On Valentine's Day I pay tribute to the father I never knew

Edwin Richard Hatfield, my father died Valentine’s Day 1966 when I was 15 months old

Pakistan President condemned Valentine's day as anti-Muslim as conservative religious groups tried to ban the romantic celebrations (PA)

I have a recurring nightmare: it’s my funeral and nobody has turned up. It’s been an occasional feature of my slumbers for a few years, replacing the one in which I turn up for an exam for which I have not revised. Sigmund Freud would have a field day. This past week I attended the funeral of my former brother-in-law, the explorer Henry Worsley. Some 850 people turned up - family, friends, colleagues and well-wishers including Prince William. It was an apposite farewell to a magnificent man who touched so many.

I’m not sure the same could be said of Edwin Richard Hatfield, my father, who died on Valentine’s Day, 1966. But what do I know? He died of a heart attack, aged 41, when I was 15 months old, my sister aged just 4 months. I’m writing this having just returned from visiting his grave in Croydon Cemetary with my Ma, 50 years a widow today.

For much of my life I thought that dad had led an unremarkable, working-class South London life – save for choosing to marry my fire-cracker of a southern Italian mother, a relatively bold move in sixties’ Croydon. However, I came to learn over time that my father was quietly remarkable. He had been shot in the air when parachuting into Arnhem during the war, aged 19. He had been married before he met my Ma, and was raising two sons alone after his first wife died from cancer. He was a secret poet and gentle soul, at a time when neither were the norm for an ice cream factory lorry driver.

There is only one photograph of my dad with both my sister and I. He lived in the pre-data, pre sharing age. Over the years I have grown out of being incredibly wistful for that which I never knew; what it was like to grow up with a father. To me, such lamenting of what might have been eventually came to feel insulting to what my mother achieved in raising us on her own, despite countless roadblocks and setbacks.

It’s a very different type of upbringing with one parent. I can’t say better or worse, because it is all I knew. Whatever one’s normal is becomes the normal. There’s an added intensity of relationship, extra layers of mutual responsibility, and yes, added feelings of pride and guilt (the guilt may just be a Catholic thing).

So today, I pay a tribute to the father I never knew and offer a Valentine’s Day shout out to all those who have lived a similarly long time with death, wondering what a difference life would have made.