My father’s childhood was wrecked by devastating loss. Ray Dark grew up in an end-of-terrace house in London during World War II. One summer night in 1941, he went to sleep in his bottom bunk bed, only to wake up in a hospital, his broken leg in plaster. A bomb had fallen on his home, killing his parents, grandparents, and siblings.

I was never close to my father. Mine was a childhood of reading by torchlight under the sheets after everyone went to bed. My father didn’t understand such entertainments. He had been a competitive runner in his youth and enjoyed supporting my two younger brothers in their sporting endeavours.

My most resolute image of our father was of him in his off-white overalls, tending to his courgettes, marrows, and runner beans. If my father didn’t understand me, I didn’t have an easier time understanding him, especially when it came to his garden-pottering. What could be more pointless than growing tubers and beans you could buy at the market? After I got married and had children, the part of me that had always regretted not being closer to him became more emphatic. I wanted to explain to my children where I had come from but had little to offer them.

In his early seventies, Ray wanted to tell the story of his childhood. By then I had decades under my belt as a journalist. Writing the book with him helped me understand the working-class culture he came from and how, despite such soul-wrenching loss, as a man he found satisfaction in his children’s achievements, even if his marriage was fraught with conflict and mental illness.

If words had brought me closer to him, after he died, writing his eulogy proved frustrating. He simply was not there in what I typed.

After the funeral, I walked along the village high street which gave way to houses and a large allotment. As I studied the huts and rectangular slabs of worked soil prepped for spring, I thought, “This is what my father loved.” Those weekends in his overalls underneath a pastel blue sky were when he found renewal amongst the tomatoes and the peas, his boot on the edge of a spade, his muscles worked and warm, and cord-like veins running through the sun-darkened hands that had cradled me as a baby.

I’d been searching for him in my words, and here he was, looking at me with that half-smile and twinkling blue eyes. “All right, son?” he asked, each word tracing out his tender, aching heart.