WINNER

Jacqui Scholes-Rhodes has a PhD in narrative inquiry and published non-fiction work in 2013, followed by an MA in creative writing, successes in Mslexia, Fish and Manchester short fiction competitions, and publication in the 2020 HWA Anthology. She’s working on two novels.

By Jacqui Scholes-Rhodes

M emory of my dad is coloured green and brown and grey. He was a smallish man, yet he spoke in a way that made him seem much bigger. He wore a trilby hat when he gardened in the rain, and boots laced all the way up to his ankles.

For years we’ve preserved him in silence, stripped from our conversations. But now I know that doesn’t work. It simply robs us of the past by masquerading as the present.

A book of his sits by my keyboard: a copy of the New Testament, given by his Majesty the King. The inscription says it was intended as a ‘source of comfort and inspiration,’ for soldiers who signed up for war in September 1939.

I love the cover, made of wood, a cross carved into it. I never knew of its existence until one Easter Mum sent it to me, no note enclosed. I was about to be confirmed by the Bishop who was planning to wash my feet. She didn’t approve.

It was the second of the only gifts I got from my Dad, my real dad that is, although he’d been dead twenty years or so by then.

His first gift came when I was ten.

We lived in a mining town where soot pockmarked the washing and fog lined your nose-holes in black. Every summer we went to Filey, on the Yorkshire coast, eschewing Blackpool because we were too posh, and Scarborough because the ‘riffraff’ went there. Filey was like heaven: white-painted houses and crescent-shaped gardens full of snap-dragons, marigolds, lobelia and alyssum. I learnt all the flower names one year: Dad said it would be useful for when I sat my exams.