On behalf of the family, may I say how very good it is to see so many people here today from so many parts of Paul’s life. He would be overwhelmed. Your very presence is a testament to the man and the way he could affect other people.
I do not intend to plot every stage of his life. Many of you played significant roles in that, giving to him and I am sure receiving something in return. He may never have told you how much he appreciated you. But he did. Very much.
We have given you a copy of his obituary as a simple account of his life. Paul Griffin: soldier, scholar, teacher, churchman, writer, husband, father and grandfather.
Instead I want to talk about the man himself, some of it through his own words as we are very fortunate to have these as a legacy.
His nearly ninety year span was broadly divided into three phases: growing up, teaching and then writing and preaching. Or learning, doing and communicating.
None of us here experienced the growing up phase. He was an only child who buried himself in books.
War broke out when he was seventeen. Finishing his studies at neighbouring Framlingham, he joined up and opted for India: a fine show of independence for a lad who had not travelled much further than 200 miles from Chingford.
His optimism must have taken a big hit when his new best friend was killed by a sniper. Tough on a sensitive boy in his early twenties.
By 1949 he was finishing at St Catharines, Cambridge. He had gone there to read Maths and swapped to read English; an early sign of the breadth of his abilities.
He was married. He had a daughter. He needed a job. What was it to be? He had written poetry and a life of writing would seem an obvious choice.
In a Man for All Seasons Thomas More advises Richard Rich to be a teacher. ‘And if I were, who would know it?’ asks the ambitious Rich. ‘You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that. Oh, and a quiet life.’
Not a bad description of Paul’s choice for the next phase of his life either, although I am not sure about the quiet life.
He started his teaching career at Uppingham under the charismatic Martin Lloyd. Paul collected heroes – good men he called them - throughout his life and was fiercely loyal to them. Martin was just such a man.
But he wanted a new challenge. He achieved this by becoming a headmaster: first in Nicosia, then at Aldenham and finally a ‘more normal 9 to 5’ job running the Anglo World Language Centre back in Cambridge.
At all three places he gathered around him a loyal and supportive staff. Many entered his pantheon of heroes, inspirational people who welcomed the trust he showed in them and thrived on it. All seemed to unite under his leadership. I am sure some stayed on longer than was good for them because of the positive atmosphere he engendered.
One described him recently as a ’man to emulate in his devotion to duty and steadfast moral purpose … with an impish and infectious sense of humour’.
Another was perhaps more ambivalent for he named his dog ‘Griffin’. I have never dared visit Yorkshire ever since as I do not know whether I will be patted, kicked or made to fetch sticks.
Neither Nicosia nor Aldenham fulfilled my understanding of a ‘quiet life’. Bombs were going off in the streets of Nicosia and at Aldenham in the sixties, British youth were rebelling, wanting a much faster pace of change than Paul was prepared to give them.
It must have been difficult for a man who had seen his friends lay down their lives to preserve one form of society, only to see young people rebelling against such seemingly trivial aspects of it.
He did not always do things by the book. One former pupil wrote this week about the in-school Community Service that Paul organised for him in lieu of serious discussions about drugs with the Police.
The loyalty endured. A string of pupils and staff from both Cyprus and Aldenham have kept in active contact with him by email and visits, giving him a lifeline to the world outside Suffolk and enriching his life in retirement.
He had that Mr Chips ability to remember former pupils. He would arrive home and say ‘Joy, I have just met Smith JR in the street. He was in my English set at Uppingham. He could never really get the hang of Houseman’s metre but he went on to Cambridge and has done very well …’
He was a polymath. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, all of English poetry, well, English literature in total. But that did not stop him arguing with a physicist about the Brief History of Time.
He was always learning and had an incredible memory. At different times he studied or turned his hand to gardening, fungi, trees, sailing, brewing, archaeology, birds – he had fantastic eyesight which probably helped with shooting at which he excelled; horse racing, cricket, rugby – he played hooker for Suffolk schoolboys; golf, tennis and so it goes on. Once he had mastered the intellectual challenge of each he was an expert.
This made him a fount of knowledge: a walking encyclopaedia which was useful to have at the end of the phone. I rang him from work quite recently as I often did when I needed a reference or advice on the placing of an Oxford comma, and asked:
‘Changes and chances what’s the next line?’
‘I am not sure.’
‘Well, you wrote it’
‘Did I? I must check’.
He rang back a moment later
Changes and chances,
Dirges and dances
This is the curious pattern of men;
Picking the daisies
Driving like crazies
Silent at breakfast and shouting by ten
Laughing and crying
Living and dying
Never the same for a minute on end;
Changes and chances
Dirges and dances
That’s what it is to be human my friend
‘You are right. It’s awfully good, isn’t it?’ He said. A typical example of Paul’s honesty.
When retirement loomed another hero said that that everyone should have two careers. He predicted that Paul’s second would be the church. In fact it was the church and writing.
Teaching and running schools had been a 24 hour task requiring total commitment and he had had little time to write.
He became a very active Lay Reader locally, ministering to communities in this area and especially here in Huntingfield. His Faith was fundamental to Paul throughout his life. His stories and poems are littered with references to God. One whole book is dedicated to poems of Faith.
His sermons or addresses were renowned for their inspiration and humour. I recall one in which he discussed our different approaches to sea fishing. Apparently I just tried to catch fish: he indulged in a mental struggle with the fish. He was more successful of course.
His writing which brought him a new audience through his regular contributions to the competitions especially those in the Spectator and the Literary Review; and in collections of parodies. Some were serious, others simply clever.
He had a sure ear for all the great writers, and could reproduce them at will. Kipling, WS Gilbert, Shakespeare or, I suspect his favourite, AA Milne:
Christopher Robin is drawing his pension
He lives in a villa in Spain
He suffers from chronic bronchitis and tension
And never goes out in the rain.
Christopher Robin goes cougherty, cougherty
Cougherty, cougherty cough
All sorts and conditions of Spanish physicians
Have seen him and written him off.
The physicians never wrote Paul off but he certainly kept them busy, showing a typically intellectual interest in the puzzle that was his body.
As a poet he was a true master of his craft and could rattle off the most complex triolet or sonnet on demand. His competition entries rarely took him long to complete: a flash of inspiration and it was there. Like the works of Mozart, another hero, they seemed to spring fully-formed to his mind.
Winning the Seatonian Prize gave him great satisfaction. It conferred academic recognition and reassured him that he was not just a jobbing parodist.
Poems had to rhyme, scan and make sense. And that was Paul all over: a traditionalist. What one of his friends called ‘The best of Englishmen’.
As well as his poetry, there are several books: novels and short stories. None was published because he was far too diffident to risk multiple rejection slips and was never writing truly commercial material.
Alongside Paul was Felicity: the perfect foil. She had fallen for his words and poems from India and he continued to write poems for her throughout his life, showing his love for her in the way he knew best.
They were a perfect couple for he was pretty impractical: domesticity was the one art he could never master through intellect. Even hoovering was not worth the family tension.
She, on the other hand, is a brilliant housekeeper and provided a loving home and endless meals for all and sundry. She mothered him, cajoled him – not always easy - loved him and devoted herself to his career, being drawn into the 24 hour life of a headmaster’s wife and caring for him to the last: doing her duty. The school bell does not stop in retirement and meals were always on the dot.
Without her, he could not function. She managed him for two thirds of his life.
We were a tight knit family, but there generally three children not two. The third, and sometimes it seemed the most important, had four legs. There are several poems about dogs: rather fewer about children.
Retirement was a happy time. A time to travel. Mum and Dad had ‘done’ the classical world from Cyprus and so they ‘finished’ the Mediterranean on a variety of cruises. He loved his adopted Suffolk and enjoyed the company of other retirees, working on song cycles or putting the world to rights in the back bar of the Crown adding his uniquely wry, Eeyorish optimism.
And he was winning competitions right up to the end. A letter arrived this morning confirming that he would not be winning the Seantonian again posthumously: they are not awarding it this year.
Mum could develop her own interests, the benefits of which you see above and around you. And there was pleasure in the growing family.
He put the delight of retirement very well in Happiness:
Happiness is being old
Watching others cope with tension
While we purchase with our pension
Joys too numerous to mention.
Youth is tinsel, age is gold.
Happiness is being grey,
Showing years without disguises
So that people say ‘How wise is
That old thing when he advises;
He grows wiser every day!
Happiness is watching youth,
Giving tuts and even titters
At their follies and their jitters,
Sipping at our gin and bitters
As they stumble to the truth.
Perhaps his most famous poem is the one that won him the Literary Review prize as Poet of the Year: Love in an English Garden
We loved, how many years ago?
So thoroughly we seem to know
The shapes of these autumnal trees,
The patterned shade, the sound of bees,
The garden perfume on the lawn
The light, the leaves, and there
The crumpled water on the pool,
Casually beautiful –
So thoroughly, we half forget
The circumstance in which we met,
When each on each was so intent
We could not see what gardens meant.
Love is not gone, but it has grown
Aware of growth itself, has known
How autumn crocus, golden rod,
Can turn our grateful hearts to God
And help this perfect place to prove
A living witness to our love.
Yet autumn brings another smell,
An ancient message we know well:
Compost and wood smoke, rotten plums,
Wet grass, and old chrysanthemums,
A choir of smells that faintly sings
A requiem for living things.
This winter compost that we scent
Is food for life’s replenishment
But what of love? When we are dead
Can it remain, and lift its head
Triumphantly, some future spring,
With every other living thing?
How may we hope to find this place
When time has turned away her face?
‘You, your pupils, your friends, God: not a bad public that. And a quiet life.’
He was principled; he was intelligent.
He taught us; he informed us; he guided us.
He was his own man; not one to suffer fools; edgy and not clubbable in the social sense.
He could be ill at ease socially; always unsure of showmen and yet happy to be centre stage.
He was wry; he was witty; he was irreverent.
He made us laugh; he made us think.
He watched us grow.
He was my father.
We all have much to be grateful for.
‘May flights of angels sing him to his rest.’
