I found my father a very hard man to understand when I was young. He was very short and thin and had large blue eyes. I could have loved him as I did my mother, but he seemed to hold us off so that we could not approach him or sit on his knee as love to do. I believe he had a hard life as a child, and I know that he left school at the age of ten and started to work. This made him an unsociable man, unfriendly even to the people closest to him. I never knew him to have a close friend as the other men did.

Everything he did had to be precise. If he chopped the sticks for the fire, each stick would be the same length and thickness as all the others, and they would all be stacked without one out of place. His motto was “ If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well”. In our household his word was law and nobody dared dispute it.

He worked hard when in a job and saw to it that we children learned the meaning of work. My mother did not have much pleasure but I do not remember her ever complaining ---- except on Sunday afternoons when father would take off his clothes and get into bed, leaving her to mend his working clothes while he had his rest. This she disliked very much, for the clothes were dirty from the work he had been doing and she hated handling anything that was not clean.

The writer found it difficult to understand her father because he ____.