Some people thought it was all over after last week’s entry. If you have been paying attention you will know that there was always more to my life than work.

Shortly after I began work at Brough I received a letter from a tracing agency asking was I the same Frank Parker whose father, Frank Alfred George Parker, was an airman killed in action in 1943. If so, I should get in touch in order to learn something of benefit. At first I thought this was a hoax, perhaps orchestrated by my son or my brother-in-law, both of whom were fond of practical jokes. Nevertheless I responded and was informed that a brother of my father’s had recently died intestate. The agency had been engaged, by the solicitor handling his estate, to locate next of kin.

In the years immediately following the war, and my father’s death, my mother had fallen out of favour with his family for reasons I never fully understood. It could be that the arrival of my sister more than 2 years after his death made my mother persona non-grata with my paternal grand-parents. There was, also, my mother’s belief, which she shared with me in a letter when I was in the process of moving from Hereford to Coventry in 1968, that my father was conducting an affair with another woman at the time of his death.

Whatever the reason, I can recall only two contacts with any of my father’s kin. The first was when my mother, my sister and I undertook a trip to London shortly after her mother’s death in 1948. We visited several of her prewar friends and relatives and I have a vague recollection of an elderly couple in a dark and smokey kitchen who I assume were my grand parents. The other memory is of a couple of about the same age as my mother who came to stay for a few days with us at around the same time.

This consisted of a brother of my father’s (not the one to whom the letter referred) and his wife/girl friend who was evidently suffering from some sickness of the mind, perhaps alcohol induced. I can remember a lot of shouting and the use of bad language, after which the couple left.

Whilst I had occasionally wondered about my relatives on my father’s side, the discovery that I might be entitled to a small legacy came as a surprise. The legacy arrived in two installments, one from his liquid savings, the second from the sale of his house.

There was a third amount, lodged in the account of a woman who had, it was said, looked after him for a number of years. What, I was asked, did I want to do about this? Should her right to keep this sum be contested? This question was asked of all the qualified inheritors.

I have no idea what response the others made to this question, but mine was to the effect that before receiving the letter from the tracing agency I had no idea the man even existed. I had no intention of depriving someone who not only knew him, but cared for him, of a sum which, so far as I could tell, he had intended her to have.

I used part of the money to purchase an annuity in Freda’s name since she would, if I were to die before her, receive only half of my pension entitlements. When, on my 60^th birthday, I began receiving my Courtaulds pension, I began making regular payments into that annuity. The other anticipated advantage of providing this future income in Freda’s name was that her total income would likely be below the UK personal tax threshold, whereas mine would not.

Meanwhile, through my membership of the CVS management committee I became involved in a project to convert a disused school in the town of Goole into a facility for community groups. When I first heard about the plan I was scornful, believing it would be impossible for the small community to raise the amount of money required. The National Lottery had not been in existence for very long at this stage and ran several different funds tailored to specific objectives. One of these was the celebration of the Millennium. Our project qualified for that and one other objective.

The locally raised element of the total cost could be represented by voluntary labour as well as cash fund-raising. A small team of volunteers, including myself, therefore set to work carrying out whatever demolition work was required – taking down false ceilings, removing shelving and timber panelling, digging up tiled floors and removing tiles from walls.

The project was finished well before the millennium and provided office space for several community groups, a community hall, a community games room and a couple of seminar rooms, all clustered around a courtyard, which gave the building its new name – The Courtyard. Both the CVS and the Talking Newspaper, which I was still leading, had their base in the building. Having been a member of the project steering committee during the construction phase, I, like the others, now became a member of the board of trustees managing the facility.

I had taken up cycling, partly as exercise and partly as a means of exploring a wider area of East Yorkshire than is possible on foot. In 2002 the government granted an extra holiday in recognition of Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee. I undertook to spend that day cycling 100 miles to raise funds for the talking newspaper. I was accompanied by a friend of one of our committee members, a life-long member of a local cycling club who regularly took part in cycling holidays in continental Europe.

We began at 8:30 am in the market square in Howden. Following the Eastern section of the Trans Pennine Trail, we cycled to the coastal resort of Hornsea, arriving around 1pm and stopping for a picnic lunch before setting off again to arrive back in Howden around 6pm.