A Quiet Hero
Six years to the day since his death, the author reflects on the loss of her father: the award-winning sportswriter Ken Jones
Our father Ken Jones died six years ago today. Not a day goes by that I don't want to ask him something. His sound wit, wisdom and mischief sustained me. For every dilemma that I faced, whether personal or professional, he had at least a solution if not always the answer. His heart never left the South Walian valley of his birth.
Though he never in his life dropped into a coalmine, his father, uncles, grandfather and great uncles had toiled underground. Black hands, tin baths and a searing longing for the sky scarred his childhood. But there was hope.
His small, proud father and uncles came out of the cage to reinvent themselves as distinguished professional footballers. Their sons followed in their boots. The Jones Boys - five brothers and three of their sons - were legends. Dad was one of them.
A brief career on the pitch and an inoperable injury later, he was soon hanging around the backstreet bars of Fleet Street, stretching pints and trying for work.
In those days, they didn't get qualifications in journalism. They started on their knees, scrapped for interviews, made do with quotes, and they grafted. There was poetry in the climb, though Dad scoffed at such a notion. He was a sleeves-up, sixty half-fags in the ashtray, firsts-and-lasts-and-let-them-figure-out-the-middle kind of scribe.
At 7:31am on Thursday 26th September 2019, I was checking in at Kings College Hospital on Denmark Hill for pre-planned surgery when the call came. I had been with Dad for three days and nights, kipping on a mattress of the floor of his hospital room and supping pre-mixed gin and tonic from tins.
It was as though he had waited for me to leave my mother and sister to it before heaving the final gasp. On that last afternoon, a heavy storm rinsed out and gave way to a livid rainbow that curved across his window. Like a bridge to another realm, was my fleeting thought. Maybe it was.
American sportswriter Tom Callaghan wrote this in the Washington Post about him, after Dad fell under a train at London Bridge. That'll be thirty-three years ago this coming 17th December.
There's an error in the piece - it wasn't a London underground train but a full-on British Railways locomotive. Few rise unscathed from such an encounter. Dad lost his writing arm but not his ability, need to write nor the will to live.
He was a devotee of Ernest Hemingway. One of his favourite, oft-re-read novels was Hem's 'The Old Man and the Sea'.
I keep a line of it: 'Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.'
