Royston Lloyd RIP
It wasn’t the ‘Happy New Year’ we’d anticipated when my Father passed away this new year’s eve just gone. A new decade to be lived without him is hard to picture – he’s always been there.
“Go and ask your father,” my mother would say when I was young and my childish demands had overwhelmed her. I didn’t need to – he’d say yes. He always did. My Dad was a bit of a pushover – soft hearted really.
He was also the voice of reason. When emotions were running high in our highly-strung family and two of us were at loggerheads, it was always Dad who negotiated the peace – his heart in the right place.
But his heart was also a problem. Although celebrating his 80th birthday last November, he suffered his first major heart attack when he was just 44 years old. In the ensuing years his health problems became so widespread and profound that you’d be forgiven for thinking that his ailments defined him – But they never did.
For as well as being kind hearted, my father was also a funny and clever man – and it shone through. Dad’s quirky sense of humour, and even quirkier turn of phrase never left him – even in the worse of times.
Just before Christmas, for example, after Dad had been hospitalised and when he was in some considerable pain and discomfort he still managed to utter a classic ‘Dad-ism’.
When my sister, Mary, said something with which he disagreed he turned to me, shook his head and said:
“When you have a clutch of children, you always get one daft one.”
But my all time favourite ‘Dad-ism’ was usually born of his frustration with one of us children.
“If I knew then what I know now,” he would say, “I would have just bred kittens.”
‘Dad-isms’ have become rich pickings for my journalistic writings, belatedly giving Dad a wider audience for his witticisms. He’d like that.
But then Dad was always good with words. For as long as I can remember, he was an avid devotee of the cryptic crossword. He passed that on to me. But he was always the master. Being no slouch myself, I am still no more than the master’s apprentice. It was always me who’d need to ring him for the answers whenever I was stuck on a clue. He’d have it. You could rely on it. I remain in awe of his intellect.
Dad took pride in many things. He was particularly proud of his garden and the sheer size of his vegetables. Home-grown vegetables were a necessary feature of Lloyd Christmas lunches.
And Christmas was a particularly busy time for Dad, especially when I was young. He spent many a sleepless Christmas Eve constructing Christmas presents. With four children and never enough money to go around, the deficit had to be made up by ingenuity. And ingenious he was. There were swimming pools, bikes and doll’s houses all constructed or overhauled at the last minute so as not to spoil the Christmas morning surprise. Which brings us back, once again, to his kind heart.
Dad sacrificed many of his own opportunities for the well-being of his family – and he did so happily. He was proud of us.
It is why the proud, funny, clever, kind-hearted man that was Royston Lloyd will live on in my heart…
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
God speed, Dad. Rest in Peace.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Susan, I’ve been extra busy of late and have only just got around to reading your most touching post. I’m sorry for your loss; your Dad sounds like a wonderful human being.
I like your quote from Dylan Thomas… Here’s one he wrote about the death of his own father:
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
🙂
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Thank you all for your kind words. They helped a great deal.
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Sorry for you loss. I still have a dad. My mum who died 17 years used to come out with mumisms.Always remember the good things.
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If one can say, with love, that someone was nice to know, that is in itself an accolade that he would be happy to hear. Despite being plagued by ill health for 36 years.
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This is a lovely tribute to your father Susan. It is a real gift to have a father you can be proud of, as I always have been of mine. He is near the age mine would have been. Just a single generation ago but a different age.
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Thanks for the honor of the story here Susan. And as the natural consequence I want to wonder where he is now. A few weeks ago there was an aboriginal smoking ceremony in Marysville… one of the Elders sisters had just died, and the fire was smoking for her, but then everyone was invited to breathe the smoke – it was meant to soothe feelings. His sister will become a star, and when the poem said that they will have stars at their elbow and foot I thought that must be right.
My mother is planning for when she dies… she is beginning to give away paintings. She has a beautiful aboriginal canvas of the stars, with pleides centred.. the seven sisters. Her four children all want it, so she’s not giving it away – it will have to stay in the family lending gallery. But I’m feeling like painting a star picture, right after I paint the flames and the tunnel leading to water and life.
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Madeleine, a nice idea from your mum to keep the painting shared between the offspring; three months a year you can enjoy this beautiful painting…
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They collected a lot of paintings at one time. My father had money in one of those funds that went bust, but then received a payout he hadn’t expected, and decided to spend it on art. They had more than they could hang, and he wanted to establish a lending gallery that would go on. So I was surprised when my mother said she was giving them away. It is nice thinking that we can share the star painting… although it’s big, and would need careful moving.
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Don’t quite know what to say except that there seems to be a great deal about the estimable Mr. Lloyd that reminds me of my Dad, particularly the joke about there always being one daft one. That’s ringing a whole campanile of bells.
There’s not a day goes by I don’t think about my parents, and usually for more that a moment. There’s so much about them I still don’t understand, there’s so much about me and my siblings that reflects and refracts them.
Like I said somewhere else; they were a lion breed and we’ll not likely look upon their like again.
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Susan, good dads are hard to come by, I was lucky like you to have one.
My kids tell me they have one too.
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Our heartfelt sympathy, Susan
Your dad seems to have had another few decades after his major heart attack and lived to see his 80th year.
My mother was supposed to be on her death bed some years ago. Religious rites had been performed and all was set for her final few hours. I quickly flew over and cared for her during those, supposedly, last moments. The day passed and doctor said, “stay with her, this will be her last night”, and the night after that, and so on. For three weeks she held on.
I went back to Helvi here on the farm. My mum had an extra five years! She was 94 and spirited up till the end. She loved advokaat and berry jenever.
She brought up her 6 sprouts magnificiently, and of the five sons and one daughter, she had many grandchildren. There are plenty of granddaughters and grandsons, but sadly, no male progeny from the grandsons so far. The Oosterman line here in Australia might be coming to an end.
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I remember reading somewhere some years ago, don’t ask me for details, about some study that suggested that the sex of one’s children is to some extent determined by the level of stress hormones coursing round the male at the time of conception.
If you’re chronically stressed, evidently you’re more likely to have a male child; and if you’re not so stressed it’ll be a female child. Makes a kind of evolutionary sense and maybe, just maybe G, it speaks to how successful you and Helvi have been in your life here in Oz. Lots of female children means you and yours must be very relaxed.
Shall that be our story? Shall we stick with that one?
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I am not sure that at moments of conception things are all that unstressed.
There is a lot there though Waz, and I have to go back and think about it a bit more.
The boys are loath to ‘involve’ and are avoiding the conjugals or ‘shacking up’ like the plague.
This is the problem.
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This is fiction, Warrigal. I have two Emmlets and if they turned out to be tigers, sharks or box jelly fish, I couldn’t have been more stressed.
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Where do boy-girl twins fit into this hypothesis Warrigal?
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You have girls if you’re in a good paddock.
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Madeleine, if you want a girl, you do ‘it’ all the time.
As for a baby boy, abstain and do ‘it’ only right at the time you ovulate, ( the male sperm is weaker , don’t waste it.)
All that other stuff, it’s just old men’s tales…
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My wife has two sisters, and her Dad had longed for a son.
He was in the Fleet Air Arm in the war and some say sailors father girls. It’s the angle of the dangle, or some such. Or the rocking of the motile or non-motile spermatozoa.
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Worst night of adolescent drunkeness… cherry advocaat and lemonade. Hard swallowing a red barocca the morning after.
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Commiserations Susan
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