I have a Christmas memory as a child of my dad working in our downstairs room, earning a bit of overtime. He liked being at his drawing board, listening to the radio and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I’d drop in to see him, sent by my mother with a cup of coffee and sometimes a plate of biscuits or a piece of Christmas cake. In summer, the windows had to be open and mosquitoes floated about all around the drawing board and up on the ceiling. But the mosquitoes didn’t bother dad.

I’d sit and read a comic or throw darts at the dart board while he carried on with what he was doing. Occasionally he’d ask me about school, but what I liked was when he let me add something to the engineering drawing he had on the desk. He showed me how to hold the pen and how if you tipped it at the wrong angle the ink wouldn’t run out. Sometimes he’d let me finish a label using the little orange stencil, or if I was lucky, I could add his initial to the title block in the corner of the drawing. This is the equivalent of the draftsman’s signature, so it was always a type of honour if he let me do that. Years later, I would work in an engineering firm myself and I would often see drawings that my dad had done come through the office on a job we were working on. I could recognise his handwriting a mile away, but I sometimes wondered if I had stencilled those initials in the title block.

My dad would work on into the small hours of the next day and sometimes, from my bedroom, I’d hear him laughing at something he was hearing on the radio, or whistling along to one of his jazz records. Dad wasn’t big on Christmas, but it wasn’t because of Christmas – it was because he shared his birthday with Christmas day. Maybe he felt a little overlooked. Or maybe he just liked listening to his radio, smoking and spending time on his own.

Dad’s sliderule and Staedtler pencil. Happy Birthday!