(Illustration: Collage: Sarah Hamil)

Sarah, our second child, was a real cutie, and still is such a beauty, inside and out. Every mother deserves to have a daughter just like her. She’s a real joy, a real treasure.

When she was a baby, I would dress her in all kinds of pretty dresses, frilly pants and white cardigans, and make princess style dresses for her each Christmas, from then on.

The name Sarah, as well as meaning ‘princess’, also means laughter; In almost every photo we’ve ever taken of her, she’s always smiling, so full of joy, much like her own daughter now.

As she grew, Sarah was just as accident prone as Stephen.

Once she fell in Wallsend Park in the play area, when she was having a walk with Granda Jack, and her front tooth went clean through the skin below her mouth, and she needed stitches. She still has that little scar today.

She also stepped on the edge of the frozen pond behind me in Wallsend park, when she was little, and fell bottom first through the thin ice. I raced to haul her out, and her bottom half was soaking. It was a good job the pond wasn’t very deep! How I got home so quickly, up the park stairs, with a baby in a buggy in one hand and screaming daughter, with a frozen bottom and wet clothes, in the other, with a worried son following on, I’ll never know.

Bob had worn a beard for a number of years and one day decided to shave it off, and Sarah, who had only ever seen him with a beard since she was one year old, came to the room and screamed in horror, and ran away. She was about four or five then.

When she was six years old, she broke her arm at school, in a fall from gym apparatus. Having received a phone call from school, I hurried along to school to accompany her to hospital, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was what the ambulance man called a ‘swan’s neck’ fracture. My daughter had a curved arm, it was totally out of shape.! But later she raised money for charity with each signature that was written on her plaster.

She and Bob were very close; every dad should have a daughter too! They would sing, skip and dance as they journeyed to Brownies there and back, to the song: “Lou Lou, skip to my Lou!” I wonder what his pupils would have thought if they’d seen him!

In Sarah’s early teenage years, a young lad at school decided to make a beeline for her and bully her, but a friend of hers sorted the situation out’ and once he picked himself up, he never bothered Sarah again. Now whether his unpleasant attitude was because I was a new teacher at his school, or whether he actually liked her, I’m not sure, but if he did like her, he had a funny way of showing it. But in Clare, this heroine, and her friend Julie, Sarah now had two new bodyguards at her new school. Julie became her best friend for life, they were inseparable.

During our holidays in France, Sarah, a young lady by then, entered and won campsite beauty competitions. Miss Les Ondines one year, and Miss Flots Bleu the next; she was a beauty, and still is, and she had also the brains to match.

Sarah applied to do Maths at Durham University, and had been accepted, but then she completely changed her mind. She’d been to see a movie about missionary work in Africa, at a friend’s church and suddenly she knew she wanted to study medicine instead, a subject which had always been at the back of her mind.

Since we had taken so much time researching other universities, I think she was initially afraid to tell us she didn’t want to study maths after all. She wanted to travel, to do something useful in a gap year, in perhaps India or Africa, and then apply the following year to study medicine.

Looking back, I can see that this was her calling, her vocation.

She was so relieved to find we didn’t mind, in fact, I was delighted with this new direction in her thinking. I’d always thought that she’d make a wonderful doctor. She had always been very kind and compassionate, with a desire to do some good in the world, and we were so very proud.

She was accepted for a work experience at the Catherine Booth Salvation Army hospital in Southern India, so off she went; and when her flight took off at Manchester airport, I was distraught. As her plane soared up and away and disappeared behind the cloud, I broke down in tears at the perimeter fence, and couldn’t be consoled. We had just allowed our only daughter, so young and vulnerable, to fly off to goodness knows where, on her own! What on earth were we thinking of?

But it was actually the making of her.

She landed in Bombay airport, caught her connecting flight with only five or six minutes to spare, and landed in Tamil Nadu. She was greeted briefly by a nurse who took her on a tour of the hospital. It just so happened that there was a patient in casualty whose toe was hanging off; and she saw it being quickly removed with a razor blade! If that had been me, I would have passed out. Not Sarah!

She was caught up in a far more colourful culture to the one she was used to. It was difficult for her to understand everyone’s English accent at first; and everyone was so busy, they had no time to organise her weekly routine for her. In fact, no-one bothered much with her at first, and she was very homesick; but then some hidden reserve kicked in, and she resolved to get herself organised. And so, she sorted out her own timetable, establishing which hours would be bandage wrapping time; which day would be observation in surgery; and so on, and once she had a rounded weekly timetable, she settled in and loved her work.

She was also invited to four weddings when she was there, and a funeral! She was ill four or five times, and on a drip at one point but she came through.

But what makes me so very proud of her time there in India was, not only did she make many friends among the nurses, and sing with them in ‘Tamil’ language on a local radio, she got on so well with the ‘untouchables’, the lowest caste there in that culture. They would hang out in front of the hospital, waiting to be given the most menial, laborious and unpleasant tasks to do. Each day, she would greet them cheerfully and acknowledge them, whilst others seemed to ignore them and keep well clear. She was advised not to have any contact with them, but she was her own person. She reminded me of Jesus’ contact with lepers and outcasts, who were the pariahs of his day.

When she returned home six months later, we hurried through to Heathrow airport arrivals, to greet her, and we were just in time to see her come through the sliding doors, pushing her luggage trolley.

She seemed smaller than ever, all sunburnt, smelling of curry, with her hair in a tight bun!” Regardless, we hugged her so tightly, she could hardly breathe. . . that was before she told us about the nits in her hair! She had been sleeping in the nurses’ dormitory, and picked up these little friends.

She asked to see a bar of chocolate again, so we took her to one of the duty-free shops. But when we got there, there was a change in her face, a look of dismay as she gazed on whole shelves filled with chocolate and other confectionery. “So much!” she said sadly. ‘Too much! One bar would have been a real family treat for people where I’ve just come from!”

And so, she became the social conscience of our family, for a short while later when Bob and I returned from a meal out with friends, she asked how much we had spent on our evening meal. We told her, and her response to our reply was; “You paid how much?”

We felt so guilty, as she added, “An entire family out there could live for an entire month on that kind of money!”

She went out to India as a young girl, and she came back, a woman; she went out there a free and easy individual, and returned with a shift in her perception of the world. She had become more thoughtful, and questioned injustices in the world.

Her time there was a real blessing, to her and us, and no doubt to those she had been with too in the hospital.

Here’s a song I wrote when Sarah was out of our sights, in India, but never out of our minds. A song which became an everyday prayer for her, as I walked with her through Psalm 23 in prayer. In fact it was to become a prayer song for all my children. Please use this for yours, if you’d like to? It’s called: ‘May your blessing be upon them.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mgQGLBLYM...

Sarah met her future husband Alan at Leeds university where she went to study medicine.

I advised her before she left, that if she found her ‘someone special’, to make sure he was a Christian, someone who would love her and respect her.

(Don’t all people of all faiths say this to their daughters about their own faith?)

She replied, “Mam there’s no such thing as a Christian, who’s a real man and has character!” I don’t know where she got this idea from, she only had to look at her dad to see it wasn’t true!

However, she came home one day and said to us:-

“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“The good news first”, I replied!

She said, “I’ve met someone very special, that I’m very keen on, and believe it or not, he’s a Christian!” I was delighted.

“So what is the bad news?” I asked with a grimace on my face.

She joked, “He’s a Methodist!” Denomination didn’t matter at all of course, and we fell about laughing.

I was thrilled, as was Bob.

We took to Alan straight away, (he had my dad’s name) AND his birthday was December 1st (the same day as my dad’s birthday) as I’ve already mentioned. That had to be some kind of a sign!

Alan had previously spent time in South America, when Sarah was in India, before they met, so they had gap years in common. His mother grew up in Belize, daughter of the former governor there, and his father was one of the engineers responsible for the Channel tunnel.

Later Sarah and Alan both spent time abroad working for Operation Raleigh in Africa.

I was honoured the day they asked me to be the priest who married them.

I recall making a telephone call to the bridal shop, following Sarah’s fitting for her dress, and when the phone was put down at the other end, the assistant asked the manageress who had been on the phone.

She replied, It’s the lady who’s marrying her daughter!”

The assistant was startled, and after a short while replied, “That’s not allowed, is it?”

“She’s the priest silly!” replied the manageress.

Alan was, and is, a born organiser, and loves all sport. I think Sarah fell for him the day she saw him standing on a table in the university common room, getting a team together for a hockey match.

In lectures at university, Sarah was known to ‘whistle’ to get everyone’s attention for the tutor, who stood trying to start his lecture. Also, whenever there was anything gruesome to dissect, and male students were feeling a little queasy about cutting, she would off to do the job for them!”

India had certainly toughened her up.

She got the label ‘Geordie doc’.

She’s still a ‘Geordie’ doc, a GP living in Maidenhead, so sadly we don’t see a lot of her and her family, but when we do meet up, it’s quantity as well as quality time together, which is lovely.

Sarah is now a qualified level 2 All England netball coach, which doesn’t surprise me, as she’s played netball for thirty-five years herself now. Local Wallsend netball coach, Margaret Chambers, facilitated her interest in the first place, when she was a teenager, and now Sarah’s been coaching in the Berkshire county league for six years, running an under 16 and an under 17 team. Her own daughter is one of her top ‘sharp-shooters’!

She, Alan, along with their daughter, and son, live in the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire, very near to Alan’s family, who live just beyond the border with Buckinghamshire.

Sarah and Alan are involved in the life of their church, and have done such a lot with young people. Sarah has run a girls’ group for three years now, and leads Alpha courses. Alan runs a youth group too, and he is very compassionate and outgoing, always eager to raise funds for good causes, in fact he’s starting a new job shortly for a charity called ‘Compassion’!

But allow me to travel back to 1979 again, when Stephen and Sarah as children, found out that another baby was on the way; they were so excited; Stephen was five years old then and Sarah was three.