' Suddenly you were gone, from all the lives you left your mark upon '...... Happy Birthday dad.

How special to be mentioned in Uncle Ronnie’s eulogy. A lovely service. Such a beautiful story of his life by Margot. Sending love to you all . Virginia ❤️

Dad's Eulogy Ronald Thomas Pallett, Ron to anyone who knew him, was born in the pretty little village of Essendon in Hertfordshire on 2nd December 1931. The eldest of five children, he grew up a country lad, becoming a crack shot with his trusty catapult, which of course, he made himself, and getting up to mischief with his cousins, sister Pamela and village lads, including poaching on the local estates. Dad would have us enthralled or in fits of laughter with his stories of what he got up to, and looking back, it is clear he was a bit wild as a youngster! Dad lived such a long time that he saw the most astounding changes in his life, from learning to read and write using a slate and chalk in the mid 1930s, through to using a mobile phone in his later years. Dad was a brilliant mathematician, and his mental arithmetic was always accurate and incredibly fast. As children, we would give him calculations to do: the square route of some huge number or complicated fractions, and he could always work out the answer so quickly. The fact that none of his children had the same ability and worse, were absolutely terrible at maths, was a source of bewilderment to him. A hopeless teacher, having absolutely no patience, he spent hours trying to drill some mathematical ability into us, only to see some of us in old age, still counting on our fingers! Dad had so many skills and we learnt them by watching him and asking his advice. There was nothing he could not make, mend or remake into something new and usually better. His cleverness with making things meant he made a lot of our toys when we were children, including sit in pedal cars and planes. He refurbished a dolls house for me that had belonged to my cousin Virginia, so that it had lights that worked and wallpaper on the walls of the tiny rooms. However, being dad, he would spend weeks making something, then right before Christmas, lose his temper with it because it wasn’t quite perfect, break it up, only to have to start again, with now only days to spare. It became a family joke that come many a Christmas morning, there were beautiful toys which we could not touch because the paint was still wet where dad had spent all night finishing the new version! It became a Christmas eve ritual that dad was to be found all night out in the shed and a Christmas morning mantra of ‘don’t touch, don’t touch!’ Dad was a faithful husband for 72 years, and once he had met mum, there was only ever Maureen Burke for him. Mum was the centre of his universe and he was devoted to her from when they first start going out together age just 16 years old. Mum was recently remembering how, on their first date in 1948, dad tucked her hand under his arm, and she stayed there for the rest of their life together. Married at 20 years old and a father at age 21, dad was also a great family man and when we were all young and growing up, his whole existence was about providing for his family. He always worked so very hard, giving all his children a strong work ethic. Until illness stopped him in the last few weeks of life, dad was still getting up early every day, working in the garden, fixing things, decorating and so on. He still used tools he had inherited from his uncle Bert, the person who taught him many of his skills. These tools are now over 100 years old. In later years during phone calls, he would always talk about how busy he was and that there was never enough time in the day to get everything done. I don’t know anyone who had a stronger work ethic. Dad was also a practical joker and risk taker, and he twice broke his back and walked after both incidences. The first time he was in his twenties. He decided to play a joke on mum one very frosty early morning by climbing up on the roof of the two story house, in his socks so she would not hear him, with the intention of calling down the chimney, as you do... His inevitable slip and fall off the roof, onto rock hard frozen grass left him unconscious with a spine fracture. This fracture was not discovered until about 30 years later, when age 59, he fell out if an apple tree while picking apples, apples I dare say, he was not supposed to be picking!!. This time he almost severed his spinal cord, but being dad, he eventually walked out of the hospital. Even in old age, he still took risks and never listened to advice, frequently falling off ladders. For such a steady, solid, dependable person, he still had that real eccentric, risk taking side that he’d had as a youth. Dad was also the most wonderful gardener, and along with mum, created many lovely gardens over the years. You only have to look at his current healthy, weedless, tidy, beautiful garden to know what sort of person dad was: tidy, neat and always a man of the earth, with an intuitive feel for plants. Dad had a legendary appetite and anyone who knew him well would look on in awe at the amount of food he could eat in one sitting. Whenever asked to make a choice of foods, for instance cream or custard, beef or chicken, his answer was always simply ‘yes’, meaning ‘I’ll have everything’. He took great joy in eating good food, something always in plentiful supply and his and mum’s house. Dad was not an emotionally demonstrative man and he disliked overt emotional displays. He always said, ‘stop crying because crying never fixed anything’. He was stoical, fiercely independent, proud and rarely beaten by anything. The first time dad was admitted to hospital in June he was not expected to live, yet against the odds, he went home cured of the life threatening oedema. The doctors tried treatment never before used with someone not just of dad’s great age, but someone in his poor medical state. Sadly, the success was only temporary and dad’s decline was slow and brutal. He was incredibly moved by the outpouring of love shown when all his children, their spouses, grandchildren and a great grandchild descended on North Devon Hospital. The staff said they had never before seen so many visitors for one patient. It was a measure of the love and esteem his large family held for him. Dad was always our rock, someone utterly trustworthy and dependable, with accurate advice on anything practical. His going has left such a large hole, but something I’ve found myself recently saying is what ‘would dad do?’ and then I know the answer because whilst he could not directly teach, he taught us all just by being the person he was. A man of astonishing extremes: irascible, impatient, quick tempered, bossy, controlling, dismissive and oh, always right! - to loving, generous, steadfast, loyal, never vain but proud of his family, always putting mum and his family first, willing to lay his life down for those he loved, nothing being too much trouble if any of us needed help: a steady hand in uncertain seas. He loved us all fiercely and created generations of fiercely loving people too. God bless you dad, we shall miss you so.