Coffee with Mr. Harbor

"At the time of Dunkirk we didn't know how many were lost," said Mr. Harbor, "and as war increased, men were called up in greater numbers. I remember tunnels being built for an underground munitions factory. There was a lot of secrecy. There was so much we didn't know or understand, but it was accepted as normal."

Mr. Harbor is 90 years old, but elegant in appearance, lucid in thought, and happy to sit and chat with us over coffee. Jill occasionally inserts a qualifier, disclaimer, or embarrassed commentary, and she frets about him in the way a dutiful daughter does about an elderly parent, but he holds his own, and we're charmed by him, even when he bluntly inquires about the intentions of his grandson and my daughter, marital-wise.

"I know they love each other, but is it for life?" he wonders.

He was quite married and settled by the time he was that age...and he is an advocate for doing the honorable thing, at least as he perceives it.

But after all, his formative years were shaped by events that we cannot fully comprehend. His mother died when he was in his teens, and then of course there was the war, looming everywhere, ending any chances for a carefree youth.

"I was eighteen years old and quickly absorbed into war work," he tells us. "I worked twelve hours a day. I was uneducated, but they saw in me the potential to learn a skill and a lasting trade in machinery engineering. I had a blessed calling."

He had a blessed marriage, too. It has been little more than a year since his wife died, and he misses her every day. This is a hard part of life. He is unmoored -- melancholy, to use another of his words. And he worries a lot, but this isn't new.

"You're either a worrier or not," says Mr. Harbor. "I was born worrying."

Mr. Harbor was quite a photographer in his younger days, and Jill has encouraged him to show us some of the old photos. They are wonderful black and white prints of railway stations, country landscapes, a Bristol street at night.

This is the world as he knew it, the places he loved, the times when he was happiest. It is like looking straight on into Mr. Harbor's memories.

I've posted two of the photos here -- in the lower picture, the man with the pipe shaking hands with the conductor is Mr. Harbor's father. To read more about Mr. Harbor, go to this link or this one.

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