ALLAN TUFFIN

My dear, dear brother, Allan, was the last of my siblings who so wonderfully blessed my childhood and growing up with their love, joy, humour, sympathy, and practical support.

While I was the youngest sibling, Allan was also Theta and Bridget’s elder brother, extending to them the same love and support that I have received over the years – as well as the same teasing and tall stories, such as his friend with the chewing-gum that grew as you chewed and had filled a room in his friend’s house. It was Allan and Theta who organised our four- part carol-singing outside our parents’ bedroom door on Christmas morning and them also that composed and directed our charades later the same day. I remember my pride playing Maigret’s offsider Lucas to his starring role as Maigret himself.

Ten years my elder, Allan was always my Big Brother, but while this allowed him to help and advise me from a store of life experience well beyond mine, it never meant that he treated me with anything but respect when he gave me his help.

I was often a rather frightened individual and I remember one of my scares was on a family holiday in Bangor. Our father had swapped parishes for a fortnight and we were staying in a rather grand rectory. I can still picture the room in which I was standing and explaining to Allan that I was not enjoying our holiday because … I was scared I was going to stop
breathing. There was no teasing or ridicule in my Big Brother’s response – simply practical advice that fixed the problem once and for ever: ‘Just try to stop breathing!’.

Sometimes when I was young, I’d get scared because I was feeling ‘unreal’. The worst time this happened was at night. Allan told me how he sometimes had a similar feeling when he woke up alone in his room at Oxford and felt detached from reality and afraid. His solution? He’d get up, he explained to me, fill his handbasin with water and wash his socks – nothing restored a sense of reality faster than undertaking such a mundane activity. It worked for him and it worked for me. Practical advice delivered with love and respect. A strong base, it strikes me in retrospect, for an excellent primary school teacher.

In 2009 I was lucky enough to spend a number of weeks with Allan and Mary, taking them on something of a Grand Tour of at least some of south, central and northern Australia. As we were organising the visit his keen interest in the land, its geology and nature, were always to the fore and, whenever there was a cultural tour run by the local Indigenous people, he and Mary had no doubt that we should take it.

Because many of the places we visited on our trip were sacred to the Indigenous people of the area, access was on their terms and limited by clear notices along the way. Allan, Mary, and I were walking along the base of Uluru (once called Ayer’s Rock), enjoying the spectacle of its size and beauty and carefully keeping to the wide pathway, as the signage requested.

Not all non-Indigenous Australians have the degree of respect for the wishes of our first nations Australians that Allan and Mary certainly felt and always showed, so when we passed a group picnicking off the path and a way into the surrounding bushland, Mary and I should probably not have
been surprised when a stentorian headmaster’s voice from behind us pointed out to that group in no uncertain terms the error of their ways.

I wish I could say that it had some effect but I do know that it shows Allan’s total commitment to social justice and his respect for his fellow human beings.

Over the years Lou and I had many happy and stimulating phone calls and then video chats with Allan and Mary. Aside from the laughter we shared, often engendered by Allan’s wit and the particular feeble Tuffin humour of which he was a master, those interactions brought home to me and Lou over and over again the strength of Allan and Mary’s commitment to social justice, which they were totally dedicated to achieving by means of the Labour Party, working hard and constantly both to further its aims and to change it for the better. Despite all the frustrations of party-political manoeuvrings, they never threw their hands in the air. An amazing example.

All my life I have benefitted from Allan and Mary’s open-handed generosity – starting from the time I was first introduced to Mary at a lunch at (I think) Allan’s Dalton flat, when (I know!) I had my first-ever steak (with boiled potatoes) and my first-ever experience of crunchy, poppy-seeded bread generously spread with real butter and marmalade, through any number of stays in Manor Park to Lou’s and my most recent sojourn in 2016.

This generosity, however, has never been limited to me and Lou, but has been extended lavishly over the years towards Ellie, Alex and Zoë and their families – and all of them who met Allan have told me in recent days how fortunate they were to have experience not only the generosity I’ve been noting but also his warmth, open-heartedness, and wit.

Allan has always been in my life, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background. Because of this I know there have been times when I haven’t noticed his presence, but, now that he is gone, his absence makes an aching gap.