I first met Richard on the day that we were moving into our penthouse apartment in the English Lake District. Moving house is listed as one of the five most stressful events in most people’s lives, and our move from Spain was an example of why it tends to hit the stratosphere.
Finding an irascible man at our door was not a favourable introduction. Richard didn’t say “welcome” or introduce himself and invite us for drinks one evening. He said that the moving men were risking breaking the elevator by overloading it and we’d better stop them and unceremoniously left. Sometime later his wife Margaret came up to welcome us and asked if there was anything she could do to help. She said they lived in apartment #2, and if we needed anything at anytime (I remember her saying “eggs or anything”) to come down.
But I was unmollified after Richard’s presentation and I thought it unlikely that we would have much to say to each other.
I was wrong.
With time we came to be immensely fond of Richard and Margaret. Richard said what he thought without embroidery, a Yorkshire characteristic I found totally refreshing. He was completely without pretension, and without ceremony one of the most generous people I’ve ever met.
He was also an iconoclast with a sense of humour. What I remember most often was the inevitable phone call I would get on July 3rd urging me to hang an American flag outside our tower window to celebrate American Independence Day.
I never did it, because actually, I never had a flag. But in retrospect, I dearly wish I had.
Richard died unexpectedly very shortly after we moved from the Lake District to Cambridge, and we miss him more often than he would have guessed.
Especially on July 4th. Independence Day suited him.
