Robertson, Ronan

OT 414 - North

Date of Death: 18/07/2013

From The Gazette 58.

Graeme went to school at St Joan's Kindergarten near Horley, The Hawthorns School, Redhill, when it was located at Gatton Point, and then Ottershaw School near Chertsey. Ottershaw was good for Graeme and he responded positively to all the activities and sports that the school was able to offer him. While at Ottershaw he began to show an interest in both theatre and ballet, an interest which he sustained throughout his life. Summer trips to Devon introduced him to sailing and rock climbing. He climbed Monte Rosa in the Alps in his late teens.

He left school with good enough results to go to university, but instead he opted to go out into the world and experience ‘real life’. He turned his hand to a range of activities as diverse as qualifying as a motor mechanic and beginning to write. In fact, he tried his hand at writing novels, a couple of which he selfpublished. This combination of the artistic and practical was something that was very special to Graeme and he pursued all these interests with a clear and determined focus.
Writing and words were very much part of who Graeme was. He had a natural ability and affinity with words, including foreign languages. He wanted to learn to speak better French so went to live in Paris. I can just imagine Graeme living as a writer in a garret room there!

Though there was so much that Graemedid in his life, the essence of him was who he was, not what he did. Languages developed again when in 1969 he joined Struan (OT 468; North) in Sweden. He lived in Stockholm for 13 years, initially working in adult education teaching English, but later working exclusively as a translator, an occupation in which he showed real talent. In fact, he continued to be in demand as a translator for many years after he left Sweden.

As well as being a writer and someone who worked with languages and words – artistic skills and temperament – Graeme was also a very practical person, and matter-of-fact in many ways. In Sweden he realised he wasn’t getting enough exercise but also needed to earn a bit of money, as well as wanting to get a bit more contact with ordinary Swedish people to improve his language skills. So he got a job with the Swedish postal service and solved those three things in one go.
It was while he was based in Sweden that he went to spend six months in Israel on a kibbutz. In fact, he was asked to stay on and live there – an unusual thing for a non-Jew to be asked. But they must have seen and valued and appreciated everything he naturally gave – his skill with his hands, his resourcefulness, and the vigour and the focus that he brought to his work. He would have been a real asset on a kibbutz. He seriously considered living there permanently, but in the end he stayed in Sweden. This was a significant junction or crossroads in his life and a difficult choice to make. Sometimes those choices were made for him – such as how he came to be living in France again: He had come back from Sweden  and spent two years in Norfolk building a 40-foot sailing boat, the Sarah Thornton. Sarah Thornton was an 18th-century Scottish ancestor that Graeme had traced. Ancestral research was something that was another of Graeme’s many
interests – eventually he privately published his research for all his family members under the title Hazard Yet Forward, the clan motto being Whatever the risk: Go ahead. That seems quite appropriate for Graham and his boat-building. It was an amazing thing to do – just to start building a boat, and not any old boat but a beautifully crafted boat, a boat that  expressed this unusual combination of artistic and practical skills that Graeme had. His boat was at the same time both a beautiful work of art and also a totally practical and functional craft. So much so that, when he was caught in the Bay of Biscay in the hurricane which hit England in 1987, the boat came through extreme weather conditions with flying colours, although it had to be towed into the French port of Lorient. Perhaps the boat fared a bit better than Graeme because he was in a bad way when they rescued him, but he was able to recuperate with the help of the locals and he ended up living on his boat in Lorient for two years, enjoying the French way of life – which I’m sure suited him in many ways.

When he felt that this period in his life had come to an end – another junction or crossroads, if you like – Graeme donated his boat to the local borstal as a project. So once again he returned to his family home in Earlswood, where he  continued to pursue his many interests. He was always interested in the ballet and was a friend of Sadler's Wells; he was likewise keen on the theatre and the arts, and enjoyed visits to the National Gallery and other galleries. He also developed his lifelong interest in the Native American – something that went back to playing cowboys and indians with Struan – but again with Graeme’s customary focus and concentration, always evident when he took hold of
something and developed it.

Graeme spent time on a Navajo Indian reservation with a view to importing Navajo crafts and blankets for sale in England. And he helped in the care of his grandmother in her last years, becoming very close to her. It was during this time that he completed his ancestral research project. As his own retirement age approached, Graeme began to look after his mother, Marion. There are many around Redhill who will remember him using his skills as a mechanic and gardener, two activities which he thoroughly enjoyed. It was during this period that I came to know him. He must have come back to Earlswood from Salisbury at the same time that I became vicar of St John’s, Redhill. And I was always ‘Vicar’ to Graeme, never Nicholas. “It’s the vicar,” he would announce when I called on Marion. “Morning, Vicar!” when he greeted me in the street – and I would often see him in his blue boiler suit and headband going to and from his jobs.

I knew none of this amazing story behind Graeme. He was always this rather quiet figure slightly in the background of his mother, yet at the same time a very calm and peaceful presence. He enjoyed being gently in the background yet connected to Marion’s social life. And he was able to simply get on with being helpful and kind, not just to her but to many others around. Graeme was kind, helpful, honest and hard-working – and, of course, focused. One of my lasting pictures is of him on our lawn – and he used to cut our lawn as he did for many people. But Graeme wasn’t just going to cut our lawn, he took it on himself to single-handedly remove every weed and plantain by hand. I can picture him now, kneeling down and meticulously digging up each one with a knife – a thankless task on our lawn, which has always been more of an area of grass than an actual lawn, making the job rather akin to painting the Forth Bridge. But it was typical of Graeme to approach it with such focus and determination This period came to an end with Marion’s death in 2009. Shortly afterwards Graeme was diagnosed with a hereditary condition which gradually deprived him of his mobility. He lived a quiet and withdrawn life until he died suddenly on 8th July. He will be missed. His is such an amazing story – and I say story. It’s almost as if he was a character from one of his own novels. I only looked through some of the manuscripts
briefly but it struck me that they were all about characters – not so much action novels but character novels. So there was Graeme, the writer in the garret room in Paris – which reminds me of the writer in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. The next time he returned to France he was more like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Graeme sitting with the Native American Indian was something out of The Boy’s Own Paper, as was building his boat and setting out for a life on the
seven seas, only to be struck by a hurricane and virtually drowned. Yet there was always something immensely practical and down-to-earth about these things for Graeme, a combination of the artistic and the practical. Just as his novels highlight people as characters rather than things that they did, Graeme should be remembered not for all the different things he did but for who he was. Let us simply remember him for being Graeme.
The Reverend Nicholas Calver, Church of St John the Evangelist, Redhill, Surrey