Ed

When I was a very little girl, McMum and McDad told me that a very special friend of theirs was coming to stay with us. They had worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before they had children, and through McMum's job as a social worker in the Jewish Hospital (I think), had met Inky and Ed Landerman, with whom they formed a lifetime's friendship.

We picked Ed up at the chilly little station in South Wylam. He had a huge, warm personality that made you love him to bits straight away. He loved children and knew just how to speak to us. He was interested in us: in fact, he was interested in everybody and everything. I became penpals with his eldest daughter Emmy, and I used to look forward to those letters from a mythical country, with Emmy's looped handwriting describing family life hundreds of miles away.

When I was fourteen, I went to the USA with my American Grandmother. She had been raised in Vermont, New England and we spent a lot of time with her elderly friends who reminisced about their childhoods together. They were tough, charming and eccentric and I got into my gig as Granny's companion. At one point, Granny tried to buy my diary off me to see what I'd written about her friends. I wouldn't sell it, because I'd written nothing about them at all: I had examined them minutely in my imagination, that was all (and done one or two slightly cruel drawings!).

By the time I got to go to visit the Landermans, I was fairly desperate for young company, and a little bit homesick. I remember the plane flying over Pittsburgh. I marvelled at the suburban gardens, lined up in grids, each with a turquoise swimming pool.

Inky and Ed Landerman welcomed me as though I was their own daughter. They had a dog called Henry, one of those terriers with a moustache and trousers, and their daughters Emmy and Laura welcomed me into the family too. I ate the first bagel I'd ever eaten in their house (yum), marvelled at their bedrooms (they had been allowed to decorate them the way they wanted them), listened to their friends playing guitars in their basement, went to a drive-in movie and ate donuts, and best of all, went to a YWCA summer camp for two weeks with Laura. We were actually in two separate parts of the camp, but its peculiar customs and habits were shared by all the girls who went there: they woke us in the morning by blaring Seventy Six Trombones from speakers perched in the trees. There was a ritual of swimming in your clothes. We went canoeing. I learned how to play Death by Winking, and I learned American singing games.

Inky and Ed showed me a snapshot of an American childhood from the safety of their home. They were funny, youthful, a little bit anarchic and incredibly affectionate. 

One by one, McDad and McMum died. Inky died. Laura and me kept in touch, and her daughter came to London with her grandmother, met Offsprog One and me at Buckingham Palace and 'did' London. Ed made his way all the way up from his hotel in Kensington the High Barnet one cold winter evening and visited me and my teenage daughters. They were charmed by him; he hadn't changed at all, apart from shaving off his luxuriant beard. It was so lovely to see him again.

Ed passed away a couple of days ago. He had spent his senior years organising tennis matches for elders, and also loving his grandchildren just as much as he loved his children. In the midst of all the current terribleness and the grimness the knowledge that it's possible for such a loving human being to reach a ripe old age, carrying on sharing his good humour and kindness, is hugely heartening. 

Ed, thank you for your love across the ocean. I send love back to you and your family, and I treasure my own lifelong friendship with your daughter, Laura. Goodbye, dear Ed.