Happy remembrance....

We said our goodbyes for now to Sharna today. He was 92 years old. A very quiet man with an impish sense of humour...and some well kept secrets too, medals in body building and ballroom dancing!!

I have known the family for at least fifty years, since they moved into Canonbie Road where we lived, and my mum began childminding their son when Sharna’s wife returned to very part time teaching. Every Christmas morning, after church, we called into their home for coffee and shortbread. Agnes began coming to church with us and many years later, Sharna, a Hindu by birth, came too, now sharing her Christian faith.

Sharna witnessed awful things in his family during the partitioning of India in 1947 fleeing their home in Rangoon for Kolkata ( now Calcutta) and previous to that the Japanese bombing of Rangoon in 1940.

Sharna moved to England to take up the role of Technical Apprentice in Nottingham where he spied Agnes one evening at a dance hall and they married in 1962. She had planned on teaching in Australia and did so for a year but came back for him. They enjoyed forty years of marriage before Agnes died of cancer in 2002.

Our first home from 1973 to 1987 was just two doors away from the family and we had the joy of watching their two children grow up. Today, years of too little contact in recent years disappeared as we shared very happy memories of a wonderful man, husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather.