every time we say goodbye: the story
of a father and a daughter
Anna Blundy
Century, #12.99
DAVID Blundy was the journalist's journalist. As a foreign correspondent his copy was judged to have no equal and is now regarded as text book material for young reporters.
No-one could quite believe it when he was shot, aged 44, reporting the war in El Salvador. It took his daughter, Anna, a decade to come to terms with his death and, as a result, write her story of a father and a daughter.
Blundy, it seems, was forever a contradiction and no more so than in his wayward upbringing of his first daughter. As a little girl, Anna found out about her daddy's ''day at the office'' in late night, long-distance telephone calls from far-away, exotic locations. She has boxes full of cherished postcards, scribbled in slanting handwriting from places as diverse as Cairo, Washington DC, Jordan, and Haiti.
Her book begins at the moment she believed her life had ended, on November 17, 1989, when she was a 19-year-old student at Oxford.
With intense detail, she describes how a fellow hack from her father's paper, the now defunct Sunday Correspondent, called her to break the news. She had, she confesses, been expecting this call all her life, but when it came nothing her father had taught her prepared her for the harsh reality of his death.
Throughout Every Time We Say Goodbye there are excerpts of letters and postcards Blundy sent his daughter from his travels. Typically they would begin ''Dear Rat Features'' and end ''Love Daddikins''.
''Bored out his mind,'' his daughter tells us, ''he wrote me letters with no capital letters, typed frantically on thin green printer-paper about birds who had laid eggs on his balcony and about all the sad old hacks who would drink at his house.''
Anna Blundy, now a journalist herself, weaves her own heartache with her father's humour to achieve a book that is neither overly sentimental nor crushingly depressing.
She is brutally honest about both her father's shortcomings and her own in the years after his death. She fled to Russia where she developed alcoholism, flitted between numerous lovers, and found no solace in the letters of condolence - some of which are reproduced in her book - from her father's many admirers.
Whereas before his death she had battled to draw her father's attention from his girlfriends - ''having three, sometimes four, parents seemed fairly normal to me,'' she explains following her parents' divorce - after Blundy was shot by a Salvadorean sniper she fought even harder to hold on to his fading image.
However, every time she tried to fill the hole her father had left with a new theory, a new man, or even with religion it seemed to get bigger and more all-engulfing. Anna Blundy decided to travel to El Salvador, to the scene of her father's death.
It was, as her book slowly reveals, a journey to life after a decade of mourning.
Anna Blundy's account is honest, often brutal but rarely self-indulgent. It offers an insight into her father's work and a thoughtful analysis of that often complicated and difficult relationship between a father and a daughter.
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