Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

8 moderately successful academically, with his interest in play competing with a need to study. At Manchester Grammar School he joined the Old Mancunian Harriers, a running club for current students and alumni of Manchester Grammar School. He had a very successful running career as a student at MGS and for several years after he left, through the period leading up to World War II. His forte was cross country running across hilly, soggy difficult terrain. “The more difficult and rotten the better” he would tell me. It is difficult to equate with modern running but he ran 10 miles at a 5:20 minutes per mile pace. He also had speed, running a 1:51 880yds on a cinder track. He probably had a really good chance of participating in the 1940 Olympics that were to be held in Tokyo. But, like so many young men of his generation, his dreams and aspirations were blunted in late 1939. Running was his joy. He expressed the love for the psychological high of the “in the moment” interplay with extreme and sustained exertion. By his bedside, three days before my father died he told me he had been vividly dreaming of the freedom of running effortlessly as a young man. For me, I knew by those words, it was time for him to let go of the frailty and pain of old age.