My dad: soldier, painter, horseman and inspiration

On the whole, I am not a fan of the modern style of family memoir. Those accounts of parents' lives – the rummaging through of old letters, the excited discovery of ancient loves and disappointments that had been kept secret for so long – can represent a sort of deferred vanity. More often than not they are about the writer himself, how he came to be where he is, his precious authorly feelings. They bear out rather too specifically Philip Roth's remark about the trials of any family that has a writer in its midst.

Yet here I am, writing about my father, who died last week. In accordance with his wishes, his funeral was attended only by his immediate family. The sun shone down on the Oxfordshire countryside that, during the last years of his life, he loved to paint. There was a perfect, simple ceremony at the local church where he had worshipped. With a sense of dramatic appropriateness that was almost too good to be true, a foxhound from the local pack appeared from the hedgerow as we drove home and loped along the road ahead of the cars.

Death is a time for what we now call closure, but of course for those left behind it often stirs up memories, questions and unresolved issues with an intensity that life never can. My father was a man of achievement. The obituaries have recalled a life of extraordinary variety: his exemplary career as a soldier, a leader of men both in war and in peacetime, when he often spoke up for what he believed while others remained silent; his sporting victories as an amateur jockey, international show-jumper and pentathlete; his role as one of those who have helped to shape modern horseracing; his writing, and his painting which, almost unfairly, seemed actually to improve when he was in his eighties.

Letters from those whose lives he influenced – friends, soldiers, colleagues, neighbours – have confirmed aspects of his life that were more important to him than any victory or medal. He inspired those he knew, not only with loyalty but with a sort of belief in themselves, which is the best kind of friendship.

But, of course, those of us at home knew all that. Dad did things well. He was a winner. He not only achieved with apparent ease what others found difficult, but he managed his achievements in unlikely combinations – the sporting with the artistic, the military with the journalistic. When my brother Philip and I were small, he was a dashing, somewhat distant figure whose life was a bewildering blur of drama and triumph that occurred elsewhere. As we grew older, we became used to strangers revealing yet another story of unpublicised inspiration.

How can I put this without appearing disloyal? The dad that other people knew was different from our own. It was not that he had a grand, public life whereas he was just a father at home – the opposite, in fact. The memories and experiences of his outside, achieving life sometimes seemed more full-blooded than those of the family, almost as if his emotional life was fuller and more satisfying out there among his soldiers and his friends, that his openness was reserved for them, that they, not us, saw the true man.

We grew up and got on with our lives, in which our father took an intelligent, questioning interest. One of his great talents was to be aware of the changing times in which we were working. Not only was he never old-fashioned in his attitudes, but talking to him never somehow seemed to be like talking to an old man. He applied himself to his retirement – painting, writing, living with my mother in the house and on the land that they both loved – with all the commitment and energy that he had shown in his earlier, more competitive days. "I am sorry for people whose nature it is to yearn for their previous occupations and pastimes," he wrote in his memoir Monkey Business. "Indeed, very often I have been happy to move on."

As I sit in his study writing this, I discover that, slightly to my surprise, I, too, have been inspired by the way in which he lived his life – his wit, his abiding dislike of any kind of snobbery, the way he naturally embodied qualities that, in a self-conscious age, are increasingly difficult to define but easy to recognise: integrity, courage and modesty.

My father was blessed with good fortune. His generation had learnt that life and time are precious things, and he pursued a career that allowed him to have fun and yet to succeed professionally. He was married for more than 40 years to a woman who loved him and who understood his need to be himself. He died with dignity, and without prolonged suffering. Throughout his life he had taken his luck and talent and had made the best of them, for himself and for others.

That was his greatest achievement, a true, rare gift and an example to the generations that follow him.

terblacker@aol.com