The day before Frank Hair died—after living for twenty years on his back with a fractured spine—he joked to his nurse: "I haven't fed ihe birds to-day. The little blighters will think Ive forgotten all about them."
An hour before he died Hair smiled to the matron and* said brightly: "Good night, matron, God bless you."
That was just the cheerful way they expected Hair to go—Hair, the man who never lost his cheerfulness. never complained from that day in France in 1917 when as a six-foot-three sergeant in the Royal Garrison Artillery a shell explosion shattered his fine body and doomed him to a life of helplessness.
A Putney man, and formerly in the Hongkong police, Hair was then thirty years old. He was sent to the Queen Alexandra Hospital Home for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors at Roehampton.
The home was moved to Gifford House, Worthing, in 1933. It was here that Hair died last week.
His neck broken, the upper half of his body paralysed, he had never been able to move off his back since that day in France.
Like other permanently disabled ex-service men, Hair went through a period of intense depression a few years after the war when the tragic realisation came that he would never be able to leave hospital.
But even then Hair's courage did not desert him. As the years wore on, though they brought periods of great bodily suffering, he conquered his mental anguish.
To others he gave the impression that he was always clinging to the hope of recovery, and so well did he live the part of a happy man that it almost seemed that he himself must have believed it.
At Roehampton he, had a hut among the trees in the grounds of ihe home, and here he tamed birds and squirrels to feed from his bedside or even from his hand.
The matron told a "Sunday Express" representative: "Two squire rels used to run up and down some fir trees which he could see from his bed.
He began by throwing bread and meat to the foot of the trees. He gradually shortened the distance until the squirrels would creep into his hut and even steal the food he had prepared for, the birds.
In the winter he always hung mutton fat out for the sparrows. For the tomtits he made us string up a row of peanuts.
He used to have a lot of fun watching their acrobatics on the string as they pecked their way through the shells.
Down here at Worthing he friends with two blackbirds. They would tap at the windows of the sun-house in which he lay to make him pull up the blinds and feed them.
Then there was the blind sparrow, which was led to the sun house by another sparrow.
He called the blind sparrow Hoppy, because it would hop a Tittle then listen to hear where its companion had gone before hopping on again.
Mr. Hair's sun house faces our back gate and he woud give a cheery smile and a wave of the hand to regular passers-by. Many of them soon became his fest friends and would come and talk to him fw hou That was one great rei for hi cheerfulness. He was alway ready to ma friends,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.