Gardening while he looked on

My wife, Sally, volunteers in fundraising and she saw on social media that volunteer gardeners were needed, and suggested I give them a shout. I like gardening and I have time, so I filled in the appropriate forms and here I am. I do a Wednesday morning which suits me really well.

A little while after I started volunteering here, my father, Roy Chapman, was at the Hospice. He was 93 and he had heart failure. He came in for respite care and was doing really well and was planning to come home. Sadly, he relapsed and died four or five days later. The last thing he would have wanted was to be blue lighted in somewhere. He was much more about quality of life rather than quantity of life. So yes, it was a shock, but we all now look back and think thank heavens, because it was wonderful at the Hospice. Absolutely unbelievable.

So there I was, gardening outside the window while he was watching from his room. The nurses even brought him outside so he could sit nearby supervising me! It was actually really quite surreal.

My father was very heavily involved in the town and the area for a very long time in many different ways, and usually you step back as you get older but he was still front and centre of everything at 93. He and my mother founded the local branch of Cancer Research UK and he was on the fundraising committee. He was chairman of Colchester United for a while. He was a senior partner of Abbotts, the estate agents. He was involved in an awful lot of things locally. 

Being at the Hospice with him was lovely and it's great now having had experience of it, to be able to put something back by volunteering. We really first touched on this when my father in law died five years ago; he was looked after by SinglePoint. They were utterly brilliant and we did some fundraising for them, which went extremely well.

I think the gardens are wonderful. There's a team of gardeners, a lot of them by the look of it. It's lovely looking at it from both sides, from being inside the Hospice rooms looking out to see the gardens looking as lovely as they are, and from outside looking in knowing people are enjoying the gardens. 

I am just really very happy to be able to help. Certainly, what I have learned in my brief time here is you've got the Hospice itself, which is the tip of the iceberg, but there is so much going on below, whether it's gardening, whether it's maintenance; there's a myriad of things. I mean I'm not terribly skilled by any stretch of imagination, as you can tell when I hack away at brambles, but I think there probably is a place for just about everybody here in some facet or another to be able to help. I'm a great believer in lots of little things make a big thing. It's always great to have lots of people doing little things; lots of people doing just a few hours a week becomes an awful lot of hours in a week combined.

Robert's wife Sally also volunteers with St Helena.