[Lifestyle] A new start after 60: A set of carpentry tools deepened my bond with my late father

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When I got the tools, I did cry’ … Lynn Leggat in her workshop. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
A new start after 60
Life and style
A new start after 60: A set of carpentry tools deepened my bond with my late father
As a child, Lynn Leggat felt closest to her dad when he taught her woodworking. Just after he died, she was given power tools for her birthday and began making up for lost time

ynn Leggat has always “kept wood stacked around the place,” she says. She picked it up here and there for a notional future when she would make something with it. For her 60th birthday, her husband Alan, a builder, bought her a set of power tools. “He said: ‘You keep talking about it, now go and do it.’”

Woodworking has always felt important to Leggat, now 62. She was born in Manchester, and when she was five, in 1966, the family emigrated to Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a carpenter who made wooden patterns for ship parts, and Leggat learned at his side. “He taught me to knock a nail in when I was seven or eight, and how to hold a saw. He thought it was important for girls to have the skills that boys have.” Her father “made tables, cupboards, kitchens. Whatever was needed in the house, he made it – a conservatory, an orangery, a games room. He just kept building things. I think doing the practical stuff with me was his way of showing me how much he cared. I knew he loved me,” Leggat says.

By the time she was 15, Leggat’s father had gone out of business. She left school shortly after. “You only really went to sixth form if you were going to college or university. My mum and dad couldn’t afford a uniform,” she says. To find work, she opened the Yellow Pages and turned to “banks”. The first one she called invited her to interview.

“I worked in a bank, a finance company, and for EMI … I was never really happy with what I was doing, so every 18 months I’d change my job,” she says. She was also “a restaurant manager and a waitress, did bar work, marketing, and demonstrations in supermarkets”.

At 22, she returned to England to connect with her wider family. One night, her uncle persuaded her to accompany him to a Catholic dance. She bumped into Alan (quite literally) on the dancefloor. He walked her home. They have been together for 38 years, and have three children.

Leggat restarted her education when she was about 30, sitting A-levels in a hall full of teenagers, and later doing an Open University degree. At 40, she started working for Manchester city council in regeneration and youth services, and for the past 10 years has specialised in charity work, teaching women DIY at a local community centre.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/09/a-new-start-after-60-a-set-of-carpentry-tools-deepened-my-bond-with-my-late-father