The Story of David
Like many ostensibly British people born at the tail-end of empire, David was cosmopolitan from birth. His father, Harold, could as an Irish citizen have sat out the war, but had felt compelled to enlist, nearly losing his life in the RAF. His mother, Luce, was a francophone Belgian – and there’s more on the Belgian front to come.
David Roger Harold Norminton was born in December 1946 in Caracas, Venezuela, where his father, a linguist and educationalist, was employed by the British Council. David spoke Spanish as a toddler, and Walloon French. A few years later, the family moved to what was then Madras in southern India. David spoke English with a distinct Anglo-Indian accent. At the age of ten, the tropical idyll ended. He was sent to boarding school in Uttoxeter, Derbyshire. He was desperately homesick, dropped his accent, became acquainted with snow. Even into his seventies, he couldn’t bear to hear the theme tune to The Archers, as it brought him back to lonely spells in the school sanatorium. David delved deep into himself to cross the emotional desert of boarding school. He emerged with character intact and a deep reservoir of unused love.
At sixteen, that love found its purpose.
Our mother, Catherine, was the daughter of another francophone Belgian with whom Harold Norminton had tried his luck before the war. Luce Merckx, David’s mother, and Emilie Varenberghs, Catherine’s mother, had been best friends in Brussels, and it was as a result of this that, precociously, our parents first shared a bath together at the age of two. As kids meeting in the summer holidays, they got on ok. That changed in the summer of 1962. And though at first it wasn’t easy to carry on a romance at a distance, they held fast as a couple, meeting when they could, often against parental approval, until they were married in December 1967. At the hotel where they began their honeymoon, they had to show their wedding rings at the desk because they looked so young.
It was a love match. David and Catherine made a home in each other – a home that our father could be sure of after so many years on the move.
While he finished his medical training at St Thomas’s Hospital, they lived in Brixton. They moved to Staines, where I was born, my father travelling to and from hospital, while our mother worked at the Institut Francais. In 1972, they moved to Bagshot in Surrey, and David began his career as a GP.
David went on to have a long career in general practice at the White Bungalow surgery in Sunninghill, that became King’s Corner Surgery, which he helped to design. He was a dedicated family doctor, humorous, efficient, quietly progressive – some thought his interest in acupuncture, for which he underwent training in the early eighties, was positively outlandish. But he was a pragmatist open to what worked, indifferent to orthodoxies if they didn’t prove their worth in practice. For many years, he and our mother were a domestic team, she, taking calls from patients when he was out on a visit, and both of them getting woken by the telephone when it rang on his nights on call.
In later years, David worked to pass on his experience, serving as a trainer to many young doctors. He worked hard, but always did his best to spend time with his growing family. We went on long holidays in the summer to Brittany and to the Vercors, near Catherine’s parents. Even in his free time, he served others. He was for many years a church warden at St Anne’s, a conservationist on Bagshot Heath, a chairman of the playing fields association. David understood that we find belonging by involving ourselves in the community where we settle. Belonging is not a noun but a verb.
David reduced his working hours in the late noughties. He retired hoping to spend many years with Catherine, travelling and spending time with their children and grandchildren. Sadly, this was not to be. His beloved Catherine died of melanoma in November 2015. David was devastated, but he bore the loss with courage and good humour, thinking as always of others. His relationship with Rita Hanford brought him companionship and the opportunity to see a little more of the world. They kept each other company through the long ordeal of Covid-19.
David took delight in his grandchildren and remained involved in their lives to the last. The whole family gathered at Christmas 2024 for a loving farewell.
David the Historian
David adored history and was a vast font of knowledge, especially of the Crusades, the late Roman empire and early medieval history. It never ceased to amaze us quite how much he knew about these periods and visiting Jerusalem, Istanbul or Jordan with him was so exciting as he brought the periods to life.
His love of the period was bound up with his humanity. To him, the religious tolerance that had existed in the Arab World contrasted with the fanaticism of the Franks. He saw in the Crusades a tragic tale of intolerance and a lesson for us today about the importance of pluralism.
David absorbed his history through books, biographies, academic tomes but also through historical novels and here we must make a special mention of Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits and Robert Merle’s Fortunes de France, which Papa adored and reread many times.
David also made history live through his coin collection. His first coins were given to him by his father and friends of the family when he was just a boy – denari from Domitian and Caracalla, Byzantine Traches from the 4th Crusade and a great drachm from Alexander the Great – and he was hooked. He spent his life building his collection and was proud to give history talks using them as prompts. Whether it concerned Roman Emperors, Crusader coins or medieval half-nobles, David was an enthusiastic storyteller. Marrying this with his love of early music, he could spend many happy hours lost in the distant past.
David the Nature Lover
David’s love of nature and of our planet was profound. He joined the Woodland Trust when it was first founded, understanding 50 years ago how important it is that we recognise that we are part of our living environment, not detached from or masters of it. David loved trees, particularly the oak, the beech, and of course, acers. If he could have had his way, our garden would have been a living shrine to acers in all their delicate variety.
Given his profound respect for the living world, he gardened for nature. We can remember him years ago persuading all his neighbours of the importance of building hedgehog tunnels in their fences. He always caught the spiders that ventured into the house and carefully took them outside, and diligently tended the compost heap and its wormery with scientific analysis.
The woods and heath behind our house were an integral part of our childhood and our children’s childhood, our very own vast adventure playground, and David was very much part of this. Treasure hunts, hide and seek, building camps, picking mushrooms, elaborate make-believe games with orcs & goblins hiding in the pines, fairies in the bogs.
We can remember one summer afternoon going with him on an adventure looking for a “lost lake” and getting spectacularly lost ourselves – those were the days before mobile phones & sat navs. Eventually we decided to just walk straight and much to our surprise suddenly found ourselves on Vicarage Lane (just behind the church!) at about 9 in the evening. Maman was not best pleased!
In fact, David’s sense of direction in a wood was something of a family legend – only last May we were hiking in the forest of Beauregard Plateau in La Clusaz, a stunning forest that we have hiked in for years. The group split as Lucie and her friends rushed ahead at pace. Suddenly we realised we had lost papa – at the same time it started to hail. Frantic whistling, yelling and hopeless searching on the phone ensued. We eventually tracked him down; David had followed his own path and was half a kilometre away!
David gave a lot of his energy to the conservation and protection of our local environment, especially the heathland at the top of the hill through the Heathland Conservation Society. He was immensely proud of the work his team achieved in the Poor’s Allotment and was always so grateful that others shared his passion for protecting the heath and were prepared to dedicate time and effort towards it.
David the compassionate, loving family man
It’s his compassion that stays the most in our hearts and memories. Always the purpose of life was to serve others, to see from their point of view. Everywhere he saw loneliness, he would go out of his way to address it. Because he was the doctor for Silwood College, he would take lonely graduate students under his wing. They spent weekends with us. We all but adopted Marie-Cruz and Paolina, two Mexican boarders at The Marist Convent, whose homesickness he recognised only too well. Our parents were immigrants, and behaved accordingly, open to others because they knew what it was to be an outsider, an incomer. Knowing insecurity, they were dedicated to giving us its opposite. And they succeeded: we had deeply happy, secure childhoods, with a strong sense of belonging and home.
