Andrew Bolt: Profound love is the greatest gift we have in this life

LOVE is a wonderful gift but my father’s life taught me that, like anything beautiful, it takes dedication, time and work to be enduring, writes Andrew Bolt.

For love to grow, you must stake the plants when it storms and water it when it dries

MY DAD was born 85 years ago near Amsterdam. He died in Adelaide last Tuesday, leaving behind a surprise — the secret to love.

Mijndert Bolt — or Mike — was the youngest in his family and the only clear photograph I have of him as a small boy show eyes that seem to see the world from a guarded distance.

Indeed, all his life Dad tended to feel alone in a crowd — like someone who did not belong.

He hated life in the army. He had a crisis of confidence teaching in a school in Rotterdam. Mum didn’t have to try hard to get him to agree to start over again in Australia.

Here he made a real go of it. Dad worked at first in a factory and as a bus conductor, but Australia was so short of trained teachers he was soon back before a classroom, despite his accent, and this time he thrived.

Many children he taught — from the migrant suburb of Elizabeth to the then frontier city of Darwin; from the desert town of Tarcoola to Tailem Bend on the Murray — will know the care he took over their lessons.

Andrew Bolt’s father, Mike Bolt, during his army service.

More than that, he was a man of unimpeachable integrity. If he gave his word, he kept it. If he borrowed a dollar, he repaid it. I never knew him to tell a single lie or do a single mean thing.

Still, our family life was, for the four children, not always easy. My mother was an unhappy woman and the family’s driving force.

But Dad’s love for his children burned steadily throughout. His love was never conditional and not one of us ever doubted it.

But in 1983, a catastrophe hit. Mum died and Dad’s life shattered — first emotionally and then professionally. He got angrier and retreated even more.

But 23 years ago, Dad had the greatest stroke of luck in his whole life. He met Margaret. Like him, she was Dutch and widowed. Unlike him, she was a talker, sociable and exuberant and always busy with the rituals of family.

In contrast, my father, intensely introverted, expected his children to ring him — not him to ring them.

For love to grow, you must stake the plants when it storms and water it when it dries.

I’d resolved years ago not to hold back as Dad did. My children have never needed to simply assume I love them. In this, I’ve also learned from my own greatest luck — my wife. Like Margaret, she also busies herself with the work that goes to build love within family and with friends.

She remembers the anniversaries and organises the dinners. She swots the exams our children must sit. She arranges the lifts for relatives who need them and brings them to our table. Her love is not just felt but shown. Even making coffee is for her an act of love.

I said there was a secret to love and this is it. People talk lightly of “falling in love”. But the falling is just the easy bit. It’s actually like falling into a garden. Once you’ve tumbled in, you must work to make that garden keep producing all the wonderful fruit and flowers. You must pull out the weeds, tend to the seedlings and keep out the pests. You must stake the plants when it storms and water when it dries.

So, yes, you fall in love, but you work at staying in it. And the longer you work, the richer love gets. I am blessed to know it.

You fall in love, but you work at staying in it. And the longer you work, the richer love gets.

Yes, you’re right. So far, I’ve described a secret I’ve learned not so much from Dad, but in reaction to him. But here’s the postscript. In the days we spent by his bedside — his soul gone, his body still breathing — we children watched as Margaret’s tribe filled the room to be with her and Dad. My brother was the first to point out Dad had become the loved grandfather to a whole new clan, many of whom we out-of-towner boys had never met.

Dad had acquired more people who loved him than I’d imagined possible and that was thanks to busy Margaret, who cried the day before Dad died and asked who she would care for now.

Please don’t assume my brother and sister, smart people, see all this as I do.

But tomorrow on a beach in Adelaide we three, the surviving half of our family of six, will toast Dad — and also Margaret and the astonishing power of love’s work.

BLOG WITH ANDREW BOLT