'I told you I'd do it' said Dad - then he jumped to his death off the cliff

Adapted from Daily Mail

On the day my father died, he’d been in an agitated state all morning. To calm him down, his sister Zoe persuaded him to go for a walk with her.

They left Redland, our holiday home on the Cornish coast, and walked up the small road towards the lighthouse on Trevose Head.

Three-quarters of the way up, they turned right to cut across to the cliff path.

Just beyond a herring-bone slate wall with a tamarisk growing out of it, where the track runs very close to the cliff edge, my father turned to Zoe.

‘I told you I’d do it,’ he said. Then he dived on to the rocks beneath.

I was just 17 at the time — too young to realise it would take years to work through the repercussions of his violent death.

My father Eric had a magnetic presence. He was about 6ft 4in, with dark hair and pale blue eyes — and very attractive to women.

My own memories of him, however, have been distorted by his bipolar disorder.

As I grew up, his bouts of mania followed by depressions became more frequent, and much of what he did bewildered me.

On the surface, our lives seemed idyllic. My four siblings and I grew up on a 150-acre farm in Oxfordshire, and spent every holiday at our other house on the Cornish coast.

My father spent most of the week at our flat in London, where he was the managing director of the Distillers Company — then involved in the marketing of Thalidomide, the drug prescribed for pregnant women suffering from morning sickness. As the world was soon to discover, it resulted in many children being born with deformities.