Jack – you write: “ I like the idea of addressing your concerns. I'd like to
do this in the hope that I can help with the communication of the values
that give meaning and purpose to your life in assessing the quality of
practitioner-research. . . . Your story, which only a few on the list
will know, about your father's belief in love and understanding and the
influence of these qualities in your own learning and beliefs, continues to
move and inspire me.”

My father Ernest’s story: brought up in the tenement buildings of the East
End of London, he was conscripted into the army in 1940 as an infantryman.
In the course of the next 3 years of World War II, he killed 10 of the
‘ enemy’ at close quarters. He was finally captured at Anzio and marched
through a wood in which the Germans were burying their dead in a pit at the
centre of a clearing. Expecting to be shot, he said to himself: “If I get to
the other side of this clearing, I will live to be an old man”. He survived
and returned home with a desire to live his life as positively as possible –
and, in part, for and on behalf of those whose lives he had violently
ended. After the privations of POW camps in Germany and Poland, he returned
safely home and I was born in May 1946: “if ever a baby was wanted, you
were” says my mother. But then I have come to realise that there has always
been a hovering sense of an obligation on me that derives from my father’s
experiences – an obligation to live my life positively, in turn, for the
children that those dead men were never able to father and enjoy.

Values? I feel such a sense of outrage at the injustice that was meted out
to my father that put him in situations where he had no options other than
to kill or be killed. He did live to be a relatively old man, but those ten
men returned and visited him as he lay dying. In his eyes, even after a life
informed by a constant attempt to love and understand the other, the debt
remained. We often study the pathological in order better to understand the
healthy (‘the other side of the same coin’). Thus my understanding of my
sense of justice that I try to live out in the form of my life is
illuminated and effused by my father’s story – not just as the words given
here but as something that is in my very bones. For me, to ‘act justly’
goes beyond my activities as a magistrate – it includes how I engage with
others in dialogue and even how I read a text written by another.

You go on to say: “I'd like to see in this review if it is possible to
share, through dialogue, and perhaps with visual narratives, love and
understanding as criteria of quality and as living standards of judgement.”
In this context and in the light of what I have written above, I see ‘love
and understanding’ – as concatenated – to be what informs the process of
treating each other justly, the whole being underpinned for me by my
father’s experiences. If I hold these core values as living standards of
judgement, then I hope they will gradually reveal themselves as I/we move
carefully closer towards the process of review.

- Pete