Our beautiful son who sent the bullies packing
My Son Laurens was named after the warhero, explorer and philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post, one of my favourite authors. And he was the sort of person that Van der Post would have approved of — a nature-lover who was in tune with the elements and, unusually in this day and age, never a slave to social media.
From his mother, my first wife Sandra, he inherited a love of lurchers. As a little boy he grew up with Akbar, Caesar and Canute and then came Jeany, a puppy acquired when he was 19 and his constant companion. They were forever out together in the Leicestershire countryside, hunting, shooting and fishing by day and ‘lamping’ (looking for rabbits by torchlight) at night.
Laurens was every inch a countryman who loved all of the field sports. Physically striking with curly brown hair and piercing blue eyes, he was often likened to King Ragnar, a main character in the TV series Vikings.
He had a wiry, muscular frame even as a little boy and the family GP said he had never seen such muscle definition on someone so young. We once sought medical advice because he was waking up after twitching in his sleep. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with him: he just had that kind of coursing energy running constantly through him.
Laurens was the youngest of my four sons with Sandra. We ran a tea-room in the market town of Oakham and our house in the nearby village of Langham had a fairly large garden, ideal for all our boys, but particularly Laurens.
By the time he was three he could ride a bike, despite being barely able to reach the pedals. If a challenge was there to be done, Laurens got out and did it — he jumped off our conservatory roof at just four and rolled away without injury.
Sadly, Sandra and I divorced when he was still young, but he remained a very positive person with a strong sense of natural justice.
Once, when he was about 13, he mentioned that he was determined to protect a boy who was being picked on at school. We heard no more about it but, knowing Laurens, you can be sure he brought the bullying to a rapid end.
He wasn’t academic in the slightest. His school labelled him dyslexic, but the real issue was that he just wanted to be outdoors all the time. He was friends with the four sons of a local farming family who were all around his age. They lived in each other’s houses and were always out working on the land and driving tractors together.
After gaining a diploma in Landbased Studies at a local agricultural college, he took on various jobs, tree surgery and thatching included, and the focus of his social life was the Wheatsheaf pub in Langham. Jeany the lurcher was often there with him, as were his ferrets which he’d let run up and down his arms.
Many of his friends were from the gamekeeping community and at one point he became a gamekeeper himself, on an estate near Belfast.
Laurens always liked to try new things and in 2016 he travelled to Australia with some of his closest mates. There he drove 100-ton earth-movers to earn extra cash.
Last year, his desire to travel took him to Thailand and it was there that he met his death in an accident on a hired motorcycle on the island resort of Koh Samui.
On the grim December day of his funeral, the sun came out for a brief moment, flooding the crematorium chapel with light and lifting the spirits of the hundreds of mourners of all ages. A friend of mine said he had never seen so many tweed caps at one gathering.
Afterwards we spent the afternoon and night celebrating his life in a marquee in the Wheatsheaf’s garden. It was a huge occasion and the highlight was his friend’s father, who owns a rare Beech 18 twin-engined aeroplane, flying over as a tribute.
Just like Laurens’ life, it was absolutely stunning.
LAURENS WELLS, born May 18, 1993, died november 23, 2017, aged 24.