The closest I felt to my father was when he died in a dream
Maybe half a dozen dreams have stayed with me since childhood. I don’t meant the ones that recur but those that possess something that made it striking at the time and which prevents me forgetting it. The eerie combination of elicited emotion and a fantastical situation — plot, even — that marked it as different from the normal scope of the weird and wonderful that describe our nightly adventures in the spaceship of our minds.
One of those dreams involved my father. There must have been a time when I loved my father. Before the disillusionment of adolescence and the full separation of early adulthood. This dream must have been in early childhood, therefore, because it left me bereft. And yet, on further consideration, I may have felt pity more than grief.
As a child I played a lot out of doors. Football in the street and long games of military warfare — mostly what we termed unashamedly in those decidedly less liberated times as “Japs and Commandos”. We were, after all, less than 20 years on from the end of the war and war films still formed a staple part of a Saturday evening television diet along with sardines on toast, chocolate cake, and milk. (Ours was not a foodie family.) Usually, John Wayne or some other American was managing to defeat the Germans or the Japanese with no help from the British, of course. But we knew the Commandos were the real heroes, along with the Desert Rats. Those were the groups we longed to be part of in our childish notions of war and valour. Our fathers had often tasted some of the real thing, although my father had done his National Service — in Libya — shortly after the war ended.
Our house in Edinburgh had a gravel drive down one side that led to a separate garage. This became an essential part of the dream. The setting of the dream was the world I knew, which was the streets of Edinburgh. The nightmare reality of the dream was that Edinburgh had been invaded by the Japanese and their soldiers were everywhere.
I could picture the uniforms and guns of the Japanese well because I was an avid reader of the small comics that specialised in war, such as Commando and War Picture Library. (It’s where I also learned my key German phrases like Hände hoch, Achtung, and Schnell Englisch Schweinehund. I think it’s rather telling that the only Japanese that was rendered in the comics was a shout of Banzai when an often futile charge was made against overwhelming odds.)
In the dream, my father and I were on the run, hiding as best we could from the Japanese, who were searching for us and, I somehow felt in the dream, closing in.
At some point, we made the fateful decision to run for it and, suddenly, we were running down the gravel drive of our house towards the garage at the bottom. A shot exploded in the sunlight — for it was daytime — and my father fell forward onto the gravel. I looked behind me to see a soldier kneeling, with the rifle pointing my way. He looked exactly like one of the small soldiers from my Airfix model soldier 1/32 figure sets.
I dropped to my own knees and looked at my father. His mouth was open and there was gravel on his tongue. He was dead. I just sat there and cried and expected to be shot. I remember feeling immense sadness for my father but couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Then I woke up.
My father lives still. He lives close by, without a gravel path and no longer able to drive, so there is no need for a garage or even a parking space, although one comes with his apartment. I don’t expect Japanese soldiers to be shooting at us when I visit him. The dream reminds me, when I think of it, of the relationship I failed to have with my father.
When my father died in my dream on the gravel path back in Edinburgh in the sixties, it was the death, in fact, of my dreams for a father-son relationship that even then I realised had slipped from my grasp.
And yet here we are, half a century later, bound together by a duty of care, if not love. I can’t explain that at all.
