One night, in the late 1960s, I stayed with my dad and his new partner in London. My recollections are extremely dim, though. I seem to remember that the address was in Islington, but that could be wrong. I remember my dad singing a comedy version of Scarborough Fair and on another day I remember him driving us to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. These images are slightly hazy and entirely in black and white.
On the drive to Sheerness, it rained incessantly. I recall the windscreen wipers splishing, splashing, just like they did in R Dean Taylor’s classic Gotta See Jane. It was so dark and sometimes we only saw the headlights of oncoming vehicles when they were virtually in top of us. My dad was getting tired and suggested I sing songs to him.
He knew I had with me a pile of Record Song Books. These were monthly music papers that brought to us the latest music news but also the lyrics of the songs of the day. So I sang to my dad for, I don’t know, an hour, perhaps longer. I remember some of the songs, too. The aforementioned Gotta See Jane, which featured the rain effects we were enjoying along the way – and the ‘windshield (as opposed to windscreen) wipers, splishin’, splashin’ – and Jesamine by the Casuals were two. I never knew why we were driving to Sheerness. When I talked to my dad about it in 2009, I wondered if we ever did.
Not only could he not remember the trip to Sheerness, he had no recollection of singing Scarborough Fair or even of me coming to London to stay in the first place. But I remembered it so well. I didn’t remember travelling to London – would I have gone by train? – but everything else seemed so clear. I couldn’t have dreamt the whole thing, could I?
It would have been around that time when I underwent my first course of psychiatric treatment. I was suffering from panic attacks and anxiety dreams. I was taking every Tuesday afternoon away from school to get my treatment. Perhaps, I’d been more mad than I realised.
Ten years ago, I sat at the breakfast table with my dad, asking if he was sure he didn’t remember. He didn’t. And I was aware I was talking with an incredible man with a near photographic memory for names and places. If he didn’t remember it, there was a fair chance it never happened.
Is the mind that powerful, to translate what must have been the dream of a young boy into a distant, yet vivid, memory of something that never actually took place? It’s entirely possible. My mind has regularly disintegrated throughout 50 glorious years of depression and anxiety and I would imagine – if, that is, I can trust my wild imagining – that my subconscious could have made stuff up. Even my best and happiest memories. How apt that they probably weren’t real.
I’m trying to piece this stuff together as part of a greater writing project and it’s getting tough, almost impossible to piece together a story when there are big memory holes and even that the memories aren’t actually what they seem.
In the late 1960s, I may have lost my mind and experienced something that never happened and I spent years wallowing in nostalgia at what was pure fiction.
My dad, a wise sage, always told me not to dwell on the past because you could not change it. But when that past might not even have existed, then what’s left?
A dream might have been a good dream, one that lasted most of a lifetime, but it’s still a dream. Isn’t it?
