My Father is, implausibly, a soldier. He is 20, just young enough, as it’s turned out, to avoid frontline service. He is catastrophically, comically, ill-suited to military life; non-conformist, cerebral, physically uncoordinated, personally unkempt, devoid of bellicosity. (He will later turn this miserable period of his life to good account by writing a novel in which the hero is catastrophically, comically, ill-suited to military life.) Having failed, utterly, to make a soldier of him, his infantry regiment has decided to ship him out to the Army Education Corps, where his talents will be put to better use helping to prepare soon-to-be-discharged soldiers for the civilian world. He has three days’ leave before taking up this new more congenial posting, and he is spending them in London.
It’s a dankly marrow-chilling early-December day, and My Father, in uniform, is waiting for a westbound Circle line train at High Street Kensington, when something on the eastbound platform opposite starts, almost subliminally, to nag at his attention. He resists whatever it is, because he has no wish to interrupt a reverie he is enjoying, about the day he has ahead of him. My Father is on his way to have lunch at an Italian restaurant near Baker Street with an old schoolfriend who, for reasons obscure but enchanting, will be accompanied by his slightly older sister. Spaghetti, lasagne, cannelloni, Chianti…. in the company of a girl who, my father knows with instinctive certainty, will be another kind of mouth-watering dish; it’s a prospect almost more delightful than a pleasure-starved National Serviceman can bring himself to contemplate.
But whatever it is on the opposite platform won’t leave My Father in peace. At first just a zone, a fragment of undefined space, to which My Father’s eye is unaccountably drawn, it is now becoming more localised, more specific. Whatever it is resolves itself, solidifies…. in the form of a person; a man, elderly, swaddled in a vast British Warm, hunched against the cold, his head tucked in, tortoise-style, and his face partially hidden under the wide brim of a grey trilby. Could it really be who My Father thinks it might be? Too old, surely? And not tall enough. And, in any case, what he would be doing here, now? No, ridiculous even to think it….
Even at this age, My Father is not a man to run in public, unless his life is in danger. But, hearing the clanking rumble of a train approaching the eastbound platform, he breaks into a loping semi-trot as he hurries towards the overpass, where he takes the stairs two at a time. Descending onto the platform, he sees the train is pulling in; and for a moment, he thinks he will be too late – unless he shouts to attract the man’s attention. But My Father is not a shouting man, so it’s lucky that, by chance or not, the man looks up now, and makes eye-contact with him. It’s hard to judge the man’s reaction, but is seems likely he feels some apprehension. Why is this burly young soldier bearing down him, with such apparent intent? The train’s doors open, but the man does not board; he is waiting for My Father, who now, approaching, a little out of breath from the unaccustomed exertion, gasps the immortal line:
“Excuse me, sir, I believe you may be my father.”
*
And now what happens? We’ll never know. The story of my father’s unexpected encounter with his father, after many years of wartime separation, has passed into family legend – and, in making this transition, been stripped of all supporting data and circumstantial detail. Does the meeting actually unfold in roughly the way I have described here? Is my father genuinely uncertain about the identity of the man he is about to accost? And, once son and father have established their relationship to each other, then what? Do they embrace? Or shake hands? Or pat each other awkwardly on the arms and shoulders? Do they weep? And does my father cancel his lunch plans, so that he can spend the rest of the day with his father, catching up on the highs and lows of their lives over the seven or eight years that have passed since they last saw each other?
*
Stories become legends, or fables, because they contain a truth. And it strikes me now that when I first heard this story, well over half a century ago, it seemed to tell me something optimistic about the world; something vaguely Shakespearean, perhaps, about separation and reconciliation, and the benignly whimsical workings of chance (Just imagine, bumping into your own father, and not recognising him!). All these years later, I find only sadness in the tale of a young man, barely more than a boy, whose father has been so entirely absent throughout his childhood and adolescence that he has become, irretrievably, a stranger. For me, now, it’s a story about the father my father will become.
*****