Not Coming Back

We were walking slowly up from Princes Street towards Queen Street when my mother suddenly announced that my father wasn't coming back. I remember accepting this announcement in a bleak sort of way but it wasn't until later that I gave it my own very personal interpretation. After his death we moved several times; firstly we stayed with my father's closest friend, David Black and his family. Since I was in love with his daughter Christine this was a happy time but afterwards we changed places so often that I lost count; in the end my mother bought a small terrace house overlooking a sports ground. It was there that I came to terms with my father's disappearance and in the strangest possible way. It was a cold winter and snow lay thick on the pavement outside the house.

If you stood facing the playing field there was to the right of you a sudden rise of forested land and glimpsed amongst the bare trees a building that had all the makings of a castle - crenellated battlements and pepper pot towers. I had gone out to play in the thick snow and already the sun was beginning to set. The ragged clouds were tinged with red and the building on the hill, silhouetted against the sky in the deepening gloom, had for me a sudden and unexpected meaning. That was where my father had gone and I was so convinced of this that my childish mind was set to rest. I ran into the house and relished that painful restoration of warmth to frozen fingers.

Both my mother and my aunt were at a loss as to how to break the news of his death to me and maybe, given that there had been a recent war where many had not come back, it seemed an appropriate formula. Many years later when I had, through the curious circumstances of my life, returned to live in Edinburgh and not so far from where this early epiphany had occurred, I revisited the street at exactly the same season and time of day. I wanted to confirm that moment. It was late afternoon and the terrace quite deserted but the condition of the sky was broadly similar. There were the trees and the castle just as I remembered them; I knelt down on the pavement in order to recapture that childhood sensation of scale. In the end I was satisfied, even though that scene was altogether drained of that earlier emotion.

A year later I applied for a residency in connection with the city's geriatric community; it was an imaginative attempt to give expression to those who were otherwise inarticulate. It was then that I found myself in the castle on the hill, wandering the narrow passages between the wards and speaking to men whose minds had been corroded by suffering and disease and whose clothes gave off the odor of incontinence. So this was the heaven to which I had unwittingly consigned my father.