Finding Art

My earliest memory of my father was his laugh. A loud fog horn: which could be heard over any dinner party or theatre production and never failed to make my mother recoil in embarrassment.

I suppose my memories of him are sketchy at best, since in the later years he became a card on my birthday and Christmas; and yet it was these cards that gave me a glimpse into this mysterious man and his new life. Firstly he always started his comment or quote with a reference to where he was at the time, whether it was ‘Staring out to the Ocean’ or ‘In the Blue Room’ he always labelled it so that I came to dream of this house with its bohemian mix of writers, artists and musicians. The quotes were of great novels and were always finished with a page reference so that I could find the book that my father had expertly picked out for me.

It was in these cards that I discovered a love of language, of the seamless poetry of words that authors used to create their masterpieces. I went on a journey of a life time with Odysseus and sailed away on a raft with Huckleberry Finn, and though I was always so good, I revelled in being expelled from boarding school and escaping to New York with Holden Caulfield.

Throughout it all the belief that I had a connection with my father through literature lasted long after his death. And was probably the reason I became a writer.

(this extract is the beginning of a fictional novella)