Stories from my father

There are moments in life when you spontaneously say something that resonates through the halls of time, and an uncle, a grandfather or a parent is suddenly, vividly brought to mind, saying exactly the same thing. A phrase that is so indelibly buried in your psyche that when you hear yourself saying it, you are at once surprised to hear it, and surprised that it has not been said before.

I had one of these moments last night as I was reading my son a bedtime story. We read his bedtime favourites and once they were finished, I put down the books and said, "Now I'm going to tell you a different story." And I started to make a story up as I went. It stared out with "once upon a time, there was a very clever boy called Oliver (my son) who had a very lovely sister called Molly (his baby sister). And one day, they were playing in the back garden, when suddenly a great mist surrounded them. It got thicker and thicker, until they could barely see anything but each other. And then, through the mist they saw a glittering golden gate". And as I spoke, I heard my father’s voice, telling me the same story as a child.

He invented such magical stories. And he could draw too. He would illustrate an entire scene from his stories for us and we would always be the heroines. There were witches and goblins, giants and talking animals, and we always overcame the powers of evil with ingenious plots, such as pouring itching powder down a witch's pants or tricking giants or befriending animals who would assist us in escaping sticky situations.

His stories would begin with a normal day. I would be playing with my sisters outside. We lived on a large property in the country, full of gnarly gums, rolling hills and rocky outcrops - a perfect setting for daring adventures, both in real life and in his stories. On winter mornings the landscape was particularly dramatic, as a dense fog would envelop the property, and we could just see the outlines of the trees through the mist. My father would use this wondrous landscape to great dramatic effect in his stories. As we were playing outside, suddenly a great fog would envelop us all till we could barely see one another. We would reach out for one another and take each others hands, keeping each other safe. We would step through the fog carefully, then suddenly, "What should appear?" "The Golden Gate!" we would shout in excitement as we sat around him on the couch, listening avidly. The gate was grand and breathtaking. It shimmered through the fog, and opened silently guiding us through to a magical land. We would come upon castles with princes and princesses, lush green forests with animals under enchanted spells and medieval villages full of simple but good  people.

He taught us with his stories and celebrated the wonder and imagination of children. Nothing was impossible, and we were wonderful not because we were sweet or cute, but because we were clever and strong. His drawings were animated and comic. They made us laugh and feel proutd to be at the centre of such delightful scenarios. I remember vividly one drawing in which I was riding on a knights horse, holding on to him with one arm and playing flute with the other arm as we galloped along, setting all of the witches into such a reverie that they did not notice as the knight and I hauled my younger brother out of a cauldron in the witches lair.

His stories were the stories of a man who came from a generation of great storytellers. A time when some of English literatures children's classics were created; stories that stood the test of time, such as Mary Poppins (1934), The Hobbit (1937), The Sword in the Stone (1938), Little House on the Prairie. Children of this era were also still reading classics from the 1920s, such as Winnie the Pooh (which is oh so funny, if you can get past Pooh's contemporary image and commercialisation. The characters of the original books are so brilliantly flawed and mistaken; such as Piglet, who attests that the broken sign above his door in the tree bearing the incomplete "Trespassers will" [be prosecuted] comes from his great great grandfather, Trespassers Will, a very great man. There was an element of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to his Golden Gate stories: an escapism that harnessed children's love of adventure, taking us to far distant lands, but always returning to the comfort and security of home.

Through his creativity and sheer enjoyment in the art of storytelling, I developed a love of stories and storytelling. And his stories have remained with me all these years, forgotten, but not forgotten. In the same way, the song that he sang as he carried me on his shoulders to bed reappeared one day out of nowhere as I put my own son to bed. The legacy we leave as parents for our children's children provides future generations with a sense of connectedness to people past and present. I hope that in telling the stories of my father to my son, he will one day tell them to his own children and they in turn to theirs, and that the Golden Gate will remain a glittering portal into magical lands for all of the children in my family.