Fiction
The Good Son
The ambulance won’t be long Mother …
The Good Son
Father was a straight talker, wasn’t he mother? Look what he wrote on the back of this photo.
‘Aden — what a shit hole’ and then the date, February 1952. This photo was taken the year I was born and the ink hasn’t faded. It’s a snap of the port, shot from the deck of HMS Glory.
Father took his camera everywhere. I missed him when he was away. When he left home for that posting, the year was as fresh as the young queen’s face.
Do you remember mother? He always came home with gifts; a souvenir for me, a bottle of Chanel No 5 for you. I thought it made you smell cheap, but you loved it. Father was full of stories about the people he’d met and the countries he’d visited, wasn’t he? I looked forward to seeing his photos of far-away places. I remember the times I spent with him in his dark-room in the basement. He called me his assistant. “Good boy, Arthur,” he’d say, as I pegged the wet photos onto a string as they came out of the trays. I can smell the vinegary odour of the stop-bath now, it clung to our clothes for hours.
He and I would sit at the dining table and I listened to father’s stories as we stuck the images into this album — he bought in Japan. See, it’s the one with…
