ONE DAY THAT BOY WILL BE PRIME MINISTER

My earliest memory of the coast may not be a memory at all; it may be a fiction, or a false recollection, or a photograph that maybe I glimpsed in a long-lost album and maybe I didn’t. It could be something that I partly imagined and partly lived through but I’ll write it down as though it’s a bundle of facts and a few officially licensed poetic images and we’ll see how close that gets us to the water lapping at the shore.

It’s true that my dad was in the Royal Navy from 1937 until 1958, and he spent the last few months of his career in Plymouth waiting to go home and start a new life that didn’t involve the floor moving under him. And it’s true that I was born in 1956. It’s true that Darfield, the village I’ve always lived in near Barnsley, had a station until Beeching redacted it and so it’s possible, just possible, that I might have got the train down to Plymouth with my mother to visit my dad and we might have stayed in a hotel near the sea and we might have gone for a walk on the Hoe. I was told this so often and I’ve told it to myself so often that, even if it isn’t true, it’s McMillan True, or Plymouth True, or Poetically True, and they’re better than boring old True. One other fact: my dad had the sea in his blood, and I don’t, and I’ve often tried to fathom these differences in my thinking and my writing. Without getting too close to the waves.

Here’s what ‘happened’. My mother is running from our house to Darfield station and somehow she is carrying me because it’s 1958 and I’m too young to run all the way from Barnsley Road. The platform is wreathed in steam like the platforms in Brief Encounter, a film I know my mother was a big fan of although I wouldn’t have known that at the time. I remember, or ‘recall’, a train door slamming and there was rain on the train windows. We must have changed trains at least a couple of times but those moments have sunk into the sponge and all I can see behind my mind’s glasses is the rain on that window. I think I remember my mother smoking.

Then suddenly we’re in Plymouth and there are gulls; I vividly remember the gulls, the same gulls that are the soundtrack to this book. Or perhaps just the one gull like The Ancient Mariner’s albatross, hanging round my ample neck as I tell this tale. We are walking (I’m being pushed in a big Silver Cross pram, surely?) by the sea and my dad is wearing his uniform and he’s pointing at a big ship, which I now know is the aircraft carrier the HMS Ark Royal but which at the time seemed to be a piece of metal as big as the shout of the gulls in my little ears.

The sea is vast and it converses with itself and its waving waves. We go right up to the ship and it is like standing next to a skyscraper or a cliff face. Suddenly in my memory or my dream or my fiction we are on the ship and a man is sleeping on a chair. My dad smiles and says ‘Don’t wake him up; he’s been on watch all night’ and the man’s sleep seems so deep as to be subterranean. I have no idea of this at the time, of course, but this introduction to the Ark Royal is my dad’s farewell to the ocean, the ocean that has sustained him for two decades and through a world war during which he became my mother’s pen pal and during which they met and got married because it was the war and you never knew what would happen.

We went to a tiny beach near a harbour and decades later I stand on that beach with my three children the night before a ferry trip to France. My middle daughter digs in the sand like I’m sure I must have done and my son sleeps in a buggy like maybe I did in my fictional pram. I feel a deep connection with the person I was and the people my parents were, as though I’m a kite and they’re the string, or the other way round. The horizon is a long unbroken sentence.

Then, years later, I’m doing a gig in Plymouth and I stay in an old hotel and as I walk into the foyer I am overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia and emotion because I am convinced that this is the hotel my mother and I stayed in when we came to see my dad in 1958; it can’t be, can it? Surely so much will have changed since 1958 that I wouldn’t notice anything, would I? Except maybe once you’ve been somewhere you leave something behind. In this case it’s a memory of me talking and talking and talking in the hotel dining room, presumably at breakfast, and then I climb off my chair and go under the table and start to sing. My mother is embarrassed but a man says, in a loud voice that will admit no argument, ‘Believe me, my dear, one day that boy will be Prime Minister!’ I stand rigid in the foyer, afraid to check in because I feel I might break some kind of spell forever. The person behind the desk clears her throat.

In 1958, on the Ark Royal or perhaps in a cramped office onshore, my dad is signing some papers. There is a tear in his eye that, I am convinced, spills out on to his cheek. Somehow the tear rolls out of the room and trickles down the road or across the ship and drips into the water, where it becomes part of the sea.