I have a recurrent dream that I am drowning and my father's life is being replayed before my eyes. But it's not the conventional kind of dream that occurs in sleep; it's not even a waking dream: it's a realitydream. The people I have trusted enough to tell them about the kind of childhood I had are usually more interested in my father than in me. Inevitably, some kind of vague sketch of my father begins to emerge when I talk about my young self, and the listener, not knowing any longer how to relate to the half–formed world of childhood, seems to prefer the solidity of an adult life, an interesting one at that, a fit subject maybe for a Greek tragedy, certainly for a novel.

My father's is the story of a man torn by his own internal contradictions and the post–colonial and other contradictions of his society: an artist who could not imagine himself without a permanent pensionable job in the public service of a recently independent state, firstly because the public service was his mother's definition of reality for him, and secondly because he very quickly found himself (unlike the famous painter) lumbered with a good Catholic uncontracepted family of six; a photographer aspiring to publish his glamour snapshots in British magazines, who was simultaneously a teacher lecturing his female pupils about the dangers of vanity, lipstick and ‘silly notions’; a fervent nationalist and promoter of the Irish language, whose own father was a sailor in the British Navy and had taught him as a boy to say Down with the rebels! at a time when the whole country was converting to the rebels’ cause; the child of a largely absent father who suddenly left him forever by dying of TB …

And so on and so forth, as my father used always to say when he was temporarily stuck for words, to convey the impression that the argument was endless, the complications multiple, the unsaid of equal importance, but of far greater length, than the said. And so on and so forth, and I am knocked down by a sudden wave of pity, again in danger of drowning, with my father's life ready to unfold before my eyes.