Hi Tim,
I really loved your play. It was very haunting and real. It was like being with you and the memories that came in were like the way one thinks with memories and thoughts weaving in at different levels, different times, different views, mixing the profound with the every day just like real life.
I thought about it afterwards and found myself conjuring up my own lost memories, somewhat fleeting. I can remember a large house set in a garden with trees in a country area with hills and think it was on the outskirts or on the way to Oldton.
I was about 6 years old and I remember that Christmas I had a tiny box of Cadbury's chocolates in my stocking, a really special treat as chocolates being almost forbidden in our house. I left them on my
mantlepiece and specially saved the hazlenut swirl. Next time I looked it had gone. I always wondered what happened to it, but suspected our nanny.
I don't remember what my father was like back then, but do remember going out to meet him from the airfield quite a way away. My mother was excited and anxious at the same time and we drove out late at night in the dark to meet him. When we got there it was not him but another pilot who had come back and they had got the name mixed up. I remember the feeling of disappointment as we went back. That is my earliest memory of my father not a face or a happening but a feeling of anxious waiting and disappointment when he did not come.
That's a feeling that comes back in other ways but perhaps should be allowed to stay there where it belongs. The other thing I must have lost there was my grey felt elephant because when we moved from there I never saw it again.
Best Wishes
Rica
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