7th July 2008 - The Lion, the Witch and the Whatnow?

I'd taken the kids to see Prince Caspian, a film adaptation of part of the C.S. Lewis Narnia series of books. Dad had been aware of these books - my sister had been a voracious reader growing up and I'm pretty sure he'd have remembered them. He didn't seem to be able to grasp the idea of cinema. I called it the films, the pictures, the Odeon, everything I could to try and convey where we'd been. But he wasn't having it, he couldn't get the idea.

"Prince Crisp Ian?" he repeated and looked hopefully for approval, searching my face to see if he'd managed to grasp it, to get it, to successfully navigate through to a conversational exchange. I nodded at him, unwilling to actually speak the lie that he'd understood. His face brightened a bit and he volunteered "Crisp toast. Ian Carmichael." and wheezily chuckled himself to a nap.

In Prince Crisp Ian there were scenes of the evacuation of children in the Second World War. Dad had been evacuated, with his brother and sister, to Dollar - a little town in Fife. I tried to imagine how that must have been. Your father away at war, you were taken from your mother, put on a train and shipped off to a place you'd never been, to live with people you'd never met, for an unspecified length of time. Can you imagine the outrage if that was attempted today? Is it any wonder the man has emotional intimacy issues? Is it any wonder this man, who had been an unhealthy invalid child for much of his youth, unable because of his chronic asthma to run about outside with other children and ostracised by classmates for his skin condition, would grow up to be incapable of showing warmth, or communicating his feelings? Poor Dad. A product of his upbringing like everyone else. I stroked his face when he slept and he smiled.