And then another voice inside said: Look at the audience.
I looked. Hundreds of faces. Dad’s colleagues, Dad’s friends. The fear vanished in an instant. I couldn’t be scared any more. And I started speaking. I told them about my father. I told them a little about his early life. I told them he had been a wonderful father. I reminded them, too, of his ridiculous inability to wear anything other than a suit – although he did make concessions on holiday, and occasionally removed his tie. I told them that on our trip to Cornwall to photograph the total eclipse we’d been standing on the beach before the skies darkened when a man who said he was the reincarnation of King Arthur, a man wearing a silver diadem and long white robes, came up to Dad, and said, bewildered, Why are you wearing that suit?
Well, said Dad. You never know who you’re going to meet.
And then I told the story I hoped they would understand.
He’s a boy, standing by a fence and staring up at the sky. He’s at an aerodrome, Biggin Hill, spotting RAF planes. He is nine? Ten? He’s been photographing each aircraft that takes off or lands with the Box Brownie camera that hangs on a string around his neck, and putting their numbers down in a spiral-bound notebook. It is getting late. He ought to leave. Then he hears a sound he cannot place, an unfamiliar engine note, and yes, there, this is it, this is the moment he has dreamed of. He stares into the sky. He sees the landing lights of . . . he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what it is. It is not in any of the books. He takes its picture. He copies its registration number onto the page. It is a visitation from the future: a new American Air Force plane. To the boy plane-spotter of the 1950s, it is like seeing the Holy Grail.
When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.
A hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Come with me, laddie.’ They frogmarched him to the guardhouse, pushed him through the door, and there, behind a desk, a sergeant-major type with a moustache and a frown stood up, barked at him, ripped the page out of his notebook, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the bin, shouted some more, took the back off the camera, exposed the roll of film, pulled it out in loops of falling acetate and dumped that in the bin too. I was crying my eyes out, Dad said. They said, ‘Go home. You didn’t see anything. Forget you were here.’ And they dumped me back at the perimeter and I stood there with my notebook and the Brownie, sobbing away. But then I stopped crying, because I’d thought of something. Something out of Dick Barton or the Eagle. Maybe I’d written hard enough. Using his pencil, he shaded the page of his notebook with graphite, and there, white on grey, impressed on the paper from the missing page above, was the registration number of the secret plane. He stopped crying, he said, and cycled home in triumph.