“A Love Letter To My Dad – And The Pages Where We Found Each Other”  

My early childhood was filled with the words of Charles Dickens, Richmal Crompton, Tolkien, J.K Rowling, Kenneth Grahame and C.S. Lewis. To me, those books weren’t just stories – they belonged to a clumsy middle-aged engineering lecturer. They belonged to my dad.

​​​Every night, I would wait up, listening for the sound of his footsteps climbing the stairs. He’d poke his head around the door, and I’d scoot over so we could read to each other, one chapter inevitably becoming two, time passing without notice to the worlds we inhabited. ​​With just a word, he could transform my room into a cobbled street where an eleven-year-old boy shopped for his first term at wizarding school. The walls could melt into a white chalk quarry where a schoolboy befriended a prehistoric child. A meadow was full of pixies, a gap in our hedge was a secret passageway, a long walk was a hunt for a bear, and a trip abroad was a new adventure. 

If my early childhood had a taste, it would be cheese on toast and frozen Capri Suns. If you could feel it, it would be like dirt in your nails, soft picnic blankets and summer fairs, the bark of oak trees, welly boots in boggy mud, and bike rides down little tracks and summers that felt like they stretched forever. And then, as it does in so many stories, something changed.

When I was eight, my dad suffered a psychotic episode due to a severe brain trauma. The man who came home that day was not the one who had left. Some days, he was irritable and angry; other times, childlike and overly excited. His lows settled into the walls of our house, while his highs made conversation feel like a high stakes game of poker that you’d always lose. During those years, our family felt like a rope taut with tension threatening to snap.  One night, he asked me to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – perhaps his way of making sense of what was happening to him, or maybe, of helping me understand. But despite everything, to me, he remained my dad. 

Eleven years passed, and I grew up. He began to recover, and I had to learn who he was again. For years, I barely read. Nothing in books seemed as important, as unpredictable, or as abrasive as life in those days had felt. But as his health improved, I returned to reading, and realised how wrong I’d been. I read Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, The Metamorphosis, The Third Man, The Catcher In The Rye and The Old Man and The Sea. Books that turned out to be cherished by my dad, too. He loved Cold War spy thrillers by John le Carré, and writers such as J.B. Priestley, P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. Through him, and his endless list of book suggestions, I found his sense of humour in Dead Souls, his career choice in The Time Machine, and his political conscience in The Road To Wigan Pier. We whittled away time, in my parents’ sunlit front room, debating what we liked and disliked in the much-beloved paperbacks.

Through this, he became my dad again. The man who had spent late-night drives as a teenager in my grandad’s fish and chip van, the fryer still running as they drove around London. He’d answered a newspaper ad for a social group and met my mother. He’d fixed pinball machines for extra cash, scraped his way up from IT technician to lecturer and travelled the world, having countless adventures. In those years, we bridged a gap that had felt miles apart for most of my life. And, slowly, a man I thought I had forgotten came back to us. 

My dad lived for another five years, but was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023 – an unknown side effect of the medication he had taken for his illness. The following months felt unbearably cruel. We had finally got him back, only for him to slip through our fingers again. Months of trial and torment followed, our broken and stretched healthcare system failed him, again and again. Yet, he still woke up wanting to live; he smiled through the worst of it, refusing to let any of it ruin what we had.

During that time, I hid my pain in the pages of books, translating my feelings through the stories I lent him. Hard Rain Falling, Stoner, A Month in the Country – each one a fragment of who I was; an attempt to show him the architecture of my inner self. The wonder he had gifted me as a child, the fruit of my liberal upbringing and the complexity of a simple life. He would tell me they were good – high praise for a man who tended to use a tonal variation of “alright”.

When he passed a year later, I had managed to capture him in those pages. I couldn’t bring myself to read for months. But I knew he was still there, waiting for me in the words we had shared. I could see him in the rolling dales of A Month in the Country or the dull wit of George Smiley. In the quiet everyday prose of Raymond Carver’s short stories and the social criticism of an Orwell novel. 

In these books, I could be kayaking on a rural lake on a quiet evening, or struggling to keep up along a narrowing footpath on a walk he would say would only take an hour. I could visit him in a sentence, a dog-eared paperback or an old receipt tucked in as a bookmark; a feeling or place we had both inhabited, a presence without being present, all at a turn of a page. Books let me keep our little chats going. In their pages, for just a moment, I get my dad back.