Missing photographs
That's me & my old man. My dad, daddy, dada. My father knows best. He would have been about forty when this picture was taken. I'm probably two, maybe two and a 'foff'. I had a little lisp so that's how I would have said it, not two and a half but two and a foff. So my mum used to tell me. We are standing, if I've got my familial history straight, in the back garden of my grandmother's house on Mansfield Drive in Hayes, Middlesex, about twenty miles outside London proper. I wish I had just one photo of my father holding my own son in his arms like this, the way my sister does of our dad and her daughters. She has plenty of snaps of him playing grandpa: our dad standing in my parents' kitchen, holding one of the twins with both arms under her pink diapered bottom, one fat little baby arm thrown around his neck, her head on his shoulder, her other hand clutching at his sleeve. The look on his face; the pleasure he takes that he's been abl