Driving with Dad

The last photograph I took from my dads car of the fields near my home 2010

Whenever I came home from wherever I’d been Dad would pick me up from the train station. Three of four times a year, home from university or the handful of times when I was working in London or Edinburgh, he would be there waiting by the car. Due to his job the car often changed, but my Dad always seemed the same; handsome, mustachioed, smoking a cigarette, a brief often amused smile at my appearance, a customary greeting of usually no more than a few words then into the car, a turn of the key then off we moved in the direction of home.  

Dad didn’t listen to the radio and was no fan of small talk, probably due to the fact that as a car salesman his days were filled with the stuff. After ten minutes chipping away at a conversation I usually gave up and watched the scenery pass by the window. In the fifteen years that we made these journeys together that scenery seemed to hardly change, day or night it held no promise of a future, it was always that place I’d left behind. I clearly remember the car, motion, the smell of the interior, leather, polish, cigarettes and the pungent orange air freshener combining with Dads aftershave; some Christmas gift dutifully splashed on each morning

No matter the question he managed to dispatch it with an answer of no more than a few words. The silence was like a screen between us and the hum of the engine our only audible companion.  As we neared home the scenery gave way to open fields, the fields of my youth. Then the long straight road that passed my old school, sitting on the darkening hilltop offering a brief glimpse of the past. Slowing into a turn, tires on a gravel road, headlights illuminating a small row of houses, my mum silhouetted in the big bay window. Home again.