Several years after the death of my paternal grandfather, I had a really quite vivid dream about him.
For most of his life he was a tenant farmer near Northampton, working in the village where my family had lived since, roughly, the Norman Invasion of 1066. But he, my grandmother, my father and my aunt didn't have enough money to be able to afford to live in the village too.
I dreamt I was walking along a particular stretch of road with fields on both sides. It's a long, straight stretch of road which dips down quite steeply and which my father used to enjoy tearing along on his bike when he was a child.
As I'm walking along, I see an old tractor by the side of the road and, close by, there is a man leaning on the wall while eating a small lunch.
I ambled over and said hello. And we chatted.
I found out he had a son, who was a bit of a tearaway, and a daughter, who was a bit of a bookworm, and they lived just over the hill. Many of the details of the dream now elude me, but we must have talked for about 15 minutes while he told me about his life.
It was only when I walked away that I realised who has was. He was wearing a long leather coat that my father later owned and then passed onto me.
But by the time I'd realised and turned around, he was driving off in the tractor.
And then I woke up in tears.
It had been about three years since the death of my grandfather, who had been suffering from alzheimers and whose death still shocked me quite profoundly. He wasn't exactly the nicest man you could imagine, giving my dad the strap whenever he misbehaved and not treating my gran very nicely either.
But he was still my grandfather. And that dream, I believe, was just a way of saying goodbye, but deep down I knew that I'd never really known him properly when he was alive.
