This summary comes mainly from Becky, because Dad and I have only dim memories of the movie. I don’t see many, and it’s by a lucky chance that a work colleague dragged me along to see this one only a few weeks back. Even after Becky’s exegesis, there’s still much for me to puzzle over. It’s that sort of film, a nightmarish mystery. I’m not convinced there’s a single fully adequate explanation, but I’ve little to offer as an alternative. Becky has seen the DVD three times. She succeeds in making me remember things, like the black flakes of paper falling across quite ordinary scenes (“bats in the belfry,” says Becky), and Teddy’s migraines, and the shooting of the Dachau guards — “Teddy” had been in a military detachment which liberated the Nazi death camp in 1945.

Such clarity, descending upon Dad and me thanks to our strange visitor, has almost sobered us. The woman leaves with the same lack of ceremony with which she entered our drugged lives. I look at Dad, a bit stunned. He can see what I mean, and comes up with what sounds like a logical way to gather up the day’s threads.

“Let’s go for a pint at the Still and West.”

Sea air clears the sinuses, and the next day a walk from Dad’s along the sea front does it for me: from Point along the Tower Walls and Battery Row to Clarence Pier and Nelson’s Anchor, thence along the Esplanade eastwards. The pavement is wide, and three young hoodies pass me on bicycles. There’s shingle and a grey-green swell to my right, and some good hours ahead for clearer thinking. From the whelks and winkles end (as Dad calls it, he remembers the pre-war days), to the midpoint, Southsea Pier — hardly grand (is any seaside resort grand?) — to the south-eastern end of the isle, Eastney Barracks. I’ll probably not get that far before turning back. Over the sea, slitting the crisp air, are the wings of gulls. Out in the Solent is a ferry from France and a number of small sails.

I don’t get movies the way he does. I go to the pictures only a few times a year, and I rarely watch films on television. I’d rather read.

My problem is something Dad was saying. I don’t get movies the way he does. I go to the pictures only a few times a year, and I rarely watch films on television. I’d rather read. I read a lot: fiction, nonfiction, and of course poetry. Copywriting and poetry go together. I’ve even published a slim volume, though it’s not a feat to brag about. For me, the interest in films, as far as my interest goes at all, is in the storytelling, the illumination, the “mirror up to nature” thing. Though no fan, I have theories. To Dad, for all his collector’s mania, film is a kind of escape — he admits this himself — and he’s not hunting for theories. He doesn’t want to know the “tricks,” he’d rather stay innocent.

One possible reason I don’t watch films much, I’ve tentatively reckoned, is that I’m too emotional — it’s too real. Real life hurts enough; making it so visual rubs salt in the wound. I guess I like reality (I’m not yet fully committed), but as the man says, I cannot take much.

By the time I reach the Rock Gardens I’ve begun to wonder what I’m really trying to wonder about today.