De Ja Vu & The Black Smoke

I’m about to confess something that I have never told my family. Don’t worry its completely innocent; benign. I’m unsure why it has come back to me now, yet it has always stuck with me for four decades.

The backdrop is my home town where I grew up. Inner city urban area in the UK, like many others in other developed westernised countries around the globe.

I lived with my two brothers and three sisters, my mother and father. On a normal untypical night, I went to bed and had a dream. In fact I had a similar dream many times over, across many weeks. I was probably at around age 10 at the time, with no understanding what this meant.

My dream was a simple one so I thought. My dad smoked and my mother hated it, being a devout Christian. He didn’t smoke that many, but the act of smoking (and this is the mid-nineteen seventies in the second largest city in England, in one the core inner city areas), was enough to turn my mother’s cheeky vibrant smile into a furrowed frown. So I go bed and the reoccurring dream is nothing more than this.

Dream State

It would be probably sometime after breakfast, maybe say eleven in the morning on the weekend. My dad would shout me in from playing with my brothers or with friends. ‘Yes’ dad’, I would have said, all polite and proper. ‘Go get me ten senior service from the Indian corner shop, up the road’, he’d have told me.

My mother on hearing this would have verbally challenged my dad for sending their ten-year-old son to buy something that could eventually do him serious harm health wise. Weird right. If someone wanted to buy poison and drip feed it to smokers over time, would they be done for murder? I suppose that’s been done already, via illegal drugs and is another story, not this one.

Following their verbal battle (between mum and dad), I would stand (in my corduroy trousers – beige, white t-shirt, with an orange coloured sweater and trainers), like a tennis spectator looking from left to right as ‘point ball’ was hit one way and then the next.

After this regular, fortuitous verbal boxing match, my mother acquiesced and my dad threw a handful of old coins in my hand (a few years after the new decimalisation in England – pounds and pence now, no more shillings, guineas or crowns). I took the money, counting it in my hand as I left my house for the three to five-minute walk to the corner shop.

I get to the shop as the Indian man (the owner was a Sikh – wore a turban) waited for me to ask what I wanted.

‘Can I have 10 senior service please for my dad?’, I asked clearly. He’d ask, ‘how’s you dad today? Working hard yes?’.

‘Yes sir’, I’d respond.

With a sort of a smile he’d hand me the cigarettes, let me know how much they were and I’d hand over the money. I took the packet and left the shop into the mid-morning sunlight. In my dream it was always a dry day and I knew what I was wearing. I would return home and hand my dad his packet of cigarettes whilst he sat in the main armchair in the house. The man of the house’s chair, that none of us would dare sit in unless my dad was at work or in bed.

So that’s the Dream state.

Reality State

After dreaming this several times over several weeks or even months; De Ja Vu or some ephemeral cousin of it, bestowed itself upon me, as a ten-year-old. One fine Saturday some time later, my dad sat in his ‘man of the house’ chair. At around mid-morning he asked me to get him his cigarettes. My mum and dad debated the rights and wrongs of a ten-year-old buying cigarettes and for the shop to sell it to me. As in my dream, my dad got the nod, or at least I did.

Wearing the clothes in my dream (corduroy trousers – beige, white t-shirt, with an orange coloured sweater and trainers), I ventured to the shop. Spoke to the Sikh shop proprietor. Collected and paid for the goods and walked home in the warm balmy atmosphere that pervaded; unscathed.

To this day, some four decades later, as I recant this to you, I’m still unsure of the blurred lines between the reality that did occur and my consistent dream. One thing I suppose, being too young at the time, would have been to track if I no longer had that specific dream once I'd carried out the actions in reality. It’s all a bit hazy. I suppose it’s a bit like trying to see though Black Smoke…