Michael Frayn remembers a childhood secret so weird it had to be true

The past is a foreign country, said LP Hartley, and he might have added that writers of fiction pillage it as ruthlessly as traders have always pillaged other countries with no adequate means of defending themselves. Characters, landscapes, events – plundered wholesale, often with names and identifying marks falsified to conceal their origins. My depredations have usually been relatively circumspect. The odd gold coin or two filched from one site, a few shards from another; a mannerism remembered from someone I once knew, a few turns of phrase from someone else. Until, late in life, I went rather further.

I wrote a novel set in a little enclave of suburban streets very much like the ones I had grown up in. I based one of my central characters on myself as I remembered being around the age of ten or eleven, and another on my best friend at the time, David. He was a boy who had seemed to have every possible good fortune – an indulged only child with a playroom full of beautifully crafted model trains, elaborate construction toys and serious tools for wood- and metal-working, all tidily shelved and carefully maintained.

He also had all the talents that I lacked and he played a very dominant role in my life. I struggled hopelessly to imitate his skill with his hands. He built an elegant puppet theatre and created lifelike actors to play in it; I built a ramshackle imitation with a severely disabled cast. He made an episcope, a pinhole camera, a crystal set, and all of them worked; I made an episcope, a pinhole camera, a crystal set, and none of them did.

He also had an imagination – I had none. As we walked round the neighbourhood he recounted a long-running tale of a talking monkey and the island it ruled over; all I could invent was another monkey and another island. It was he who determined all the games we played and all the hobbies we took up. Under his command we hollowed out a camp in the middle of a local hedge, and from it conducted our own private war on Nazi Germany.

By the time we had grown up I had lost all contact with him, and I made my career by using the imagination that I had never had when I knew him, and inventing the fictions that I never could invent as well as he could. More than half a century went by, and as I struggled late in life to find a narrative focus for a novel I wanted to write about the way in which children (and adults) make sense of the world around them through the stories they tell themselves, he had come back into my head – and as much in command as ever. What I had remembered was something he had told me one day as we sat in his back garden drinking the lemon barley that his mother had just brought us for elevenses. “My mother,” he had said thoughtfully, as we watched her walk back to the house, “is a German spy.”

I was astonished – even more astonished than I was by all his other initiatives. It had come out of nowhere, unsupported by any evidence, not suggested by anything that had happened – a pure spontaneous invention. It wouldn’t have surprised me all that much to learn that his father was a Nazi agent – his father was horrible enough for anything. But his mother? Who was always so loving to him and so welcoming to me as his one friend? It was absolutely unbelievable!

But had I believed it, nevertheless? Well, yes, in the way that unbelievable things do get believed. It had taken on a kind of reality just by being said, as some of our latter-day politicians have discovered with their entirely unevidenced allegations of conspiracy and proclamations of unachievable futures. The reality was established because the words had been said by David, whose role it was to say things like this, and because it was obviously the start of another of our games. It was just too rich in enjoyable possibilities not to be true.

So what had happened? Had we actually played the game out? Had we put on false beards and shadowed his mother to her secret transmitter and her meetings with her German controllers? I couldn’t remember. All I could remember was that simple dramatic headline to the story. Maybe we had kept her under surveillance for an hour or two, and then, when she failed to steal any secret plans or send any covert radio messages, had got bored and given up.

But now I began to wonder what would have happened if we had been a little more persistent in our efforts, and watched her not for an hour or two, but for a week or so. What, at the age of ten or eleven, would we have made of an adult life?

So the fictitious boy in the novel I was planning, whose name was Keith, made the same announcement about his own mother, as slavishly as I had adopted the idea of the talking monkey, and my narrative was under way. Very soon Keith and his friend Stephen were hidden in the camp they had set up, much like our own, but sited just opposite his house, and they were spying on all his mother’s comings and goings. The events that followed I invented, but his mother remained very much as I remembered her – graceful, indulgent, amused at our antics. The father, too, was the father I remembered – a cold-hearted and frightening tyrant who had cast the one dark shadow over my friend’s good fortune in life. And the boys themselves were recognisable versions of my friend and myself. Keith at one point even held a carving knife to Stephen’s throat, just as David had once held one of the chisels he kept so well sharpened to mine, a torture that I supposed Keith, and perhaps David, had learned from seeing his father exercise it on his mother. The country of the past seemed to me as open to exploitation as the fictitious one I was creating, and I felt free to import from it and adapt my imports exactly as I thought fit.

I had nearly finished the book when a very obvious and disconcerting thought came to me and stopped me short. The past, it suddenly struck me, was not a fiction. It had an objective reality that was shared with other people. Until that moment my friend had ceased to be quite real for me, in the sense of being a creature who could be affected by present events. He had been dematerialised by time, because for so long he had existed only in my memory. But if I was still alive, it belatedly occurred to me, then he might also be. In which case he would be a sentient creature just like me, with an awareness and feelings just like mine. He might read the book and recognise himself and his parents. He might not like what he read. He might be very hurt.

I tried to discover whether he was still alive, but I could find no trace of him. Eventually I put my scruples aside and went on with the book, but uneasily conscious that sooner or later I should have to decide whether to go ahead and actually release it to the world.

But the past, like any other foreign country, can spring surprises, and it was at precisely this point that it sprang one on me – one of the biggest surprises I have ever had.

It was a letter from David, my vanished friend. After more than half a century he had come looking for me, just as I had started looking for him.

“A voice from the past,” said the letter, and he reminded me that we had spent time together all those years ago, “devising joint plans for fighting off the power of the Third Reich, sometimes from the centre of a farm hedge”. I might be surprised to hear that he was still alive, he said. He would love to hear from me if I was agreeable. And after his signature at the bottom, in case I still hadn’t remem- bered who he was, he added: “The one with the ferocious father.”

It was as if I had conjured him back from the land of shadows simply by thinking his name to myself. Or gone back to one of our favourite books, 101 Tricks a Boy Can Do, and at last managed to do the hardest of them – making someone appear out of nowhere.

I realised, as I gradually recovered from my astonishment, that there was an explanation for the coincidence. As he said in his letter, “There comes a time in life when the past starts to occupy a proportion of one’s thoughts. I think they call it old age.”

So of course I had to write back and agree to meet him. And I had to confess what I was doing.

This is an extract from Among Others: Friendships and Encounters by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Michael Frayn is speaking at the Idler Festival.

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