What story do you want to tell?

My six-year-old son Ben knows I write books, but can’t understand why I don’t write Star Wars books.

Recently, he has become more interested in my life when I was “little”. He is especially excited about the days when his three-year-old sister “didn’t exist”, a state of affairs he would love to see replicated today.

He wants to hear about the houses I lived in, the toys I played with, the people I knew. While it’s difficult to get into the details of your earlier life when your ex-wife is now engaged to your brother, I answer him as honestly as I can.

As he lies in bed at night, I tell him about parks and playgrounds, broken bones and street games, the grandfather he never knew.

Talking to my son has uncovered buried memories of my late father lying next to me, sharing the stories of his national service years. I can’t recall any of the events, only loose impressions of a firing range, an army camp, an assault course, and a signals post in a forest. It’s made me understand how much love he put into those stories, which nobody will remember now they been forgotten even by me.

I found Ben a picture of my dad in uniform, a tall smiling soldier with razor-creased khaki pants and shiny black boots, and I wondered what life was really like for him, orphaned as a teenager, a factory worker at fourteen. He used to speak quite fondly of army discipline, and I once asked his second wife why she thought he liked being told what to do.

“Because he didn’t know what to do,” she said.

In my early twenties, I fell out with my dad over nothing, and grew closer to my grandfather, who’d been in the Air Rescue Service in the East End of London during the Blitz. I drank in the club with him and his mates. They hardly mentioned the war, but talked about each other (usually just to trade insults) and the drunken times they had on ex-servicemen’s marches.

My second novel, Spirit House, is about those people. I wanted to preserve the memory of their bitter humour and unsated appetite for life.

I’ve written it, in part, so my son will know what kind of men they were.

Even though I know he’d prefer me to write a Star Wars book.

Author, journalist, editor, lecturer and Good Weekend columnist Mark Dapin walks tall among the Sydney writing community, which regards him as a man of great stature. He has reached many literary heights: his first novel, King of the Cross, won the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction. You can buy his latest book Spirit House here.

If you were writing a book what story would you tell?