Tell Me If I'm Dreaming

I'm not yet in my teens -- but nearly there!
and as a treat allowed to spend the day with dad.
He works for Spalding, sports manufacturer
as golf club maker, making them by hand --
and that is where we are, his place of work,
but on the roof, looking out across the River Thames,
past Putney Bridge, to where the boat race -- Oxford
versus Cambridge -- is about to start. We watch
until the boats are out of sight -- three cheers,
it's Oxford in the lead! -- and then go down into
the bowels of the factory, there to find 
dad's workshop -- or attelier, as I prefer to call it, 
having recently acquired the word. Dad picks up 
an adze - his favourite tool and I await
with bated breath expecting he will start to shape
a club head... No, it is a rifle that he chooses from
a cupboard, places in his vice and starts to shave the butt.
A woman enters with a half-strung tennis racquet
asking his advice about a problem she's encountered.
I cannot take my eyes off her. She is a younger version
of my mum, for this is how they met. When I do,
I see the former workshop is an aircraft hanger,
and standing at the far end is a Meteor jet fighter.
(Dad worked with Whittle on developing the first
jet engine and later worked on them with 616, the first
jet squadron.) This one, solid looking to begin with,
morphs into a drawing of itself as I look on. 
I recognise the drawing straight away: dad gave it
to me when he came home on a weekend pass. 
It had been drawn inside an empty Camel 20 packet
to show me what the secret plane was like. Imagine then,
how mortified I was to have to burn the box--  and not
to breathe a word about the secret plane to any
of my friends! The hardest thing I ever did that was!

A courier now enters with some crates of brand new clubs.
Dad takes one from its box and swings it gently, testing
weight and balance. As he does, the head falls off and hangs
from the shaft end on a length of leather whipping which
is slowly -- very slowly -- unwinding as we look. 
It is as though he's caught a club head shark 
and now is playing him for all he's worth. 
Alas, the shark is winning -- handsomely. 
He tries another club, and yet another,
seventeen in all, and everyone the same. A golfer --
high profile and professional -- comes in with yet 
another clubhead dangling from yet another shaft. 
dad speaks to him and reassures him. He will fix the club.
He leaves and so do we. We join the queue for the new
trolley bus -- our latest, state-of-the-art means 
of transport home to Mitcham. We find The High Street 
packed with people leaving from the riverside. 
Above their heads we can quite plainly see 
a locomotive, green -- Pacific Class, as I recall from recent
spotting days, huffing and puffing its way towards us.
.........................................................

Well, you will know quite clearly that this was a dream. It was in fact an actual dream which I recorded at the time, recorded because everything in the dream had also occurred in actuality. All, that was, except the fishing rod golf clubs . That occurred many years later. A small detail, I know, but it has always been enough to make me wonder... (And Okay, I guess you can say that none of dad's Meteors morphed into a drawing, but it did have a basis in fact.)