Jonathan Frost
Telling stories is our ancestral inheritance. Humans have shared stories since the beginning; stories are an oral history, an ancient tradition of sharing memory, ancestral dreams, so the past continues to live. Thirty thousand years ago, the palaeolithic inhabitants of the Lascaux caves created representations of their world on the cave walls, telling their story. They were communicating. After thirty thousand years, their message was heard. This is us.
Creating imaginary worlds is what we do. After all, our perception of reality is a human construct, not shared by any other species on earth. But who are these storytellers, these creators of dreams?
Stories give voice to those who wish to be heard. Once told, is it enough that their story exists? Is storytelling an innate part of our genetic coding? In the end, what remains apart from memory?
What inspired me to write down the words I heard inside my head, motivated me to create a world populated by people whose lives unfolded with each turn of the page? Where did the idea for ‘Dreams of Eden’ come from? Was it a kind of magic, the residue of some shamanistic, ancestral force residing in my subconscious? I have an answer to that.
Wednesday evening, February 27th, 1957, I’m six years old. It’s five o’clock, Children’s Hour on the BBC Home Service. I’m listening to an episode of Rosemary Sutcliff’s, Legion of the Ninth on the family radiogram. I am in heaven. The fire crackles in the grate; rain is coursing down the lead glass windows. Wind moans down the chimney like a sad ghost. I am Marcus Aquilla.
Almost ten years later, I am sitting in the school chapel, bored, staring absently at the stained-glass windows, only half listening to a Lenten sermon being delivered by a visiting priest. Suddenly, I hear the words: exorcism, temptation, works of the devil. That woke me up. The priest was talking animatedly about the dangers of Ouija boards, how young minds can be corrupted, that demons are real. Oh yea, bring it on. My, some might say unhealthy, fascination for seances and communing with the dead, became firmly planted in my subconscious. What I didn’t know at the time and a question perhaps I should have asked, where would this lead?
Now I know, ‘Dreams of Eden.’
I had no cunning life plan. My school had pretty much written me off as a waste of oxygen. But hey, this was the sixties. Pirate radio was turning us on to the alternative music imported from America: the evolving underground music scene in London. I’d watched the anti-Vietnam demonstrations in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy on TV. An alternative lifestyle beckoned. No grey suits or ties for me. Morocco beckoned, communal living, music, free love. I left home and moved to London. Where else? The times were indeed changing, from grey to technicolour. I was caught up in the wave.
Let’s cut to the chase. Life can be a magical, unpredictable, serendipitous journey, an adventure of discovery, otherwise, what’s the point. It was one I travelled joyfully. I relied on instinct, chance encounters and luck. You always need luck. But as the old hippy idiom said, ‘go with the flow.’ I did.
Sure, I messed up, took wrong turnings, got deflected by ephemeral diversions, but in the end arrived at my destination.
One afternoon while sitting beneath a tree on Barnes Common with a friend and the dog, I had a bizarre thought. What would a friendly alien think, if the only evidence of our species existing was me, my friend and the dog? That was the start of a wild adventure. It sparked an idea in my head for a story. That was the genesis of ‘Dreams of Eden’. The fact it took me almost fifty years to get around to writing it, well, that’s another story.
I decided, a real spur of the moment thing - I’ll go to Israel, do some research – as you do. I ended up working for the Department of Antiquities in Jerusalem. This led to my obtaining a degree in archaeology. I worked on sites in the UK, Israel, Sudan and Syria.
Then, while living in a house in Tite Street, Chelsea, next door to where Oscar Wilde used to live, I had a chance encounter with a film director at a dinner party. Following that 'chance' meeting, I began a career as a researcher, script writer and filmmaker – serendipity you see. A further fortuitous meeting, resulted in my working as a freelance, foreign news journalist for the BBC and NBC.
Finally, after meeting my wife, I moved to Lincoln where I was employed as a lecturer in English, film theory and production at Lincoln College and Lincoln University. I had my own music show on local radio, playing all that rock, blues and psychedelic music, I had loved so much back in the day – reliving memories you see, listening to John Peel’s Perfumed Garden over fifty years ago. The circle of life.
However, life has a habit of throwing curve balls. Covid struck. I was forced to retire. I was made redundant, then diagnosed with bowel cancer. I thought hell, don’t drop the ball now. While I was recuperating after successful surgery, I was wondering what I was going to do with my brain. Then I had a thought, that idea I had for that story almost fifty years ago. It was still there, locked away in a dusty, forgotten room in my subconscious, waiting. Two years later it became Dreams of Eden, the story I hope you are reading now.
