Finally, my brain gave it to me - a dream of young Peter Graves. Not distressingly elderly Peter Graves or even 1960s Peter Graves, but a twenty to twenty-five year old Peter Graves, golden and beautiful. I wish I could remember it better, but I wrote down what I could.
I was watching a video on a cassette tape in L****'s bedroom. It was Hold Back The Night, but I was in it too. I came across three men, all soldiers, possibly brothers, seeming 1950s but also American civil war era it seemed. The youngest was a young Peter Graves, in his early 20s, very sunny and golden. A great sense of innocence in him, and a kind of innocence in all of them. There was tension between the men. The oldest was impatient and grouchy. PG had something wrong with him. He was lame and injured, but he was cheerful, lying on the grass, propped up a little. The older man was wandering off and coming back, keeping a look-out, very restless. The other man, the middle one, lit PG a cigarette, because he couldn't, and passed it over. I took it and wasn't sure if I should take a drag to keep it lit. I didn't, and it stayed lit as I passed it to him.
He took the cigarette and lay back, smoking it, happy. He was perpetually happy, even though the other two, the older one in particular, were rather grumpy. They were worried and wanting to move on but bound to help PG and keep him safe. There was a sense that he was troublesome but they cared about him and wouldn't leave him.
I lay down beside him to talk to him. I can't remember what we were talking about. Something about what was going on. At one point he turned onto his side a bit to look at something and his shirt billowed open. It had some kind of fabric on the inside with a large 1950s style cartoon on it and I thought that was rather charming. It seemed to go with his boyish personality. I caught glimpses of his flat, golden chest with a very little hair on it and was aroused by it.
We were largely ignoring the other two men, who were more nervous. They needed to move on, they were muttering about things. It was a big, green, healthy landscape with a worn path where we were and hills rising up near us and a long way on the other side. We were kind of on the edge of a valley. At one point we shuffled near to the edge of a cliff and looked down, and far, far below was a kind of city or base or something built like segments of a circle pulled out and moved around. Rather space age. It belonged to the enemy, I think.
We needed to move on. He could walk, but with a severe limp. I had thought it was some kind of congenital thing but it turned out later he'd been injured in action. His foot was all crooked over. We'd move on for a bit and then settle again somewhere sheltered and we'd lie and talk and ignore the others. Then some kissing started up on this grassy bank where he was lying and it was really very nice. Near the end we were in my bedroom under the quilt. I was trying to work out how to lock the door but I couldn't get anything to work. I was close to going out to the shed, finding a bolt, and screwing the damn thing on. Then dad came in very huffily and asked if we were watching the film in the other room, or if he should just switch it off. It seemed important that he didn't turn it off, because after all this was the film we were in. We broke away from the kissing, laughing, and I said yes, we were watching it, and he went off huffily and we resumed the kissing. It was all fairly innocent but absolutely wonderful, as if everything were filled with sunshine.
