David Astle's search for the old sarspadidious

Heather Coddington was stumped. Frustrated. Everywhere she turned, no database or dictionary had anything on sarspadidious. "My late father was born in the 1920s," she explained by email. "He used the word to mean really good, or excellent. But I've never been able to find any reference to the slang."

Or dead-end references only, where some dusty internet forum tried to uncover the mystery word's root, just as Heather was trying to do, and likewise getting nowhere. "Can you help?" she added.

I tried, honestly. I plunged into Trove to cross-check the treasures archived by the National Library, yet my lone hits were flimsy. Both dated from the tail-end of The Great War, one in Adelaide, the other, Dubbo. The first was an alias on a letters page, the second a station name no longer listed in the pastoral records.

I wrote back to Heather with empty hands. And empathy too, as my own father (born in the 1920s) had his pet expressions to stump a younger me. As a kid, whenever I fell, he described my tumble as going for a Burton.

For years I put the phrase down to a Dadism, only to grow curious as an adult. Recently I tried to unmask this clumsy pioneer. Was Burton an iceskater? A drunken waiter? Turns out the drunk guess was warm, since the fancied root is an ale from Burton-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, close to where my nana was born. The beer was RAF slang for the drink in general, that is the ocean, where doomed pilots were bound.

Which leads me to a dream I had three years ago. Sorry – a Wordplay first, recounting dreams, but stick with me. I was underwater, struggling for breath in an Olympic pool. My lungs craved oxygen but an object on the pool's floor caught my eye. It was white, shaped like a pistol, perhaps a bone. I wanted to grab it but my air was spent. I shot to the surface and woke with a gasp.

Just then, the phone rang beside my hotel bed. It was 5am. It was Heather, not the sarspadidious woman, but mum. She called to say what the whole family had been fearing. My father had breathed his last in a Lane Cove hospice. The shock lay heavy on my body. It hung in my face as I shaved that morning, seeing my father's features in the mirror, gazing back.

"I'll do it for you," I told him to his face, since I didn't want to do it. Teach crosswords, I mean. Not today, but the circumstances were too eerie to ignore. The master class was slated for The Theatre Bar at The End of the Wharf, the very precinct where Captain Barry roamed in his prime, two blond boys in tow. I knew the docks by heart, and here I was, teaching crosswords to 200 strangers where forklifts once roared, my hand squeezed in Dad's.