You see the boy on the left, that's me. Recently I found this photograph of my pal RD and me, taken in the summer of 1959. We lived on the as yet uncompleted Potters Green housing estate in Walsgrave on Sowe, Coventry. RD and I were members of the Potter's Green Boys' Club and played for its football team.
This photograph was taken a few days after Peter, the man who organised and led the boys' club, told me that RD had won the club's all-round athlete's award. He said he wanted to tell me before the award ceremony because I was so competitive and would be very disappointed. He wanted to prepare me for this. Actually the disappointment was that I now imagined Peter liked RD better than me.
Look at the photograph again and you will see that I have my socks tucked into my trousers. I had just been cycling. I had wanted a bike and though we were not poor, my parents didn't have the money to buy me the lightweight, 5 geared, drop handle Coventry Eagle racing bike I desired. My father found the old frame of a ladies bike complete with chain wheel and pedals but with no handlebars, wheels or brakes. He also found : an unsporty looking straight handlebar, wheels and brakes, and fixed the bike up for me. It may have looked makeshift but to me it was a bike and I rode it for a year or so until my parents did purchase a Coventry Eagle racer for me which, a few months later, I wrecked by crashing into the back of a milk float while I was cycling and daydreaming on my way to Foxford School.
I look at that boy now sixty years on and I quietly admire him. He's looking at the camera in a shy, doubtful way as if he is just discovering that he has become an enigma to himself. He is at the start of not having absolute control over what he may have thought life held in store for him.
He doesn't know what is lying in wait for him along the way; good experiences, bad ones; wrong directions taken yet sometimes good routes found; relationships gone wrong and relationships that were right; the ecstasy of becoming a father; having children who achieved a little because of him but in large measure in spite of him; regrettable actions taken that caused pain for others and himself; making lifelong friends; the joyful experience of becoming a grandparent; being part of a family and community and inevitably all those painful unresolved matters involving others that can now never be resolved.
Taking all this into account I look at the boy in the photograph and think, "You may have had no idea of the rough road you would be forced to navigate over the next 60 years but you survived. That is some kind of achievement."
In recent times when in conversation with my friends I have played (for sympathy and for fun) the rôle of the stiff, increasingly confused agèd bloke. I'm not going to do this any more. In these last weeks, two friends, both of whom I loved, have died unexpectedly and suddenly. Both were in their fifties. I am 73 years old.
My father died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 58 so I have become a more experienced human being than he, yet he is my father. Inside my head he remains older and wiser than I am. Unlike my Dad and my friends though, I am still going along the road. I'm glad of that.
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Alison Poltock comments
I loved reading this, wish it was longer. I was saddened to hear about your friends' deaths, but relieved to hear that your confused old man behaviour is all an act!
Brian McAuley writes
Thanks Charles, a lot of this resonated with me.
