Old Soldiers

One good thing to come out of my aunt’s funeral was that it put me in touch with an old relative – one of my aunt’s cousins. Despite living in the same town all our lives our paths have rarely crossed. Or so we thought. It turned out that his window cleaning company cleans the windows at the building where I work and I’ve been signing off his monthly invoices for the last 7 years without even realizing who he was. The world is small.

I wonder if I have to declare this family connection now? Would there be a case against me for backdated nepotism? Ignorance is no excuse or so I am told.

Anyway, I filled him (Alan) in on the birth of Tom – or “Thomas Arthur” as my granddad calls him: the Arthur named for my granddad’s favourite elder brother… And it turned out that through other convoluted family connections Alan had long been in possession of some of Arthur’s old effects. His old army spurs, a combination lock and a cigarette case, etc. He very generously thought that as I was a closer relative than he was himself they ought to all belong to me.

This was very generous and a bright moment during a bleak occasion. We swapped telephone numbers and in all honesty I didn’t expect to hear from him again. Not because I thought he would welch on the offer but because, well, life happens and the first thing that usually gets swept accidentally under the carpet is a good intention.

But, to prove me gratefully wrong, Alan came good.

He rang me up last week, arranged to meet and placed these previously unknown family treasures – plus some wonderful old black and white photos of Arthur – into my care.

The items themselves are very humbling and I’m deeply indebted to Alan for parting with them so generously.

The spurs still go round though the leather is now very age worn and the silver is tarnished somewhat. The cigarette case – although only silver plated – is still a wonderful thing to own. It’s engraved with Arthur’s name and his batallion – the 271st - and contains a number of small knick-knacks. A gold crucifix, a medallion again engraved with his name and batallion number. And weirdly a Sacred Heart of Jesus pendant. My granddad is as nonplussed by this as I am as none of the family are or have ever been Catholic. I’d love to know how it came to be in Arthur’s possession.

And lastly the lock. The lock – I assume some sort of bike lock – is both magnificent and deeply touching. It’s rusted and I doubt it would lock anything securely now. But the combination still works after well over 75 years. Just put in my gran’s name – ROSE – and it releases very sweetly indeed. The fact it has so long carried my gran’s name, I find very moving.

Such details speak volumes for a family closeness that came to a sad end when Arthur was only 48. He died of a stroke and it apparently took my granddad a long while to come to terms with it. I can still remember my gran telling me (many, many years later – Arthur had been long dead before I was born) about the first time my granddad went into the local pub that he and his brother used to frequent without Arthur by his side.

He simply collapsed with the grief of it.

You can see why then, “Thomas Arthur” has extra-special meaning for my granddad. The rest of us refer to him as just “Tom” but for my granddad it’s always been and always will be I suspect “Thomas Arthur”.

I shall safeguard these small family treasures for Thomas Arthur until he is old enough to appreciate their full meaning and care for them himself. In the meantime I’m merely passing them on very slowly, waiting for time to finish marching by.

Shoulders back. Head held high. It’s a form of salute.

Timeslide

A chance encounter this lunchtime has set me off reminiscing...

In-between bouts of heavy rain I decided to kick-start the old MP3 player and take a mooch along one of the many river walks that perforate my home town of Leamington Spa. As luck would have it, this particular route took me by the college where I completed my art foundation course back in 1988 and where I met Dave who, for many years was my closest friend. My best friend, in fact.

Now Dave is still a good friend but life being life we now rarely see each other and hanging out never extends further these days than a rare 20 minute rushed conversation on the street corner, usually in the morning when he’s on the way to his job and I’m on my way to mine. He has a family, I have a family... What can I say? Our commitments and drives seemed to slowly separate over the years until the bond that once held us close as brothers disintegrated without either of us ever quite being aware of it.

It’s something that occasionally causes me a twinge of regret and pain but never for very long – there just isn’t room or time in my life at the moment to dwell on it. And I guess that says it all. As for Dave, well, I’m probably being unfair but I don’t think my absence from the great scheme of things particularly impinges on him at all... but that’s possibly the subject of another post.

Anyway, this lunchtime, as I wandered passed the college where Dave and I first met who should I run into? Dave Jr. Dave’s eldest son who bears an uncanny resemblance to his father when he was 18. It was odd to see him goofing around with his mates the same way Dave and I did exactly 20 years ago and in the same place. Just for a second I honestly wondered if I’d walked through a hole in time or life was inexplicably repeating itself in some kind of temporal ox-bow. Some weird loop serving no other purpose than to endlessly repeat itself.

For the briefest of moments I was 18 again with no other worries than the thought of bunking off from lessons for the afternoon, my head full of stupid ambitions and dreams which now, 20 years on, seem wasteful, ill conceived and ill chosen. Looking back at myself I was lumbered with a profound lack of direction and a hopeless lack of motivation. Not a great combo.

But when you’re 18 it’s fine. There’s plenty of time to do things, loads of time... too much time in fact. So much time you fritter it away on silly pranks and things that don’t really matter and things that are of no consequence.

And I envy Dave Jr that.

But despite the pleasurable regret, the slight sugary tinge of melancholy that is tinting my spectacles this afternoon I’m glad that I’m here and not back there. It’s good to have passed through that period and to be standing on a hillside looking back at it through a pair of wizened binoculars... because as someone clever once said: the past is a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. Besides which the sexual desert that characterized my twenties is not something I’d ever care to revisit no matter how young it might make me appear.

Today then, for the first time ever, the small grey hairs in my beard and hair are most welcome. They’ve been hard won by trial and experience.

And when I was 18 I certainly would have envied myself that...