__ Usually when I pick up The British Book of Hit Singles,
it’s to clear up some question in a trivia quiz, but tonight my intention is
more serious. I want to find a day in 1965 which remains burned into my memory
with remarkable clarity. I can do this because someone took along a transistor
radio, and I remember four songs that were playing that day: the songs are Ticket
to Ride, The Times Are a’ Changing, Catch the Wind and True
Love Ways, and their highest chart positions are at the end of March and
the beginning of April.
As the Beatles always entered at Number One, the date cannot be
earlier than April 15th, with the other songs still hovering around,
holding their positions or descending with dignity. This means that I was two
weeks off my fifteenth birthday, and just starting the summer term of my fourth
year. It is the right sort of date to confirm other details in my memory like
the daffodils in Clifton Grove. I was glad to find they were a product of
memory rather than retrospective imagination.
This is the problem with non-fiction – being truthful. There are
no such constraints on fiction. At least, if there is truth in fiction, it is
of another order- a truth of the emotions, of character, of probability- not
fact as such. Fiction freely admits, even celebrates distortion, exaggeration
and downright misrepresentation of the literal truth. If I were so inclined, I
could cook up a good piece of fiction based on the happenings of that Spring
day thirty seven years ago. You would never know and you would have no cause to
complain.
But I don’t want to embroider or exaggerate in this case,
because I want to know what it was that made this day, a Sunday in mid- April
1965, an exceptional day for me. I want to ask myself if that can be done without
resorting to any of the more blatant devices of fiction.
The beginning is commonplace enough. A group of boys, perhaps
fifteen of us, have assembled on the narrow footpath. It runs along the river
side of the flood wall which stands between the school playground and the River
Trent. Also present is Father Roger Killeen, our awesome and saintly grouch of
a headmaster. For some reason that escapes me now, he had decided to take a
group of boys on a hike up the river for the day. There was little planning involved.
The strategy just seemed to walk as far as you could and then think about
getting home. Father Roger, or “The Horse” as he was commonly known- a tribute
to some uncommon facial characteristics - may have been there on other famous
outings, like the time when “boys” wandered unsupervised into a crevasse near
Zermatt, or the much earlier occasion, when it was decided to take the whole
school to Paris. This trip justly became a part of folklore, when a teacher, an
over enthusiastic ex-pilot, hired a converted WWII bomber and flew fifty or so
boys over The Channel. Because there was no heating or pressurization, the
boys, in caps, blazers and short trousers, arrived suffering from hypothermia
and altitude sickness. This is a good story, but I do not have to vouch for its
authenticity. All I have to say is that I heard it on good authority. However,
it seems to me a likely example of embroidery, which I wish to avoid here. In
comparison, this outing promised to be a tame affair. There may have been some ulterior
motive, like nature study, but this remains dim in my memory.
The walk starts with a series of bridges – the attractive foot
suspension bridge next to the school, then Wilford
Bridge, a utilitarian box-girder
affair, and finally the recent Clifton
road bridge.I can describe this part of
the journey well because I covered the ground many times on cross-country runs.
It was a scrubby country of fields hemmed in by low hawthorn hedges, territory
well within the flood limits of the river and consequently muddy and grim.
Nowadays, much of this ground has been built over, but then it was
semi-derelict rough grazing.On the
other side of the River Trent is the misty grey outline of Nottingham
beyond Wilford power-station. However, the day had a hazy anti-cyclonic
feeling, unusual for the time of year and we were in good spirits as we reached
the last bridge we would encounter on our way up river.
Just after Clifton
bridge, we came across a reach of the river where, from our higher vantage
point, twenty or so yards of shallows made the bottom visible. Beyond the low
bushes and the “pegs” of anglers – muddy platforms close to the water – we
could make out a series of sordid objects in the shallow water – an old tyre, a
few bottles and an old teddy bear or doll lying face down. We joked about the
way this ran ironically counter to our day communing with nature.
We were walking away, when, by some overwhelming instinct, I
caught the eye of my friend John Hayes. He returned my look, and we knew we had
to retrace our steps to the shallows. Everyone else walked on. It was the teddy
bear that had troubled us. An instinct much deeper than common sense told us
that the bear was not a bear, but a body, the body of a small child. We broke
off a long branch
from an alder tree and made our way down to the water. The bear/body was easily
dislodged and steered into the bank. John grabbed the little jumper and pulled
onto the bank the body of a two or three-year old child. I remember the eyes
staring pure white out of a bloated face. There was a whiff of decay and we
both shied away. The strange thing is that sweet, dirty smell of death, which
you know even before you have experienced it.
I ran along the bank and called the rest of the party back.
Someone’s persistent transistor radio was turned firmly off.One of us was sent to phone the police and
The Horse arranged an impromptu service for the dead while we waited for them
to arrive. He asked us to pray for the parents too.This is a key memory, as vivid as yesterday,
the circle of faces against the dark trees and the vividly blue sky- the buzz
of indifferent traffic on the bridge a hundred yards away. In religious terms,
I’m certain that most of us were sceptics, despite the enforced Catholic regime
of the school, but possibly for the first time in our lives, prayers meant
something.Death was doubly shocking on
a bright, warm spring morning, at the beginning of our jaunt up the river, at
the beginning of our adult lives.
I suppose we were subdued as we continued our journey. I can’t
remember. It is also possible that we were subject to that nervous, jittery
hysteria that sometimes accompanies tragedy. However, I do remember the steady
rise of the ground towards Clifton Grove, a massive wooded bluff on the south side
of the river. The path rises through trees on both sides until you emerge at
the top, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river that curves away
impressively to the west. All the way up, the hill was carpeted with daffodils
and beside the path, primroses and the starry shapes of wood celandine. Was it
poignant then? It seems so now.
Many years later, I was to take a school party there to locate
the exact place where Paul Morel made al fresco love to Clara Dawes in Sons
and Lovers. It was the sort of academic joke that might raise a laugh with
sixth formers.
“Over there?”
“No – too many
nettles.”
“Here?”
“No, too steep.”
Guffaws.
I remember telling
my students about the body we found many years before. I think I always knew
that I would write about it one day.
We stopped for a while at the top of the hill. I remember
looking out over Beeston, the jigsaw of the Boots factory site and the cakey
grey symmetry of the University. To the left, the unglamorous Western suburbs
melted away into an indeterminate grey- green. The radio was on again. Bob
Dylan was singing The Times are A’Changing. None of us sitting there
that day realised just how much things were about to change – not just in our
lives, but in the life of the whole planet. In less than five years, Mr Dylan’s
imagined revolution would be reaching its heady climax of hedonism and leftist
politics.
It was along haul over the fields to Barton, a small riverside
settlement with a few pleasure craft and caravans. There’s probably a pub involved
in it somewhere. Strangely, I have a clear memory of the tussocky ground we
were covering, looking down and watching out for the occasional water channels
that crossed the fields. I was up beside Roger Killeen and I wanted to engage
him in conversation. I think I wanted to challenge him on something – some
aspect of religious belief. This was almost certainly brought on by the events
of the morning. I had the reputation of being something of a philosopher.
Another priest had caught me reading Ulysses under the desk during a
particularly turgid XD(Christian Doctrine) class, and as a sort of revenge, I
had been awarded the XD prize that year, to my shame. I was a fly in the
Catholic ointment, a fully fledged atheist from earliest memory, although
timidity and a conventional respect for authority kept me on the safe side of
open rebellion.
When you look at the statues in church at the age of eight and
realise that it’s all a terrible mistake, this leaves you with a lot of time on
your hands to think. Once you have scoured your mother-of-pearl effect plastic
covered missal for anything of interest and not found it, this leaves more than
five-hundred hours of thinking. My calculations are based on mass once a week
for ten years, and I’m not counting under the age of five. So what do you think
about? For me, it had resolved into the problem of suffering, of divine
providence. Was there any sense in it? Where was divine justice when the
innocent suffered? The lurid icons that surround you as a Catholic – the stations
of the cross and the ghastly Sacred Heart surely contribute to this line of
thought.
It was probably along these lines that I was attempting to
engage The Horse in debate, but he was having none of it and I remember feeling
thwarted. In his own way, he was probably involved in a similar internal
debate. Years later, when several of his colleagues had left the priesthood in
the early seventies, he was to embrace the dark saintly path of self-sacrifice
and run a hostel for down and outs in Nottingham, while a circulatory disease
claimed parts of his body one by one. It may be that he considered I was
intending to exploit the gruesome discovery of that morning to support some
sceptical view of providence. Maybe he just needed more time to take it in himself.
In the end I gave up.
Barton loomed into sight, Nottingham
at play by the water. A water skier was irritating the anglers who threw
fistful of maggots at him and told him to “bogger off” as the local phrase
would have it. Peroxide blonde grannies with upper arms as thick as tree trunks
scoffed ice creams while skinny, ivory- white kids took headers from a wooden
landing stage. A huddle of small motor cruisers called things like Stella Maris
and Sandpiper bobbed close to the bank in an iridescent sheen of oil. But this
is extrapolation and not strictly memory. I’m working on a few visual
impressions, that’s all. On the other hand, experience tells me that this kind
of memory is usually accurate. Places tend not to change that much.
It was mid-afternoon when we walked up through Thrumpton back to
the main road, eventually joining it at a high saddle of land that looked west
to the power station, south into Leicestershire and east towards Nottingham and home. We were tired and thirsty and
slightly pissed off. We must have stood there by the main road for some time
waiting for a bus that didn’t come. It was Sunday afternoon, and the charts
were playing on the radio. I remember two songs. As I looked down across the
brown fields towards Gotham, it was Donovan’s Catch
the Wind. My memory of the wooded slope to the north is still underscored
by Peter and Gordon’s True Love
Ways. It was just an ordinary place – one that
I have passed a hundred times in my car since then and never given it a second
thought. But somehow, combined with the music, it has become a permanent vivid
fixture of my memory. Eventually, The Horse used his priestly prerogative to
get us a lift on the back of a lorry. This is the kind of risky venture that
might earn any teacher a severe reprimand nowadays, but The Horse was no
stranger to adventure. During WWII had he not escaped from Occupied France
across the Pyrenees disguised as a nun or was
it a washerwoman? Another piece of embroidery – not mine. As we sat in the back
of the open backed truck with the wind blowing through our hair, we listened to
Ticket to Ride.
When I got home, I didn’t tell my parents about the body. I
don’t know why. Perhaps I thought they would find it indecent in some way but
more likely, I wanted to mull over an experience that had made a big
impression. I went into our front room, put on Tchaikovski’s Pathetique
and started to tackle my homework. The swirling tragic cadences of the last
movement summed up a day of contrasts that somehow signalled the end of childhood.
The process of triangulation that occurs between times, places,
people and objects is the stuff that memory is made of. Once you get locked
into that system, everything within it is mutually supporting and that’s why
some memories stick.
My elements were the river, the discovery of the child’s body,
the unusual warmth of the day, the songs on the radio and the lift on the
lorry. Each one becomes a girder in a frame that can never be separated,
because the more elements, the stronger the frame. I have tried to keep that
frame intact. But beneath this factual construction is a strong current, a dark
dichotomy involving life and death in stark contrast. Perhaps it was that day
that it started to flow in my imagination with all the sluggish power of a great
river. Even now I balance the sickly sweet smell of death with the scent of the
cool, fresh daffodils on Clifton Grove. In the background, Tchaikovski is
playing, and I know what he meant, even if the music now seems appalling
sentimental.
Originally published in May 2006 in Literary Potpourri
