Absent Friends

Present!

Recently, I received an email out of the blue from an old schoolmate. Ian was someone I had grown up alongside – quite literally, we were next-door neighbours for a few years as small children [1] – and, although I knew we had not been close friends in those most memorable years of late adolescence, nonetheless he is someone I ought to be able to remember well. Except that, annoyingly, I couldn't, and the more I thought about it, the vaguer my recollections became. I could remember him at primary school well enough – we had sat in the same classrooms for seven years, after all – but who had been in his group of friends at secondary school? What direction of study had he taken in the sixth form? Good grief, hadn't he, in fact, been in one of my own subject groups? German, perhaps, or Geography? No, that was another boy, similarly tall, and with a certain facial resemblance to Ian, but not him. Or was it? This had all the makings of a first-class mnemonic embarrassment.

Now, once you have passed the age of 60, failures of memory take on an alarming quality, like finding a fresh crack in a load-bearing wall, or being woken by a ringing telephone in the small hours. Things like that Billy Collins poem, Forgetfulness, are no longer quite so wryly amusing. I have spent entire mornings trying to remember a name, coming at it from various different angles until, with a disproportionately intense surge of relief, it has turned up in some dusty corner of my overstuffed and neglected memory palace. Phew! But on the subject of Ian at secondary school: nothing.

So, to cover my humiliating lapse of memory, I emailed another old classmate to ask if he could remember anything about Ian. But he, too, only had the vaguest memory of someone who might or might not have been him. Which was odd, because Ian was large and characterful, not the sort of lad you would easily forget. It was as if he had been edited out of the narrative.

In the end, the answer turned out to be simple. He had indeed been edited out. Ian's family had emigrated to California in 1966, and so he had spent just a single year at our secondary school. There was nothing there to forget, other than the removal of his piece, so to speak, from the board. In those days, this would often happen. Someone would fail to reappear at school at the start of a new year in September, and their absence would either not be noticed at all, or quickly forgotten. Friends and classmates came and went; new ones took their place in the register. A move to another school in another part of town, never mind another part of the world, meant they had simply ceased to exist, in any meaningful sense, in the ongoing group Bildungsroman (or soap opera, if you prefer) of 30 or so individuals.

Of course, that was before social media. It never ceases to amaze me that my daughter is still in touch with a girl who left her school at about the same stage as Ian left mine, when her family moved to Yorkshire. I suppose there must have been people in my day who stayed in contact with a particularly close friend by letter or by phone, but I'm not aware of any; after all, letter-writing is rather more effortful than texting, and a single family landline is not an ideal medium for sharing adolescent secrets. No, absence from daily "facetime" resulted, in effect, in a complete excision from reality.

The oddest thing, though, was realising that neither of us could have the faintest idea of who or what either of us had been, become, acquired, abandoned, ventured, achieved triumphantly, or failed at miserably on the journey from age 12 to age 64. Which is a long, eventful journey by any standards. Who, I wondered, did Ian imagine I was now? Did this matter enough to either of us to take the necessary corrective steps (essentially, to write an entire summary autobiography)? I suppose if someone were to read their way through the nearly ten years' worth of posts on this blog – all 1,500 of them – they might get a sense of who I am, or at least of how I have chosen to present myself. But "I" is always a work in progress, and will have been changing even over the course of this most recent decade, too. And then there are the shameful and secret (or indeed admirable) things, forgotten by or unknown to me but regarded as essential attributes by those more objective observers, one's work colleagues, friends, and family. Nobody is ever quite who they think they are, especially in the eyes of others.

I suppose there is a case to be made that your 12-year-old self is your purest self. Poised between childhood and adolescence, at that age you are both completely yourself and a blank canvas; wise to the world, but not yet compromised by it. To be known and remembered as you were then, and only then, is to be a character in some eternal tale of late childhood, such as Just William, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or, ah, Lord of the Flies. Which has its attractions, doesn't it? Why complicate things?

But what must it have been like, to have been uprooted from Stevenage New Town and transported to Southern California in 1966, right at the time of peak Beatles, Beach Boys, and Byrds, not to mention Mamas and Papas, Mothers of Invention, and, um, Monkees? Or Vietnam and Civil Rights, come to that.

It's automatic when I
Talk with old friends
The conversation turns to
Girls we knew when their
Hair was soft and long and the
Beach was the place to go

Suntanned bodies and
Waves of sunshine the
California girls and a
Beautiful coastline
Warmed up weather
Let's get together and
Do it again
Beach Boys, "Do It Again"

Sounds awful, doesn't it? All that sand and warmed-up weather! Poor guy, forced into proximity with suntanned California girls, picking up those good vibrations, when he could have been hanging around in the rain at chilly bus-stops after pub closing-time like the rest of us. When the family returned to England some years later, it must have felt like the expulsion from Eden.

But, when I was thinking about the possibility of someone doing that same journey in reverse, from Southern California to North Hertfordshire, a little memory-ping went off. At the back of my mind, I suddenly found I had a vague recollection of, yes, some American lad who had turned up at our secondary school for just a year or so. Or was I just imagining that because of its conveniently satisfying symmetry? What was his name? Jim or Joe, maybe? Damn it, here we go back into the dusty memory palace... I may be gone for some time.

Absent!

1. Their house could well have been the location of the Mary Mouse episode.