Absent Friend

Ingelheim Exchange, Easter 1971

(Mike, Steve, Tony)

Sad to say, one of my original crew of home-town "besties", Tony Collman, has just died. Most of us, I imagine, get to hear of the death of the friends of our youth belatedly, if at all, and with little or no awareness of who they became or what they did in the years after we chose (or drifted onto) our divergent paths through adult life. The person we remember almost certainly bears little resemblance to the person who has died, most likely in some town you don't know, and mourned by family and friends you will never have met.

This was not like that. Although, curiously, if I had never started this blog I would probably never have heard from Tony again after the last time we met in (I think) 1981, and I might never even have discovered he had died, unless it was many years later, as happened with another good friend, and no doubt with others I have yet to hear about. There seems to have been something oddly prophetic about Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam", from an album that was something of a favourite in our little small-town circle of friends:

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said
And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led
Except for once in someone else's letter that I read

Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.

Except we were not laughing, that last time. Tony had changed, and by no means for the better, it seemed to me.

But before getting to that, I should probably describe who this old friend used to be.

We attended a boys' grammar school in the New Town of Stevenage, 1965-72, that became a "comprehensive" in 1968/9. Tony, when I first knew him, was a mild-mannered, un-sporty, bespectacled boy who usually ended up without much effort somewhere in the top 5 ranked by academic ability in our year. His small size (that is, before a dramatic late growth spurt), heavy-rimmed glasses, and habitual briefcase led him to be given the slightly cruel nickname "Joe", because of his resemblance to Joe 90, the puppet character in the British children's TV programme of the same name. His mother Lena was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Berlin who worked for the same patrician chain-store, John Lewis, as my mother, and his father Jim was a bricklayer from London, a Communist, and a very tough customer. Necessarily, as he was the local organiser for the building workers' trade union AUBTW (later UCATT), and played a very significant role during the construction of our New Town.

Tony was by inclination a scientist, but also a very competent linguist, and we first became good friends around the age of 16 on our school's Easter exchange visits with our German twin-town, Ingelheim am Rhein. We shared a taste for intoxication, in-jokes, and improvised goofy humour of the sort that probably only appeals to smarty-pants adolescent boys. We had a lot of fun together, some of it quite foolhardy in retrospect, most notably when we hitchhiked from Amsterdam down through Germany as far as Munich in the summer of 1971, bonding over the sort of memorably mad (and sometimes scary) adventures you could have in those days as footloose 17-year-olds at large in Europe.

At the end of our schooldays Tony went off to Bristol in 1972 to study Physics, and I (after a further term of study and two terms working as a teaching assistant) finally left Stevenage in 1973 to study English at Oxford. For the next couple of years we exchanged letters and visited each other and our friends who were also away at university, as well as those establishing various dens of iniquity back home, and probably spent rather more time entertaining ourselves than was compatible with serious study, certainly of lab-bound Physics, although less so of that slacker's degree, English.

Tony, Bristol 1975

(photographer unknown)

Then, somehow and quite quickly, it all fizzled out. Fast friends went their separate ways, and in those days of frequent changes of address (and no mobile phones or internet) communications would be intermittent for a while, at best, then cease. Around then Tony's hedonism and habitual mood seemed to have darkened in spirit; he went off to Egypt to teach English language for a few years and returned a different, more difficult and even dangerous man. Despite efforts to establish himself as a software developer and resorting, among other things, to taxi-driving, at some point he acquired a profound animus towards the police and other authority figures, resulting in a series of court appearances, fines and ultimately jail sentences, mainly for assaults (such as allegedly deliberately driving a car at two police officers). He also endured periods of homelessness, including a spell living in the woods back in Stevenage, where he was burned out of his encampment by young thugs. In his own words, he had "disappeared into the night" during the 1990s.

Eventually, however, the Stevenage local authorities found him accommodation in a small council flat, and he seems to have settled into a relatively contented life in the new century living on state benefits, helping to edit Our Stevenage, an online archive for reminiscences about the town's history, and pursuing his two enthusiasms, cryptic crosswords and the "abstract strategy board game" Go. As a fan of comedy, he would catch the train into London to join the audience for BBC show recordings: somewhere there's a video clip of his enormous beard getting noticed and riffed on by comedian Paul Merton and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the long-running TV show Have I Got News For You. It seems the idea of ever getting a job, never mind a "career", had dropped off his agenda altogether, along with any prospect of a family life: AFAIK he never settled into any steady relationships. That darkness seems never to have completely dissipated, either, but we won't go there: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But that is all retrospective knowledge on my part. Whatever did or didn't happen to Tony in the 1980s that resulted in his effective self-immolation in the 1990s – I can only speculate – his personality had undoubtedly changed from the brilliant, mischievous and essentially benign jester I used to know into a glum, paranoid misfit with a gift for alienating people (including most of his old friends from home and those he had made at university) and, even more puzzling, someone capable of occasional fits of violence. The word went out that, in the Byronic formula, he had become "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I didn't have any more contact with him for the three decades after 1981, as I did have a career and serious family responsibilities to consider, and the few rumours that reached me were sufficiently troubling to put up some solid precautionary barriers.

Then in 2011, quite aggressively at first, he began turning up as a transparently pseudonymous commenter on this blog. After a spell of light skirmishing in public we began a wary email relationship – he was clearly quite bitter about the friends he felt had abandoned him, and I was nervous about bringing this volatile stranger back into my life – but things steadily grew warmer over the years. I started posting him the TLS crossword every week – he was an active and expert participant in various cryptic crossword solving and setting circles – and he clearly enjoyed inducting me into the baffling conventions of cruciverbalism, sometimes asking for help with the more recalcitrantly literary ones. Despite some occasional spikiness – he would vehemently reject any offers of financial help, for example – it seemed that the old friend of my youth could still be detected somewhere in the voice and personality animating these email exchanges.

Knebworth Festival 1973

(photo: Martyn Cornell)

However, I only actually met Tony once in these latter years when our friendship was reviving, and that was entirely by accident. To celebrate my birthday in 2018 we travelled up to London to meet our children at the Hayward Gallery for the Andreas Gursky exhibition there. On that day, behind the galleries and theatres on the South Bank, there was an open-air market selling food, and as we walked through I heard someone calling my name. It appeared to be an elderly derelict with a long matted and plaited chest-length beard sitting on a wall, eating a curry from a cardboard tray. My partner and daughter hurried on, but I was curious. I walked over, and asked, "Sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?" To my amazement, it was Tony, utterly unrecognisable to me, even standing face to face in broad daylight. Given we had been in regular email contact for a few years by then, it was a very unsettling experience [1].

Anyway, in September last year he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, had declined any treatment (wisely, I think), and been given "weeks to a year" to live. He asked me to keep it a secret from our mutual friends – I really don't know why, unless he thought this would be a suitable posthumous reproach for their neglect – and (with one or two honourable breaches) I respected his request. Which was not difficult, as in all honesty it was hard to think of many mutual friends whose contact details I still had or would be able to find who, sad to say, would be particularly interested in his state of health. As I say, from somewhere, somehow, he had acquired a true gift for alienating people.

Then, at the end of January this year, he was hospitalised with shortness of breath, and was discovered to have Covid. They put him into intensive care with an oxygen supply and intravenous antibiotics. He still seemed chirpy enough via email, though, and quite his normal self – he asked me to send the latest TLS puzzles to the hospital – so I agreed to set up a Skype video call. Sadly, this turned out to be a bit of a wasted opportunity, at least from my point-of-view. It was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but his laboured, widely-spaced attempts to speak between breaths kept getting snagged on some idée fixe about a locally-sourced brand of sausages. Now, I'm a patient listener, and I like a sausage as much as the next guy, but this seemed rather beside the point under the circumstances. It was such a bizarre contrast to the lucidity of his emails, but then I suppose he may well have been under heavy sedation. So I listened to him ramble on for an hour or more until some nurses appeared, made my excuses, and closed the session, feeling that this was not an experience I was in any hurry to repeat.

Nonetheless, the Covid cleared up and, after checking out his flat for fire hazards, a hospital-style bed was installed so that he could sleep upright with a supply of oxygen, and he was sent home on the 8th February. He had already asked me to post the next TLS crossword to the flat in anticipation of his imminent discharge, and on the 12th he acknowledged its receipt by email, as he always did.

There was then was an ominous silence, that stretched on and on for ten days. Nothing. Eventually I decided to ring the hospital to see whether he had been readmitted. But the doctor I spoke to informed me that, as I suspected, he had died. When? On the 12th February. I found this hard to believe: not so much that he had died, but that he had died ten days ago, on the very day that he had sent me that last email from home. But by checking his name, address, and approximate date of birth it was confirmed: yes, he was dead, or "had passed", as the doctor kept saying, as if he had been sitting some kind of exam.

So, there it is. To be honest, it's a relief no longer to feel conflicted about whether to make the trip up to Stevenage to say a final goodbye, even though I knew in my heart that was never going to happen. We always like to think we will "do the right thing", don't we? Despite knowing that we'll generally choose the comfortable thing instead. Less selfishly, it's also a relief to know he won't have to suffer the final painful stages of a terrible disease.

Tony sent me a selfie from hospital, an honest portrayal of himself in the gaunt days before his death, still with that matted and plaited chest-length beard, but it's not easy viewing, and so I choose to remember him as he was in summer 1971, a bright young man of 17 experiencing full liberty for the first time, with every prospect of an exceptional life of achievement and happiness ahead of him. That this was never to happen is, in the long view, perhaps just a simple twist of fate, an unexpected kink in the narrative, or even – as I suspect the later, belligerent version of Mr. Collman might have argued – just your opinion, mate. And who asked you, anyway?

Tony, Ingelheim, summer 1971

1. In a typical Collman move, when I emailed him to apologise about this the next day, he replied, "SO tempting to reply 'What the hell are you talking about? That wasn't me!'"...