Resilience

I've never been one of those extroverted types who feel the need for a whole galaxy of friends, spread across a wide spectrum from soul-mate to nodding acquaintance. My Christmas card and calendar lists are fairly short – exclusive, even, you might say – and my birthday card list is even shorter, pretty much restricted to family and a handful of my closest friends. Add to those my email "address book" – not a lot bigger – and I'm pretty much in touch with everybody I want to be in touch with, from my oldest friends, dating back to my school and university years, to a few ex-colleagues and those I have met – whether IRL ("in real life") or electronically – through my blogging and creative endeavours.

That "pretty much" is definitely a grey area, however. It's small, and populated by a handful of off-grid, uncontactable people – possibly still out there, possibly not – that I once knew and am still curious about. I think of them as interrupted, unfinished conversations that could still be worth having, if the opportunity were to arise. Some have gone silent in recent years, some I have not heard from or even about for four, five decades. They may be dead, on the run from the law, or just assiduously minding their own business.

From time to time something will arouse my curiosity about one of them, and in an idle minute at the keyboard I might feel like searching them out on the Web. However, this always feels a little bit creepy to me – after all, if they had wanted to get back in touch I'm not exactly hard to find – so I generally resist the urge and, on those occasions when I have succumbed, have never yet actually attempted to contact anyone I did manage to find. Although, in fact, it's surprising how few of them have left any trace at all on the internet, which takes quite some effort these days. Besides, at our age – early 70s and older – you really don't know who or what you might find. Which, when I think about it, is probably the reason why they may never have got back in touch with me, either. Time takes its toll, and some things are best left in the past where they belong.

After my old schoolfriend Tony Collman died in February last year, I passed on the news to the very few people who might care one way or the other (Tony had done his best to alienate everyone he had ever known). One of these was another old classmate, Ian Cropton, who, like Tony, had returned to our home town of Stevenage in his latter years; in Ian's case to care for his ageing father. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised not to get a reply to my email: I knew that the two of them had "fallen out", as we say. It was inevitable: Tony's talent for destroying friendships was truly world class. I also knew that Ian was suffering ill health himself, and had since retreated into a fragile, monk-like existence in Colchester.

After I'd heard nothing at all from him for eighteen months, it seemed that Ian might have moved into that grey area of lapsed contacts, so in the summer I thought I'd better look him up, only to discover that he had died in April 2025. Again, I was saddened but not entirely surprised. Sometimes it can feel that the swish of the Reaper's scythe is getting uncomfortably close. But, as I say, at our age...

Ian came to mind again recently when I read an ex-colleague's blog post about a road accident he had witnessed as a child, in which another child had been hit by a car when walking to school. It reminded me that, after he had got back in touch a few years ago and we were sporadically emailing each other, Ian had told me a very similar story about his walk to school in 1963, with the difference that the child seen lying dead beneath the car was his own younger brother, Malcolm, just seven years old. He was understandably haunted by this tragedy for the rest of his life, although it was something he had never mentioned – not even indirectly – in all the years I had known him at secondary school. How far a person is formed by such an extreme early trauma it is impossible to say – the lad I knew was a gentle soul with a lugubrious personality and a slightly pessimistic outlook, who later went by the self-deprecating internet tag of "Eeyorn" – but as a foundational story it did seem to make sense of a lot of things about Ian and his stop-start life.

It goes without saying that too many young lives in places like Gaza and Sudan are being impacted and quite likely distorted into unpredictable shapes every day by events like this, in tragically large numbers, and for unacceptable reasons. Nobody, and certainly no child, can witness the loss of brothers, sisters and parents in the bewildering chaos of bombardment and military invasion and come away unchanged. But people are resilient. Human history is a history of ineradicable, cockroach-like persistence through untold plagues, wars, and famines: we are all the descendants of survivors. The fragile triumph of "western" civilisation is that we are less likely to be subjected to these things than at any other time in the history of our species. So much so, that it can seem that we now experience a perverse, atavistic hunger for life-haunting memories, preferably of rather less traumatic intensity, and ideally experienced vicariously. Which is where art and entertainment step in.

Horror films and violent thrillers are the obvious examples. The body count in a two-hour cinematic diversion can be off the scale: see my (light-hearted) post A New Union calling for the typically nameless victims of movie massacres to organise as the Amalgamated Representatives of Guards and Henchfolk (a.k.a. ARGH). But dramatised dread will seek you out, uninvited and unasked, whatever your age. I was terrified by the volcano-dwelling "goons" in the Popeye cartoons, and the dreams of a lot of children of my age were disturbed by watching the early years of the TV series Doctor Who, and in particular by those relentlessly psychotic aliens, the Daleks: Destro-oy! Exte-ermina-ate! In fact, those tea-time episodes of the mid-1960s, best experienced by peeping from behind the impenetrable safety-barrier of the sofa, had an unsettling family resemblance to that pioneering BBC sci-fi horror of the 1950s, Quatermass, which my parents would watch after my sister and I were safely asleep in bed.

And yet somehow something of the essence of Quatermass still seeped into my subconscious mind: I suppose horrified shouts and screams on the TV have a way of making their way upstairs and penetrating the sleeping brain, like some marauding extraterrestrial creature. I'm sure I can't have been the only one to have watched the film Alien twenty years later with a mounting sense of a familiar dread: no, not you again... An ersatz, self-imposed, first-world terror, no doubt, but no less real for that. Then, the very next year, as a Jack Nicholson fan and against my better judgement, I saw The Shining, which scared me into white-knuckle rigidity, I have to confess: I vowed "no more horror films for me" after that.

Not least because I had seen it at an afternoon screening before, as a junior assistant at Bristol University Library, doing a solo evening duty at the Law Library situated within the university's imposing Wills Memorial Building. This was a mistake. At the end of that winter's evening session my job was to close up the library, nerves still thoroughly jangled, by turning out all the lights one by one in each room until it was perfectly dark, then lock up the door behind me, still inside a gothic cathedral of a building that would make a perfect setting for a Hammer Horror vampire movie. I pretty much ran out of there.

So that was at least one promise to myself I have kept: I haven't watched another self-declared horror film in the subsequent forty-five years. And yet, as if to illustrate something about our incremental generational resilience – might there be some sort of inherited inoculation against bad experiences? – horror films are my film-buff daughter's favourite genre, the grislier the better. Go figure, as they say.

But, perhaps there is hope that one day there will be a world in which future generations everywhere can enjoy the thrill of scaring themselves silly with fake horrors that sublimate things their ancestors had to suffer in real life. It could happen, and – please, you princes, potentates, presidents, and prime ministers – make it be soon. Sadly, a sofa offers no protection at all against bombs, bullets, or soldiers bent on mayhem.

A linocut I made in 1980...