Tollesbury Time Forever Page 3

  So there we were upon the ground. He looked down again and I could not help but stare at him.

  And then he spoke once more, turning his large head quickly to me as he did so.

  "When did you come?" he asked plainly.

  "What do you mean?"

  "When did you come?" he repeated, slower this time, emphasizing every word with a rasp of his tongue, spittle forming on his hanging bottom lip.

  "Where?"

  "Here! When did you come here?"

  "Erm, today; last night. I'm not sure."

  He paused, considering my answer.

  "As I thought," he murmured, nodding. "Heard the splash."

  This made no sense to me at all until I realised where he was sitting. In an instant, I saw myself as I was the previous evening, drunk and forlorn and trying in vain to kill myself. The man had been staring all this time into the exact same marshy pool into which I had allowed myself to fall. And I shuddered at the coincidence, if coincidence it be.

  There was nothing I could do but to sit and to wait. I could not tell you how many minutes went by, though I can tell you that every second seemed crucial as if there was a pattern to be followed, a script that was being directed by people unseen. All I know is that as I was about to speak, the man swivelled round in one frenetic, lithe, movement, his legs still crossed. And there I was, face to face with him. I breathed deep, gulping air as if it were cider.

  As I looked across into his face, I sensed it slacken a little. Was it tiredness? Or maybe disappointment?

  Though I had been about to speak, I honestly had nothing to say. In such a moment, anything I could have said would have been entirely meaningless anyway. There was a depth to this moment far greater than any words of mine could have filled. So I just left it to him.

  "You are here because you are meant to be here. I am here because it is the only place I can be. I have waited here for you for some time, lain dormant, you might say. Now don't you be letting me down, boy. You don‘t want to go letting me down. Not again."

  He continued in that flat, atonal voice of his, slow and dull. And it made me listen all the more.

  "You will learn from me boy.”

  He took a pipe from his pocket, filled it slowly with tobacco, lit it and sat and puffed.

  “What will you learn?” he continued, leaning towards me now until I could smell his tobacco breath oozing through the freshness of the air between us like fetid oil upon the purest of streams.

  “Well, you will learn to love me and you will learn to need me; that is what you will learn. And I will lead you to a place where you will learn life, life itself, mind. Then, when the time comes, you will know of death so plain and you will give yourself up to this world. Then may we never see each other again. For the good of both our souls.”

  A breeze eased through me like a thousand tiny daggers. I shivered though the day be warm.

  "Have you nothing to say, boy?" he asked eventually.

  I sat in stillness looking down because I did not want to return his gaze. Though I could not see his eyes I could feel them. It felt as if they were seeping into me, injecting some kind of blackness into my blood. A statue, I clearly was not but, all the same, I was unable to move. My senses had left me. There was a buzzing in my head as if my mind and my brain were struggling with one another, neurotransmitters wielding dopamine and flying out from the trenches of my frontal and temporal lobes, a see-saw battle of such brutal force that I had to just let it happen. That was me, the impotent war correspondent cowering in his ramshackle hotel room, unable to comprehend the fighting even though his own head be the battlefield.

  Rage on, this crazy feeling. I know it’s got me reeling. Rage on to me…

  "Nothing to say, boy?”

  It took all my strength to shake my head. I was drained beyond belief.

  “Good. Then may it all begin.”

  I did indeed feel as if I were on the verge of a beginning rather than an ending. Where things were going to lead, I knew not, nor did I care at that point. To have a direction, a purpose, is fundamental to human existence. Without it, we flounder in an ocean of self-doubt and ennui. And within moments of the man lapsing once more into silence, I felt I belonged here.

  The brightness of the day faded into the orange of the evening. Then darkness came. The stars pricked white holes in the black cardboard sky and the marshes slowly filled with the salty water of the sea. The gentle waves reminded me of the sound my dog used to make as it licked itself clean with its clumsy pink tongue. I cherished the memory and closed my eyes briefly. I think I must have slept for a while as I failed to notice that my shoes and the ends of my trousers had become sodden as the marshes had filled.

  How long had passed since that man had pronounced the beginning of who knows what, I did not know. I should have been hungry, but I wasn’t. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. I was, however, very tired so I reluctantly dragged myself to my feet to find a dry place to rest. The old man was nowhere to be seen. He had been claimed by the night. And how appropriate that was. Perhaps the night was not complete until he was a part of it. Learn to love him? I doubted that very much as I walked back to the village square, stumbling along as if pulled by a chain of my own devising.

  I slept that first night beneath the 19th century firmament huddled against the inside of the low wall surrounding St Mary’s Church, the shadows of the gravestones under the round moon being my only companions. The bells tolled on the hour though they were mere tings on a triangle to me; for my sleep was deep and untroubled. There were no three o’clock in the morning fears of what bills were to come through my door and no worries of telephone calls threatening me with all sorts if I did not make payment on the many loans I had. There were no car doors slamming, no buzzing radiators and no next door neighbours trying to out-scream one another. And there was no nurse coming round to inject me once a fortnight.

  Thus I slept in the sparsely populated, neatly kept graveyard of an old church in the summer of 1836 entirely unaware of what was to become of me.

  3. Let It Be

  The ribald yelling of a cockerel woke me with a start. Having overcome the initial shock, I stretched languorously, the joints of my arms and legs clicking with relief. The sun was just above the roof of The King’s Head so I guessed it was about five or six in the morning. Birds hovered high in the air like headlines in a blue newspaper sky. I stood slowly, turning to look over the low church wall. A sigh broke from deep within me as I met the day. I folded my arms and leaned forward, resting on the perfectly irregular stone. Leaning against an old stone wall and gazing into the distance has since become one of the pleasures of my life. It is a truly profound experience when you think of the picks that quarried the stone, the arms that carried it and the hands that formed it.

  There comes a time in every man’s life when he must stop and consider what he has achieved. This moment is not the normal pondering of how things are or the mulling over of certain recent events. It is not a ‘life-flashing-before-your-eyes’ moment. It is a definitive moment where a man considers his worth, his presence in this world. You may think mine would have been the instant before I allowed myself to fall to my supposed demise in the salt marshes, but no, that was merely the pathetic folly of a drunk. My moment of self-scrutiny came that morning as the sun rose and the birds chattered. It was then that I began to fully consider the life that I had led.

  I was born in Dagenham, East London in the summer of 1958. Dagenham back then, and to a large extent now, was a massive grid of similar looking streets that spoke of struggle and spirit and pride. My dad and my uncle worked alternate shifts at the huge Ford’s manufacturing plant just off the old A13 road and my mum took in washing from neighbours for what she called ‘pin money.’ I remember the claxon that used to blast out of the factory at midday and then again an hour later. It signalled the beginning and the end of the lunch break for the workers and always used to startle me, even though I knew it was coming.
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br />   When I first began school, some of the children used to tease me, telling me that inside Ford's there was a huge monster and that the siren went off to warn the workers the monster was awake. I used to come home desperate to see my dad, hoping he hadn’t been caught and devoured. It used to affect my sleep too, these worries about the monster across the road. I guess it didn’t help when my dad used to try and comfort me, saying for as long as we lived in Dagenham we would never be alone. For if you closed your eyes and listened, you could here the Ford's manufacturing plant breathing, a living, puffing organism that brought only fear to my young heart.

  I wouldn’t say I have fond memories of Dagenham. They are tainted with loneliness and fear. People in general irk me. Angry people scare me. Sad people enhance the natural feeling of sadness within me. Dagenham, as I recall through these fading years, was a place for the lonely, the fearful, the angry and the sad. I have never been back. Even though I understand the Ford's plant has now closed down, I have no doubt that the monster is just hibernating. I have no desire to be around when it decides to waken - for creatures such as that merely sleep; they do not die.

  We moved to Tollesbury just after Christmas in 1963. My grandmother, whom I had never met, had died and left us her house in this little village none of us had ever heard of. I remember my parents discussing whether or not Tollesbury was even in England. It was a big move for all of us. We didn’t have a car so my dad had to stop working at Ford's. This pleased me greatly as I felt that at least we would be safe from the monster. It had felt as if we were going on holiday, a holiday from which we just never returned.

  So from being lonely in Dagenham, I became lonely in Tollesbury. My parents found work at the jam factory in Tiptree and I started at Tollesbury School, just down East Street, almost opposite where we lived and where I still live to this day. The school was built in 1896 and is intimate and neat. Back then though, as a shy East London boy, I found it daunting indeed. The other children all knew each other. They spoke funny. They were polite to me but, all the same, I felt excluded. Looking back, maybe it was just a village thing. I have been drinking in the King’s Head for more or less my whole adult life yet I believe it has only been in the last couple of years that I have been considered a regular.

  So my little five year old self had needed a friend. Fortunately for him, he found four of them - The Beatles. Even at that early age, or maybe because of it, I knew instantly that they were wonderful.

  I never had a favourite; they were just The Beatles to me. To be honest, I wasn’t one for all the Paul or John stuff back then. Their songs to me were the aural equivalent of seeing a brand new colour. They brought a sense to me of the vibrancy of the world. It was everything - their voices, their music and their smiles. In later years, I read and re-read the lyrics, searching for some deep poetry within them, something that would give me a clue as to their allure. But it was like trying to touch a cloud. Beauty is as beauty is. It is no more complicated than that. The moment you try to understand some things is the moment you break the spell.

  So as my mind was beginning to be wonderfully overwhelmed by the sights and smells of the countryside and the sounds of the Beatles, my parents began to go their separate ways. Apparently my dad took to drink and my mum cried a lot. To my shame, I didn’t really notice either until the end. When I was eight, my dad left us. He more or less just fell out of the door with a bin bag of possessions in his hand. I don’t know whether my mum threw him out or whether he just decided he’d had enough. Nobody ever explained it to me. I never saw him again. And my mum was never the same. Even The Beatles changed.

  And, yes, I admit it, I did cry on 31st December 1970 when Paul announced to the world that the band was splitting up. I spent day after day in my bedroom playing the early albums over and over again. I had all their records of course, but Sergeant Pepper onwards brought just confusion to me. It seemed as my life was becoming more complicated so the Beatles added to that complication rather than resolved it. By the age of thirteen, despite my desperate attempts to cling on to hope amidst a troubled childhood, I had become a maudlin, cynical youth who dragged his feet physically and metaphorically. I was at odds with the world and didn’t care who knew it.

  The Fab Four had once bestowed upon me a belief that life was there to be enjoyed, that anything was possible - and then when they discovered it was more complicated than that they just left me. They had made me feel people were perfect and that love was tangible. They had pretended to me that the world was a place of innocence and joy, when in reality it was just full of bullying and arguing and sadness.

  In retrospect, I knew I should have gone back and listened to those later albums, but it would have broken my heart then as it would now. I have forgiven John and George and Ringo, but Paul, he didn‘t seem to suffer. John got shot, George got cancer and Ringo got drunk; but Paul managed to get on with his life. It was if it was all just music to him. That, to me, poor suffering adolescent as I was, seemed wholly unforgivable.

  The Seventies, my formative period I suppose you could call it, was a blur of misery and anger. I truly believe I was in my mid-twenties before I could hold an adult conversation. Life was gradually opening up as my mind started to make sense of what it was truly like to be an adult. Yet throughout this transformation from caterpillar to butterfly the intensity of my feelings was matched only by my inability to express them.

  I was saved by The Clash. There were perhaps other contributory elements to my salvation, but Mick Jones and Joe Strummer truly brought me into adulthood. They were angry and rebellious, just as I believed myself to be. Yet there was a humour and a sophistication in their songs that made me realise one fundamental fact – to be miserable is to capitulate. London was burning and so was I. They ignited within me a will to fight back. Just as Bob Dylan taught me how to keep on keeping on and Bruce Springsteen taught me how to run.

  I was twenty two years old when I met my wife. Yes, I once was married and I suppose technically I still am. Her name is Julia. When I was twenty four, we had a son. His name is Robbie. He has Down’s syndrome. He will be twenty-six in September this year. I haven’t seen him since he was four. It may as well have been a thousand years ago for all the impact I have had on his life. Yet I miss him still.

  Life comes and it goes. And it can change - just like that.

  The sounds of Tollesbury waking permeated my consciousness. The smells of a country life entered my nostrils and the clarity of a country air filled my lungs. I left the shadows of the graveyard and stepped upon the dewy moisture of the village green.

  Timelessness overwhelmed me. My only decision was whether to go right across the green or left towards The Recreation Ground. This was almost becoming a ZX Spectrum game from the early eighties. I would not have been at all surprised if I had seen Thorin Oakenshield cross-legged on the ground, singing about gold.

  I looked languidly over my shoulder in the direction of the Recreation Ground and was enthralled to see at the end of a fifty yard dirt track, a large field surrounded by trees. It was a perfect ellipse. There were no houses guarding it, no Parish Rooms, no stone wall and no cars. There it was before me, wide and open and lush. I smiled as I breathed – such a perfect combination of muscles and nerves that can only occur in the most gorgeous of moments; and when it does, your soul is truly at one with your heart and your mind.

  So I walked unencumbered to the centre of the grass ellipse. I just stood there, surveying the field like an opening batsman who has just walked out at Lord’s Cricket Ground for the first time, taking in the fielding positions and the boundary line, the colours in the crowd and the possible impact of the cloud cover. I am in love with the game of cricket; and for that, unlike so many other things in my life, I feel not the need to explain myself.

  Oh for a fine bat in my hand and for an umpire to signal the first ball of the day. I sigh now, even as I write these lines on my bedroom wall…

  And do you know what I did? I laid myself
down where the wicket would have been and I slept for hours. Call it a long held ambition; call it a kind of alternate reality jet-lag. Call it what you like. I slept because I wanted to. There was a simplicity in such an act that marked the moment as profound. My body was upon the earth as the world turned. The sky looked down upon me with, I sensed, approval.

  So what do you do after a long day in the field? You have a pint. It was worth a try. I raised myself to my feet and headed optimistically for The King’s Head. I pushed against one of the weather-beaten doors of the pub and it opened smoothly, not a creak in sight. Amazingly, the interior was little different than it is today; at first glance that is. The bar was in the same place and withered beams held up the ceiling. A fire place gaped in the far wall, full of roughly hewn logs. A smiling young barmaid was ready for action and a couple of old men stood huddled and wary in a shadowy corner.

  On closer inspection, however, my eye was drawn to the differences, the imperfections, if I can even call them that. Between the ceiling beams was a substance that seemed to be a mixture of dried mud and straw and the floor, basically, was just trodden-in dirt. Lamps, lit by what I presumed to be oil, cast more gloom than illumination and the whole pub smelled like a farmyard. If I had lit a cigarette in there, it would have been like dabbing the most wondrous scent onto the grubbiest of necks.