Nineteen Seventy-Three
1973 - Birmingham. Slap in the middle of Britain. If you’ve seen “Life on Mars” then you know exactly what this world was like. Dirtier, less polished than ours. Everything a bit broken, kids with dirty faces, long hair and second-hand clothes.
Since his friends, Tim and Jon, had recently moved to Norfolk, the boy had now graduated to walking to school alone (he was very brave) and he was allowed to have his own key to let himself in at the end of the day. His mother told him he was lucky she hadn’t had the key of the door till she was twenty-one and here he was getting it at the age of eight.
He was walking to school along the gulley behind the houses in Kingshurst Road and had just passed the back of his Grandma’s house when he suddenly, violently knew that he could not go to school today, that he had to go home immediately, that he had a sharp pain piercing his chest and tears running down his cheeks.
He put the key in the lock and pushed the door open. His mother in the front room with the baby looked up, surprised because he’d only just left. She could see he was upset and, when she asked, he told her why he’d come back.
“I can’t go to school anymore because… because I don’t have any friends”
She listened and thought and then asked him about one boy after another whom she knew were in his class, but each suggestion was met with a stony “No.” He was determined not to be wrong about this and he wasn’t going to be talked out of it. For every name that was brought up, he could think of a very good reason why that person was not his friend. And he sank deeper into the gloom, deeper into feeling so sad that he could barely feel anything at all any more.
So his mother sat him on her knee and cuddled him and told him two things about friendship. Firstly that you have to work at being friends with people. You have to go out and find them and then you have to bring something to the friendship. His heart sank deeper. He knew that he had nothing to bring. Secondly, she said, you have to go out and find your friends among the people you spend time with already, look for the good in someone. Friendship isn’t about asking people to be your friend it’s about finding people that you like doing things with and sticking with them, seeing how you can support each other in doing what you like to do. She was quite sure he could do that, if he’d just try. And so his fate was sealed, for since Tim had left, there was certainly nobody else nearby who liked doing the things he liked doing.
But now he had to go off to school because she was going out and he knew he couldn’t stay at home on his own. So he should wash his face with cold water to make the redness go from his eyes and she would walk him round to the school and explain why he was late. He could be brave, couldn’t he?
And although he was grateful for her kindness, he now knew that there was no solution to his dilemma except to stay in this place of being brave and not showing his sadness. He knew that he was able to find a place of feeling nothing at all and that he would be much safer and find life much easier if he did that, instead of all the difficult things she’d suggested. They walked to school in silence.
I wrote this a while ago in preparation for a project that I'm now revisiting. About friendship. About social ties and family ties. About going out into the world. There's a positive or two within this world of gloom and childhood despair. I hope you can see them too.