After weeks of non-stop comment -whoring, I suspect this entry may well defeat the commmentators entirely.
Yesterday afternoon I had an email from someone I hadn’t seen in 23 years. When I last saw him he was a dumpy 17 year old with a near autistic interest in video games. He was in town and I invited him to lunch. I found him in our waiting room; a dumpy 40 year old who had apparently exchanged all of his hair for a wife, two kids and a home in Brisbane (not a bad deal). Over lunch he mentioned another childhood friend: F.
I was a typical of my generation. Every boy had a best friend with whom they did pretty much everything and a pool of “mates” from which new best friends were occasionally drawn. From what I can deduce from the crowd of boys that attend the school around the corner from where I live, the concept of a best friend has been replaced by membership of a sort of dog pack of never less than 10 which speaks a language of its own (with a vocabulary limited to the words “shut up Bruv”).
 During my first year in secondary school F was my best friend. We fell in with each other whilst travelling up to school in Colchester by train from Frinton where we both lived. Most of our social lives happened on the train. There were two types of railway carriages (or cars). The first conformed to the modern type, with corridors running the length of the carriage. However, some were divided into enclosed 6 seat compartments with a door at each end. Our group of friends would always try to get one of these compartments to ourselves. We would jump in and then lean out the door window to discourage any adults from joining us. If an adult got in it would mean 40 minutes of sitting relatively quietly playing Top Trumps. If we could keep the compartment to ourselves it meant we could swing from the luggage racks, use swear words we’d learned from bigger boys and “bundle” which was a sort of aimless mass play fight that probably had latent homosexual undertones. There were one or two older kids on the train who used the journey to engage in a little light recreational bullying. There was little worse than finding some burly 17 year old joining you with a malevolent gaze. You knew once the train got moving your 11 year old arse was going to get kicked about for 10 stops.
One afternoon, F and I got a compartment with our friends. One by one the rest got off as we made our way through the East Essex countryside. Three stops from home a man in his thrities got into the compartment and sat next to F. He seemed to want to talk. We were reluctant because we been warned about speaking to strangers. On the other hand we had also been told to be polite to adults. After asking a few questions he put his arm round F. We were stunned. F looked at me, suddenly pale and desperate. The man then leaned close to F and kissed his cheek. With hindsight we should have pulled the emergency brake or screamed but we were so scared we just sat there full of panic. When we reached Frinton he announced he was getting off too. We went out of the front of the station and I looked around for an adult but there weren’t any. The man was telling F that he wanted him to come for a walk in a field close to the railway line. I knew I couldn’t let that happen but I also had no idea what to do. 5 years in the cub scouts did not seem to have left me prepared to deal with the situation we were facing. An idea occurred to me. I “reminded” F that I was supposed to be going to his house for tea and that his Mum was expecting us. The man said he was sure F’s Mum would not mind his being late. I insisted we had to go straightaway. The man looked at me, trying to work out whether I was lying or not. Our eyes met and I was willing myself to sound truthful. F, who was crying insisted it was true and the man relinquished his grasp on F’s wrist. We ran to F’s house.
Withn 10 minutes the police were there, listening carefully to our story. I knew they would want a description and had tried to memorise the man’s features. I could feel my recollection slipping from me as I tried to pinpoint it. I told the police I would draw a picture of him and they gave me pencil and paper. I scratched away and F agreed it was a likeness. The policeman looked at it and said “We know him. Don’t worry we’ll go see him”. It seems there were two men living in my home town who were, as one might say, known to the Police. The drawing was just good enough to narrow it down to one. So far as I am aware no proceedings ensued.
Being 11 was scary. We went from being the eldest boys in primary school to the youngest boys in a school we wouldn’t leave until we were (at least formally) men. There was a big adult world crowding in our own which had, until then, Â been dominated by comics and cartoons and swimming at the beach. Within 4 years we would be gathered round F as he described being seduced by the older sister of his french exchange partner. 5 years later F was dead, killed in a rowing accident whilst at university and by then we had fallen out over something so trivial I can’t even remember what it was.