Forever Young

by Ray Connolly

  Father Michael grinned. He enjoyed the game as much as Ian. The record was indeed a rare one, a compilation of The Very Best of The Fleetwoods, including, as the record cover said, ‘their greatest hits Come Softly To Me, Mr Blue and Tragedy’. Out of respect for Ian’s feelings he took it admiringly in his hands, and stared at the bland expressions of the boy in the sailor suit and the big busted Doris Day look-alikes who flanked him. ‘My, my, what happy memories this brings back,’ he murmured appreciatively. ‘The Fleetwoods. Do you remember, Ian, how for a while nearly all the American groups called themselves after motor cars? The Fleetwoods, the Cadillacs, Chevrolet and the Impalas …’

  ‘Dion and the Belmonts,’ broke in Ian, not wishing to be upstaged.

  ‘And Michigan and the Pontiacs. Remember them? Strange how no English group ever called themselves Cowley and the Morrises, or Vauxhall and the Lutons?’

  Ian laughed. ‘It’s a virgin, Father, if you’ll excuse the expression. Never been played. Mint condition it is, straight from the factory. See the cellophane’s unbroken.’

  ‘How much?’ Father Michael came to the point.

  ‘Twenty?’ Ian looked hopeful.

  ‘What? Don’t you know I took a vow of poverty? I’ll give you ten.’

  Now it was Ian’s turn to look horrified. ‘Fifteen!’

  For a moment Father Michael wavered before pitching in with his final offer. ‘Thirteen and five free raffle tickets.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, Father,’ Ian capitulated, as he had always known he would, and taking the record from the priest, slid it into a paper bag. ‘Do us a favour will you. Play “Raunchy” for me and Brenda. It’s our twenty-fifth on Monday.’

  Father Michael passed the money across to the little man. ‘Consider it done,’ he said, and strode out of the shop bearing his new record. Ian would never know but he had never cared much for The Fleetwoods. They had always been too insipid for his taste. This record would be one he would gladly make into tonight’s star prize.

  Back in the car he checked his watch. He would just have time to make one more call before he had to get back to start setting up. Starting the engine he turned in the direction of Bickerston College.

  3

  Balancing his tray with one hand and holding his books in the other Dr James Martin threaded his way through the busy refectory to a vacant seat by the window. It was tea-time at the end of his first week in Bickerston. He was nearly half way through the seminar and he was bored. Pensively he broke a digestive biscuit and scattered the crumbs as he considered the people around him. They were, with only one or two exceptions, younger than he was, mainly students between eighteen and twenty-three, he imagined, dull kids who appeared to write down everything they were told and who questioned nothing. That seemed to be the way it was with further education these days. The greater the threat of unemployment the less demanding, less critical were the students, every one eager not to displease or rock the boat in case it should in some devious way affect future chances.

  He now regretted accepting the invitation to come to Bickerston. When the invitation had arrived at his flat in Islington he had seen it as a welcome break from the year’s writing and research he had set himself. Two weeks away, not far from Cotswold country, just a short drive from Oxford. But culturally Bickerston was light years from Oxford; a small, quiet town with a couple of good schools, a college of further education with a greatly exaggerated reputation, one cinema, no theatre and a couple of Roman ruins of little consequence. Come to think of it, except for the Roman ruins, it wasn’t that different from the place he had grown up in.

  ‘D’you mind if we sit with you?’ Standing over him bearing trays of lemon tea and slimming crackers were a couple of girls, neither of whom looked more than twenty. While both were pretty, they had, he considered, the pastiness of career slimmers.

  Politely he moved his books and made space for them. He had noticed them before sitting at the back of his lectures, always together, always attentive, and hanging around in the corridors gossiping together. He glanced around the refectory. There were several other places vacant for them to have chosen.

  ‘How are you enjoying the course so far?’ he asked, more from politeness than particular interest.

  ‘It’s great,’ the more forward of the two replied. She had a heavy Birmingham accent, which didn’t quite marry with her Nordic blonde hair and slightly prominent teeth.

  ‘We were wondering …’ began the other, and then faded away.

  Her friend came to the rescue: ‘Yes, we were wondering if you’ve nothing better to do whether you’d like to come to a party tonight.’

  ‘It’s in Warwick Hall, that’s the girls’ hostel,’ came back the other.

  ‘Not a big party.’ The girl with the prominent teeth was covering any silence left by her friend.

  The lecturer smiled. It was not at all uncommon for girl students to pursue their teachers. ‘I’d love to come,’ he replied.

  ‘Eight o’clock then. Room 308,’ the quieter girl was losing her reticence. ‘I’m Sandra.’

  ‘And I’m Sue.’

  ‘And I’m James. And now if you’ll excuse me.’ He finished his tea. The girls smiled up at him. Suddenly they looked terribly young.

  Getting up, he collected his books and hurried from the refectory, already late for his class. It was already after five and the college was congested with students making their way around the endless corridors of polished wood and glass, making getaway plans on this Friday afternoon. His route lay across the main hall and up into the facing modern block. He hurried down the wide steps. On the balcony of the mezzanine floor a group of rock climbers were assembling for a weekend of peril. Stepping around the island of rucksacks and ropes James found his way blocked. Below him was the concourse of the lobby, where the students milled together moving from one lecture room to the next. The lobby was the heart of the college. It was here that everyone congregated and where all the notices for forthcoming events were pinned to the walls. Momentarily James glanced over the balcony. Below him a priest stood against a wall pinning up a poster. James stopped short when he saw what the poster was advertising. It was something called the 706 Union. That address had an old and familiar ring. Suddenly the priest turned around. And James recognized Michael.

  Astonishment was his first reaction. For a second he could not quite believe what he was seeing, and leaned forward to convince himself that he was not mistaken. As the priest moved away from the notice board he tried to shout. It was to no avail. The noise of the students drowned everything.

  Suddenly the route in front of him cleared, and pushing past the climbers he dashed down the steps and into the lobby, just in time to see Michael disappearing out of the door. He took half a dozen steps across the lobby and then stopped. Into his mind flooded the bubbling brass of the trad jazz band, the smell of the freshly mown grass on the cricket field and the silhouettes on the marquee.

  Turning he looked at the poster. ‘Come to the 706 Union,’ he read. The 706 Union. It was a though a hand had reached out from the past and was dragging him back more than twenty years to another small town in the heart of England, and to two boys who had been almost inseparable.

  4

  November 1961

  A cloud of warm mist rose from the sixteen heaving bodies entwined in the scrum; and mud like quicksand cloyed at the clawing feet. It was an English autumn, dark and damp, and two teams of schoolboys struggled against the conditions and each other for possession of a leather rugby ball. From the middle of the scrum James heard a long sharp blast on the referee’s whistle and knew that the week’s torment was over.

  ‘Three cheers for Milthorpe, hip, hip …’ The school captain was doing his sporting Englishman’s act of thanking the opposition for co-operating in this mass débácle in the wet. James chose not to cheer. Untying his arm from around his school mates, he turned weary legs in the direction of the changing rooms. Keener chaps than he were already breaki
ng into a jog in order to be ready at the doors to applaud the victors, and he groaned inwardly at the surfeit of enthusiasm manifest around him.

  ‘Hooray … hooray … hooray,’ went the choruses from the mud-caked hooligans around him.

  ‘May they rot in hell.’ A familiar cheerful voice at his side mirrored his own feelings perfectly. Limping alongside him came Michael Kennedy, his horizontally striped shirt ripped from collar to armpit.

  ‘There has to be an easier way of proving one’s manhood,’ gasped James as they set off back across the tundra together.

  ‘Not in a Catholic school there isn’t,’ murmured the other boy.

  Michael had been James’s closest friend, indeed only friend, for longer than he could really remember. His first recollection of him was at the age of seven when they would sit together, two quiet boys in the dining room of Michael’s home, playing with lead soldiers and blocks of wood which they pretended were tanks and armoured cars. But even then they had been friends for several years. They had joined the infant school, he had been told, on the same day, and after the tantrums of parting from their respective mothers they had quickly formed an obsessional friendship, a companionship from which all other children were excluded, and which served as mutual comfort and protection from then on.

  From the infants they had progressed through primary school and on to grammar school, boys of similar abilities and virtually identical interests. As young boys their lives were spent on their bicycles, aggravating the neighbourhood where they lived as they made believe they were Stirling Moss and Mike Hazelwood. On one occasion Michael read of a tandem for sale in the local newspaper and they pooled their life’s savings so that they might buy it. At another time they dared each other to go pot-holing in some of the minor holes on a weekend’s trip to Derbyshire, and once they even tried to go into business growing mushrooms – a short-lived hobby. They were always happiest in one another’s company. But when James discovered the Everly Brothers in the spring of 1958 he knew he had found a passion which they could both truly share for the rest of their lives. The tandem was sold and in its place appeared two guitars.

  At first their parents had assumed that this was just another hobby which would quickly pass. But it didn’t. Indeed as the months went by and the boys’ grasp of music increased the hobby intensified into obsession, not only with the Everly Brothers, but with every rock and roll record and group to be imported from America. They were both bright but their encyclopaedic schoolboy minds were put to no more important test than memorizing the ephemera of the new music. No name, title, flip-side, record label, colour or occasionally even number, was too trivial for their study. They were, they liked to tell themselves, the biggest experts on rock and roll in the United Kingdom.

  Slumped in the corner of the changing room James rested his bruised body against his kit bag. Alongside him Michael eased a swollen foot from a mud-and-grass-crusted boot. In the shower rooms the hearty Protestant voices of Milthorpe could be heard carousing slightly obscenely, and certainly sacrilegiously. They listened in silence for a moment, each busy nursing his own wounds.

  ‘Go on try me then.’ Michael was the first to break the mood.

  ‘Oh, I dunno, let me think. What about the address in Memphis of Sam Phillips’s Sun recording studio?’ James dug deep into prime trivia.

  ‘Oh yes, good one.’ Michael stopped examining his foot to concentrate. ‘Was it Union Drive, Memphis? Or Union Avenue? That’s it, Union Avenue?’

  ‘But what number?’

  ‘Oh come on.’ Even Michael thought that was pushing it a bit.

  ‘Your brain must have been crushed. It was seven hundred and six. Don’t you know anything? 706 Union.’

  5

  Paul was out of his make-believe priest’s clothes long before his mother or Cathy got home, but that didn’t prevent him being found out. Having bored of his benediction he had, while still dressed in his mother’s nightdress and his sister’s cape, begun to change the cartridge in his pen, with the inevitable results. Most of the ink splashed on to the nightdress, but the cape didn’t escape a sprinkling as well. At first he had entertained ideas of scrubbing the ink out, but when a trip to the bathroom only spread the damage further he quickly dropped the nightdress into the laundry basket and shoved the cape to the back of Cathy’s wardrobe. He knew his mother would be at least partly sympathetic, but Cathy’s mercies could hardly be relied upon.

  At first he thought he might have got away with it. Cathy came in late from the school drama society, where she was playing Desdemona in the end of term play, and the telephone rang for her even before she had time to begin supper. While Paul ate he examined her through the open door into the hall as she chattered in circles to her friend Suzie, hanging on to the telephone like a starling hangs on to a worm.

  ‘You’d better get yours,’ said his mother, fussing over him as usual, salving her conscience that he should have had to spend the afternoon alone. ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘Nothing really special,’ said Paul unhelpfully, as he attacked his lamb chop.

  Mary looked at him from the small kitchen which adjoined the dining-room. She could tell by his shoes and the mud on the carpets that he had been down to the stream. She didn’t complain. She knew she spoiled him, but he seemed such a well-meaning, trusting child that reprimands always sounded spiteful. And when she did occasionally have to chastise him tears would well up in his eyes so easily that she would find herself apologizing almost before the scolding had begun.

  Cathy, on the other hand, could take all the verbal punishments there were to offer, without showing any sign of remorse. A strong, self-willed girl she got on with her life, with a sublime indifference to the daily difficulties which could weigh so heavily upon her mother. While Paul reminded Mary of herself in his diffidence, Cathy had the confidence and independence of her father. Good at everything she attempted, popular and pretty, Cathy’s only real shortcomings were a blindness towards those less sure of themselves, and a terrible teenage girl’s enjoyment of gossip, particularly with Suzie, the school production’s Othello.

  ‘Cathy.’ Mary called sharply. Her supper was getting cold.

  From the hall Cathy waved a ‘coming soon’ arm at her mother, and continued her conversation. ‘Hey wait, what are you going to wear?’ she asked into the phone.

  ‘Cathy, I won’t tell you again.’ This time a sharper reminder.

  ‘All right, I’m coming,’ Cathy could never be rushed. She turned back to the phone to give Suzie one last answer. Paul watched in silence. This happened nearly every night. ‘I can’t, it’s got ink all down the front,’ he heard her reply.

  Paul swallowed a chip and turned away. She’d noticed.

  ‘Cathy!’ Mary’s final warning had the tone of finality.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Bye.’ Cathy put the telephone down. ‘It was Suzie,’ she said smiling at her mother and instantly deflating her irritation.

  ‘It always is,’ said Paul, anxious to get in some jibes before Cathy’s inevitable annoyance reached him.

  ‘I can’t imagine what you talk about,’ said Mary. ‘It’s only an hour since you left her.’

  ‘They talk about boys. I’ve heard them. And sex.’ Paul smiled beatifically at his sister.

  Mary changed the subject. ‘What was that about ink, anyway? What’s happened?’

  Cathy looked accusingly at Paul. He felt himself going red. ‘My cartridge got stuck,’ he murmured weakly.

  ‘Oh, yes! Well I don’t think it’s fair.’ Cathy turned to her mother. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing borrowing my clothes pretending he’s Innocent the Twenty-Second.’

  ‘I was rehearsing.’

  There was a silence. Mary looked at Paul. When he was under attack he seemed to become smaller. She knew all about his priesthood fantasies. No doubt he had used her nightdress again as well. ‘It’s only a game,’ she said quietly, then seeing that he had finished his chop she added:
‘Would you like an iced bun, Paul?’

  Cathy pulled a face. Her mother always took Paul’s side. ‘It seems a funny sort of game to me. He’s just an infant transvestite with a religious obsession.’

  Paul giggled out loud. Cathy’s reprimands never bothered him as much as his mother imagined.

  ‘Don’t be such a bully, Cathy,’ Mary said. ‘Can’t you see you’re upsetting him?’

  Mother and daughter turned to the small boy who was trying to control his giggles. Cathy gave in. ‘All right. Sorry, Babes, but next time the Holy Ghost wants a chat with you d’you think you could find one of my old dresses?’

  ‘What’s a transvestite anyway?’ asked Paul taking a bite of his iced bun.

  ‘A queerwolf in a frock,’ came back Cathy.

  ‘Wwwooooooowwww!’ Paul lifted his head back and howled absurdly.

  Mary waited for him to calm down: ‘Paul, haven’t I told you never to howl with your mouth full?’

  ‘Sorry. I was just communicating with the undead.’

  ‘I thought vampires were the undead,’ said Cathy, suddenly taking an academic interest in the conversation.

  ‘And were wolfs.’

  ‘Werewolves,’ corrected Mary, pouring some tea for herself. ‘Did I tell you a boy had his leg off today?’

  Paul looked disbelieving. He had heard his mother’s exaggerations about the horrors of the casualty ward too many times to be too easily taken in. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, half a toe. He came off his motorcycle. Seventeen years old. His life could have been ruined. Those things should be banned. It’s his parents’ fault.’

  Cathy, recognizing a standard mother lecture on the perils of motorcycles, quickly steered the conversation in another direction. ‘It usually is,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m not sure about that …’ began Mary. Cathy could sometimes be too sharp for her own good.