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October 25, 2005
Growing Up
I would say that ‘growing up’ is an ongoing process that happens in stages. You are chugging along just nicely thinking you know it all thank you and then suddenly something happens, an event, something you read or something someone says to you and it marks a turning point in your life where you look back to the time before with a kind of embarrassed shuffle at your naivety.
I remember one such turning point rather well. I had jacked in A-Levels at school and was in my first couple of weeks of sixth form college. I felt all grown up because it was all so new. Those teachers that remembered me from when I was 11 and treated me accordingly were distant memories, also I could wear jeans which we weren’t allowed to do at our school. It felt like starting afresh, as an adult. More importantly I was now studying A-Level English Literature and Language as opposed to just Literature.
Our first language assignment was to write a letter to someone who was no longer with us. Now in those days aside from a couple of cats, a dog and a hamster or two, I hadn’t experienced death, all of my grandparents (except one who died when I was so young that I had very little recollection of him) were alive and more-or-less kicking. So who did I write to? Get this, I wrote to John Lennon.
John Fucking Lennon.
You see I thought it was quite cool, I was saving up for this John Lennon t-shirt I had seen in Camden because as I mentioned I was now free to wear what I liked.
I can’t remember much about what I wrote, but no doubt I cliched on about ‘a life cut short in its prime’ and page after page of drivel about what he might be doing now, how he might actually have got around to ensuring world peace, or something. No doubt it didn’t occur to me that he might be living in some posh mansion in Richmond surrounded by his millions, leaving his abode only to collect his OBE.
So we had handed these assignments in, and a group of us had sat together in the canteen (or 'refectory' as it was now known) afterwards. We had only known each other a week and so naturally we were still struggling with the small-talk stage of our relationship. It wasn’t long before we got around to who we had written to. Someone had written to their dog (to be honest the thought had crossed my mind but c’mon John Lennon was so much more... well ... cool really) there were a couple of Grandparents in there of course and finally we got round to this woman. She was the eldest of all of us, probably in her late thirties, the archetypal bubbly overweight woman (or so we thought) who never minded speaking up in class. I can still picture her now, where she was sitting, what she was eating and more importantly the matter-of-fact lassiez-faire manner with which she said,
‘Of course, I wrote to my babies.’
These days that sentence would stop me dead, I would automatically assume the worst, but I was young. The way she said it, it was as if she was talking about a bunch of guinea pigs or something.
Yep I thought she was talking about her guinea pigs.
I think everyone else must have thought the same because I still remember how she begun her story competing to the sound of sympathetic gushes from around the table, I still remember how gradually one by one we all fell silent and gaped open mouthed until by the end, it was just her voice and the clittler clatter of plates being washed up just the other side of the hatch behind us.
There had been a fire, she had lost all three of her kids. She had tried to save them but had passed out from smoke inhalation. But the time the fire brigade had got there, it was too late.
I realise now, it was her coping mechanism, that lively exterior but at the time I couldn’t understand how she had managed to shock a table of 17-18-19 year olds into silence, how none of us could think of what to say, how after spilling this tragedy onto the table she could just stand and say,
‘Anyone for coffee?’
I think what shocked me more than anything was that this tragedy had happened a few years previously, only five miles from my own doorstep. Why hadn’t I remembered this myself? Surely it would have been all over the local papers, surely I would have been able to smell the burning flesh from my own bedroom window, why hadn’t I recognised the woman’s face? Why hadn’t I remembered?
When I got home I asked my Mum if she recalled anything. She couldn’t, she said it probably was in the papers but these things happen all the time it was six years ago after all. I think that was the first time that I realised that heartbreak exists continually, that there are hundreds of non-white non middle-class Jamie Bulgers and Sarah Paynes who don’t make the headlines because some cold-blooded hack somewhere has decided that they wouldn’t make a good story.
In the end I became quite friendly with the woman, well I say friendly what I mean is we used to work together, sometimes go out for a drink, have a laugh. She used to love hanging out with people much younger than herself, I wonder now if she envied and in some way tried to emulate our innocence.
I even went to her house a couple of times, I hate to admit it but I tried to avoid the place as much as possible. It was like a shrine, the walls were covered with photos and above the mantelpiece was an enormous painting of the three of them, it filled the whole wall. I couldn’t help staring even though it would send a chilling shiver along my spine, if you looked into their eyes they seemed empty and soulless, ghostlike. I wonder how much of this had to do with the fact that she had it painted from a photo after the event .
Once she gave me a guided tour of the walls and in that same light-hearted voice that had become so familiar to me by now, she took a little more of my innocence.
‘Of course’ she said ‘I haven’t got many photos of my babies. These are all I could salvage from friends and family. Most of our own photos were destroyed by the fire.’
For the fear of sounding like the newspaper article that I did or didn’t exist, that fire took her kids and as if that wasn’t enough it took her memories too.
A week later our letters were returned. I got an A - I should have been pleased but by that point I had come to loathe the piece. I hated the heartless teacher even more for giving me that grade, especially when I found out that the grieving mother didn’t score as well as me. I never read it again and as soon as I could, I binned it. It had come to represent a part of my life of which I was ashamed, a distant time when writing about the death of a pointless pop star would bring a tear to my eye. I had forgotten all about the t-shirt.
Even today I still have these moments where I know there will be no going back to how life was before but I think that what made this particular event stand out from the others was that it made me realise that growing up is an ongoing process, that I will never be able to know or understand everything, that when I’m eighty years old there will still be something that will come along and shock me when I’m least expecting it.
Or at least I hope so. Maybe knowing everything is not all its cracked up to be.
Pehaps the best I can do is to pray that these experiences will always be second hand, because the minute you pass out and tumble down the stairs on the way to save your kids’ lives, I guess that is the moment when you start to know it all.
Posted by purple elephant at October 25, 2005 10:00 AM