Home.
Sometimes magic happens in the most unexpected places.
I’d been through that place a hundred times or more, it was on the bus route I regularly took to bigger places of a weekend or school holidays and I’d never really thought about it, I’d almostforgotten about it when I passed my driving test and the route to the same places was altered by A roads and bypasses.
I lived with my parents in a small village, you could call it quaint, a village green with a long dead oak tree, hollowed out by disease and time that people loved to photograph with the village church in the background. A big playing field attached to the two-building primary school where I’d spend hours playing football with the other kids in the village and a few post teen locals.
There were four of us the same age, my age, Ben who lived at the old teashop, Victoria, posh but not snobby, she lived in a big house on the extra expensive road in the village, her parents owned a nursery, the plant kind, and she rode horses. Then there was Lucy who lived a few doors down from me on the road that went down the side of the field, she was the first person to speak to me when we’d moved over from the suburbs just before Christmas when I was 10 and that was Luce, the kindest soul I’ve ever met.
The four of us were supplemented by another lad, our age but he’d gone to private schools so were barely saw him, nice enough lad, parents were a bit nettle wine and quiche, the first time we all got drunk together was on a couple of bottles of elderflower wine he’d snaffled.
And then there were the older kids, Andy, from the next village over, effortlessly cool, captain of the football team, Mike who moved in next door to us five years after us, took the tag of ‘new boy’off me but he was great and Vicky’s brother Jeremy, who’s guts I hated the first time I set eyes on him, and he didn’t think much of me either, he’d go out of his way to tag subtle digs at me and being the new boy, I took it. Until I lost my rag with him and stuck one straight in the kisser while we were having a break from playing Two Pots & In.
By the time we were 16 Lucy and I were what you could call a couple, in that awkward mid teen phase, a lot of people wondered how the fuck I’d managed that, the village pub wouldn’t serve us so we’d go into the town where we went to school, there was a fleapit cinema, late night (for us) cafes, a couple of little grotty indie and metal clubs that we spent a lot of time in and a snooker hall, where we’d nip down if they had a dance or something on.
It was a good time to be alive, post GCSE’s the four of us had an extended summer, doing stupid things like getting up to wave at the bus as the older lot got on for an extra few weeks of 6thForm, it was all very Enid Blyton.
The routine for the next couple of years was the self-same 6thForm, dressed in suits, social events and for me and Ben, getting the bus into the city, either to watch football or just hang around a different set of grotty indie bars, we’d spend Sunday round one another’s houses.
Then came 18.
Mike, Andy and Jeremy had all gone away to university the year before, our world shrunk to just the four of us, we became extra tight in that last year, doing everything together, gigs, parties, my sister’s wedding and Lucy’s mum’s funeral, the boys came back for both, and we all sat side by side during each service.
But when it was our time to pack our things and go, I wasn’t prepared for the wrench.
As much as I loved life in the village there was a part of me that clung to what I still called ‘Home’. The place where we’d come from, that’s why teenage me would take that bus on a Saturday, it was my suggestion that we went the first time, we’d often be joined by Vicky and Lucy in that last year together, it was a long running theme that when Uni time came I’d go there, ‘We’ll send him off back home’ they’d say.
But I didn’t, I’d had enough of educationafter the A Levels, not that I thought that I knew it all, which was my mother’s reaction to me telling her I wasn’t going to further my education, I still don’t know why, I wanted to be different, I wanted to earn.
I saw each of them off in turn, Vicky cried, Ben gave me one last dead arm, and the first man hug I’d ever had.
Lucy and I spent her last weekend in a tent, a spot where we’d all go camping in the summer, tucked away in a coppice near the river, We knew, when things got serious that the tome would come where we’d go our separate ways, it was inevitable, we could have gone somewhere together or try a long distance thing, to age me, this was way before emails and instant messages, but we made the most of the time as it ticked down.
It didn’t make it any easier when the time came and we were sat round a fire with marshmallows for the last time, talking about everything we’d seen and done, laughter and tears as we rolled through the years. Losing her mum had obviously devastated her, her dad was selling up, going to be closer to his family, I ended up helping him move with my dad and brothers, so she had no reason to return to the village, it broke both our hearts.
