I wonder whether anyone reading this has come across the same dilemma: that a ‘friend’ who has been a ‘friend’ for many years is still a ‘friend’, but only because he (or she) has been a ‘friend’ for so many years that it would be odd not to talk of them as a ‘friend; but that when push comes to shove you admit to yourself in your quieter, private moments that your ‘friend’ really isn’t your friend any more. Perhaps, for this reason or that, you even find you can no longer respect that ‘friend’ and wonder whether you even still like that ‘friend’. Are you familiar with any of that?
I am: I have - or had - two such ‘friends’. Both were friends I made at from college, which is where we make many friends - as well as ‘friends’, the quote marks intended to indicate which kind of friend I am talking about.
. . .
I think it is unlikely that at college any of us completely resembles the person we later become as ‘an adult’ (in fact, it is probably a commonplace of which I am apparently unaware and which has already earned me a little scorn from this or that reason for mentioning it). Most of us in our college years, despite attempted beards and boobs, are still at some point in transition from out-and-out childhood to adulthood, although I think I should qualify that claim. First of all — and as usual — there can be no hard and fast rule: a boy or girl of 16 can be a damn sight more mature in may ways, not least emotionally, than a boy or girl of 20, an age when it even seems quite ludicrous to describe anyone of either sex as a ‘boy or girl’.
I also think it’s true that throughout our later life we still change in many ways and, depending upon circumstances, might sometimes do so quite substantially, and there is no point at all at which we are definitively ‘s0-and-so’. Yet it will also be true that whatever changes do come about after the age of 30 has come and long gone — in my case, for example, a rather more responsible attitude to money which developed later in life than might have been helpful (although I am still liable to impulsive, cavalier spending) — they will more be ‘variations on a theme’ with our central personality remaining what it was.
Those two ‘friends’ would most certainly recognise themselves were they to happen across this post, although I don’t think there is much chance of that, so I shall push on. I should also add that I shall be writing about just the one: because I have now finished writing the first draft of this post and am revising it, and realise it would become far too long if I wrote about both. He is most certainly no longer a friend, though at the end of the day as things turned out and despite my growing private thoughts, it was he who gave our almost dead ‘friendship’ its coup de grace.
. . .
I had quite a bit of affection for him when we were at college, although in many ways we were like chalk and cheese, not least in our backgrounds. There was me, the son of a ‘middle-class’ parents who — albeit pretty much by chance and through circumstance — had ended up with a public school education and, especially after being locked away at one for five years, arrived at Dundee University in 1968 with a cut-glass accent there was really no getting passed; and there was Neil (not his real name), the son of a dustman from West London, then Essex, and avowedly, self-consciously, proudly, politically and actively ‘working-class’.
This, remember, was at in the last years of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, when Britain had a Labour government, was in the death throes a post-Edwardian social order, her empire was, if not dead, was dying and those of her once young men who had risked their lives to defend her were now in their young middle-age and in no mood to take any shit from anyone. In short the old order was dead (although recalling what has happened over the past 50 years since then, the cynic in me cannot resist adding ‘so long live the old order’, because as was pointed by a fictional Sicilian nobleman ‘everything must change for everything to stay the same’).
Looking back over those 50 years, in all respects everything did stay the same: the length of skirts might have gone up, then down, then up, then down again, homosexual men who were then the butt of every nasty joke we could think up can now marry each other (and possibly even get their wedding cake baked in a Northern Ireland bakery when no one is looking) and where then you could usually only get olive oil for cooking in a small bottle from your local chemist, you now can get fucking any ‘exotic’ spice or herb from anywhere in the world more or less at your local corner shop. Yet plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the richer are still getting richer and the poor are still staying poor.
(By the way, when you read that, please bear in mind that I’m not even a bloody bleeding heart pinko. Oh, and if you are by chance ‘rich’, I don’t suppose you will care as much than if you were ‘poor’, though even if you do regard yourself as ‘rich’, there is still someone somewhere who regards themselves as ‘richer’ and most certianly looks down on you. As I say plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)
In those days of ‘kitchen sink drama’ many in ‘the media’ would adopt a ‘working-class’ accent because, believe it or not, after centuries of the underclass, once seen as the scum of the earth, the non-people it was OK to kick from pillar to post, it was suddenly cool to ‘be thought of as one of them or of having evolved from them. But snobbery is still snobbery even when, as then it for a short while, it took complete leave of its senses.
Incidentally, I put those two conventional descriptions — ‘middle-class’ and ‘working-class’ — in quotation marks because I dislike both intensely and sincerely believe that at the end of the day they mean and describe nothing. Many who think of themselves as ’middle-class’ or ‘working-class’ might disagree profoundly, of course, but stuff them, they are kidding no one but themselves. If we are talking real ‘class’, as in ‘a class act’, you’ll find it very evenly distributed throughout the nominal social ‘classes’, and you will also find in many who think of themselves in a ‘class’ above others a distinct lack of it.
Money doesn’t buy ‘class’ and you most certainly need not have money, ‘breeding’ (another horrible, horrible concept) or education to have ‘class’. Think of me as a romantic fool for saying so if you like — although you would be quite wrong to think that — but people are people are people and always will be. ‘Class’ is, as far as I am concerned, a non-description, a chimera, a fantasy encouraged by those who like to justify having more money than others. In fact, a blog post on ‘class’ and why at the end of the day the notion of ‘class’ is just so much cack, might not go amiss, but I must haul myself down off my high horse and try not to muddy the waters by going off on a tangent.
. . .
Neil and I were at Dundee University from 1968 to 1972 when ‘student politics’ were all the rage (and, by the way, what the bloody hell happened to ‘student politics’? Taking a look at why might also be worth a post of its own). Neil was right at the thick of them. Until 1967, the year before I went to Dundee, it had been established as a separate university in a drive by the then Labour government’s to expand tertiary education and make more university places available for everyone with enough brains to benefit from such an education.
Previously for most of the past 86 years Dundee had been Queen’s College, St Andrews, and on gaining its own identity, I suspect it was intent on putting as much clear water between itself and St Andrews as possible to underline it was now independent. (Broadly, I think, Queen’s College had the science, medicine and engineering departments and St Andrews proper kept all the humanities.)
Dundee was quite a small university when it started out, having no more than around 2,000 students (it now has 15,000) and it was — it might well still be the case — quite common for friendships to form right across the faculties, and many friendship groups were wide-ranging and eclectic. Neil was one of the big revolutionaries at Dundee and became Students Union president in his third year and also took control and became the editor of
Annasach, the student newspaper. One of his first decisions was to change the paper’s masthead with a traditional twee Celtic-looking script into one strongly resembling Pravda’s which just screamed ‘seize control of the means of production’.
He and I lost touch for a year or two after graduating — he without a degree if I remember, and I with an Ordinary (though I had read for an Honours) — but were soon back in touch when I was working as a reporter on the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln and he was living and working in Sheffield. I can’t though remember how we found out where the other was.
By this time Neil was working for in the Sheffield branch of Avis (‘We try harder’), the car rental company and making a good fist of it. He was also, whether consciously or not, slowly re-inventing himself from the out-and-out
socialist firebrand intent on slashing and burning capitalism in any and every shape and form into the successful small business owner he eventually became. In his time with Avis he rather surprised me — who in retrospect always was and, I think, still is a little naive — by becoming very much the company man.
To this day I find it odd when loyal employees talk of themselves and their employer as ‘we’. There’s nothing wrong with that if you want to make a good career for yourself, and I suppose it makes perfect sense, but I couldn’t have done it and never did or had to (although, thank goodness the world of print journalism and newspaper was still on the fringes of most things and that kind of slavish attitude, although I did come across it, was never required. Anyway, I didn’t have much of a ‘career’ and was always just one of the poor bloody infantry).
From Sheffield Neil was moved by Avis to London and lived in Woking where I and my girlfriend of the time visited him and his first wife. Then a few years later while I was working for the Evening Mail in Birmingham I was his best man at his wedding to his second wife, a very nice, very straightforward, very capable woman from South Wales. I can’t remember whether he was already then living in Cambridgeshire, but my girlfriend, also from South Wales, and I visited him and his family there. The two women, both Welsh, did not get on — there was an embarrassing moment when my girlfriend, by then no longer sober, was quite sharp with Neil’s wife about something or other though what the issue was I never knew.
Finally, Neil and his family pitched up in Caerphilly after he and his wife started their own small business installing phones and telecommunication systems. I was living and working in nearby Cardiff (for the South Wales Echo) and had, as several years later when work and life found us both in West London, a standing invitation to Sunday lunch. We always got on well throughout this time. The slash, burn and kill all capitalist running dogs era had long gone, and Neil was by now a keen Labour supporter. I did not support any party, but I have to say we disagreed on little politically. But it was while he was living in Caerphilly that I began to suspect we were on our way to becoming ‘friends’ because we had always been ‘friends’.
I remember one particular instance when, one summer’s afternoon, we were sitting in his living room with a drink or two watching some kind of nostalgia fest on television of bands who were all — in my view — long, long past their prime and The Moody Blues began to play. I had never gone for them and thought their kind of hippy-lite pop was naff in the extreme, but by now, 25 years on, it was all a lot worse: the band were all paunchy and bald or balding and they were even more insufferable. So when Neil came over all nostalgic and more or less began talking of the ‘good old days’ (a conversation I loathe), I was — to my mind suitably — caustic. He didn’t like it and I did sense a certain resentment.
Eventually, we both moved to London. Neil had gone through a very sticky patch in business but had avoided bankruptcy and and a great deal of related trouble by the skin of his teeth, not least thanks to his wife who really did have her head screwed on. Again I had a standing invitation to drop in, and he, his wife and I did see a lot of each other, but there was never the same warmth now. His wife had become even fonder of the booze and it was obvious she was developing a problem (and though I kept up with her as well as with the wacky-baccy which we both enjoyed — Neil never bothered with it or drinking very much — I never developed a problem). Then there came her admission one night when she, always very straight to the point but now also very drunk, announced ‘Neil hates you’.
It was unusual for this to be announced so openly — and in front of Neil — but in an odd way it made complete sense and didn’t surprise me. By now he and I disagreed on much, often quite vociferously although we never obviously fell out. I was getting a bit fed up with what I regarded as a certain dishonest posturing.
By now the distinctive London tones had long been abandoned in favour of a classless, neutral received pronunciation accent which I’m sure was very suited to business meetings, although on some occasions when we were alone he re-adopted them to persuade both of us — it seemed to me — he hadn’t ‘lost touch with his roots’. But he had, of course, and quite willingly, though had he known it and had he broached the subject — I could never in any way volunteer the information without risking sounding snobbish — I really didn’t give a flying fuck either way. The point is he did: I suppose when you are ‘in business’ and have your own small company, who you are perceived is no longer just a personal matter but as much, if not more, a commercial one.
It occurred to me more than once that in an odd sort of way Neil’s wife was far more pleased to see me than he was when I called and that it was partly because I knew the Neil of old. I knew the old revolutionary Neil, the man who had all the red in tooth and claw slogans and arguments at his fingertips, the figurehead at demos and sit-ins, the Neil who was always intent on confrontation with the authority. But by now, 35 years on, the ‘working-class’ attitudes had been left well behind and although I’m sure he wasn’t at all ashamed of them in any way, they were his past and no longer relevant to his present.
Then something odd happened. Late one evening he rang me to tell me his wife had died: she had got up during the previous night, quite possibly drunk — in fact pretty much quite certainly drunk — and on her way downstairs had fallen and somehow killed herself. I had and was given no further details and I didn’t ask for any.
When I was back in London a few days later I went to see him. His children were there, but the only other non-family member was another friend from way back when they had been young lads together in Essex. In the course of the afternoon he and I found ourselves alone and chatted, and it turned out his childhood friend had not really seen a lot of him at all in the intervening years. I mentioned that when Neil had called me to tell me of the accident and his wife’s sudden death, I had been rather puzzled as to why he should have called me. There was no reason why he shouldn’t, but I knew he had a lot of others friends in his social group, all of whom lived far closer, yet none of them were there. Then his friend told me he had thought the same: he, too, had wondered why Neil had rung him to tell him of his wife’s death.
The following week I rang to ask when and where the funeral was to be. Neil told me he didn’t want me to come. Why not? I asked. Because I had sexually molested his daughter he said. Now that will need some explaining.
A few months earlier on one of my regular weekend visits to see Neil and his wife, she and I had drunk a lot of red wine and smoked a lot of wacky-baccy, and at about 12.45 on the Sunday morning his 15-year-old daughter and I were upstairs in, I think a ‘study’, looking up something on the then fledgling internet. (This was in the days when the internet was still occasionally referred to as the ‘world wide web’ and ‘the information superhighway’ and idealists — Neil was one — predicted it would be ‘the future’. Cynics like me insisted that unless and until folk could work out how to turn it into cash it was going nowhere. It was one of the things we argued about. Guess who was right.)
Sitting there, the young lass on my left (I can still picture it now) I, drunk and stoned, for no reason I can think of leant over to kiss her. She, horrified, pushed me away. That was the sum of it. Whether it was sexual molestation I shall leave you to decide. Anyway, on that day a few months later just after Neil’s wife had died and I had come visiting (and presumably had, by then, left the house) she will have told him about my drunken lurch towards her.
I’ve never seen him again since then or been in touch in any way. I didn’t go to the funeral although I would dearly have liked to as I like Neil’s wife very much, but it would not have been very diplomatic. And our ‘friendship’ which had started around 30 years earlier was well and truly over. I have to say that by then I was relieved.
NB There was one occasion when we were at Dundee that Neil asked me for advice: he fancied the daughter of one of the professors and wanted to ask her out. The trouble was that she was irredeemably ‘middle-class’ (for quote marks, see above) and he was worried, very worried it seemed, what his fellow student revolutionaries would think and how they would take it, especially as her father had such a prominent position at Dundee.
I told him to got ahead and stuff what others thought. He did and I can’t remember there being any ‘recriminations’ (‘You bloody sell-out, Neil, fucking professor’s daughter, what about the revolution?’ It is pertinent to note here that, especially given what had happened in Paris in 1968, many of the comrades really did think there was a good chance they could help start a socialist revolution in Britain. Rather like the comrades from Momentum these days.)
