Seems like it was just yesterday...
13th July, 2007
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There are those times when the days roll slowly by and then, in a blink, accelerate to pass in a flash, the markers blurred like pylons beside a speeding train. It happened recently when I got a call from a former schoolmate I hadn't seen in a decade. He'd want something, I knew, for old classmates don't call unless they have a need. If he wanted money for some school building project he was out of luck. I would turn the tables and ask him if the school might sling me a few dollars - for old times' sake.
It was not money, however, that he sought. There was a belated school reunion coming up, he said, and the organisers were wondering if I'd address it as a former school captain. "I've never been to a reunion," I'd replied. And if I did attend and agreed to be the speaker, I'd have to stay sober - my limited experience with formal parties having taught me that attendance and abstinence were mutually exclusive. He continued to press me until my will to resist weakened and he prevailed. "You can go on early," he said. "You'll only have to stay sober for half the night." At least, I thought, it would be fun trying to catch up with the rest of them in the tosspot stakes once the speeches were done.
"What will I say?" I asked the caller.
It was months distant so I made a diary note and immediately forgot about it. A week later, an envelope arrived containing a photocopy of an old high school newsletter column, one I faintly remembered having written. I checked the date and was taken aback. Ten years had passed. I re-read it and the memories returned. Here is part of what I wrote: "It was his last day at school, the last exam paper handed in not 20 minutes before. It was not how he had dreamt it would be. He had imagined wild cheers, bags tossed in the air, 120 classmates rushing through the school gates to grasp the freedom they believed would be theirs. Instead, he walked out the front gates alone, the street empty, the realisation dawning with painful slowness that there were dozens of people with whom he had spent most of the past five years of his life whom he had not farewelled and whom he might never see again. "He crossed the main road at the bottom of the street and walked up to the train station, tossing his bag against the newsagent's front window. On any day at this time there would be a pushing, shoving melée as the train trundled to a halt, the conductor yelling as a wall of boys and girls flooded aboard. There was just himself today as the conductor pushed the button that ran the length of the train, the answering "ding-dong" of the bell in the driver's cab sending it grinding slowly down the track. "It rattled past the swimming pool in which he had thrashed about like a dying dugong in the dreaded compulsory school swimming carnivals. He was vaguely aware that he was being propelled into strange and uncharted territory, as foreboding as it was exciting, and he wondered what lay ahead. He'd get a job, but as what? There was still time, however. The exam results were not due for at least six weeks and until then he had time to enjoy what was to be the last summer of his unspoiled youth, although he did not know that then. "He roamed the streets, enjoying the untrammelled freedom of being neither student nor wage slave, revelling in his complete lack of responsibility, vaguely aware of the sun setting on his extended childhood." These were the thoughts that came to mind when the former schoolmate first called me. "It's 10 years, mate. Ten years since we left," he said. I told him I'd be there and as I hung up, I could hear the ring of the train bell and see the empty street that stretched from the school gate before me on that hot, November afternoon in the summer of '96. It's been more than ten years now and I can still see the street, feel the heat and hear the bell. |
