The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller

Sitting in what has come to be called my study, a room in the first-floor flat of a ramshackle Majorcan house, my eyes move over racks of books around me. Row after row of coloured backs and dusty tops, they give an air of distinction not only to the room but to the whole flat, and one can sense the thoughts of occasional visitors who stoop down discreetly during drinks to read their titles: “A Greek lexicon, Homer in the original. He knows Greek! (Wrong, those books belong to my brother-in-law.) Shakespeare, The Golden Bough, a Holy Bible bookmarked with tapes and paper. He even reads it! Euripides and the rest, and a dozen mouldering Baedekers. What a funny idea to collect them! Proust, all twelve volumes! I never could wade through that lot. (Neither did I.) Dostoevsky. My God, is he still going strong?”

And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that. Often I would like to rip them away from me one by one, extract their shadows out of my mouth and heart, cut them neatly with a scalpel from my jungle-brain. Impossible. You can’t wind back the clock that sits grinning on the marble shelf. You can’t even smash its face in and forget it.

Yesterday we visited the house of a friend who lives further along the valley, away from the town noises so that sitting on the terrace with eyes half-dosed and my head leaning back in a deck-chair, beneath a tree of half-ripe medlars and with the smell of plundered oranges still on my hands, I heard the sound of a cuckoo coming from the pine woods on the mountain slopes.

The cuckoo accomplished what a surgeon’s knife could not. I was plunged back deep through the years into my natural state, without books and without the knowledge that I am supposed to have gained from them. I was suddenly landed beyond all immediate horizons of the past by the soft, sharp, fluting whistle of the cuckoo, and set down once more within the kingdom of Frankie Buller.

We were marching to war, and I was part of his army, with an elderberry stick at the slope and my pockets heavy with smooth, flat, well-chosen stones that would skim softly and swiftly through the air, and strike the foreheads of enemies. My plimsoll shoes were sprouting bunions, and there must have been a patch at the back of my trousers and holes in my socks, because I can never remember a time when there weren’t, up to the age of fourteen.

The roll-call revealed eleven of us, yet Frankie was a fullblown centurion with his six-foot spear-headed railing at the slope, and his rusty dustbin lid for a shield. To make our numbers look huge to an enemy he marched us down from the bridge and across the field in twos, for Frankie was a good tactician, having led the local armies since he was fifteen years old.

At that time his age must have stood between twenty and twenty-five. Nobody seemed to know for sure, Frankie least of all, and it was supposed that his parents found it politic to keep the secret closely. When we asked Frankie how old he was he answered with the highly improbable number of: “‘Undred an’ fifty-eight.” This reply was logically followed by another question: “When did you leave school, then?” Sometimes he would retort scornfully to this: “I never went to school.” Or he might answer with a proud grin: “I didn’t leave, I ran away.”

I wore short trousers, and he wore long trousers, so it was impossible for me to say how tall he was in feet and inches. In appearance he seemed like a giant. He had grey eyes and dark hair, and regular features that would have made him passably handsome had not a subtle air of pre-pubescent unreliability lurked in his eyes and around the lines of his low brow. In body and strength he lacked nothing for a fullgrown man.

We in the ranks automatically gave him the title of General, but he insisted on being addressed as Sergeant-Major, because his father had been a sergeant-major in the First World War. “My dad was wounded in the war,” he told us every time we saw him. “He got a medal and shell-shock, and because he got shell-shock, that’s why I’m like I am.”

He was glad and proud of being ‘like he was’ because it meant he did not have to work in a factory all day and earn his living like other men of his age. He preferred to lead the gang of twelve-year-olds in our street to war against the same age group of another district. Our street was a straggling line of ancient back-to-backs on the city’s edge, while the enemy district was a new housing estate of three long streets which had outflanked us and left us a mere pocket of country in which to run wild — a few fields and allotment gardens, which was reason enough for holding an eternal grudge against them. People from the slums in the city-centre lived in the housing estate, so that our enemies were no less ferocious than we, except that they didn’t have a twenty-year-old backward youth like Frankie to lead them into battle. The inhabitants of the housing estate had not discarded their slum habits, so that the area became known to our street as ‘ Sodom’.

“We’re gooin’ ter raid Sodom today,” Frankie said, when we were lined-up on parade. He did not know the Biblical association of the word, thinking it a name officially given by the city council.

So we walked down the street in twos and threes, and formed up on the bridge over the River Lean. Frankie would order us to surround any stray children we met with on the way, and if they wouldn’t willingly fall in with us as recruits he would follow one of three courses. First: he might have them bound with a piece of clothes-line and brought with us by force; second: threaten to torture them until they agreed to come with us of their own free will; third: bat them across the head with his formidable hand and send them home weeping, or snarling back curses at him from a safe distance. I had come to join his gang through clause number two, and had stayed with it for profitable reasons of fun and adventure. My father often said: “If I see yo’ gooin’ about wi’ that daft Frankie Buller I’ll clink yet tab-‘ole.”

Although Frankie was often in trouble with the police he could never, even disregarding his age, be accurately described as a ‘juvenile delinquent’. He was threatened regularly by the law with being sent to Borstal, but his antics did not claim for him a higher categorical glory than that of ‘general nuisance’ and so kept him out of the clutches of such institutions. His father drew a pension due to wounds from the war, and his mother worked at the tobacco factory, and on this combined income the three of them seemed to live at a higher standard than the rest of us, whose fathers were permanent appendages at the dole office. The fact that Frankie was an only child in a district where some families numbered up to half a dozen was accounted for by the rumour that the father, having seen Frankie at birth, had decided to run no more risks. Another whispered reason concerned the nature of Mr. Buller’s pensionable wound.

We used to ask Frankie, when we made camp in the woods and squatted around a fire roasting plundered potatoes after victory, what he was going to do when the Second War started.

“Join up,” he would say, non-committally.

“What in, Frankie?” someone would ask respectfully, for Frankie’s age and strength counted for much more than the fact that the rest of us knew roughly how to read and write.

Frankie responded by hurling a piece of wood at his interrogator. He was a crackshot at any kind of throw, and rarely missed hitting the shoulder or chest. “Yer’ve got to call me ‘SIR’!” he roared, his arms trembling with rightful anger. “Yer can get out to the edge of the wood and keep guard for that.” The bruised culprit slunk off through the bushes, clutching his pole and stones.

“What would you join, sir?” a more knowing ranker said. Such respect made him amiable: “The Sherwood Foresters. That’s the regiment my dad was in. He got a medal in France for killin’ sixty-three Jerries in one day. He was in a dug-out, see” — Frankie could act this with powerful realism since seeing All Quiet on the Western Front and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer — “behind his machine gun, and the Jerries come over at dawn, and my dad seed ‘em and started shootin’. They kept comin’ over, but the Old Man just kept on firm’ away — der-der-der-der-der-der-der — even when all his pals was dead. My Old Man was ‘it with a bullet as well, but ‘e din’t let go of ‘is gun, and the Jerries was fallin’ dead like flies, dropping all round ‘im, and when. the rest o’ the Sherwoods come back to ‘elp ‘im. and stop the Jerries coming over, ‘e counted sixty-three dead bodies in front on ‘is gun. So they gen ‘im a medal and sent ‘im. back ter England.”

He looked around at the semicircle of us. “What do yet think o’ that, then?” he demanded savagely, as if he himself were the hero and we were disputing it. “All right,” he ordered, when we had given the required appreciation to his father’s exploits, “I want yet all ter scout round for wood so’s the fire wain’t goo out.”

Frankie was passionately interested in war. He would often slip a penny into my hand and tell me to fetch an Evening Post so that I could read to him the latest war news from China, Abyssinia, or Spain, and he would lean against the wall of his house, his grey eyes gazing at the roofs across the street, saying whenever I stopped for breath: “Go on, Alan, read me a bit more. Read me that bit about Madrid again…”

Frankie was a colossus, yet a brave man who formed us up and laid us in the hollows of a field facing the railway embankment that defended the approaches to the streets of Sodom. We would wait for an hour, a dozen of us with faces pressed to the earth, feeling our sticks and trying to stop the stones in our pockets from rattling. If anyone stirred Frankie would whisper out a threat: “The next man to move, I’ll smash ‘im with my knobkerrie.”

We were three hundred yards from the embankment. The grass beneath us was smooth and sweet, and Frankie chewed it by the mouthful, stipulating that no one else must do so because it was worse than Deadly Nightshade. It would kill us in five second flat if we were to eat it, he went on, but it would do him no harm because he was proof against poison of all kinds. There was magic inside him that would not let it kill him; he was a witch doctor, and, for anyone who wasn’t, the grass would scorch his guts away.

An express train came out of the station, gathered speed on the bend, and blocked the pink eavings of Sodom from view while we lifted our heads from the grass and counted the carriages. Then we saw our enemies, several figures standing on the railway tracks, brandishing sticks and throwing stones with playful viciousness into a pool of water down the slope.

“It’s the Sodom gang,” we whispered.

“Keep quiet,” Frankie hissed. “How many do you see?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Eight.”

“There’s more comin’ up.”

“Pretend they’re Germans,” Frankie said.

They came down the slope and, one by one, lifted themselves over to our side of the railings. On the embankment they shouted and called out to each other, but once in the field they walked close together without making much noise. I saw nine of them, with several more still boldly trespassing on the railway line. I remembered that we were eleven, and while waiting for the signal to rush forward I kept saying to myself: “It won’t be long now. It can’t be long now.”

Frankie mumbled his final orders. “You lot go left. You other lot go right. We’ll go in front. I want ‘em surrounded.” The only military triumph he recognized was to surround and capture.

He was on his feet, brandishing an iron spear and waving a shield. We stood up with him and, stretched out in a line, advanced slowly, throwing stones as fast as our arms would move into the concentric ring of the enemy gang.

It was a typical skirmish. Having no David to bring against our Goliath they slung a few ineffectual stones and ran back helter-skelter over the railings, mounting the slope to the railway line. Several of them were hit.

“Prisoners!” Frankie bellowed, but they bolted at the last moment and escaped. For some minutes stones flew between field and embankment, and our flanks were unable to push forward and surround. The enemy exulted then from the railway line because they had a harvest of specially laid stones between the tracks, while we had grass underfoot, with no prospect of finding more ammunition when our pockets were emptied. If they rallied and came back at us, we would have to retreat half a mile before finding stones at the bridge.

Frankie realized all this in a second. The same tactical situation had occurred before. Now some of us were hit. A few fell back. Someone’s eye was cut. My head was streaming with blood, but I disregarded this for the moment because I was more afraid of the good hiding I would catch from my father’s meaty fist at home for getting into a fight, than blood and a little pain. (“Yer’ve bin wi’ that Frankie Buller agen, ain’t yet?” Bump. “What did I tell yet? Not ter get wi’ ‘im, din’t I?” Bump. “And yet don’t do what I tell yet, do you?” Bump. “Yer’ll keep on gooin’ wi’ that Frankie Buller tell yer as daft as ‘e is, wain’t yer?” Bump-bump.)

We were wavering. My pockets were light and almost empty of stones. My arms ached with flinging them.

“All right if we charge, lads?” Frankie called out.

There was only one answer to his words. We were with him, right into the ovens of a furnace had he asked it. Perhaps he led us into these bad situations, in which no retreat was possible, just for the fine feeling of a glorious win or lose.

“Yes!” we all shouted together.

“Come on, then,” he bawled out at the top of his voice: “CHARGE!”

His great strides carried him the hundred yards in a few seconds, and he was already climbing the railing. Stones from the Sodom lot were clanging and rattling against his shield. Lacking the emblematic spear and dustbin lid of a leader we went forward more slowly, aiming our last stones at the gang on the embankment above.

As we mounted the railings on his left and right Frankie was half-way up the slope, within a few yards of the enemy. He exhorted his wings all the time to make more speed and surround them, waving his dangerous spear-headed length of iron now before their faces. From lagging slightly we suddenly swept in on both flanks, reaching the railway line in one rush to replenish our stocks of ammunition, while Frankie went on belabouring them from the front.

They broke, and ran down the other slope, down into the streets of Sodom, scattering into the refuge of their rows of pink houses whose doors were already scratched and scarred, and where, it was rumoured, they kept coal in their bathrooms (though this was secretly envied by us as a commodious coal-scuttle so conveniently near to the kitchen) and strung poaching nets out in their back gardens.

When the women of our street could think of no more bad names to call Frankie Buller for leading their children into fights that resulted in black eyes, torn clothes, and split heads, they called him a Zulu, a label that Frankie nevertheless came to accept as a tribute, regarding it as being synonymous with bravery and recklessness. “Why do you run around with that bleddy Zulu?” a mother demanded from her child as she tore up one of father’s old shirts for a bandage or patch. And immediately there was conjured up before you Frankie, a wild figure wielding spear and dustbin lid, jumping up and down before leading his gang into battle. When prisoners were taken he would have them tied to a tree or fence-post, then order his gang to do a war dance around them. After the performance, in which he in his fierce panoply sometimes took part, he would have a fire built near by and shout out that he was going to have the prisoners tortured to death now. He once came so near to carrying out this threat that one of us ran back and persuaded Frankie’s father to come and deal with his son and set the prisoners free. And so Mr. Buller and two other men, one of them my father, came striding down the steps of the bridge. They walked quickly across the field, short, stocky, black-browed Chris, and bald Buller with his walrus moustache. But the same person who had given the alarm crept back into Frankie’s camp and gave warning there, so that when the three men arrived, ready to buckle Frankie down and drive him home, they found nothing except a kicked-out fire and a frightened but unharmed pair of captives still tied to a tree.

It was a fact that Frankie’s acts of terrorism multiplied as the war drew nearer, though many of them passed unnoticed because of the preoccupied and brooding atmosphere, of that summer. He would lead his gang into allotments and break into the huts, scattering tools and flower seeds with a maniacal energy around the garden, driving a lawnmower over lettuceheads and parsley, leaving a litter of decapitated chrysanthemums in his track. His favourite sport was to stand outside one of the huts and throw his spear at it with such force that its iron barb ran right through the thin wood.

We had long since said farewell to the novelty of possessing gasmasks. Frankie led us on a foray over the fields one day, out on a raid with masks on our faces — having sworn that the white cloud above the wood was filled with mustard gas let loose from the Jerry trenches on the other side — and they became so broken up in the scuffle that we threw each one ceremoniously into a fire before going home, preferring to say we had lost them rather than show the tattered relics that remained.

So many windows were broken, dustbins upturned, air let out of bicycle tyres, and heads split as a result of pyrrhic victories in gang raids — for he seemed suddenly to be losing his military genius — that it became dangerous for Frankie to walk down our street. Stuffing a few shreds of tobacco into one of his father’s old pipes — tobacco that we collected for him as cigarette-ends — he would walk along the middle of the street, and suddenly an irate woman would rush out of an entry wielding a clothes-prop and start frantically hitting him.

“I saw you empty my dustbin last night, you bleddy Zulu, you grett daft baby. Take that, and that, and that!”

“It worn’t me, missis. I swear to God it worn’t,” he would shout in protest, arms folded over his head and galloping away to avoid her blows.

“Yo’ come near my house agen,” she shouted after him, “and I’ll cool yer down wi’ a bucket o’ water, yo’ see’f I don’t.”

Out of range, he looked back at her, bewildered, angry, his blood boiling with resentment. He shouted out the worst swear-words he knew, and disappeared into his house, slamming the door behind him.

It was not only the outbreak of the war that caused Frankie’s downfall. Partly it came about because there was a romantic side to his nature that evinced itself in other means than mock warfare. At the end of many afternoons in the summer he stood at the top of our street and waited for the girls to come out of the tobacco factory. Two thousand worked there, and about a quarter of them passed by every evening on their way home to tea.

He mostly stood there alone in his black corduroy trousers, patched jacket, and a collarless shirt belonging to his father, but if an older member of the gang stayed for company it by no means inhibited his particular brand of courtship. He had the loudest mouth-whistle in the street, and this was put to good and musical use as the girls went by with arms linked in twos and threes.

“Hey up, duck!” he would call out. “How are yer?”

A shrug of the shoulders, a toss of the head, laughter, or a sharp retort came back.

“Can I tek yer out tonight?” he cried with a loud laugh. “Do you want me to treat you to’t pictures?”

Occasionally a girl would cross to the other side of the road to avoid him, and she would be singled out for his most special witticism: “Hey up, good-lookin’, can I cum up and see yer some time?”

Responses flew back like this, laced around with much laughter: “It’ll cost yet five quid!”

“Ye’r daft, me duck, yer foller balloons!”

“I’ll meet you at the Grand at eight. Don’t forget to be there, because I shall!”

It was his greatest hour of mature diversion. He was merely acting his age, following, though in a much exaggerated manner, what the other twenty-year-olds did in the district. The consummation of these unique courtships took place among the bulrushes, in the marsh between the River Lean and the railway line where Frankie rarely led his gang. He stalked alone (a whistled-at girl accompanying him only as a dim picture in his mind) along concealed paths to catch tadpoles, and then to lie by himself in a secret place where no one could see him, self-styled boss of osiers, elderberry and bordering oak. From which journey he returned pale and shifty-eyed with guilt and a pleasurable memory.

He stood at the street corner every evening as the summer wore on, at first with many of the gang, but later alone because his remarks to the passing factory girls were no longer innocent, so that one evening a policeman came and drove him away from the street corner for ever. During those same months hundreds of loaded lorries went day after day to the edge of the marsh and dumped rubble there, until Frankie’s secret hiding place was obliterated, and above it lay the firm foundation for another branch of the tobacco factory.

On the Sunday morning that my mother and father shook their heads over Chamberlain’s melancholy voice issuing from the webbed heart-shaped speaker of our wireless set, I met Frankie in the street.

I asked what he would do now there was a war on, for I assumed that in view of his conscriptable age he would be called-up with the rest of the world. He seemed inert and sad, and I took this to be because of the war, a mask of proper seriousness that should be on everybody’s face, even though I didn’t feel it to be on my own. I also noticed that when he spoke he did so with a stammer. He sat on the pavement with his back leaning against the wall of some house, instinctively knowing that no one would think of pummelling him with a clothes-prop today.

“I’ll just wait for my calling-up papers,” he answered. “Then I’ll get in the Sherwood Foresters.”

“If I’ll get called-up I’ll go in the navy,” I put in, when he did not offer an anecdote about his father’s exploits in the last war.

“The army’s the only thing to join, Alan,” he said with deep conviction, standing up and taking out his pipe.

He suddenly smiled, his dejection gone. “I’ll tell you what, after dinner we’ll get the gang together and go over New Bridge for man?uvres. I’ve got to get you all into shape now there’s a war on. We’ll do a bit o’ training. P’raps we’ll meet some o’ the Sodom lot.”

As we marched along that afternoon Frankie outlined his plan for our future. When we were about sixteen, he said, if the war was still on — it was bound to be because the Germans were tough, his old man told him so, though they wouldn’t win in the end because their officers always sent the men over the top first — he’d take us down to the recruiting depot in town and enlist us together, all at the same time. In that way he — Frankie — would be our platoon commander.

It was a wonderful idea. All hands were thrust into the air.

The field was clear over New Bridge. We stood in a line along the parapet and saw without comment the newest proof of the city’s advance. The grazing lands and allotments were now cut off from the main spread of the countryside by a boulevard sprouting from Sodom’s new houses, with cars and Corporation double-deckers already running along it.

There was no sign of the Sodom lot, so Frankie ordered three of us to disappear into the gullies and hollows for the rest of the gang to track down. The next item on the training programme was target practice, a tin can set on a tree trunk until it was knocked over with stones from fifty yards. After fencing lessons and wrestling matches six of the Sodom gang appeared on the railway line, and at the end of a quick brutal skirmish they were held fast as prisoners. Frankie wished neither to keep them nor harm them, and let them go after making them swear an oath of allegiance to the Sherwood Foresters.

At seven o’clock we were formed up in double file to be marched back. Someone grumbled that it was a late hour to get home to tea, and for once Frankie succumbed to what I clearly remembered seeing as insubordination. He listened to the complaint and decided to cut our journey short by leading us across the branch-line that ran into the colliery. The factories and squalid streets on the hill had turned a sombre ochred colour, as if a storm would burst during the night, and the clouds above the city were pink, giving an unreal impression of profound silence so that we felt exposed, as if the railwayman in the distant signal box could see us and hear every word we spoke.

One by one we climbed the wire fence, Frankie crouching in the bushes and telling us when he thought the path was clear. He sent us over one at a time, and we leapt the six tracks yet kept our backs bent, as if we were passing a machine-gun post. Between the last line and the fence stood an obstacle in the form of a grounded railway carriage that served as a repair and tool-storage shed. Frankie had assured us that no one was in it, but when we were all across, the others already rushing through the field and up on to the lane, I turned around and saw a railwayman come out of the door and stop Frankie just as he was making for the fence.

I didn’t hear any distinct words, only the muffled sound of arguing. I kept down between the osiers and watched the railwayman poking his finger at Frankie’s chest as if he were giving him some really strong advice. Then Frankie began to wave his hands in the air, as though he could not tolerate being stopped in this way, with his whole gang looking on from the field, as he thought.

Then, in one vivid second, I saw Frankie snatch a pint bottle from his jacket pocket and hit the railwayman over the head with it. In the exaggerated silence I heard the crash, and a cry of shock, rage, and pain from the man. Frankie then turned and ran in my direction, leaping like a zebra over the fence. When he drew level and saw me he cried wildly: “Run, Alan, run. He asked for it. He asked for it.”

And we ran.

The next day my brothers, sisters and myself were loaded into Corporation buses and transported to Worksop. We were evacuated, our few belongings thrust into paper carrier-bags, away from the expected bombs, along with most other children of the city. In one fatal blow Frankie’s gang was taken away from him, and Frankie himself was carried off to the police station for hitting the railwayman on the head with a bottle. He was also charged with trespassing.

It may have been that the beginning of the war coincided with the end of Frankie’s so-called adolescence, though ever after traces of it frequently appeared in his behaviour. For instance he would still tramp from one end of the city to the other, even through smokescreen and blackout, in the hope of finding some cinema that showed a good cowboy film.

I didn’t meet Frankie again for two years. One day I saw a man pushing a handcart up the old street in which we did not live any more. The man was Frankie, and the handcart was loaded with bundles of wood, the sort of kindling that housewives spread over a crumpled-up Evening Post before making a morning fire. We couldn’t find much to talk about, and Frankie seemed condescending in his attitude to me, as though ashamed to be seen talking to one so much younger than himself. This was not obvious in any plain way, yet I felt it and, being thirteen, resented it. Times had definitely altered. We just weren’t pals any more. I tried to break once again into the atmosphere of old times by saying: “Did you try to get into the army then, Frankie?”

I realize now that it was an indiscreet thing to say, and might have hurt him. I did not notice it then, yet I remembered his sensitivity as he answered: “What do you mean? I am in the army. I joined-up a year ago. The old man’s back in the army as well — sergeant-major — and I’m in ‘is cumpny.”

The conversation quickly ended. Frankie pushed his barrow to the next entry, and began unloading his bundles of wood.

I didn’t meet him for more than ten years. In that time I too had done my ‘sodjerin’ in Malaya, and I had forgotten the childish games we used to play with Frankie Buller, and the pitched battles with the Sodom lot over New Bridge.

I didn’t live in the same city any more. I suppose it could be said that I had risen from the ranks. I had become a writer of sorts, having for some indescribable reason, after the evacuation and during the later bombs, taken to reading books.

I went back home to visit my family, and on my way through the streets about six o’clock one winter’s evening, I heard someone call out: “ Alan!”

I recognized the voice instantly. I turned and saw Frankie standing before a cinema billboard, trying to read it. He was about thirty-five now, no longer the javelin-wielding colossus he once appeared, but nearer my own height, thinner, an unmistakable air of meekness in his face, almost respectable in his cap and black topcoat with white muffler tucked neatly inside. I noticed the green medal-ribbon on the lapel of his coat, and that confirmed what I had heard about him from time to time during the last ten years. From being the sergeantmajor of our gang he had become a private soldier in the Home Guard, a runner indeed in his father’s company. With tin-hat on his sweating low-browed head Frankie had stalked with messages through country whose every blade of grass he knew.

He was not my leader any more, and we both instantly recognized the fact as we shook hands. Frankie’s one-man wood business had prospered, and he now went around the streets with a pony and cart. He wasn’t well-off, but he was his own employer. The outspoken ambition of our class was to become one’s own boss. He knew he wasn’t the leader of kindred spirits any more, while he probably wondered as we spoke whether or not I might be, which could have accounted for his shyness.

Not only had we both grown up in our different ways since the days when with dustbin lid and railing-spear he led his battalion into pitiless stone-throwing forays, but something of which I did not know had happened to him. Coming from the same class and, one might say, from the same childhood, there should have been some tree-root of recognition between us, despite the fact that our outer foliage of leaves would have wilted somewhat before each other’s differing shade and colour. But there was no contact and I, being possessed of what the world I had moved into often termed ‘heightened consciousness’, knew that it was due as much to something in Frankie as in me.

“‘Ow are yet gooin’ on these days, Frankie?” I asked, revelling in the old accent, though knowing that I no longer had the right to use it.

His stammer was just short of what we would once have derisively called a stutter. “All right now. I feel a lot better, after that year I had in hospital.”

I looked him quickly and discreetly up and down for evidence of a lame foot, a broken limb, a scar; for why else did people go to hospital? “What were you in for?” I asked.

In replying, his stammer increased. I felt he hesitated because for one moment he did not know which tone to take, though the final voice he used was almost proud, and certainly serious. “Shock treatment. That’s why I went.”

“What did they give you shock treatment for, Frankie?” I asked this question calmly, genuinely unable to comprehend what he told me, until the full horrible details of what Frankie must have undergone flashed into my mind. And then I wanted power in me to tear down those white-smocked mad interferers with Frankie’s coal-forest world, wanted to wipe out their hate and presumption.

He pulled his coat collar up because, in the dusk, it was beginning to rain. “Well, you see, Alan,” he began, with what I recognized now as a responsible and conforming face, “I had a fight with the Old Man, and after it I blacked out. I hurt my dad, and he sent for the police. They fetched a doctor, and the doctor said I’d have to go to the hospital.” They had even taught him to call it ‘hospital’. In the old days he would have roared with laughter and said: “‘Sylum!”

“I’m glad you’re better now, then,” I said, and during the long pause that followed I realized that Frankie’s world was after all untouchable, that the conscientious-scientific-methodical probers could no doubt reach it, could drive it into hiding, could kill the physical body that housed it, but had no power in the long run really to harm such minds. There is a part of the jungle that the scalpel can never reach.

He wanted to go. The rain was worrying him. Then, remembering why he had called me over, he turned to face the broad black lettering on a yellow background. “Is that for the Savoy?” he asked, nodding at the poster.

“Yes,” I said.

He explained apologetically: “I forgot me glasses, Alan. Can you read it for me, and tell me what’s on tonight.”

“Sure, Frankie.” I read it out: “ Gary Cooper, in Saratoga Trunk.”

“I wonder if it’s any good?” he asked. “Do you think it’s a cowboy picture, or a love picture?”

I was able to help him on this point. I wondered, after the shock treatment, which of these subjects he would prefer. Into what circle of his dark, devil-populated world had the jolts of electricity penetrated? “I’ve seen that picture before,” I told him. “It’s a sort of cowboy picture. There’s a terrific train smash at the end.”

Then I saw. I think he was surprised that I shook his hand so firmly when we parted. My explanation of the picture’s main points acted on him like a charm. Into his eyes came the same glint I had seen years ago when he stood up with spear and shield and roared out: “CHARGE!” and flung himself against showers of sticks and flying stones.

“It sounds good,” he said. “That’s the picture for me. I’s’ll see that.”

He pulled his cap lower down, made sure that his coatcollar covered his throat and neck, and walked with stirred imagination off into the driving rain.

“Cheerio, Frank,” I called out as he turned the corner. I wondered what would be left of him by the time they had finished. Would they succeed in tapping and draining dry the immense subterranean reservoir of his dark inspired mind?

I watched him. He ignored the traffic-lights, walked diagonally across the wide wet road, then ran after a bus and leapt safely on to its empty platform.

And I with my books have not seen him since. It was like saying goodbye to a big part of me, for ever.