‘Well, he had no choice but to be successful,’ his sister Kelly said to me later, ‘because my dad was always pushing. Dad was always torturing himself. But he didn’t have to worry about John because John always liked to be doing something at a high level.’
When he was about twelve, John was always out on the street shouting orders at the other kids. He just had that leadership thing and all the kids respected him. ‘Then suddenly,’ says his mother, ‘he just stopped all that. I asked him why he wasn’t shouting any more. He said, “I just don’t wanna be that way.” When, in junior high school, he was called out and had a fist-fight he had to tell his mother about it. She was simply pleased he had won. ‘I thought it was always my job to keep them safe and on track,’ she said. The boys spent a lot of the summer holidays cutting grass for money around the neighbourhood.
‘That’s the smell I remember,’ said Sabrina. ‘The boys’ room always smelled like old, grassy, pre-teen sneakers. I remember opening their closet and looking down to a mound of sneakers and thinking, Why are there so many?’ And when I spoke to her in a bar at the top of a tall hotel in Philadelphia, Sabrina just kept turning over the pages of old photo albums as if they held a mystery. She’d been putting the albums together ever since John died, wanting to bind the material of his life and all their lives together. ‘Ever since he was young,’ she said, ‘he had a coach’s mentality. The kids in the street wanted to be like him. And, you know, the motto of the Marines is Semper Fidelis, ‘Always Faithful’. That was him and always was him. Even before he was flying he loved to fly at things. We had a great childhood.’
Mrs Spahr wanted to show me around the house before we continued talking. The boys’ room had an American flag above the desk. The trees outside seemed frozen and watchful, while Mrs Spahr recounted how the boys would play games up here once upon a time and share stories and laughs. It was hard not to think of soldiers all over the world who started off in small bedrooms like the one in Cherry Hill: looking up at the placid walls and the tidy small space, a certain dream seemed to rise for a moment and take hold, a very domestic dream of glory. Motivations are perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
‘You know, his father hated to fly,’ said Mrs Spahr. It seemed he would do anything to avoid going on a plane, including driving across the country to see John when he lived in San Diego. ‘Ronnie wanted John to be a football coach and that was that. He didn’t want him to join the Marines and thank God he wasn’t around to see what happened to John because it would have killed him, too.’ Mrs Spahr was dabbing her eyes with kitchen napkins as she spoke; they were brightly coloured, with the words ‘Happy Holidays’ printed the same on each one.
When I caught up with Sabrina again she seemed as if she had been thinking about significant things in the meantime. ‘Even at a young age,’ she said, ‘he wanted to bring out the best in people and teach you what he knew. That was his gift. For my father, it was all about family. We went to church and it was always the front pew. It was a house where they would have parties, cocktails and cigarettes. It was that time, right?’ Sabrina is different from the other people in her family: she worries a lot and tends to be an organiser. She will say, in quiet moments, that there is something missing in her life and that what happened to John stopped her in her tracks. Like her sister Kelly, she often starts sentences with the phrase, ‘I said to my husband…’ and she gives off a feeling of hope that family can answer all of life’s demands.
Mrs Spahr played down the influence of her husband’s anxieties on John’s chosen path, but others felt the influence was pretty decisive. ‘Not a lot of fathers in New Jersey would get up at five in the morning to drive their son to the river,’ said Sabrina. I thought about that, and wondered at Ronnie’s overall effect on his son’s inner life. Sabrina’s voice is quiet, even quieter when she’s discussing their father, as if he might be listening, as if she were speaking in church, as if she were being disloyal. ‘He didn’t talk about much,’ she said. ‘My mom talked. I always wished that he had talked more.’
In May 1981 there was a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘Spahr is New Jersey’s gift to St Joseph’s Prep Rowing’, said the headline. ‘In America, those kinds of young men are a breed apart,’ said a friend of the family, ‘and they’re treated like gods in certain schools.’ The photograph accompanying the article is of a tousle-haired, clean-limbed and smiling John Spahr, looking like a tragic hero out of Scott Fitzgerald.
Why does one of the very best scholastic rowers in the United States go to school in North Philadelphia – when he lives in Cherry Hill? ‘It was just word of mouth,’ said John Spahr, who won the Junior National Singles championship last summer, rowing for St Joseph’s Prep … Spahr, who gets up at 5 a.m. daily so that he can start practicing on the Schuylkill at 6, isn’t just an oarsman. He started at quarterback for the Prep this fall, and started for the private school stars in the City All-Star Game in April.
The newspaper spread also included a picture of Mrs Spahr, elegant as ever, a believing mother, mid-life, pre-crisis, and far from the vexations of a poor Irish childhood, shouting encouragement to her American boy from the bank of the river.21
St Joseph’s Prep is a Jesuit school. Past a hall of portraits showing successive principals since 1966, the head rowing coach Bill Lamb sat in a room under an overactive air-conditioning system. ‘To educate mind, body, and spirit,’ he said, ‘and show how these three components make a complete person, that is the Jesuit mantra.’ Mr Lamb had a habit shared by many of the people I spoke to about John Spahr: he spoke about him in the present tense. I wondered as I listened to the coach’s tough statements what effect the death of a young man had on the lives of people who lived for the vitality of youth. But Mr Lamb was circumspect: one imagines he feels, somewhere, that sacrifice is a known and regrettable part of the game. ‘John is the perfect model,’ continued Mr Lamb. ‘To turn the skill and the confidence you learn in athletics and use that to develop as a person – and John, in a heroic way, took that complete person and recognised how he could best be of service to others. He dedicated his life to that.’
His star pupil wanted to lead and change things. He was popular and athletic, and the rowing team needed that very badly at the time, because it was feared the school might lose its position in the league. ‘If we could get John to row, the rest of the kids in the school would look at rowing as something cool to do. When this started we had nine guys and by the end we had over a hundred. The best marketing is when the kids tell other kids there’s value in what they’re doing. He was successful at everything he ever did. But even when he was at the top level, John acted as if he was at the bottom. Out of any year, you can see there are two or three who will do outstanding things.’
I imagined Mr Lamb was a lot like Mr Tothero, the coach in the first of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels:
The coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life: the head, the body, and the heart … ‘All those years, all those boys [says Tothero], they pass through your hands and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back … Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best.’
‘Some talented guys can sit back a little,’ said Bill Lamb, ‘but John was working as hard as the weakest guy on the team. He didn’t want to risk the privilege by getting involved in some of the things that teenagers get involved in.’
‘And what about his father?’ I asked. ‘Some people have suggested the influence was strong.’
‘His father was a very, very conservative, strict disciplinarian,’ he said. ‘He raised all his daughters as if they were boys. It was his way or the highway.’
‘Isn’t there a danger in the American system,’ I said, ‘in creating such a platform for sterling brilliance at school that the rest of life
is a struggle to maintain it?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Bill Lamb. ‘That’s our greatest challenge. We have a lot of kids who never leave high school. They’re thirty years old and they’re still operating as if it was St Joe’s Prep, and the real world isn’t like that. Some of them have a problem in applying the lessons they learned here to their daily lives. But it’s about hard work. Pick up the sports pages I’ll show you five of those guys. But with John it was almost as if he didn’t really exist. He was the model of success, and you couldn’t have drawn it any better.’
Down at the boathouse it was dark and the town’s lights were reflected in the black ripples of the river. Al Zimmerman, another of John’s teachers, showed me the boat that was named after John and the memorial plaque. Mr Zimmerman used to teach Latin and Greek at the school and he wrote the words for the plaque; he skirted around them when I was there, as if shy of what he had produced. The boathouse was full of expired energy and prolonged ideals. Al talked of what they tried to give John and about what he gave them. His voice lapped gently and kindly at my back as I looked out at the river, and beyond that to the merging borders of Pennsylvania and Delaware and New Jersey, wondering how many of the people out there once knew a young man called John Spahr. And what did his life say about theirs? About ours? About the lives of nations? ‘He liked to roll his sleeves up and get the job done,’ said Al Zimmerman. ‘And that’s what you really need in a crew. He applied those same principles elsewhere.’
*
The River Tyne is a place where famous industry appears to have given way to infamous leisure. The only ship I passed as I made my way to visit Anthony Wakefield’s wife and children was one called Tuxedo Princess, a former liner now converted into a nightclub. Along the quay the flashing lights spoke of concert halls and happy-hours, while the shipyard cranes stood still against the dark. Among them, once upon a time, battle cruisers were built to order and the gatling gun was made by W. Armstrong & Co.
As he came to the end of his schooldays, Anthony kept saying he wanted to be a soldier. Living with his grandparents, he always enjoyed the stories his grandfather would tell about surviving the Normandy landings. Anthony’s guardians made a rule that no toy guns were allowed in the house. But at secondary school Anthony got in with a rowdy crowd and was expelled. His childhood was transformed in that period by an adult accusation: some girls said he’d got rough with them in a park. ‘It wasn’t true,’ said his brother, ‘but it shocked him. Anthony was dyslexic and was never going to sit exams anyhow.’
The Army Careers Office in Northumberland Street turned Anthony away the first time. They said he was too small and too thin, so he got a job stacking shelves at a discount supermarket; the second time they let him have the forms. His Uncle Dan says he didn’t think Anthony would pass the interview for the army because he was a little bow-legged and had high arches. Anthony accepted another job, at the twenty-four-hour Tesco in Kingston Park near the airport – where many of the staff go round on roller skates – but right away the letter came from the army saying he was in. Anthony and Paul’s beloved grandmother was dying, but she said she wanted to hold on to hear Anthony’s news, ‘Just to make sure the boys were all right,’ said Paul.
Anthony’s choice of regiment, the Coldstream Guards, was made on the basis, he said, that all the best-looking guys joined the Guards. (The regiment performs many ceremonial duties: the Queen’s Birthday Parade, Trooping the Colour, the Changing of the Guard.) He did his training at Catterick and Aldershot and then Pirbright, where he passed out in 1998 on St George’s Day. ‘We had to stand in a line for four hours,’ wrote Anthony to his Aunt Emily during his training. ‘All our legs hurt and we are all very tired and we are starving. The only thing I’ve had is a Murray Mint off one of the lads. We are going to get our hair cuts tomorrow.’
Once he got going, Anthony was getting about £250 a week, serving first in Belize and then in Northern Ireland. When he came home on leave, he would sometimes go out with Paul and his friends to clubs in Newcastle. Anthony loved tanning parlours and dancing, so he was as comfortable in his brother’s preferred gay haunts as anywhere else. ‘If anyone had come near him I would probably have killed them,’ said Paul when I asked him about it.
‘Was there anything about Anthony you didn’t like?’
‘I didn’t like it that he smoked,’ said Paul, ‘or that he had tattoos. The tattoos came with the army.’
On the left side of his chest Anthony had a fairly large tattoo of a ripped flag – a Coldstream Guards staple – and he also had a tattoo of a kneeling girl in fishnet stockings. During his second tour in Northern Ireland, a young Catholic pulled a gun on him but he didn’t fire and Anthony was commended for standing his ground. Before that he’d already got married to Ann Toward, a girl he’d met in the Global Video shop on Shields Road. ‘He was just dead nice,’ says Ann. ‘He took care of himself and he was a laugh.’
Ann already had a little girl, Stacey, when she met Anthony. She had the baby when she was about sixteen and she has never had a job. (She is thirty-three.) She and Anthony went on to have two more children, Scott and Corey, who are aged ten and five. Anthony’s Aunt Emily told me Anthony ‘totally loved’ having a house of his own. ‘He would love making dinners,’ she said. ‘And he’d want everybody round. When he did that he’d clean the house from top to bottom. It was as if he just loved the idea of making a proper family himself.’
Paul has few good words to say about Anthony’s widow, and she knows it. I tried to steer him away from saying too much. I told him I was writing everything down, but he said that didn’t bother him. The circumstances of his childhood and his brother’s loss have made Paul self-absorbed, understandably so perhaps, but he doesn’t see how difficult it must be for Ann bringing up three children on her own. Paul and Anthony’s difficulties with their own mother may lie behind some of this confusion. Paul was boiling with rage about his mother one night when I drove him round Newcastle. At that stage, his mother hadn’t wanted to speak to me, and Paul couldn’t understand why. He couldn’t work out why other people didn’t see the point of the story – as if it meant they didn’t see the point of Anthony – and he considered his mother’s refusal to be yet another rejection.
This had all been part of the chaos of Anthony’s life, not just his childhood but also the time before he died, when he and Ann had split up and he was going out with a local hairdresser called Kym. The Byker Estate was pitch black the night I called on Ann, and her house seemed over-excited and over-populated, children rushing in and out of the bright kitchen. She is a pretty woman with a nice smile and a bad cough. She was looking for her inhaler but she held a pack of cigarettes in her hand the whole time I was there. I was told Scott had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and he certainly whirled around a fair amount, crashing into the fridge and clearly finding it hard to settle.
‘My dad and me went to the lighthouse museum,’ Scott said, wrapping himself around my arm. ‘On my birthday my dad hided all the presents behind the settee and in the cupboards. I found five and then he told me where the other ones were. There was a hundred stairs at the lighthouse museum.’
‘He died,’ said Corey.
‘I went in me dad’s car with me friend,’ said Scott, ‘and we ate chewing gum and we asked Dad if we could put music on and that and he say, “Aye.”’
I asked Scott what he would like to do when he grows up. ‘I want to be a high court judge and work with horses,’ he said. The whole family spoke with sing-song Geordie accents, the words pouring into one another.
Stacey came down the stairs wearing a Playgirl T-shirt and with her hair in bunches. She is fourteen. A neighbour told me that Anthony doted on Stacey. ‘When he got home on leave,’ she said, ‘he was always taking her up the town to buy her phones and trainers, whatever she wanted.’ By the time Stacey began to speak – it took her a while to stop chewing the ends of her hair and giggling – the living room had turned into a corner o
f Bedlam. Scott was thumping the Formica kitchen top with a giant stick and shooting us all with a plastic gun and Corey was blowing a whistle. ‘My dad was nice,’ said Stacey. ‘He told jokes and he didn’t shout at you. We went to the Metro Centre on my birthday. He bought us a Girls Aloud CD and jeans and everything, then we went to KFC.’
When Anthony Wakefield died, his loss animated a series of hurts and complications that might never end. ‘Every Christmas, every birthday, every memory,’ said Ann, ‘the death of Anthony just affects the kids. To Corey his father is just in heaven. Stacey goes off on her own to her bedroom and broods about it and has her own thoughts. With Scott’s problems, he often just doesn’t understand. At the time of Anthony’s death, Stacey would blame me, saying, “It should have been you,” and things like that.’
I asked her if they had enough to live on.
‘We have eight hundred pounds a month,’ she said. ‘Four hundred and sixteen of that goes on rent for this house, and there’s another hundred a month for council tax.’
‘So you and the kids have seventy pounds a week left to live off?’
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You’ve just got to get on with it.’
It was hard to speak to Ann while Paul was there: resentment made him vigilant, and he felt angry when she spent a few moments with me in the kitchen alone, ‘forcing me to hear her side of the story’, he said.
‘There needn’t be sides,’ I said to him later. But I felt sorry for Paul and thought his possessiveness about his brother’s memory could only be part of his grief.
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