If Only They Could Talk

by Ian Walker

  As it turned out, Hopkinson was a good student coming top of the class in the final term’s examination. I was very happy with his progress as I told his mother at the fourth form parents’ evening in June of that year.

  She was very pleased with my report, which I’d just about finished giving to her when she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  I’d thought there was something about her that I rec­ognised, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “It’s Margaret,” she said. “Margaret Bishop as was, Margaret Hopkinson now.”

  I was stunned. The girl I remembered from the school dance had glasses, mousey hair and a tooth brace. The well-dressed woman in front of me was sophisticated and beau­tiful with pearly white teeth, blonde hair and blue eyes. The ugly duckling had definitely turned into a swan, albeit with the help of contact lenses, hair dye and an orthodontist.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” I said. “Margaret Bishop, I never would have guessed. You look absolutely fantastic. What have you been doing all these years?”

  “If only you’d said that I looked fantastic 25 years ago, Miles,” she replied. “Didn’t you realise that I had a crush on you back then?”

  “Well, I suspected that you liked me, especially after your friend Olivia told me that you fancied me. But back then I was completely dazzled by you know who, which turned out to be a big mistake on my behalf. But less of that, you still haven’t told me what you’ve been doing.”

  “After school I went to Sheffield University where I stud­ied Law. Following that I got a job working for a large firm of a solicitors in London, which is where I met my husband. We married in 1955 and Richard was born the following year. But my husband turned out to be a serial adulterer and we separated in 1962, which was when I decided to move back home to Chesterfield.

  I now work for Skipton and Halesham in the town centre. Do you know them?”

  “I certainly do,” I replied. “Their offices are in what used to be my parents’ house.”

  “Look, I’m holding you up. You’ve got other parents to see,” Margaret continued. “Why don’t we go out for a drink and we can catch up at our leisure? You can meet me at work and I can show you around.”

  “I’d like that,” I replied. “I’m free most days. Not tomor­row though as I take Duke of Edinburgh Award sessions after school on Wednesdays. So how about Thursday?”

  We agreed to meet at half past four and with that she smiled before going over to see Frank Kendal who taught her son maths. The boys affectionately knew him as Minty.

  I was quite nervous when Thursday came around. Margaret was a successful solicitor with a high-powered job. Was it a date? If so, it was the first I’d been on for nearly four years. Also I was really apprehensive about what I might discover in my parents’ old house. I had such happy recollections of my childhood there and part of me didn’t want to disturb those memories. Another part of me was quite curious to see what Skipton and Halesham had done to the place.

  From the outside the building had hardly changed at all. But inside it was a different matter. When we’d lived there the ground floor consisted of a large hallway with stairs going up to a galleried landing. To the left was our living room and to the right was my father’s study. Then there was a dining room and the kitchen at the back of the house.

  The first thing I noticed after going inside was that the wall between what had previously been the hallway and my father’s study had been removed. Now the whole area served as the reception for the solicitors’ practice.

  I approached the receptionist and said, “Miles Goodyear. I’m here to see Mrs Hopkinson.”

  The receptionist told me to take a seat and offered me a coffee, which I politely declined. A few moments later Margaret appeared, kissed me on the cheek and asked me if I wanted to have a guided tour of the building. I told her that would be nice.

  To be honest, there was very little to remind me of my boyhood home. The stairs and galleried landing were still exactly the same as I remembered them, but that was where it ended.

  Our living room where we had spent so many happy Christmases in front of the fire, opening our presents before playing carpet bowls and Escalado was now a meeting room. The dining room where we’d tucked into Christmas dinner was now a solicitor’s office. Most of the fittings had been removed from the kitchen with only the sink remain­ing. It now served as a staff common room with tea and coffee making facilities.

  Margaret’s office was on the first floor in what had once been Rupert’s bedroom. The other four bedrooms had also been converted into offices and the bathroom now served as ladies and gents toilets. Finally, the top floor, which my father had lovingly converted into a flat for Sarah and I, now served as a storage area and was packed full of legal files.

  I don’t know what I’d been hoping to get out of looking around my former home. But it was clear to me that it had changed out of all recognition, just a mere shell of the fabu­lous Georgian home it had once been.

  Once the tour was completed Margaret and I left and went for a couple of drinks in the Market Tavern. I didn’t really like visiting our old pubs as they tended to bring back too many memories. But the Market Tavern was only a few yards away from where Margaret worked. Besides, it was one of the better pubs in Chesterfield town centre.

  We chatted about our school days and our old friends. Margaret didn’t know that Herman had married my sister, although she knew that Sprout and Carrot had wed and that they were now running a successful chain of supermar­kets. That was because she specialised in corporate law and had done some work for R and G.

  I was thoroughly enjoying myself and didn’t want the evening to end, which it did far too soon as Margaret had to get home to make Richard’s supper. She told me that she had enjoyed herself and that we really ought to do it again sometime. She gave me her telephone number and asked me to give her a call before she picked up her handbag and left.

  I never phoned her. Perhaps it was because I was too set in my ways by then or perhaps it was for Richard’s sake. After all, he would have been teased mercilessly if it were known that I was going out with his mother. It was bad enough for poor Nigel and I was only his uncle. But the main reason was because I couldn’t help but feel that it was never meant to be. If it had been, then I would have gone out with her 1944 instead of going out with Sarah.

  If I’d made that decision back then my life would proba­bly have turned out very differently. Margaret was an intel­ligent woman. She was a solicitor specialising in corporate law. If I’d married her, chances were that I would never have lost the brewery. Not only that but I probably would have ended up with a son like Richard, ready to take over from me when I retired.

  But I’d made the wrong decision back then and I would have to live with the consequences of that for the rest of my life.

  Chapter 28

  Nigel and Molly decided to tip the contents of the spirit bottles into the sink, just as they had done with those they had discovered in the dining room.

  Like the other sideboard this one also contained a variety of glasses, most of which were pretty nondescript and were des­tined to join the others in a box to be taken to the hospice shop.

  One, however, caught Nigel’s eye as it was engraved. It was a pint mug. One side had the Chesterfield Grammar School badge on it, with the school motto of non quo sed quomodo underneath. The other side said, ‘To Miles Goodyear on the occasion of his retirement July 19th, 1991’.

  “It’s his retirement present,” Nigel explained. “I remem­ber that he retired in July 1991, the same day the school closed for the last time.”

  *******

  In August 1973, I received an unexpected letter through the post. It was from Howard’s wife telling me that he had died suddenly from a heart attack. It was like a bolt out of the blue. He was only 48 and had seemed to be as fit as he’d ever been when I’d seen him two months previously at the university reunion.
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  He was the first of my friends to die and it served to remind me how fragile life can be. Of course, my brother Rupert had died when he was nineteen, but that was war. Howard had died from a heart attack. People don’t nor­mally die from heart attacks aged only 48. I was going to be 46 myself the following month and it made me wonder how many more years I had left.

  I didn’t know Howard’s wife, as he hadn’t met her when Sarah and I got married. After that the only times we ever met were at university reunions. Naturally, he never brought his wife to these annual events, as it left him free to spend a night of passion with Gorgeous Gail every year.

  It seemed his wife got my details from Howard’s address book along with several other of his friends who she’d never met. She had written to all of us to let us know.

  Howard worked for Berkshire County Council and lived in Reading. So it was with a heavy heart that I caught the train to Berkshire the following Thursday in order to go to his funeral.

  The crematorium was packed with his work colleagues and friends, none of whom I knew. The wake was held in a local cricket club, where I went up to Howard’s wife and introduced myself. I told her how sorry I was to hear that Howard had died so young. He had left her widowed at the age of only 42 with two sons aged fourteen and sixteen.

  I told her the story about how Howard and I had dressed up the statue of William Herbert with a handbag and scarf when we were students. It was one of the few stories about Howard that I could tell her.

  The story made her smile.

  “You know today has made me realise just how many of Howard’s friends I’ve never met,” she said. “You’ve all got such wonderful stories to tell about him. Somehow it makes this awful situation seem better. But tell me, I’ve already asked several people, and nobody knows who she is. See that woman over there? She must have thought a lot of Howard, as she hasn’t stopped crying since she arrived. But I’ve never met her before and I don’t know who she is. Do you know her?”

  She was pointing at Gorgeous Gail and I had only a split second to decide what to say.

  “That’s Gail, our old cook from university,” I replied. “In fact, she still works there as I last saw her when Howard and I went back for the reunion in June. She’s always had a soft spot for Howard, always gave him second helpings.”

  “Well, it’s really good of her to come,” she replied.

  “Gail always bent over backwards for Howard,” I contin­ued. “She was always going to come.”

  It was an inappropriate joke to make at a funeral. But Howard would have loved it.

  Howard must have been dealt a poor hand in life since none of my other friends died when they were so young. As for my own life, well I just kept on with my bachelor exis­tence of occasional visits to the pub with Brian and Colin and cultural trips to the Continent during the summer.

  In fact in 1974, the five of us went on a tour of Italy when I was finally able to visit Rupert’s grave, something my father had never been able to do. It was thirty years since Rupert’s death and yet his grave and all the others in Monte Cassino cemetery were in pristine condition, which was thanks to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of course.

  School was an endless struggle as I tried to teach the boys about Caecilius, Matella, Quintus and all the other charac­ters in the Cambridge Latin course. That said, most of the boys I taught ended up passing their Latin O-level. We were a selective school after all. You might not have to pay to go there anymore, but you still had to pass your eleven-plus.

  They say that time speeds up as you get older and I can definitely back this up as it didn’t seem very long before I’d clocked up twenty years’ of service.

  It was January 1990 and I was now 62 years old, less than three years away from retirement. However, it was looking less and less likely that I would last that long.

  Not that there was anything wrong with me, it was the school where the problem lay. Chesterfield Borough Council had been trying to do away with its grammar schools for years. Mr Price, the headmaster, was fighting a rear-guard action trying to save us, but the council was Labour-controlled and they didn’t like grammar schools as a matter of principle. It seemed that the name change, dropping the word ‘Grammar’ from the title of the school, hadn’t fooled them in the slightest.

  The headmaster’s last chance was a vote by the parents to take the school out of local authority control. But when that failed, the game was up. The school year of 1990-1 was to be our last and the grammar school, which was only three years away from celebrating its 400th anniversary, was to be replaced by a new comprehensive.

  Of course, most teachers could have transferred to the new school, but very few of my fellow masters took up that option. I was only just over one year away from retirement anyway, so I was never going to take up a new post. Brian and Colin were only in their mid-fifties, but both of them opted for early retirement as well. After all, both of them were not married and they owned their own houses out­right. The two of them also had over thirty years’ worth of pension contributions, so they didn’t need to work anymore.

  My pension was much smaller as I had only been paying into it for twenty years. There never seemed much point in having a pension when we owned the brewery. It was stupid really since all our staff had been in a company pension scheme. But the brewery was a family business and I always assumed that it would continue to support family members after they retired. It had never even crossed my mind that the business wouldn’t exist when it came to my turn.

  The last day of term was a sad affair as we were all saying goodbye to colleagues we’d known for many years. When all the pupils had left, we held a farewell party in the school hall at which we were all presented with a glass tankard resplendent with the school crest. They were all individually engraved, which was a nice touch.

  “You may as well take some of the Latin books from the library with you as well,” said Brian. “They won’t be need­ing them in the new school as they aren’t going to teach Latin. They’ve decided that they need a more modern cur­riculum and so they are going to replace it with Media Studies instead. Personally I find it amazing that you can get a GCSE in watching TV these days.”

  I went to the library and helped myself to a book of poetry by Catullus and the works of Pliny the Elder. They’d been part of my life for over twenty years, even longer if you included university and my lessons with Hugh Janus before that. Anyway, if I hadn’t taken them, they would only have ended up in a skip.

  Chapter 29

  “I know the tankard is personalised but it will still proba­bly fetch something at auction being as though the school’s closed down,” said Molly.

  Nigel agreed and placed it with the items waiting to be taken to auction. By this stage, the pile was so high you could barely see the fireplace. Nigel drove a Volvo Estate. It was the favourite car of shopkeepers due to its massive load carrying capacity. But even so it looked as though it was going to take them two trips to take everything to the auction house.

  There were only four drawers in the sideboard left to clear out and the first of these contained yet more old coins. Not only that, but this time there were also some ten shilling and £1 notes. All of these were added to the growing collec­tion in the tea caddy.

  Two of the drawers were crammed full of old photos, which Molly put into a box so that Emma and Nigel could look through them all at the weekend.

  That left only one drawer. They initially thought it con­tained a variety of programmes, but they turned out to be ‘celebrations of life,’ from the funerals of people Uncle Miles knew. There were quite a few of them, a sad reminder that Miles had outlived most of his friends and family. Included amongst them were the orders of service for the funerals of Nigel’s parents.

  “We still have both of these but I’m not going to throw them away just yet as Emma might have misplaced hers,” said Nigel, who then put the rest of the orders of service into the nearest bin liner.

  *****
**

  Retirement should be fun. It should be a time for you to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do. However, I wasn’t enjoying retirement at all. For a start I was lonely. Being single wasn’t so much of an issue whilst I was work­ing, but once I’d retired I really started to regret my deci­sion not to find another partner.

  Herman had retired shortly after me, but his retirement could not have been more different to mine. Neither of his children was interested in taking over the family business, so he’d sold the shop and got a good price for it. He and my sister now seemed to spend all their time travelling around the Mediterranean on various cruises.

  I wasn’t travelling abroad anymore as my friends could no longer accompany me. Colin had bought an old chapel near Barlow and was converting it into a cottage for himself. He was so busy that he had no time to travel. Meanwhile, Barry had bought himself a smallholding and couldn’t leave his animals. I had no desire to go abroad by myself, so I just went for walks in the Peak District instead.

  The only person who hadn’t retired was Sprout. By 1999, he was 71 years old and was still head of R and G, still being supported by Carrot. Both of their sons were working for the company in senior positions. However, Sprout showed absolutely no intention of giving up work and handing con­trol over to them. Or so I thought.

  I didn’t get to see Sprout much anymore, as work took up all his time. Therefore, it came as a complete surprise when he phoned me up one day and asked if I wanted to go out for a drink.

  We decided to meet in the Market Tavern at seven o’clock the following Tuesday and I was really looking forward to it. Sprout was always good company. I’d known him for sixty years and we never ran out of things to talk about.

  As soon as we’d got our first beer he dropped his bombshell.