Old School

They were back in the Husband’s old hometown, a beautiful Cotswold town, albeit off the touristy beaten track. Like most old English towns not much changes, estates grow around the edges but the historic centre remains unchanged but for a few different shops, or cafes, or pubs.

It was a Roman town, with a strong Roman history, complete with an old amphitheatre, built in the early second century for the town then known as Corinium. Once able to hold up to 8000 people, eager to watch the blood sports so popular then, it was now overgrown and visited mostly by locals walking their dogs or young boys seeking adventure, perhaps pretending to be Roman gladiators.

They were on the opposite side of town though and walked through the old Abbey Grounds, site of an old Saxon church, through the Norman Arch that had been built in 1117, something that fascinated her every time they walked beneath it. That it had stood through so many centuries, wars and bloodshed, and probably still would for many more hundreds of years. She imagined the many people over those centuries that had stood in this spot, looking up at this magnificent structure and wondered what their lives had been like. Who they were and why they had been there, how they lived and how they died.

He remarked of playing football here, in these grounds, many years ago as a boy she thought she had come to know, but she wondered if you ever really knew someone. Like, really knew them. Inside and out … their thoughts, their beliefs, their views on life. Maybe you did but you could never live their memories, unless you were in them and even then your recollections could be vastly different from their own.

She thought she knew him, this man of hers. She had travelled back to his home town many times and lay in his childhood bedroom imagining his life as a young boy, a wayward teenager and then a young man before eventually moving out and starting his own family. She had seen the world through his eyes, out the bedroom window of his childhood home, overlooking the large garden and the stone cottage beyond. She knew him for the stories he’d told and the memories he’d shared over those visits, what he was and what he came to be. From the photographs he’d shared of his life before and the people in them that at one time had been so important to him.

But she sat now in the old WheatSheaf pub, so very English, full of dark oak beams, low ceilings, and walls saturated with years of smoke and a history dating back a few hundred years, listening to his reminiscing and she wondered how much she really did know. Or in fact how much she needed to. They were there to visit his old childhood friend, a moment from his past, a chance to share stories and relive memories. A glance into the life of a teenage boy that lived for his football and where all else was irrelevant, and where a vein of devilish mischievousness may very well have been his undoing if not for a streak of luck and timely intervention.

The town had been smaller then, the sprawl of new estates not even imagined and this very pub one which would never had been entered lightly. Full then with unsavoury characters and gangs of youth bristling for a fight, he had very seldom ventured in here. It was nice now, in an old worn out kind of way, full now of locals here to watch the football on screens set up throughout the many rooms, packed in fact.

She listened again to them remembering their old teachers, describing (what seemed to her) the cruel and unnecessary forms of discipline they endured, schools then completely different in their view of children – crushing spirits she thought, rather than nurturing them. But the two laughed at these memories, perhaps not so traumatic as it initially sounded, instead a chance to bond again over their pints of beer. A moment shared, a time remembered.

His friend sadly had Parkinsons and had had for many years. He was at times hard to understand, but there was a glint in his eyes and a boyish smile emerged as they shared their stories. She could see the boy from the photograph when he smiled, easily recognisable after all these years. His friend remembered being fast, a runner, he loved to run and was good at it. So cruel then the twist of fate that for him now made even walking difficult. This was now a second friend on this trip that they had learned was diagnosed with an incurable disease, and she felt lucky that she and the man she loved were blessed with good health and hoped fervently that it would stay that way.

It felt somehow to be a trip of goodbyes and today another was looming, their last day in England, half of their long-awaited trip now over. Another day with a new adventure, car journeys and ferry crossings and more family to see.

The next phase of their trip was all about love, laughter and happy ever after …