TWO LITTLE BOYS

Not me, but I might easily have been one of them...

Ricky and David were two little boys and they were inseparable in the playground of Westland Infant school where they did whatever it is five year old boys do when they’ve got the freedom to play until the bell is rung by a severe Miss Girdstone who spent most of her time trying to find reasons to chastise as many children as she could with the back of her hand.

Ricky came from the big house at the top of the hill. His father did something mysterious all week in the big city and his mother wore a huge amount of lipstick which David thought made her look scary. But drspite that, Ricky was all right. He had the best ideas when it came to making plans, which is what the two of them did when they might have been doing something more interesting, like playing running or jumping games.

Meanwhile, David came from the scruffy house at the bottom of the hill, the one that needed a few licks of paint and the broken window needed to be mended. His dad was dead. He had been in that terrible state since not long fter the war because he smoked too much … the second world war, that is. His mother might have been lovely if she hadn’t been so harassed, but it was she who knew he smoked too much, and told David whenever she could. Ricky might have bright ideas, but David did too, pretty good ideas despite everything, and it was those ideas that drove the two boys together.

“Space,” Ricky announced several times, “I want to go to space. When we’re zooming between the stars, money won’t mean one little thing. It’ll just be one lovely big adventure.” Ricky seemed preoccupied with money and the value of things, which ran off David who had very little like water off a duck’s back.

“It’s dangerous, though,” pointed out David whenever the topic came up, “there’s no air to breathe in space, and if there’s no air then you die.”

He knew all about dying because of his dad, and it was probably that which made him so cautious when it came to life. Ricky, though, was much more cavalier because he knew quite a lot about taking risks because that’s what his dad did when he was in the city for day after day. He even took risks in his one room city flat with Miss Argyle, though it wouldn’t have really mattered unless Ricky’s mum found out about her.

It was probably just as well that their often repeated debates were theoretic rather than practical, because when they hit their seventh birthdays their world imploded with the sort of violence that rocks nations. Ricky left Westland Infant School and went to a boarding school where nothing was ever to be as theoretical again, leaving David to mooch around the playground on his own, even ignoring Jane Winters who was seven as well and who had an eye for the weak and oppressed and wanted to comfort him.

David was neither weak nor oppressed, but she thought he might need her quiet support. He didn’t, but had no idea how to stop it so he just accepted the fact that she meant well and continued mooching on his own when he could. After a while Jane cast her loving attentions on Barry McGovern because he had two broken legs on account of a bicycle accident in which he’d almost died, and she left David thankfully alone.

And that was all. A beautiful friendship foundered on the rocks of reality and David would never be the same again. And, incidentally, neither would Ricky, who discovered that other boys in his dormitory liked to play the sort of games he hated and teased him if he didn’t join in. But he was a theorist, a thinker, a philospher with a huge brain and not a player of silly games. Until, that is, he saw sense, not liking to be isolated, and joined in.

When he was eleven David went to Dinsdale School, a good school even though its reputation was one of a second rate school, and he still missed Ricky when memories surfaced, as they did every so often. He was marked out as cretinous (according to the class bully, Josh Grindly) because he was the only boy who was allowed o have free school meals. But he didn’t really mind. He knew his mother’s purse was usually just about empty

And a few other treats marked him as different, too. A man from the council took him shopping for school clothes every year, and he didn’t have to pay, and neither did his mother, who was gradually showing signs that the strains of living were making their way into her precious head. But David was just a kind: he didn’t notice.

Ricky, however, went on to the very posh school in the middle of town, the one school that insisted that double decked buses should never pass down the road that ran by its sports field in case Joe Public saw something he shouldn’t, like a boy being mistreated with a cane. It did happen back then because boys seemed to deserve reprimanding for such misdemeanours as having a pen that leaked and left smudges in their best writing books, and that doesn’t seem to happen any more.

By the time he was eighteen David had all but forgotten Ricky, and he was one of the few in his school that found a route to higher education via the good offices of a Red Brick university, and he found himself revelling in studying the infant subject of astronomy, and much of his work was spookily similar to the ideas that had roamed through his head when he himself had been an infant at infant school.

Ricky, though, was more involved in important studies at an ancient university that boasted the number of important politicians had passed though its doors, and Ricky studied politics because he was expected to.

It was around that time that David’s mother gave up the ghost. The poor woman had struggled despite having deteriorating health for as long as she could remember, and one day she went to her late husband’s grave to beg him to help her, and simply closed her eyes mid sentence, and they never opened again. David was distraught, he even cried in public, but was lost in a world he didn’t understand and the funeral, her few friends who turned up to mourn her demise, everything passed by him in a fog of sadness mixed with sorrow.

Shortly after that Ricky’s father got caught doing something really naughty with money though his excuse, that he could see nothing wrong with something everyone does anyway was almost accepted by a judge when it went to court, but he was given a prison sentence thankfully suspended if he kept his nose clean in the future.

And then they were both twenty one and leaving their very different universities, and Ricky, hair smartly cut to a style known as short back and sides, like he always had, found himself travelling in a railway comparment with a man who was almost, but not quite, vaguely familiar. It was David, and he had allowed his hair to grow excitingly long because it was the fashion amongst clever young men, and he was a clever young man.

“Don’t a recognise you, sort of?” asked Ricky.

David looked at him. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied, and smiled, “maybe you saw my guest spot on The Sky at Night talking with Patrick Moore?”

“No, I don’t think I did,” replied Ricky, “I’m not into that sort of nonsense. The future’s in money, you know.”

David smiled at him.

“No,” he told him quite seriously, “When we’re zooming between the stars, money won’t mean one little thing. It’ll just be one lovely big adventure.”

“I knew a kid who said that, once,” grinned Ricky, “A silly young twerp. I wonder what he’s doing now? On the dust carts, I shouldn’t wonder… I reckon he must have always had nits!”

“And I knew a boy who liked to dream,” replied David, “I wonder what he’s doing now? Probably in some money-making so-called industry, thieving his millions and looking down on the rest of us as if we were nothing more than specks of dust spoiling his view of his world. And he’ll have forgotten what its like to be human, I’ll bet.”

“I’m in politics, not money,” growled Ricky.

“And I’m into space and the universe,” smiled David, “and the future,” he added

© Peter Rogerson 31.07.23

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