 |
Old Friends
This week I borrowed a car and my friend Billy and I took the ferry to Stranraer.
Billy will be ninety this November. He was born in East Belfast, worked as a weaver, married a Catholic, Maureen, from Ballymacarett, and came to live in West Belfast in 1940.
As the saying goes, Billy's not getting any younger, and he wanted to see again his friend, Gibbie, a Scotsman, who was born in Coatbridge in 1915. As a young man, Billy and his friends were into hostelling and it was in a hostel at the top of Loch Lomond sixty-five years ago this July that Billy and Gibbie met and became life-long friends, writing to each other when Gibbie was in the army during WWII, and visiting each other, even after they were both married. They met their wives, Maureen and Sadie, whilst hostelling, Billy in the Mournes and Gibbie in the Cairngorms. Both Maureen and Sadie died three years ago, and Billy and Gibbie hadn't seen each other in twelve years.
The sailing took just over three hours and the weather and conditions were perfect. We disembarked at 1.45 pm and began the long drive to Cockermouth in Cumbria, across the border. It occurred to me that the last time I had driven on this road was in September 1972, driving late through the night, listening to Stevie Wonder on Radio Luxembourg singing 'Superwoman' as it faded in and out. Memories came flooding back about old friends, what had happened, who had and had not survived, the journeys we have all gone through.
We were short on petrol but amazingly there are no petrol stations (bar two family ones that looked permanently closed) on the seventy-two-mile stretch between Stranraer and Dumfries. And, when we did stop to refuel, the garage accepted our Northern Irish sterling notes, though I had expected objections.
Throughout the trip there were to be many literary reminders. We passed through Dumfries, where Robbie Burns spent his last days, drove past Eccelfechan (I know, try pronouncing it even sober), birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, who it was, I am certain, introduced that brilliant German word schadenfreude to the English language, a noun which means to take great pleasure in the misfortunes of others! Finally, we arrived at Cockermouth around five o'clock.
Gibbie's and Billy's eyes lit up when they saw each other. Gibbie is very nimble for his age, whereas Billy has trouble with his legs and has to use a frame which his daughter, Rita, got him in the USA.
It was a glorious evening so we sat on a bench in Gibbie's back garden and I listened with fascination as they reminisced about their hostel days, trekking up mountains and down dales, about all the characters they went about with, about the 'code', quite chivalrous, that operated in the Youth Hostel Movement in the 1930s, and the respect that young men had for women. Every person lives through a rich history and every story is different, is told from a different, if even marginally different, angle.
Billy, who is self-taught, has an amazing grasp of poetry and an impressive repertoire. Gibbie, who has a degree in English from Glasgow University, worked as a teacher before retiring. On Wednesday we went for a drive through part of the Lake District, lakes whose names we had to learn as kids in Geography Class. The scenery was breathtaking but the countryside was fairly deserted due to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, which has hit Cumbria quite hard.
Whether it was a reference to nature or the elements, love or life, Billy or Gibbie would recite part of a verse from Wordsworth (who was born in Cockermouth), or Betjeman ('Youth an age on Beaulieu River, Haunts…') or Burns or the Bible, and the other would finish it. I couldn't keep up with them and I wished I had had a tape-recorder.
They even sang and exchanged hymns and I joked with them because they are both atheists! Billy said he had a friend, Billy Logan, from Ballysillan, who knew every quote from the Bible. Gibbie took us to Pendle Hill and showed me the rock where George Fox, the founder of the Quaker Movement, had preached to thousands of people in the 1650s. Fox had been imprisoned for a year and ill-treated for preaching. Though a bit of a fundamentalist when it came to 'line-dancing' he was good on social status: "The Lord forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low… neither might I bow or scrape my leg to any one."
We had our last supper together on Wednesday night, I cooking, as they again sat outside in the warm evening, close together, retelling events from forty and fifty years ago, cracking open small epiphanies to reveal what one or other had perhaps forgotten, and I heard the occasional laugh and confirmation.
On Thursday morning, Gibbie and Billy came out to the car and I asked them to stand for a photograph. Then they shook hands for a long time and said goodbye. As we turned the corner from Rose Lane Billy said with a finality and a passion, "That's my old friend Gibbie, who I met in 1936."
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much
Unvisited, endeavoured to retrace
The simple ways in which my childhood walked;
Those chiefly that first led me to the love
Of rivers, woods, and fields…
O Friend! O Poet! brother of my soul,
Think not that I could pass along untouched
By these remembrances.
- William Wordsworth
[ back ]
© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison