61 Never look back

Reading:

Never look back

‘Their friendship, like many friendships developed in adolescence,
is sustained by their mythologizing of it.’ Nicole Flattery

I’d remembered that long ago you’d let slip
That you were going to live in Somerset. 
And though it was thirty years since we last met. 
On an impulse I decided that I’d look you up 

And see if you were still working in that laundry. 
If by chance you were still there we would have  
Lunch somewhere and chat about the days when we
Played Dixieland together in Battersea. 

I can see you now, kicking off the beat, 
Me whacking out the chords of the middle eight. 
Then that vocal: ‘Get your coat and grab your hat…’
‘Just direct your feet. To the sunny side of the street.’

But you were taken unawares and felt abashed
You couldn’t leave the counter unattended. 
I in turn was dashed. You’d quite forgotten
That schoolboy me who once you had befriended.

You’d given up jazz as soon as you’d you got married. 
And you’d not painted for years. Our embarrassment
Surpassed my worst fears. I’d looked forward to it so.
Instead I felt nothing but relief when it was time to go. 

I apologise for my intrusion into your resigned mundanity
With memories of that different life when we were friends.
Like me you could have gone to university. But it was not to be.
Four years of fighting in a tank is where that story ends.

You showed me how to smoke although I soon gave up my pipe 
And I’ve long since abandoned beer for wine. At the time though
I was lost and your ironic, un-heroic tutelage helped me grow up.
When I came to visit you that day, this is what I wanted you to know.

I’d also like to think, despite my sad fiasco, I had once given something
In return: encouragement to try for a professional career once more;
To look at life beyond the chatter of the laundry girls, banal and boring;
To try again for that life which would have been yours. But for the war.