Letter from a terrace in Palma 3

                                                                                                        29 November, 2014

Good morning,

The toot toot man

Today I was in Bedminster, Bristol, after taking an early morning flight from Palma.  The Airport Express bus had seats for thirty people but I was the only passenger.  In Bedminster we passed a stone building that used to be a church when I was a boy.  There was, for about a couple of years, and I’m talking about the late 50s now, a large painting of a mountain by the road in front of the church.  We saw it every time we passed in the car.  A path wound upwards around the mountain and on this path was the figure of a mountaineer.  The top of the mountain showed £20,000, which was the amount the church needed for restoration work.  The man was the amount of money raised, and every week the man climbed a little higher.  I don’t know if he ever reached the summit but I hope that he did and that the repairs were done.

The church still stands but now it is no longer a church.  It is a shop for specialist workwear.   All that effort made by so many people to climb the mountain and now the church is a shop.  But their work was valid then whatever the building is now.

In Bedminster I was in the same place but the time that mattered was years ago.  The place was not the same.  That place was in that time. Today it means little. Today it is a clothes shop.

The same thing happened when I revisited my old school after 30 years. It was a different place. The same buildings were there.  The same road was there.  Even the same trees were there, the great cedars in their own garden on the corner of the Liberty, but it was not the same. How empty is the present!  It is merely a ghost of the past. The shouts of fifty boys, the rush to the dining room carrying the books from the last class, the appetite we took to lunch!  None of that was there. There was no toot from the old motorcyclist.  Well, it wasn’t really a motorcycle but a moped, one of those hybrid machines that were half bicycle half motorbike.  The old man passed at the same time each day just before we went to lunch and always sounded his high-pitched horn twice just before the junction where College Road joined the Liberty opposite the cedar trees.  I could show you the exact place now if you were to come with me, but it wouldn’t mean anything today.  We used to run up the road from class and wait for him and he came day after day, without fail.  Every day he sounded his horn twice. Toot toot.  And we laughed with the cruelty of boys who had all their lives before them.

Now there is no one.  No noise, no shouts and the toot toot man does not pass by.  Nothing is the same.  The place is empty though other boys run by, thinking boyhood will last for ever, just as we did.

Your sincerely