I have never managed to read more than half a page of a Faulkner novel, but that one line is bang on. The past isn’t even past.
I had to take down a wall’s worth of pinned notices, photos, cuttings, souvenirs.
There were papers pinned over papers, photos over photos, all overlapping and up to four deep. I took them down as a wad, put them in a box and stashed it.
Last Saturday I rediscovered it and that was that for the afternoon. It was a box of the past that wasn’t even past.
Every one of us is an accretion of our yesterdays, a coral reef built slowly up through lived experience. So it’s all but impossible to throw out stuff that’s associated with the past. It feels like an amputation.
One piece of paper sang.
The moment I saw it a whole chunk of the past rose as if from the grave.
It was a page of photographs torn from a library book. There were photos of four teenagers who would go on to become the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, but the page was folded to show only one of them. That one was Brian Howard.
Born in 1905 Brian Howard showed promise as a poet but lived a life of drugs and drink and a series of gay affairs and wrote little and died young.
But it wasn’t for Brian Howard that I tore out the photo of him. It was because the young Howard was the spitting image of Danny.
Danny was a year younger than me. We played representative cricket together. We had similar roles in the team so we were effectively rivals but that didn’t matter.
He was a quiet, modest, gentle lad with huge eyes. I showed off to earn his friendship. And whenever we met up good things seemed to happen.
The late teens are the best and worst years, the most vivid, the most intense. More happened in a week then than happens in a decade now.
Just to look at that photo now and I remember crashing my little motorbike into roadworks, I remember lying down on a railway line, I remember a bloke who tipped horses for a national newspaper telling me I was going to be a writer and none of it matters to anyone but me and it will never cease to matter to me.
After I went away to university, Danny and I rarely saw each other. And once I went to live abroad in 1979, that was that.
Until, that is, 30 years later when I returned one summer to visit my elderly mother, dug out some old friends and was told that Danny still lived locally. They gave me his number.
I was nervous of calling, because the past is sometimes best left undisturbed. But I called and there was happiness in his voice and we arranged to meet at the railway station.
I was early. I was looking for a 17-year-old face now three decades older.
Another middle-aged guy was standing there and waiting, but that’s what people do at railway stations. He sensed my gaze and looked my way, then went back to scanning the passers-by.
Five minutes later he came over. ‘‘Joe?’’ he said.
Over the first beer I apologised for my younger self, for having been self-dramatising, performative. He would have none of it.
They had been the best days, he said. Did I remember when ...?
And since then? He’d played a little professional cricket. He’d taken to carpentry then joinery, then cabinet making.
He now made bespoke wooden furniture, top-end stuff. I said that had to be good. He said it was a living.
He had two daughters. His marriage, he said, was beyond repair, but he stayed in it for the sake of his girls.
Then he looked at me over his beer with the huge eyes of old and asked if I thought that was wise. He looked intensely sad.
We got drunk. I’ve not seen him since and doubt I will again.
But that photo. I’ve now framed it and put it back on the wall.
The past is never dead.
- Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
