Waving to Elizabeth

I may never get back on my bike again. I suppose I should try though the loose pedal will need some work if indeed the old thing has not fallen apart at the back of the garage. It is dry in there so it may be possible to retrieve it undamaged. I used to cycle to school during the summers I was in the sixth form. Our school was tiny compared to most institutions these days, still is though the middle school has been merged by filling in the wonderful quad it used to have to fit in computer rooms and new stuff I’ve never seen. As well as being small (<400 pupils), it was also out in the sticks and took people from an area with a diameter of 20+ miles though maybe it was a very long ellipse rather than a circle. I was only 5 miles from the school and could leave bang on 3:45. The buses didn’t leave for twenty minutes after that which meant that I could be sitting on the cable box by the Church when our bus actually arrived. This seemed to impress a number of the kids on the bus who would actually wave – physical exertion always being able to breed popularity more than any intellectual ability. There were even a few slightly romantic gestures which made my day, though I didn’t dare delve into the seriousness of any of these even though some of them were from girls; I lived for studying of course. All this seems the coolest thing on earth to me and yet looking back at the pictures we all seem lost in the mire of dated seventies fashions and haircuts without any of coolness attached to such things a Life On Mars. The coy waves from the bus may make me want to go back but some of the vicious sneers on the faces of some of my classmates remind me of a certain rural reality. For some strange reason, the foyer of this building had the smell of our school corridors and a lot of this came back to me in that instant.

And all the books I should have been reading then, a list that haunts me, things I will never get around to, just like I will probably never get back on that bike; all those science books instead of ‘On the Road’. We were not cool, just sad and mired in trying to look cool. Even some of the ‘cool’ kids look strange, with pinched faces and sneers of dislike for everything. Or is that just normal attitude for teenagers? And yet so many of them I liked. I would love to speak to them again. There was strange magic in some of them. I was an outsider, born in town and brought up in town. Some of the kids came from families that had been in the same houses for generations and despite their liking for punk or Prog-Rock or Electronica, could tell you of things not far removed from witch bottles and fertility curses. I imagine the girls and their apple peel thrown over their shoulder, looking for the initial of some boy they liked, or scattering flour in the fire to make faces of future boyfriends. Maybe all this is just colouring and it never came to me when I moved back to town, but I told someone in a pub once where I came from and they evoked an image of deep magic and magnetic things drawing back leavers to the village. It gets me sometimes, even just seeing the hills; bringing on some desire to just lie down in the bushes, looking up at the empty sky, blue or grey, to just live on what the place provides. Winter would bring me out if this, grey water all around, getting in everywhere; wetting the floors and making the house seem cold and empty with even the high-banked fire failing to lift the darkness.

Witches and whiskey they were; Fairies and coy smiles, born of the Celts who made the fort on the hill. I bet you could trace through from the bones the students used to dig up all the way through to some of those kids, lost in that valley for years. And now we are scattered save for a few grown up to farm or inherit those old houses that just avoid the shadow of Ragged Stone Hill.

I’ll never get back on that bike.