1980: Happy Christmas, War Is Over

43 years ago today

I liked Dave: he was broad, strong and reminded me of Robert Mitchum. A few years before, he had joined our primary school part way through the term. The Head handed him over to us outside the girls’ loo and told us to ‘make him feel at home’. We asked him who his team was, where he’d come from, and then I’d said ‘Let’s see how strong he is” as I gripped his hand, smiling. He squeezed mine back, crushing it with such ease that any further would’ve showed me up totally. “He’s very strong”, I said to the others, putting my arm around him and hoping the blood would make it back to my fingers.

He asked me to cover his paper round for a few weeks. This meant money in the run up to Christmas, and I liked the idea of that. A mate had a Louis Armstrong album - I’ve no idea why - that I thought Dad might like for Christmas. He wanted a quid for it. That and a box of After Eights should do the trick. 

The pre-dawn mornings were freezing, dark, and often as not solid rain or black ice. That wasn’t so good. It hurt to wake up on that second Monday. I’d dressed for school as the turnaround from ending the paper round to pedalling into school was tiny. A small comfort: I found a forgotten sherbet lemon in my blazer pocket from before the weekend.

Every bike journey had an absent-minded challenge I set myself: do a ten-pedal wheelie, go no-hands between the factory and the turnoff, or to get up the hill in second gear. That morning’s: to not finish the sherbet lemon before I got to the newsagent. 

I cycled the six minutes - right trouser leg tucked into my sock after I got a hiding for snagging and oiling up the last pair - the sherbet lemon a barely dissolving oyster of the most incredible sweet-sour beneath my tongue. I span the pedals to vertical and stood the bike on the kerb. A friend ran out of the shop.

“One of the Beatles has been shot!” 

I played Dad’s red Best-of constantly. 

“Wha?!”

What was left of the sherbet lemon flew from my mouth in slow motion, cracked in two on the kerb, the largest part slipping into the drain, the smallest sitting in an oily puddle. I almost salvaged it.  

I knew it was Lennon. We all did. 

Elvis, John Wayne, Sid Vicious, Keith Moon and now Lennon. What was going on.

The radio was full of Imagine and Happy Christmas, War Is Over for the next month, only it wasn’t war that was over; it was something else, but I wasn’t sure what.