This Is Guernsey

By Shaun Shackleton

IN THE film, Rumblefish, Tom Waits plays the part of Benny, the owner of the local bar and pool hall in which the gangs hang out.

About halfway though the film, he gives this little speech.

‘Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see, when you’re young, you’re a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there … it doesn’t matter. You know. The older you get, you say, “Jesus, how much I got? I got 35 summers left”. Think about it. Thirty-five summers.’

It might not be one of Francis Ford Coppola’s best films but that speech is pretty poignant, especially when you’re only in your 20s when you first see and hear it.

On May bank holiday weekend 2007, my wife’s sister and her son, Jim, came over for two nights.

Jim had recently turned 21 and I hadn’t seen him for five or six years. Now he was a man – smoking, drinking, cussing and regaling tales of Yorkshire lowlife that made me at first sad and nostalgic and then all paternal and worried.

The lowlife that he mixed with, I realised, were a lot lower than the ones I had knocked about with when I was his age.

I hung around with Hedley Braithwaite, Grimwright, Callum O’Quake and the Glimmer Twins and James Brown, the Soulfather of God.

Jim and his crowd all had jobs and money and all the advantages and disadvantages that those things could buy. They also had cars and mobiles and seemingly limitless credit cards.

I had £68 a fortnight, Shanks’s pony or the bus and if my mates ever wanted to find me, I’d be in the Pig, the Rat or the Albert.

He told me stuff that made Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side sound like the theme tune from Rosie and Jim.

I didn’t want to come over the ‘old, experienced uncle who had seen and done it all but learnt by his mistakes’ (because I realised that I’d done and seen nowt and still hadn’t learnt owt) but I told him to have a good time while he was young but to watch himself.

He’s such a nice kid. Quick to laugh and quick to tell jokes and he never sits still.

He’s intelligent and thoughtful with touches of underlying menace like all 21-year-olds and he reminds me of his old man. When he was married to his mum, we were inseparable.

When The Gaffer and I lived in London, we were just round the corner from them in Balham.

One day Jim – who was about seven at the time – his dad and I went looking round the second-hand shops in Clapham. There was a wedding coming up and we had to buy some ‘new’ suits.

We couldn’t find anything for us but we found a tiny suit jacket for Jim.

We all swanked up Clapham Common Road in our near-identical jackets and when we got home we got a right rollicking from Jim’s mum because she thought he looked ridiculous.

The jacket was binned and that was that.

Jim laughed, saying he remembered it well.

We sat in our back garden and listened to Guernsey Live, him drinking Carling Black Label and me on the Guinness.

‘I don’t know how you drink that stuff,’ he laughed.

I poured one out and we watched as the foam inside turned from cream to brown to white, like volcano dust, and said: ‘Look at that. What’s not to like?’

‘I agree with you. It looks great. And then the head comes up all white. But then you taste the stuff. Urrgghh!’

We sat talking in the Guinness-black back garden until long after the last band played.

He couldn’t believe the music was three miles away and it was the wind that carried the sound.

‘I don’t know why I thought Guernsey was so small,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember it that well from the last time I came.’

‘How small did you think it was?’ I asked him.

‘I dunno. About 500 people?’

When I told him 60-odd-thousand, he said: ‘No way.’

After I had walked him back to his hotel, it was 1.30am.

The next day we spent around at our friends’ house. They had both known Jim when he was small and the woman had worked with his mum in London when they were both teachers.

There were kids running round, computer games, a puppy which Jim loved and a roast dinner. A great day.

The day after, I drove Jim and his mum to the airport and then they were gone.

It was a poor, almost weatherless day and neither of my kids nor The Gaffer wanted to do anything. So, after building a fire and doing the dishes, I took a walk through my early childhood.

Along that seafront where my mum would get me a Swansea bun and I’d get bittersweet jam down my anorak.

I passed a church where I’d go every Sunday, a shop where my granddad got petrol for his Morris 1100 and a house that was a post office where he bought his sausages.

A beer garden where I’d sit and eat crisps and drink Fanta, now bulldozed to the ground. Some water lanes in which I’d play in my orange wellies, now choked with weeds, the water barely moving.

I walked past a family home that 35 years ago was abandoned and empty, a sunken fort that once held States houses and a youth club.

I got back to my car and filled up at a garage that was once just a garage but was now also a supermarket.

I drove past a beach where I had tried to swim but failed and along a road that once, on holiday, I’d ridden down on a four-wheeled bike hired from behind a restaurant.

Bunkers that used to be open, clos that were fields, a golf course that was once waterlogged farmland.

I’d just spent the past two nights reliving my nephew’s childhood but that childhood is over and he is now a man.

I had to go and take that same trip alone because I had no one to go with me.

‘Thirty-five summers left. Think about it. Thirty-five summers.’

I did think about it, Tom. If I’m lucky, mate. If I’m lucky.

And all the way round, I thought: ‘Be lucky too, Jim.’

Article posted on 10th May, 2008 - 9.00am