O'Hagan On Friendship

From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Caledonian Road
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-39748-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 64 Seiten

** AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW ** From the bestselling author of Mayflies and Caledonian Road, a heart-enriching celebration of what makes us great: our friends. If we are lucky in our lives, our friendships will be rich and varied. They will be shared with those with two legs, with four legs, with whiskers or clean faces; they will come dressed in the simplicity of childhood or the professional attire of adult life; some will span decades, and some will be only fleeting. But the thing they will all have in common is that life is not only unimaginable - but unimagined - without them. In these gorgeous personal reflections, Andrew O'Hagan explores friendship through music and poetry, memory and history, illuminating the many ways and reasons that people come together, and how our lives are all the better because we do. Andrew O'Hagan's novel Caledonian Road was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 31/03/2024

Andrew O'Hagan is one of this generation's most exciting and serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times and was voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Hagan, Andrew

Leseproben

1 / Boys United

I think the best children’s stories are those about friendship. Whether it’s the tale of the adventurous, slightly heartless boy who flies one evening through the Darlings’ window to look for his shadow, or the Little Prince adrift in the desert, these stories show that the first great challenge of our social lives is to find the friend who might somehow match our capacity for wonder. In my own childhood, I was always searching for such a friend, and from the very beginning it felt like a creative act, a bold, differentiating effort of the soul. One day in 1974, when I was among the dreamier pupils at St Winning’s Primary School, it so happened that the school trip (to a Glasgow park) was rained off, so Mrs Wallace decided the whole class should go instead to the Regal Cinema in the nearby town of Saltcoats. With its musty smell of old curtains and soft drinks spilled on the carpet, we watched Charlotte’s Web in the late afternoon. At the end of the film, I remember the other boys rushing up the aisle, tumbling through the exit hooting with laughter, embodying, I suppose, a healthy disregard for life’s more melancholy aspects. Sitting with a library copy of the book that night, and having no such disregard, I was blind with tears, moved to a kind of mental action by this story of loyalty, loss and renewal. I wanted a friend like Charlotte. Wilbur the pig asks the spider why she did all these things for him, saving his life and all, when Wilbur hadn’t done anything for her. Charlotte replies simply that Wilbur had been her friend. The reader understands in an instant how this must be a tremendous thing.

Many years later, I believe the ties of friendship are as important to the average person as every other form of romance, a set of loyalties that turn in the head like old records. Writing this now, a memory of lost time comes drifting in on a harmonica – Bob Dylan’s ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’ – a gentle hymn to a great union, a guitar-picking, crack-voiced tribute to the yearning you can feel for an old friendship, as fresh as this morning. I can’t hear that song without thinking of Mark Macdonald, a friend of my Scottish childhood who stands now like a totem over all the friendships I’ve ever had, because he was the first to shine and the first to go. I dream of Mark in the famous red summer of 1976, the summer of droughts and Jammie Dodgers, Concorde and the Ford Fiesta, the Montreal Olympics and troubles in the North of Ireland. That summer and the following one, the summer of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, stand out for their combination of national fervour and sweltering heat, the sense of cut-price refreshments and punk rock. Mark had his own story, but we joined forces for a few quick years and founded a boys’ own industry of discovery.

I was new to the game, new to friendship, and the bold Mark, with his mop of chestnut hair and his deep fund of jokes, seemed to propose a happy answer to all my ridiculous doubts about the future. Family could seem terribly involved, it could be dark, personal, historical – and next to that, friendship was like a glass of cool water after a fever, a drink that was meant to last, quenching your worries. I can’t speak for all the families round our way, but the house I lived in with my parents and my three older brothers was a zone of adversities, unpaid bills, things you could never talk about, disappointments relating to the past. My parents worked, but they didn’t enjoy working, and they didn’t seem to enjoy family life either. They weren’t our friends, not then anyhow, and they weren’t friends with each other. The house in fact was a palace of stress and we weren’t allowed to bring anybody inside, which had the effect, over time, of making other people’s houses seem hugely exotic to me. By the age of eight or nine, I was mostly to be found in our neighbours’ houses, already lighting candles of friendship to illuminate all avenues of escape.

I lived at Number 12 and Mark was at Number 26, across the square. We were soon flashing our torches at night in a flurry of codes. There was stress in everybody’s houses, but I learned from Mark that friendship was one of the vehicles to independence. He was good for me, funny and imaginative about people’s oddness, and it was only after meeting him that I believed friendship might be a clear riposte to all manner of repressions and Catholic ritual. Mark had a better home life, but he cultivated rebellion in ways that can challenge adults to the same extent as they delight children. At ten, we were developing a private language and claiming the world for ourselves.

Among its virtues, friendship in childhood also thrives on a degree of perversity. Mark was heroic because he would say things nobody else would say. We didn’t ever hear it at school, but originality requires courage, and my first best friend was brilliant when it came to turning the tables on all that was expected of us. I don’t propose that friendship is necessarily the enemy of parenting, but it was a good start. When I was young, parents often saw their children’s friends as the family’s worst enemies. And with reason. A great friend can summon a new world order, and, best of all, the beginnings of a new person for you to be, tugged from the constraints of home and homily.

Soon enough, Mark and I were out conquering the seaside towns of Ayrshire, loitering in penny arcades and graveyards until there was darkness over the coast. Preadolescence is a particularly fruitful time for alliances that can seem to outwit adult complexity. Mark was wiser than any adult I knew because his laughter came from a much deeper place. We laughed all day, making fun of our circumstances and the various characters of the town, and never, at least on my part, giving much of a thought for the uptight world that was waiting back home. There were many long walks in our youth, much dilly-dallying down roads in the early dusk, as well as a lot of loitering in bus stops or outside chip shops, killing time. That phrase is always pejorative now, ‘killing time’ describing a failure to be purposeful, but in the golden hours of young comradeship, to kill time is to be a happy murderer. For Mark and me, the hours never dragged, they oozed, and we were the unbeaten Ayrshire champions of doing nothing brilliantly. We could spend a whole evening procuring and sharing a bag of chips, and such evenings still exist in a vapour of salt and vinegar. As with Proust’s famous madeleine, I need only sniff a chip shop pickled onion and all the promise of friendship returns to me with its cargo of grief.

I have in my hand a box of matches – Scottish Bluebell, made in Glasgow once upon a time by Bryant & May – and when I strike a light, just for the memory of it, a second’s burst of burning sulphur takes me to the core of childhood mischief, to Mark and me in those bus stops surrounding our housing estate, lighting a stolen cigarette, burning a piece of paper just for the hell of it. Boredom, no less than killing time, was a seedbed of opportunity, a chance to create nonsense and riot out of the dormant minutes. Time was never empty; it was simply about waiting for the right thing to happen. That’s a vital element in childhood friendships, the consciousness of time being on your side, of time being your friend and not the sworn enemy it so often seems to be for busy adults. Mark and I stared at things – a burning milk crate, a dead and rotting crab between the rocks, a comic book, the middle distance – in a way that was utterly vital and natural, without knowing that it was a talent children are bound to lose to the deadlines and responsibilities that come later. Fire was fascinating. We had the urge to light things just to see how they would change. Best of all was dropping the burning match into the box itself, creating a flare that we called a ‘genie’ – a staking-it-all-on-red effusion of light, there in the dark of the bus shelter or in one of the tunnels connecting the new estate to the old part of the town. First friendships involve such experiments, almost secrets, and I think of my first friend as a kind of explorer, Marco Polo Macdonald, who distinguished himself among all the cowlicked boys and girls by being the riskiest.

In those days, at least in suburban Scotland, you could feel far from the world, and friendship unaided by technology meant shared physical spaces – I’m speaking of swing parks and railway sidings, youth clubs and discos, shopping malls, seaside promenades, swimming baths and building sites, football fields and industrial wastelands – places you didn’t go to with adults and which felt private. Mark and I were sometimes joined by a lively, smart little kid called David Tully. Smiling, freckle-faced, he was always coming up with new games and was a kind of dynamo. I can still see Davie with his arms outstretched, impersonating a fighter plane as he ran between the grass hillocks in our square, rattling like a tail gun and shouting for more ammo. He would later serve with the RAF before becoming a commercial airline pilot. On Instagram these days, I enjoy the maps he posts of his flight paths across the world, Singapore, Barbados, Melbourne, and of course I see again the excellent inventor he used to be, readying himself for life not by being obedient and staying at home to devise a plan...