Southend U3A

Writing for Fun

July 2018

Catch Me If You Can - Anne Wilson

IN MEMORIAM:

Benjamin Thomas Lovell. 1968 - 1978

Forty years have passed since you left us, but you are always in our thoughts. Taken much too soon.

Your Loving Family

Thomas put the newspaper down slowly. Seeing Benjamin’s name in print had jolted him initially. He would have been fifty this year. Probably married with a family if fate hadn’t intervened. There was precious little of the loving family referred to remaining, as Benjamin had been an only child and his mother widowed shortly after Benjamin’s death. Now frail and careworn, she clung to the past with tenacity in order to preserve her fading memories. He thought back to that morning in 1978.

It had been a big shock to everyone when Benjamin’s death had been announced in assembly by the head, whose voice, cracking with emotion embarrassed them all so much that the boys had little option but gaze at the floor, ashen faced. It was jarring to see an authority figure, usually always so in command, shrivel before their eyes and become as vulnerable as a child.

Benjamin had not been a popular pupil. Shy and sickly; he had been an easy target for the others’ contempt: a loner – not by choice, but due to what was conversely a sensitivity within the others. Their child-like insecurity had made them shun him (and fostered a need to be seen to be shunning him) lest they were perceived weak by extending the hand of friendship or kindness.

There were prayers and hymns dedicated to him that morning – the singing not exactly lusty because both teachers and pupils were shell-shocked by Benjamin’s youthful demise.

Much to his surprise, his mother was adamant that they should attend the funeral.

‘Oh mum, I hardly knew him,’ he protested.

‘We must go,’ she replied tight-lipped. ‘He was your classmate, after all. I couldn’t hold my head up in the town if I didn’t support the Lovells in their hour of need.’

It was an illogical statement and she knew it in her heart. She barely knew the Lovells, but assumed the mothers of the other children in the class would take that stance and didn’t want to be seen as uncaring.

‘Life is miserable,’ she admonished him. ‘You’d better get used to it now, because you’ll certainly find it so when you grow up.’ It was a sentiment worthy of a character from a Dickens novel and was of little consolation.

In the event, the other mothers had obviously been more lenient with their ten year olds because the funeral yielded only a sparse attendance from the school, with three of the teaching staff present and a handful of dutiful mothers ‘sans’ offspring and most of them unaccompanied by their husbands. The assembly tribute had been deemed as having fulfilled its obligation to a wretched pupil and the school carried out its normal daily, routine with little interruption. Folding the newspaper, it made him feel sad and pricked his conscience. Nowadays, it would have been so different. The school would have probably closed for the day and the church would have been bursting to capacity with staff, classmates and both parents. The forty intervening years had made a bigger difference than anyone would ever had imagined.

He had been surprised by the Lovell’s bungalow, which served as an after-the-funeral-gathering. It was small and spartan and was what his mother later described in the privacy of their own home, as ‘in desperate need of up-dating.’ Neighbours had helped with the refreshments and carried out their labours whilst the Lovell family and their small number of relatives and friends were in attendance at the church. Again, in the privacy of their own home, his mother referred rather scathingly to the ‘simplicity’ of the event. Thomas had used all his powers of resistance when marched over to the Lovells with his mother and instructed by her to offer them words of sympathy, but his protestations had proved to be of no avail. His sentiments seemed to him unconvincing and he fervently hoped when he looked back, that they had been taken for youthful awkwardness – maybe even profound emotion at a loss that affected him so deeply he could not express it adequately.

‘You know he had a heart condition,’ the child’s grieving mother informed them in a tremulous voice and his own heart leapt; swelling with guilt as his mother nodded sympathetically. ‘I just have no idea why he would have been playing in the woods on his own after school. Benjamin was so careful not to exert himself.’

He knew, though. He also knew Benjamin hadn’t been on his own. Someone had been there with him.

'I want to be your friend Thomas. Please let me.’

At first he had rejected the pathetic request, but had then reconsidered it. How funny, it would be if he could arrange for this awkward, frail boy to meet him in the woods and then somehow suggest a game where Benjamin would need to run; panting after him in pursuit and making a spectacle of himself. It would be something to regale his friends with at school the next day. He felt pleased with himself and confided in no-one. It was his idea and he should receive sole credit.

‘We’re going to play a game called ‘Catch Me If You Can.’

‘You’re so thick, Benjamin. You really are. It’s like hide and seek, except when I hide I don’t stay put. When you get near me, I’ll call out and run somewhere else and you have to keep after me until you finally catch me. If you do, then we can be friends and you can be part of my gang.’

Benjamin had been so pathetically eager to comply. His physical condition and strength was grossly inferior to that of the hunted and Thomas, of course, knew it. It amused him to weave in and out from behind the trees and call out, watching the little figure dart about anxiously, getting more and more breathless as he did so; his puny legs buckling with exhaustion. With one mighty lunge, Thomas made a swift bolt towards what he intended to be the final tree before calling an end to the game. He had practically enough ammunition already to humiliate his prey and hid behind the large trunk, smiling with victory.

‘Here I am, Benjamin. Catch Me If You Can.’

He waited, but nothing happened. Then he heard a sound. A feeling of unease suddenly swept over him. What if Benjamin was running back home to his mother in tears? He emerged, expecting to see him in the distance, scurrying away, but instead, the boy was only a few yards away and the sound Thomas had heard was not sobbing, but gasping. The little boy then collapsed in a heap in front of his eyes and the body was still.

Thomas was a ten-year old child, without the instincts of an adult of the ‘right’, or even practical thing to do and his primary thought was the trouble he would be in, so he fled, sick with panic.

His fifty-year old self brought him back to the present. He picked up the shopping, together with the newspaper and parked outside the small bungalow he had come to know so well.

A familiar, grey-haired character, seated in an old wooden chair, smiled warmly at him.

‘’I’ve got your shopping, Mrs. Lovell,’ he said, placing the bag on the table. ‘And I’ve brought you a copy of the newspaper. It’s in there.’

It seemed to him that the time she took to read the obituary was disproportionate to its length, but she was obviously savouring each word.

‘You’ve always been so good to me, Thomas,’ she said, clutching his hand in hers. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you. And it was kind of you to put the notice in the paper. Thank you so much for arranging it.’