The joy and sorrow of innocent days

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 24, 2007 

When I was five, I loved the boy who lived next door. He was the same age and same shape as me - quick and naughty and fidgety. I don't know what it was about him but every time I saw him I just wanted to sigh with pleasure as something clicked into place.

His house was to the left of ours - similar but bigger - and the road was sunny and calm and on Sundays the gutters turned soapy as all the dads washed their cars. Our mums were friends and so, probably, were our dads and he had a baby brother and I had two baby sisters but we lived our whole lives in the sandpit, white sand running through our fingers and getting in our shoes.

Though he didn't look it, my friend was ill and so was his brother. They had the same illness. I didn't know what. All I knew was it wasn't the same as, for instance, when my sisters and I all had the measles at Christmas and had to stay in our dressing gowns for lunch. And it wasn't the same as the time that mum took me to see Dr Jolly, who lived across the road, because a wasp had stung my finger.

Actually, the way in which he was ill didn't really matter because it never showed. He was fun. We had fun. We pretended to be Indians and ran around both gardens - his and mine. We ran up and down the stairs in both our houses, shouting so loudly that our mums shouted back at us. One time, when we were playing in his house, he pointed to a glass door. "Lean against it," he commanded and I did but there was no glass in it and I fell and banged my head. He thought it was very funny and, once I'd finished crying, so did I.

He had no pets (or was there a cat?) but we had two yellow canaries, Hickory and Tick-Tock. Hickory was the boy and Tick-Tock was the girl. One day Hickory just fell off his perch and died. I don't know why. We were so sad and so was Tick-Tock. Mum said we should all hold hands and walk round slowly in a circle and sing All Things Bright and Beautiful, so we did.

We buried Hickory in the garden, under the rose bushes where my sister once climbed in wearing just a nappy and had to have all the prickles pulled out of her bottom. It was a bad place to fall but a good place to be buried. When my friend and I were in the sandpit, we could look up and see Hickory's little wooden cross made of two ice lolly sticks stuck together.

Not long after we buried Hickory, my friend's baby brother also died. It was odd to have him die when, just a few days before, we'd seen him being held by his mum and waving to us from an upstairs window.

He was too small to wave by himself so she helped him, holding his little hand and making it go up and down. We waved back - hopping and jumping in the sandpit - and he laughed and he didn't look at all like he was about to die. But then Hickory hadn't either. Just like with Hickory, we sang All Things Bright and Beautiful, only this time our mums cried.

My friend and I carried on playing in the sandpit. "Is your brother in heaven?" I asked him. He didn't look at me. He was concentrating on making a channel between two humps of sand. "He's at peace," he said.

I told him we might get a new canary. "Good," he said.

A couple of years later we moved house and I don't know if our mums kept in touch or what but I don't remember seeing him after that. I don't remember thinking about him either, though I must have. I did see him once, years later, when we were both about 13, but I hated boys by then and he was shy and wouldn't look at me. He said he was going to be an ornithologist.

"What's that?"

"Someone who likes birds - the feathered kind."

When I was researching my book, I revisited that house I'd lived in when I was five. The elderly man who lived there told me my friend's parents were still, 40 years on, in the house next door. "But both boys died," he said.

"Both? Are you sure?"

"Yes, oh yes. One as a baby, the other as a teenager. Cystic fibrosis - a terrible thing. Very sad for the parents."

I think of my friend quite often these days - very often actually, considering how long ago I knew him and how little claim I would have had on the person he might have grown into. It's the quick, clean shape of him that I remember - a flash of blond hair hurtling down the lawn and the frowny set of his jaw when he thought hard about something.

And I remember the doctor coming round and giving us both our polio boosters - a white lump of sugar with sour stuff on it - and us crunching it in our teeth and then racing round the garden, laughing, to get rid of the taste, while the soon-to-be-dead baby brother waved and smiled at the window.