The Summer Of Billy

Jeez, nothing like a warm early summer morning to send a fella off down the rambling road of rumination.

Maybe summer is the season that best connects us to both our real and our perpetually reimagined youth?

Only sun, heat and shrieking fun remembered, never the torpor of yet another pointless rainy Sunday afternoon, when even Pluto the adorable over-fed beagle couldn’t be bothered to rise from his kitchen floor inertia.

No routine back then to clog our young and fidgety thoughts, even though the routine of mother and home was what actually freed us to wander and wonder.

I mean you wouldn’t have the time to build that rickety tree house in the woods, or smoke those first lung-fumigating cigarettes in that dilapidated farmhouse if you also had to make your own dinner, would you? 

Responsible, then, for nothing except the gathering of the experiences I now endlessly curate. 

Leaning on the fence out back this morning, as Bella and Lily sniffed and pawed through the wispy wasteland scrub, my forehead glowing as the hazy sun pulsated in the barely blue sky, I became lost to birdsong and present sensation: for I was back in The Summer Of Billy.

I was 12, and he was 14 … I hadn’t even known up to then I was a know-nothing small town country lad until I met Billy.

Billy spoke like a film character, a London boy … but he didn’t act like this made him special, or superior … just me feeling limited for the first time as he wittered nonchalantly of things and places in the vast and teeming cosmopolitan melting pot that London seemed to represent … 

Football matches with thousands of people jostling and chanting on enormous heaving terraces, drinking Bovril and singing naughty songs about Tottenham, or West Ham when they were playing his Arsenal …

London … stately stone bridges across the rapid Thames … flaming lamplights … nifty sports cars and Michael Caine … Jack The Ripper slashing his way through smoggy Victorian alleyways … Royal castles, Beefeaters and jewelled queens … thwocking cricket bats and cockney rhyming slang …

And Billy, this child of that sprawling metropolis happy now to beat thistles and behead dandelions with a gathered stick as we wandered out the bog road, or snorting as we tickled wonderful old Pluto, who had his own chair in two different houses, and the joy of Billy laughing himself silly the day I coloured Pluto’s eyebrows in with black polish.

Billy’s parents were both from our town, but had met in London. His dad would eventually move back and open a pub in our town.

Billy couldn’t tell me what his dad worked at, but he earned a hundred pounds a week … sure only movie stars had that kind of money … no wonder he was able to buy a pub …

The thwock of little stones against the bedroom window, and a grinning Billy — always grinning Billy — below, in the only shirt I ever remember him in, short-sleeved, kind of military olive, with those epaulette things buttoned down on the shoulders …

We were going to climb the Devil’s Bit mountain three miles out the Borrisoleigh road …stopping off at that funny old shop on Barrack Street, behind the Garda depot, and which only opened when you rang the door bell …

The old grey-haired lady in her frilly shop coat and glasses on a string, as we bought two bottles of warm RC Cola and a had little brown paper bag filled with golfball chewing gums and some sweet cigarettes.

Feck knows what we talked about as we skittered along … maybe that was the day he told me my first ever knock-knock jokes … ‘Knock, knock’ -— ‘Who’s there? — ’Euripides’ — ‘Euripides who?’ — ‘Euripides trousers and you’ll have to buy me a new pair’ …

Still there, lodged forever in my skull, and you think of the gems of civilisation and culture that have vanished as quickly as they entered this same noggin …

 Billy and I were soon at the Devil’s Bit summit … sure really it was only a grassy hill and only involved a gambol up through swishy grass on well trampled green and path, to the two rocky outcrops up top … the Long Rock and the Small Rock, and the gap between them that the Devil himself made when he supposedly bit into the mountain and spat it out to in Cashel, 20 miles away, to form the famous Rock of Cashel, the ancient seat of the High Kings of Munster.

The huge mildewed once white Marian cross on the summit, visible for miles and miles around, looked pretty puny up close but we were the real Kings of Munster now as he whooped and hollered out over our might domaine … you could see the counties of Kilkenny, Tipperary, Limerick, Offaly and Laois, we were told in school …

Being one of six children … four boys … and always in a gaggle of brothers or cronies … hanging out with Billy was my first intimation of exclusivity in a friendship … and it was intoxicating, intriguing, and exhilarating …

Years later, it feels like such a formative experience, a vital step towards my sense of a self alone … part and apart …

I didn’t know why, but it really was important to me that this funny, friendly and impossibly exotic boy from swinging, swaggering London was happy to hang out with me, to come thwocking stones against my window in those enchanting early first hours of sunlight, when the world is young and gleaming, and days are long and full of possibility.

Summers end, so they can begin again when winter, spring and the rest have had their turns, and each season unravels its mysteries and traditions … and all too soon Billy was back in London …

There were no letters, or any of that nostalgic stuff you’d read about in novels … in reality, I don’t think I was really capable yet of looking beyond the now and the immediate tomorrow, so there was no lamenting the absence of a boy I had never even called a friend to his face …

I just assumed that, just as the burgeoning leaves turn red and russet, and fall away to allow the next buds to begin, that Billy would be back again in his season …

No preparing me, then, for the news not that long afterwards that Billy had drowned … drowned in that same rapid Thames of myth and poetry …

Because we only heard about it weeks after Billy drowned, there was no funeral or florid farewells, just a delayed and gnawing shock and sadness, and I reckon that luckily for me, my naivety protected me from the worst excesses of what grief I would have felt if I was properly capable of it …

Still, I think of him so often, and the many things Billy’s death at the age of 14 represents … 

The weight of sheer and total loss, of course … snuffed out potential and possibilities … the bewildering banality of allowing this smiley, cheerful fellow, my friend … to come into a world that so casually and pointlessly discarded him long before his proper time.

And maybe I imagined it, though I think not, how Billy’s family were marked by his passing …

The whole family moved back to our town eventually, and I hung out with Billy’s brothers at times, and his mum and dad were so lovely … but I never felt the same connection with them that I had experienced that one summer with Billy …

I moved on, knowing they never did … none of them … not really …

So I lead Bella and Lily home this morning, feed and water them and all that … make my own breakfast, load up the coffee, and retire to my little writing den and the living room of my heart … to live again that Devil’s Bit adventure …

 The warm breeze wafting in through the shutter lats as I wallow once again in the Summer of Billy.