Four Summers III – 1995

Back To Burton Street

NOW – 1/6/06

I was talking with Alex not long ago, and we were speaking of things from the old days, and I made some comment about how, back then, there were so many things that happened in such a short space of time. He looked a bit blank, and asked what I meant. I explained that, to the best of my recollection, the era in question, which I always measure by the duration of my residency at number 19 Burton Street from the day I moved in to the day I moved out, was about twenty-one months. This meant, I explained, that all our adventures and misadventures, our highs, lows, moments of despair, tragedy, elation, and success, our loves and our lost loves, our multitude of drink-fuelled and petrol-driven escapades, our brushes with the law, the DHSS, the council, and local criminals, our days of doing all kinds of things and many more of doing very little, all took place in less than two years, and the very best times of all in little more than one.

Alex couldn’t believe it for a minute, but it started to sink in, and he admitted that he’d never, in recent years, thought about how short a time we, and the rest of our little group, spent together. Friendships within the gang extended before and after the year of 1995, or more precisely the period from October of 1994 to July of 1996, and obviously Alex and Kate had known each other all their lives. Add that to the way friendships have a way of coming and going, and then coming back, over the years, and it’s difficult to imagine a defined period of time from when a friendship started, and when that friendship became a circle of friends, and when that circle got up to became a definable era, and of course, when that era came to an end, a circle of friends became reduced to a friendship, a friendship that came to an end. There was some sort of circularity to the Burton Street days, if you want to call them that, and in the intervening years it’s been difficult for many of us to think about them because they did have such great highs, and such unpleasant lows. However, from the distance of a full decade, it’s become easier to look back, particularly now the main protagonists are all friends once again, friends who go out drinking and talking about football, and writing, and – of course – those good, bad old days.


THEN – 26/6/95

19 Burton Street was a big, three storey house at the end of a terrace of Victorian dwellings. It was owned by Steve’s parents, and although they had lived in it many years previously, it was now split into five separate ‘flats’ with communal bathroom, shower, toilet, and kitchen facilities. It had been intended for students, but by the summer of 1995, its final resident in full-time education had departed, and its occupants consisted entirely of former Burleigh Community College students who, for the majority of the time, got on pretty well with each other.

Flat five, the top floor of the house, which was split into a bedroom, a living room, and a study, was Steve’s. Half-way down the stairs to the first floor, was the shower room, and on the second floor itself was the bathroom, flat three, which was occupied by Beth McNeil, and flat four, which was the occasional residence of Simon Clewlow, another one-time member of the theatre studies A level group of 1994, although frequently he would disappear for several days and then reappear with no explanation as to his whereabouts during the interim. Underneath the shower room, in a room off the stairs in-between the first and ground floors, was the toilet, where a spider that I christened ‘Boris’ lived for a long time. When Boris died or moved on, another arachnid that I took no time at all in naming ‘Boris II’ took his place. The ground floor consisted of the kitchen, flat one, which was mine, and flat one, which at the time stood empty, save for a bed, a wardrobe, and a table. However, it was only very recently that it had been vacated. Regular readers may recall that in a previous episode of Four Summers I wrote:

“…our rugby playing student flat-mate from Wigan Tony Heaton had moved out, taking his pornographic playing cards, his facial injuries, and the mystery of the girl whom he claimed was “his sister”, with him. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a time or a place to tell the full story of Tony, and the extent of his bizarre behaviour and lifestyle, but I hope there is.”

There is, and it’s right here.

TONY

Before we went to Glastonbury, flat one had been occupied by Tony Heaton, a business studies student from Wigan. During our sojourn in Somerset, he had moved out with several hundred pounds’ worth of rent still owing, and his whereabouts since that day remain unknown, although we did see him in the Griffin a few months later sporting a goatee beard, which was as incongruous on him as the lack of sporting injuries, because, while he lived with us, he regularly appeared with a black eye or a broken nose, which he blamed on the games of rugby he regularly participated in. However, it’s quite possible some came from his side-line in promotional work, in which he regularly dressed up as cartoon and computer game characters, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, work which he claimed he got through “his sister”, although it has never been conclusively established if the were really related, or if she was actually another of his many dubious female acquaintances, of whom more anon.

The reason Tony may have acquired facial injuries whilst dressing up as Sonic the Hedgehog may not immediately be apparent, but the appearances in costume were mainly in shopping centres outside new computer and console game shops, where even a big rugby player is defenceless against gangs of teenage lads jumping him whilst wearing a bulky costume and an immense, fibre-glass head. After one too many encounters like this, Tony began recruiting for others to dress up as Sonic, whilst he acted as ‘security’. Liz Marshall, one-time Burton Street resident and girlfriend of Steve, did it once, and so did I, earning the best money I ever have in my life – a hundred quid for standing outside a shop in Bedford for a few hours. Despite the heat, and the heaviness of the head, it was almost enjoyable, particularly – and I may sound a bit soft here for just a moment – the excitement on the little kids faces at seeing Sonic the Hedgehog. “You’re my hero”, a little girl told ‘me’. Looking back, it sounds a bit sad that a computer generated hedgehog could be anybody’s hero, even a five year olds, but at the time it felt quite nice to be bringing a little ray of sunshine into somebody’s day, no matter how it was accomplished. The only real downside of the day was having to spend the journey there and back in Tony’s battered old Vauxhall Cavalier, which he seemed incapable of driving safely, possibly due to the fluffy dice, and non-smoking sign that dangled from the rear view mirror.

As well as bringing us occasional employment, Tony had also contributed a microwave that wouldn’t switch off at the end of a cooking cycle, and a toaster that either didn’t work at all or worked too well. When he moved into the house, he also gave out a load of free noodles and a can of Harp lager to each housemate. The noodles not only survived his tenure in the house, but they were also there a year later when I moved out. Other “contributions” he made were his pornographic playing guards, a massive poster of Pamela Anderson that hung above his fireplace, and his bizarre love life. Although several girls stayed over in his room during the early part of his tenancy, there didn’t seem to be a regular partner in his life, until the appearance of one girl who regularly tried to contact him by turning up unannounced at the house, sometimes in tears, desperate to speak to him. Whenever she appeared, Tony would cower in his room, leaving the rest of us to tell the poor girl that he was out, and no, we didn’t know when he’d be back. However, with a degree of cunning, she finally caught up with him a few nights later, by hiding in the phone box across the road, calling our house number, and when Tony answered it, she dashed across the road, banged on the door, and finally got to speak to him.

We never discovered whom she was, or what was going on between her and Tony. Nor did we establish the true relationship between Tony and another girl, who stayed in his room for several weeks. He told us that she was “his sister”, although whether this was a) his real sister, b) the girl who got him his promotional work, or c) another girl entirely and he was simply using the term “sister” as a cover for a multitude of female acquaintances, we never found out. Nor did we ever really work out his true feelings for Beth, because for a while, to her dismay, he seemed quite smitten by her, constantly springing to her defence in any argument, and once accusing Simon of taking advantage of her. He also tried to set up a surprise party for her nineteenth birthday, which didn’t really work out as planned, and took to going into Beth’s room in the evening for no particular reason. The final straw came when, after a long and boring conversation with Tony – no doubt with him doing most of the talking - she fell asleep on Tony’s bed, and awoke to find him watching her from his armchair – at that moment, she made it clear that there could never, ever, be anything between them, leaving Tony with just his Pamela Anderson poster and his collection of pornographic playing cards.

While Beth was probably most pleased by his departure, it was something of a relief for myself also, because in the last couple of months before he left, Tony had gone inexplicably mad, and started watching his television with the sound turned up to its highest volume, making it clearly audible in the room next to his – mine. We’d read somewhere that watching the telly with an excessive volume was the sign of some mental disturbance, and that Tony had gone a bit funny was made more explicit to us shortly afterwards, when we saw him taking his teapot into the street for a walk. Because of this, and the fact that he was vastly bigger than us, we kept our nicknames for him – Mr Meticulous, after he refuted one of Beth’s friends’ allegation that McDonalds staff masturbated into the mayonnaise (“they have very meticulous hygiene standards”), and Mr Placid, because he frequently said “I’m a very placid person”, despite also alleging that he was “the hardest man in Wigan” – strictly between ourselves, although we didn’t completely succeed. When he heard Beth saying something was “meticulous”, he replied, “you can shut up, and all.”

And then, without a goodbye to us (except possibly to Beth and Simon), he was gone, and that one occasion in the Griffin aside, we never saw him again. Wherever he is now – probably back in Wigan, being meticulously placid despite his hardness – I’m sure he’s probably still driving a car, with no-smoking sign and fluffy dice, and playing rugby at the weekends. Whether he still takes his teapot out for walks, I fear we shall never know.

THEN AGAIN – 1/7/95

With Tony gone, the last vestige of the first era of my tenure living at Burton Street, when Karl, Valerie, and Liz all lived there, and every one was at college or university except me, disappeared. I’ve already written about Liz’s departure, and although it’s tempting, now is not the time to discuss Karl and Valerie, and what happened while they lived in the house, or how they left. For now, it’s sufficient to point out that they were all gone, and the residents for the duration of the summer of 1995 were Steve, Beth, Simon, and myself. As far as I can recall, Steve and I didn’t really see much of Beth or Simon on a day-to-day basis. With the latter working first at a place called the Friendly Hotel, and then a newly opened Tesco superstore most days, and Simon doing whatever it was that he did for money – I think he worked in an unlamented bar called Busters, but that might have been his “uncle”, a figure almost as legendary and notorious in Burton Street folklore as Tony’s “sister” – their days didn’t really interact with ours. We saw them from time to time in the evening, either at home, or at the pub, but their lives didn’t really interact with ours in the way that it could – and perhaps, it should – have done.

Meanwhile, I stopped taking my Prozac, started writing a diary, started learning to drive, and also started working with Steve and his dad. Well, I say ‘worked’… it wasn’t really work, although it frequently became as stressful and disappointing as work can be, and at other times as lucrative and rewarding as work can be, in both the financial sense and in the sense that one has achieved something through what one has been doing. I won’t say here precisely what it was that we did – partly because it’s something that we kept very quiet about at the time, and partly because, as I understand it, there’s still somebody who makes a living from it, or at least, there used to be, and he was the only person apart from me, Steve, and his dad, that did know. I don’t know if either of these reasons are a good enough excuse to not detail how we made our money back in those days, but somehow I feel that it’s best not to explain everything here. People did find out certain things, as the months went on – Steve told Kate what we did, if not how we did it, I told Kim something similar, and Ian discovered some part of it from somebody who saw us going somewhere, for example – but these were isolated examples of people knowing, and I only found out that Ian had some inkling about what it a long time after it had finished.

I’ve made the whole thing sound more cloak-and-dagger than it sounds, I know, but it’s difficult to say anything without making some allusion to what we did, which, as I told Beth, and Ian, and Alex, and anyone else who asked at the time, wasn’t anything illegal, wasn’t something to be ashamed of, and also, wasn’t any kind of work that affected me claiming the dole every fortnight, so when I told the lady at the job centre every second Wednesday that I hadn’t worked in the previous two weeks, I was telling the truth. I didn’t make a vast fortune doing it, and there were some days when I didn’t make any money whatsoever. It could be great fun, and it could be terribly frustrating – probably just as frustrating as it is to read about something without actually knowing what it is that you’re reading about. But I won’t say anymore, not in this version of Four Summers, anyway. It’s enough to know that this work that we did was always in the afternoon, and it always came after a brunch consisting of a toasted bacon sandwich and a big mug of tea at the Coffee Pot, a venue that is still Loughborough’s best café, and is still run by Mario, the chap who ran it back in 1995. As if to prove he’s the best in the business, Mario remembered me when I went in there almost a decade later at Christmas, 2004, and wasn’t surprised to see me order the same thing I used to order back in the day. In a moment of pure serendipity, that has everything and nothing to do with the Burton Street days, and the story that surrounds them, Steve also turned up in there, and we sat together and drank tea, and chatted, almost like it was the old days. The only thing that didn’t fit in was that the girls working for Mario had changed, and he didn’t have a packet of Benson and Hedges in his shirt pocket. Sometimes, the distance between then and now is so small that you can almost reach out and touch the past. Almost.
 

To be continued...