Friends

It may come as no small surprise to you to know that I have friends.

No, really. I do. Not many, it’s true but they are out there scattered about the World in miniscule clumps. This is in much the same way as I, too, am scattered about the world.

We have, I believe, become all too blasé about ‘friends’.

Perhaps it is because I am venerable that my mind lives in a time that is now old fashioned. Perhaps I am out of date. I have been overtaken by social events and developments that are beyond my understanding.

As a young man I lived where electricity was scarce. It could be found, if you looked very carefully, here and there in isolated patches where people who were regarded as ‘well-to-do’ lived.

We had no telephones and yet walked abroad for hours singly and in groups with no contact with anyone but our own thoughts and our immediate comrades.

Nobody worried about us. They knew we should be fine wherever we were.

We roamed the fields and pastures, through the woods and along the riverbanks, we strolled the cliff tops in season collecting gulls eggs for breakfast and combing the beaches for fascinating objects that, in our minds eye, had washed up from some foreign and exotic shoreline.

We drank from the river. We shared ice creams and sandwiches. We never got sick and none of us died from some dread accident. We never saw ghosts when we were out at night and none of us was abducted by aliens.

There were no computers. Our computing power was limited to pencil and paper; our portable device was a stick used to draw in the sand. We read. We read everything.

We made friends. Not many, it’s true. But we made friends.

We had fights in school and in the fields. Sometimes we should get home with a bloody nose. Dad would ask how the other person was. He never asked who started it. It was something that was expected because we were young; we were sorting out the pecking order.

We didn’t take people to court for some slight. Lawyers were for big things like buying a house. That didn’t bother us because buying houses was for the rich people. Those were the people who had cars.

We had the bus and, sometimes, the train until Dr. Beeching swung his mighty axe and closed all the local lines.

Nobody resented rich people. They, clearly, had earned their money and were entitled to it. Even those that had inherited money were fine with us. We ‘knew our place’ in society. We knew when to doff our caps; we knew that success, for us, was to learn a trade. The mark of success was to get on the bus each morning with a bag of tools, a lunch pack and a flask of tea to go and do a ‘proper job of work’.

I spoilt it.

I wrote a story in the ‘Eleven-Plus’ examination. It got me through the entrance to a classical education at the local Grammar School.

My friends went to the Secondary Modern school.

I was labelled a snob.

But I still had friends.

Many years of service in Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force meant meeting thousands of people. Most of them were also in the Air Force but some were in the Army and a few were in the military of other Nations.

There were quite a few Americans among those. The United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) had lots of good people based all over Germany and working in West Wales with the United States Navy (USN) was quite an eye-opener because we were in mixed accommodation.

Entertaining, that was.

We mixed with Germans and Belgians, Dutch and Norwegian, Danes and French. All sorts. All of them were good people.

Sometimes we called them ‘friends’ but they weren’t. Not really.

Now I live in Malaysia. I meet new people all the time. Good people. My Mother once said, “All the people I meet here in Malaysia are good people.” I found it hard to argue with that.

A few of them we call friends.

This is the modern trend. This is the idiom of the day. We have ‘friends’ on ‘Facebook’ but are they? Really? We have ‘Friends Reunited’ but is it really true?

When I was very young a friend would stand with you, back to back and fight off the oppressors. Sometimes they were the ‘big boys’, sometimes they were just many but a friend would put up with the ridicule and the pain and fight with you; support you; stand by you whatever the odds.

The rest were acquaintances.

Now I know lots of people. We talk on the computer; we have never met.

We call each other ‘friend’ because that is the way it is now.

There are very many people that I like. There are many people with whom I can disagree but still enjoy their company even if it is vicarious.

There are ‘people I know’, acquaintances and people I like.

A few, just a few, are friends.