Leaving The Man Behind (short story)

I grew up before the invention of the internet. When making a phone call meant walking to the end of the street to use the phone box. When the biggest craze was the yo-yo and we all had bicycles. We had one rule to abide by; get home before it gets dark. We didn't spend hours on the x-box or PlayStation. Instead, we built swings in trees and raced our bikes through the woods.

My best friend was James Davies. Jimmy to me and the rest of the kids in school. We lived on opposite ends of the same street - he lived the posh end, close to the park. I lived the other end, closer to the school and store. His Dad was a Captain in the RAF. Mine was a steel worker in the factory. His Mum wore Chanel lipstick. I once caught my mum carefully rubbing a pickled beetroot on her lips.

We were chalk and cheese, but we were also joined at the hip. Summer break meant weeks of adventure time; hunting rabbits with air riffles, chasing sheep in the fields, building tree houses. We read comics and The Secret Seven, dreamed of changing the world and inventing something spectacular. We wondered over Apollo and even built our own space ship out of cardboard boxes and tin foil. 

Jimmy's Mum and Dad put up with me, but I knew that I was not the kind of friend that they wanted their precious James to have. They were proper middle class, I wasn't. Jimmy should have been in a boarding school somewhere, but he said that as long as his father’s invalid parents lived in the retirement home, they couldn't afford to send him away. The only time I ever saw the serious side to Jimmy was when he talked about how scared he was of his grandparents dying. As soon as they did that, he'd be sent away.

When we were nine, I saw the marks on Jimmy's back where his father’s belt had been. Jimmy said that he'd deserved it, and that it hadn't really hurt, but I could tell he was lying. Captain Davies had been in the Second World War and said that as a fighter pilot, he'd dropped hundreds of bombs on the Germans. But Jimmy told me that he'd heard him talking to his Mum one evening, and that he was actually a supply pilot, and had only ever flown around the country delivering stuff to the troops. But regardless of that, Jimmy feared his father. When he heard the boom of his voice down the street, he’d drop whatever we was doing and run as fast as he could to get home.

As carefree as Jimmy appeared, he still obeyed his father’s every word.

It was the summer of '72 and we were twelve years old. It had taken a hell of a lot of work, but we'd managed to persuade our parents to let us go camping overnight in the fields just a few miles from home. 

Jimmy had a two man tent. Nothing special, and smaller than our outhouse, but for two intrepid explorers, it was our mansion. My mother had packed us some food. A lot of food. Tinned pork sandwiches, apples and banana’s, 4 bottles of pop, and even a pack of ginger snaps. Jimmy’s mother had also supplied us with 2 water canteens and even more sandwiches. Jam sandwiches, as it turned out. Perfect fuel.

We set up camp on the edge of the field, on a rise. From under the leaves of the huge tree, we could see all of the land stretch away before us. The sheep and cows, the road cutting the landscape in two with a dark grey slash of tarmac. We were kings of our land.

We built our tent, and stored our food and blankets inside so the pretend wolves wouldn’t get to it. We then proceeded to have a great battle, with thousands of pretend troops fighting for their freedom and their lands. Jimmy won.