Of all the people to bump into totally out of the blue, Christopher Hadley would have been up there, even though it had been all of 15 years.
We’d been in the same fourth year class at primary school, as it was in those days, so at the Watford Gap Services we must have both been 26-ish. One immediately funny thing was that I even remembered the date of his birthday, October the 29th. Mine was November the 19th, so he’d always be those 19 – sorry, 21 – days older than me.
I must have had that memory as part of the effect that Christopher had on me.
At school he was very clever, easily the cleverest boy in Mr Bloomfield’s class. We weren’t big mates as such. I was more into football and cricket than English and arithmetic, but I was certainly fascinated by him and his cleverness.
Part of it was the way he was with it. He was no boastful clever clogs. There was just a calm authority about Christopher Hadley, a kind of wisdom. His gentle smile was something else as well, and when he was saying something to a small group of us, myself mostly on the outside of things, he seemed to make a perfect kind of sense, his childhood words flowing all around us somehow.
I know it sounds really silly but I can even remember wondering, as he spoke during those dreamlike moments, if he was so much wiser than me because of those 21 days between us. It seemed like 21 years.
So here we both were stopping for a coffee, him heading back to London somewhere and me heading north to see someone in the family.
I saw him first, coming into the Costa area. I’m normally hopeless with names but great with faces. In this case it was both. He sat down three or four tables from me and actually looked in my direction without any signs of recognition on his part.
He was about five feet eight or nine, which made sense, and he had the same slightly egg-shaped Benedict Cumberbatch type of face; smart, clean-shaven and a small briefcase placed to his right at the table for two. He sipped his coffee and opened a novel.
I’ve never been slow at diving into situations. Why should we be? What’s the problem? So, after a couple of minutes, I sauntered over, excused myself and asked if he was Christopher Hadley. He smiled in that same friendly fashion and said he certainly was.
It was okay for me to sit down and rabbit on about how great it was to see him, about how we hadn’t been big mates but how I’d always liked him and been impressed by him. How cool he was long before it was cool to be cool.
He smiled again. ‘Good days, weren’t they? I was never much good at sport but you were.’
I asked him who he remembered most and he rattled off Roy O’Neill, Peter Tate and Kathleen Clarke.
‘Katie Clarke!’ I almost shouted. ‘I was totally in love with her. She used to get chapped lips but always seemed so grown up. She lived up the road from me in Battersby Road and I remember standing outside her gate one afternoon after school, not knowing what to do or say.
‘There was a terrible silence until I asked her in desperation when her birthday was. November, she said. November? I said, I’m November! What date? Nineteenth, she said. Nineteenth, I roared. That’s mine too! It was like we were married!’
‘What happened after that?’ asked Christopher.
‘Well, nothing really,’ I said. ‘I was hopeless. Years later I got it into my head that the way forward with women was to make them laugh or at least talk to them, and that helped. But you’re stuck with some things, I suppose. What about you? What are you up to?’
Christopher – he was never a Chris – flashed the same self-deprecating smile and said he was teaching creative writing at Durham University. It was some sort of holiday and he was visiting his parents in Honor Oak. His girlfriend, Helen, who also worked at the university, had headed north to Edinburgh for the break.
At that time, I told him, I was working for a semi-professional football club, coaching the junior lads and doing most of the writing for the match day programme. ‘I really enjoy the writing,’ I told Christopher. ‘I write match reports and pen pictures of the players, and I try to make them more interesting than the usual guff, adding a touch of humour here and there and giving one or two players nicknames to brighten it all up – like The Grinch and Gargamel from The Smurfs, my assistant coach and a volunteer.’
Christopher seemed to take a real interest, which encouraged me to dive in further. I’m like that, given half the chance. ‘To tell the truth,’ I said, ‘I’d love to write short stories. Not novels – they’d be beyond me. Just short ones with maybe a simple message and twist in the tail. D’you think I should join a creative writing class?’
‘You could do,’ said Christopher. ‘You’d pick up some good tips, I’m sure. But you’ve already got the energy and enthusiasm from your match reports, so why not bash something out, about a thousand words? It’s not a lot, once you get going. We can exchange emails and you can send them to me to have a look, if you like.’
I couldn’t have been more pleased. Meeting Christopher Hadley and staying in touch. As we exchanged email addresses, Christopher added a little bit of advice: ‘Why not think of people or situations that had a great or interesting effect on you or your life, whenever it was, and turn them into fiction?’
We shook hands firmly, and I said: ‘Good idea, Christopher!’
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