Perhaps it is the practice I have been getting with the interviewing of people, or maybe it is a lifelong skill that I simply never noticed, whatever it is, I appear to have an innate ability to get people to talk about stuff - without really trying. Take last week as an example. It was Saturday and it was national expose your flesh day. You know the one I mean. The one day in the year that the sun comes out and people everywhere, much like the ecstatic scrabbling of dogs looking for leads, tear open the doors of their closets and don the most optimistic item of clothing they own in order to celebrate April’s first five minutes of sunshine.
And so it was that I found myself in a strapless sun dress standing outside Somerfields in Brentford, yes, Brentford, at 7pm on a Saturday night. It was my old buddy Mark’s birthday and I had the dress to prove it. We met at The Brewery Tap. On arrival I was reminded of a previous visit, many moons ago. It was vaguely comparable to the scene in American Werewolf where our hero arrives at the back of beyond, pushes open the door to the local pub only to be met by rotating heads and the stony silence of a series of League of Gentlemen look-a-likes.
Except this time they were smiling. Kind of. ‘We don’t get your type around here much’. This was clearly what they were thinking as I perused the facilities. To the right, a pool table – still nobody on it! So far, so good. To the left, the judge and jury, a motley bunch consisting mainly of Brentford’s most ‘senior’ members, and, starboard, our host, stationed behind his taps, much like the captain behind the controls of a large sailing ship.
The pub might not have changed much but I have. I’m more of a driver than a drinker these days and I couldn’t resist half a lager in one of those glasses that looks like the thick glass windows of an old fashioned pub. You don’t get many of those to the pound in your average Gastro pub. Nope, there’s wasn’t a herb-crusted cod nor pan-fried frittata in sight at The Brewery Tap. This is what we would term ‘a proper boozer’. You’ll have a packet of pork scratchings and a pint of Young’s and be glad of it here at the Brewery Tap.
Now, I know I said I had an innate ability to get people to tell me stuff but I’m only half telling the truth. Mark began celebrating his birthday at around midday so I can’t take all the credit. Mr Lager played his part too. It was quite a scene as I stepped out into the self-designated young(er) persons area i.e. the garden. A lot of celebrating had clearly been done and one person was asleep on the table.
The birthday boy was having a fine old time, if you could only get a look behind his sunglasses – so the thing on a Saturday night out in Brentford. My good friend Tania had also been let out of the house for the night, a party girl if ever there was one and it wasn’t long before they were contemplating the piano action in the front bar. Yes ladies and gentleman, this wasn’t just any old real boozer. This was a real boozer where real old people sit around and listen, sometimes even joining in, to another real old person who plays the piano and sings. Tania looked like she had died and gone to heaven. I, meanwhile, spent some time getting to know the birthday guests. The first conversation went something like this:
Him: what do you do with your time then?
Me: I interview people about virginity loss.
Him: (raising eyebrows), I don’t actually remember losing my virginity but I am about to become a grandfather.
My turn to raise my eyebrows now and you would too if you were looking at what I was looking at.
Me: If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?
Him: I’m 39
Me: and how old is your expectant son or daughter?
Him: It’s my son, and he is 13
Here I will leave a long silence in which to contemplate this astonishing piece of news, although in real time I think I did continue to gabble about something whilst lifting up my jaw from its resting place on the pavement. Here was a normal enough looking man, of sane mind, no outward signs of poverty/ill-education or any other cliché ridden stereotype that you might care to reach for in order to explain such a calamity, telling me that his thirteen year old son is about to become a father. Tania has a son who is 13. He is a lovely boy but he still laughs if you tickle him. He is a child.
For the record, the man looked like he had been slapped about the face with a fish. And in amongst the lager, cigarettes and the warmth of a first Saturday evening spent outdoors, I felt sad for this man, and his son, and most of all, for a girl who had managed to conceal a tiny human being inside her body for almost seven months until the bump got too big and the game was up. We want to believe that this doesn’t happen in this day and age, but it does. Virginity loss can be every bit as dramatic now as it was for our parents.
Revelation number two pales a little in comparison but it is no less poignant. The owner of the tale was Dave, a forty two year old man, whom, as it turns out, was a frequent visitor to many of the same watering holes I frequented in my teens. The Cobwebs, The Bull and Bush and The Old Ship. We revisited them in our memories and then got onto first gigs.
Me: ‘My first gig on my own’, (up until13 years old, my brothers took me to gigs. Genesis, Echo and the Bunnymen, Blancmange, I was a pretty eclectic kid), ‘was the Hammersmith Palais to see Africa Bambaataa and The Soul Sonic Force’.
Him: ‘I was conceived outside the Hammersmith Palais’.
There’s not much to say to that except how the monkey nuts did that happen?
As it turned out, he was adopted and he didn’t find out this truly unique piece of information until years later when he questioned his birth mother and she told him the truth about her ‘situation’. Without going into too much detail, a night out at the Hammersmith Palais can be memorable for many a reason, not least for the fumble outside in the car that led to the birth, and the adoption of a son in 1966.
Perhaps I do have one of those faces. Or maybe we are just a generation who are happier with the truth. We no longer live in an era where pregnancy has to be concealed – unless you are thirteen years old. In a week when I was also told a story about a woman who gave birth to her second child and lost her husband to a heart attack on the same day, I realise that truth really is stranger than fiction. You don’t have to scratch the surface of most human beings too hard in order for them to tell you stories that you will never forget. We all have them. Perhaps I might write down a few of my own sometime.
Meanwhile, the party in the pub continued. Not only that, but the ice had begun to melt as Tania and Co talked the pub pianist into playing a selection of Elvis classics and the evening’s entertainment really got underway. Later, as Mark, with two fingers bandaged from an accident earlier in the week, attempted as good a rendition as you could ever expect to hear from a man with only eight digits of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, I fancied our geriatric audience were enjoying themselves more than they let on. But it still wasn’t quite like this in our day, they seemed to say. Actually it was. You just didn’t talk about it is all.
*All names have been changed to protect identity.
