Free Lost Lad by Narvel Annable

factory!     
     
    No one had thought to ask about birthdays.  It would have come as a surprise to all members of that particular quartet to find that at the start of July of 1960, they were all still fourteen years old, and all of them born within six days of each other.  For all his bulges in all the right places and manly maturity, the tall athletic Scott was in fact the youngest of that group and two days younger than the twins who were born on the very day when the first ever atomic bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert by the Americans.  The flash on that day, which was seen 250 miles away, had cast a shadow over all their lives.  The threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present with frightening TV images of a furious little fat bald-headed Nikita Khruschev banging the table at the United Nations with his shoe and threatening to 'bury' us!  The prospect of dying a virgin was a constant worry to Dobba.
               
    But not a worry to the 1960 version of 'The Fonz', when one lazy Saturday afternoon he raced over to Stanley Common to pick up Dobba to accompany him on a cycle ride to Matlock Bath.  Hurtling north along the (then quieter) A6, under the mottled glades of overhanging woods, eventually they reached the picturesque Swiss-like resort with its cheerful parade of gift shops and cafes.  The lads took comfort and rest, slowly sipping hot steaming tea from old quaint cups.  They sat in an ancient tea shop which had probably not changed in half a century, except for the radio, somewhere playing in the back kitchen.  Simeon was savouring his tea, trying to catch fragments of lyrics, intermingled with pizzicato strings which enhanced the silvery tones and adolescent nasal sounds of Adam Faith -
                " ... but I can't, resist, the thought of being kissed by - someone else's baby ..."    
               
    A beautiful tune which stayed dancing around his head for the whole of that day. 
                They ended up in a rowing boat on the Derwent, deep down inside a heavily wooded green and dank rocky ravine in a soup of delicious air, thick with the scent of ramsons.  Girlie giggles from aloft floated down through the sun glinting ferns causing them to look up to see two wenches giving friendly waves.  Dobba, embarrassed and awkward was relieved when his companion, panting and struggling with oars, gave an appropriate 'Heanor style' response -
                "Ave got energy fa you dook, but not fa this!"
     
    High summer endured day after day and mid-July saw the same two friends on that same river just north of the Belper River Gardens.  In that gentle, civilised, lost world of Kenneth Grahame, after the style of Rat and Mole, they drifted under the willows enjoying the mottled reflected sunshine under the riverside foliage and heard the friendly Derwent rhythmically lapping their little boat. 
                Simeon Hogg was fully aware of the total magic and enchantment of that long summer and fully aware that it would not and could not last.  It was all held together by Howitt.  The friends and friendship and the stage upon which to perform.  Like an ugly unknown blackness, leaving day was remorselessly approaching, followed by the chill wind of autumn.  Soon Simeon would be unwillingly creeping away from school.
     
    Overhead, the occasional flash of white from magpies, and the dank nostalgic scent of tiny starred wild garlic from the bank.  The passenger looked affectionately at the happy golden oarsman laughing and splashing and thought -  "It will never get better than this!"
     
    And it never did.
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    Journey to the Far North
     
    The approach to the end of term was tinged with sadness.  Very soon the Howitt lads would be going their separate ways, into the big world, to work for a living.  Responsibility and a harder discipline was not to their taste.
               
    Having failed to