40 years

When I was born in 1965, I was grreted by my parents, my paternal Grandmother, both my maternal grandparents and both my maternal great-grandparents.

I can barely remember my Grand-grandfather, and have no real memory of my great-grandmother, other than the house on Clapham Road they lived in. She kept a red grape vine, that according to family legend, she fed with blood from the abattoir.

My Great-Grandmother died about a year after I was born, and then Great-Grandad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, mover in with Nana and Grandad while he got weaker. Until one day he wasn't there, and when we went round, there was a wake with all the furniture moved out of the house, and it being filled with nothing but chairs.

That was my experience with death until Christmas Day 1984.

I had a small family, and it would appear that there were strong genes in both sides of the family, my maternal grandparents livinf into their late 80s, and my other Grandmother until she was 97. Death's cold hand would not touch my family until 1996.

1984 had been a bad year for me, Conservative economic policies wraught a bitter harvest on my generation. Myself, I had had two jobs that year: one a short order chef for just two short lunchtime shifts. I wasn't asked to go back a third day. And there was the five weeks I was a general help and car cleaner at a garage on Beccles Road.

So, when at half six on Christmas Eve, Marting, Jim and Chris came calling asked if I wanted to go out for the evening. I declined because I had no money, even when they said they would sub me. I have thought there must have been someting on TV I wanted to see, but looking online, because everything is there, there was a film: Once of our Dinosaurs is Missing, Only Fools and Horses, Cagney and Lacey and later, Val Doonican(!)

Details are misty now, 40 years distance, but at about 03:00, Martin was driving back past the college, and there was a taxi parked on the side of the road with headlights on full beam. Martin assumed, the taxi was on the right hand side of it, so went left, but instead mounted the pavement where a few yards on there was a very solid lamp post in the middle of the footway, and the car hit it doing (probably) more than 30mph.

Martin was thrown clear, and so survived, but Chris and Jim suffered fatal injuries.

Jim lived next door to us, so at half eight, Greta, his Mother, came round to tell me that James and Chris had been killed, as wel as (wrongly) Charlie. Could I go round to friends to tell them the news.

Not the job I thought I was going to do that morning.

First job was to go and tell Charlie's parents we thought their son had been killed. This turned out to not be the case when they went to his room to wake him up. I saw Simon on the way back, so flagged him down, then to Trevor's to ruin is Christmas as was best friends with both.

Charlie had bailed early so thing i would probably have done had I gone too

Early in January there were two huge finerals, pretty much the last time we, us friends, got to be together until 2009 when we had a reunion.

I puta post of the former pupil's Facebook group this year. In the past I would put messages in the local paper, but those papers are a thing of the past now. And 40 years does blur the memories, people posting the few photos they have in the Facebook group helps us to remember.

Christmas wasn't the best time to learn about death, but then worse for Jim and Chris's familes.