Fifty-five years ago four of us promised to meet back at the same bench by the same lake. Yesterday I drove out there expecting nobody. There was no one on that bench — there were three boxes on it, and a phone taped to the arm rail, ringing.
PART 1 — THREE BOXES
In 1970 there were four of us.
Bram Lunt, Ozzie Drexel, Pasco Vey and me, and every afternoon of every summer from about 1966 we were at the small lake past the quarry road outside Thistlewaite.
There is a wooden bench down at the north end of it. It was ours the way things are yours at fifteen, which is completely and without anybody granting it.
On the night we finished school, the four of us sat on that bench at about two in the morning and made a promise.
Fifty-five years from that night, wherever we were, we would come back to it. Same bench. Same lake.
It was Pasco's idea and he was the one who said fifty-five, because somebody said fifty and he said fifty was a number people actually manage and the point was to pick one that would be hard.
We were seventeen and we thought that was very funny.
Then life did the thing life does.
Bram's family went to Australia inside a year. Ozzie went to Germany for work in 1974 and stayed. Pasco married a woman from Portugal in 1979 and I have never met her.
I stayed. I am the only one of the four of us who never went anywhere at all.
We wrote for a while. Then postcards. Then nothing, and nobody decided that and nobody noticed it happening.
I did not forget the promise. Not for one year.
I want to be honest that for most of those fifty-five years it was a private thing that I turned over the way you turn over an old coin in a pocket, and that from about 2010 it started keeping me awake.
As this year came round I told myself repeatedly not to build anything on it. Fifty-five years is an unreasonable thing to ask of three old men on three continents.
I drove out there yesterday anyway. Thirty-one minutes. My hands were not steady on the wheel and I had to stop once on the quarry road.
I came down the path through the trees at about quarter to eleven in the morning.
There was nobody on that bench.
There were three cardboard boxes on it. Different sizes. One of them had customs tape on it and a lot of writing.
And there was a mobile phone gaffer-taped to the iron arm rail at the end of the bench.
It started ringing while I was standing eleven feet away looking at it.
PART 2 — THE SHOEBOX
I have had a good life and I want that established before any of the rest of it, because this is not a story about a man who was lonely for fifty-five years.
I worked at the water board for thirty-four years. I married Rosalind in 1977 and we had Ellis in 1981 and she died in 2016 and I miss her every single day in a way that has stopped being an emergency.
Ellis is forty-four. He is a good son. He rings me on Sundays.
Two years ago he and his wife did a seventieth for me at the golf club. About thirty people, which was more than I wanted and exactly right.
I had brought a shoebox.
Photographs. Four boys at a lake between about 1967 and 1970, and a picture of that bench with all four of us on it that Bram's sister took on a Kodak in the July of 1969.
I got it out at the end of the meal because somebody had asked how long I had lived in Thistlewaite, and I started telling them about the promise.
I had got about as far as Pasco picking the number.
And Ellis came round the table and took the box out of my hands.
He put the lid back on it and held it against his side.
And he said, to thirty people:
"Give me that, Dad. Nobody's coming. Put it away before you embarrass yourself in front of everybody."
The room went quiet.
Thirty people. My brother-in-law four feet away. Two women Rosalind had worked with for twenty years.
Somebody laughed, the small kind, the kind that is meant to be a rescue and is not.
Nobody said one word.
And I said, "Right you are," and he put that shoebox behind the bar with the coats.
I did not mention the promise again for two years.
Not to Ellis, not to anybody. When the date started getting close this spring I did not tell one living person I was thinking about it, including my own son, and on the morning I drove out there I told him I was going to the garden centre.
Seventy-two years old, lying to a forty-four-year-old man about where I was going.
PART 3 — WHAT WAS IN THEM
The phone was Pasco.
I will come back to that, because I need to put down what was in those boxes first, and I did not open them at the lake. I sat on that bench with a phone against my ear for fifty-one minutes and then I put all three in the back of the car and opened them on my own kitchen table at about four in the afternoon.
The one with the customs tape was from Australia.
Bram Lunt died in the November of 2019. Lung. He was sixty-six.
His daughter Perrin packed that box. In it there is a wooden paddle off a rowing boat with four sets of initials burned into the blade with a soldering iron, which we did in 1969 and which I had completely forgotten existed.
And there are eleven letters, in a bundle, addressed to me at my mother's house on Sallow Road, postmarked between 1988 and 1997, every one of them marked returned.
My mother sold that house in 1986.
The second box came from Bavaria.
Ozzie Drexel died in the March of 2023. Heart. He was seventy.
His son Lukas sent a tin, and in the tin among other things is a photograph, printed, dated on the back in biro: the ninth of August 2014.
It is that bench. It is empty except for Ozzie Drexel sitting on the left end of it in a blue jacket, on his own, arms folded, looking at the camera on a timer.
He came in 2014. He got the year wrong. He thought it was the forty-fifth and that we were doing something for it, and he flew to this country and drove to that lake and sat on that bench and nobody came.
He was eleven miles from my house.
And the third box is from Portugal and it is the only one that was packed by a man who is still alive.
In it, in a plastic sleeve, is the back page of a school programme from the July of 1970, with four signatures on it and a date written in Pasco Vey's handwriting.
We wrote it down. I had no memory of that whatsoever.
He has had it for fifty-five years.
PART 4 — FIFTY-ONE MINUTES
Pasco Vey is seventy-two and he is in a hospice outside Setúbal and has been since the January.
He rang that phone at ten forty-eight in the morning, Portuguese time being what it is, and he rang it again eleven minutes later, and I picked it up the second time because I had spent the first call standing eleven feet away being unable to walk toward it.
The first thing he said was, "Dun. Is it you or is it a dog walker."
We talked for fifty-one minutes.
He spent the last eleven months organising it from a bed.
He found Perrin Lunt through a memorial page in the January. He found Lukas Drexel in the February, through a company Ozzie had worked at, which took him six weeks and about forty emails.
He asked both of them for a box. He did not tell them why at first because he thought it sounded mad, and he told me that Perrin Lunt rang him from Australia and cried at him for twenty minutes.
He paid a woman in this county called Ceri Oyelaran, who runs an errands business, forty dollars to collect three boxes from a depot, drive them to a lake she had never heard of, put them on a specific bench, and tape a phone to the rail.
He told her that if nobody had picked it up by three in the afternoon she was to go back and take everything away and nobody was ever to know.
I asked him why he had not just rung me.
And Pasco Vey said, "Because you wouldn't have gone."
He is right. If he had rung me in the March and said come to the lake, I would have found a reason.
I would have been the man who could not be told. It had to be three boxes on a bench.
The other thing he said, which is the reason I have written any of this down, came at about the forty-minute mark.
He said, "We all remembered. Every one of us. Nobody dropped it."
And then: "That's the bit that's going to bother you, Dun. It bothered me for a year."
PART 5 — THE SHED
On the Sunday I went round to my son's.
I had rung him on the Saturday night and told him everything, all of it, in about twenty minutes, and there was a long silence on that line and then he said, "I'll be in."
There is a box in Ellis's shed labelled Dad — old papers, which went in there in 2011 when I moved out of my mother's last house after she died.
Neither of us had opened it in fourteen years.
There are four more of Bram's letters in it. Not returned. Delivered, to my mother's house, in 1991 and 1993, and put in a drawer by a woman who was eighty and who did not throw them away and did not give them to me either.
Ellis got that box down himself and put it on the bench in his shed and then went and stood in the doorway with his back to me for about two minutes.
Then he said, "I was scared you'd go out there and nobody would come."
And I said I know.
He said, "That's not why I took the box off you."
I said I know that as well.
He said, "I took it off you because I couldn't watch thirty people feel sorry for you."
Which is the truest and worst thing my son has ever said to me, and I have decided it is also the thing I am going to keep.
Pasco is still alive. We speak on Tuesdays and Fridays and I have a laptop now, which Ellis set up, and I have seen that man's face for the first time since 1979.
I am flying out in the March if he is still here in the March, and we have both said that out loud to each other, and neither of us has pretended otherwise.
The paddle is on my wall.
The 2014 photograph is in a frame on the shelf and I have looked at it a great many times. A man in a blue jacket sitting on the left end of a bench on his own, on the ninth of August, eleven miles from my front door.
Nobody's coming. Put it away before you embarrass yourself.
My son said that in a room at a golf club in front of thirty people, and thirty adults heard it and one of them did that small laugh and not one of them said anything.
He was wrong and he was also nearly right, and the difference between those two is about three inches of gaffer tape on an iron rail.
Two of them could not come. One of them came eleven years early and sat on that bench on his own and went home and never told anybody.
May you like
And the fourth one spent eleven months of the last year of his life making absolutely certain that when I walked down that path there would be something on it.
THE END
