The Family

Yes, me and Tim are down in Devon for the weekend. Ade's fiftieth birthday was on Tuesday so we're down to put a bit of a dampener on things. Literally, they say it's going to rain cats and dogs. Adrian and Sue do indeed have cats and a dog, but no sign of rain so far I'm pleased to say.

The weekend began with us arriving last night. Reasonable drive down Friday night with relatively little hold ups. Met them in Winkleigh and back to theirs for food, wine, 'Trivial Pursuits' and trivial pursuits. It's started well, but what's going to happen next I wonder?

What happens when the music stops?

That is what we were also thinking on mid-summer night in 1974. What do we do now?

We had had a fun night. We had literally danced the night away. At the height of the evening we were all joining in with 'Schools out' and bouncing around to 'Come on Eileen', and busting moves to tunes like Dianna Ross's 'chain reaction' and of course my brother's favourite 'Midnight train to Georgia'. People have asked afterwards if we were dunk. Well we really weren't. There was little to drink at the party anyway, and for some reason Graham's parents had locked all theirs away. We were high though. No not that sort of high. We were good Grammar School boys and girls. We were a wholesome high, giddy and wanting the night to last for ever.

Actually the really sensible ones had gone home, the boys with girlfriends, the girls without boyfriends, leaving mostly the boys without girlfriends. I can't remember, but if Maria had been there she had long gone home. We certainly didn't want to repeat the farcical performance outside her house when I brought her home at one minute past eleven, a couple of weeks earlier.

I hesitate to joke about it even now. Maria was Italian, her family was Sicilian. She had been introduced to us all through her brother, who was at our school and a fabulous footballer. Maria was beautiful, and we were 'going out'. At that age and time, going out meant meeting up in town for a couple of hours at El Greco's or where ever. Maria had to be back by eleven. So that night I drove her back ever so slightly late. There at the gate, in the dark, with a street light behind him, was a stocky, angry Sicilian. 'Don't worry', my passenger reassured me. 'I'll explain' she said.

She didn't really get a chance to explain, for before I could put on the hand break, the drivers side door was flung open and I was hauled out. A diminutive Italian, arm waving and battering about my covered up head, was shouting in a strange language. I don't know what he was saying, it was a stream of, what I presumed, was Italian. I think he probably meant to say 'I'd be grateful if you wouldn't mind awfully bring my daughter back at the appointed hour next time', but it could have been much worse. Come to think of it it probably was worse, as there was Maria, also battering him and shouting stuff in Italian and screaming. It wasn't proper fighting you understand, we might as well have had pillow cases. I can only imagine the sight of two people hitting each other, with the third crouching under his protecting arms, shouting 'get off, get off' silhouetted against the night sky with Italian expletives and duck down filling in the air.

It stopped in the end and I drove off.

We laughed about it later. In fact I quite liked to old man after a while. He even asked me to join a game of poker with him one afternoon, and lent a fiver. After the game he said I could keep it. Wow.

He never said 'welcome to the family' though. Perhaps that's just as well