Patrickandme

Patrick Purcell was my best friend at Cowbridge Grammar School in the early 50s. We were in the same form together. He taught me how to birdnest - in the days before it was made illegal - and we looked especially for moorhen eggs that tasted good, though a little oily, when fried.

I talked him into getting on the schoolbus to my home in Llantwit Major and inveigling my mother into giving us the money to go to the pictures (she couldn't easily refuse when he stood there beside me). And later I must have bored him when I insisted on his listening to my newest jazz record acquisition, usually the Vic Dickenson Septet or the Dave Brubeck quartet. But he never betrayed boredom. On those afternoons when we were determined to dodge games or rugby matches we hid in the same schoolbus which was parked nearby and smoked cheap fags bought singly from a local shop.

When we left school we met up fairly regularly in Cardiff for a pint and a chat, but when I moved on to work in London and then Sheffield, we lost touch. He went on to become a chartered accountant, I continued as a newspaper journalist. But I never forgot Patrick Purcell (or Percy as I knew him in our youth). And when he emailed me after discovering me through this website it was a strange but exhilarating sensation. We had lived almost a lifetime in separate boxes, bringing up our own families - he and Maggie have two sons - but a reunion was clearly inevitable. There was a lot of catching up to do over the half-decade since we had shared those early years.

We had holidayed together : the top picture above was taken on a hired Norfolk Broads yacht. Neither of us could master the sails but luckily the boat was fitted with an outboard motor. The photograph below was taken (I think) in a jazz club in St Helier, Jersey. Patrick is not so sure and his memory has turned out to be better than mine on most things. But, incredibly, he has preserved these photographs while mine were lost in the many moves I had made.

We remembered the same schoolmasters, some of them idiosyncratic but likeable, some of them idiosyncratic but better forgotten. We remember being in school with Anthony Hopkins, but it was Percy who pointed out that the actor was in the same class as us. We even remember other classmates who may well have gone on to fame and fortune - but not in our knowledge.

Understandably, our first meeting was a nerve-wracking one for me, but it went well. We had plenty to talk about, still much in common. And when conversation briefly dried there were these photographs to study and ponder. Didn't we look young?