5 – My Lucky Day
The best of childhood friendships endure most things the ups and downs of adolescent life can throw at them; I was lucky enough to have the best mate a kid could have growing up at Villas in Duck and that remains the case all these years on, through all that supposedly adult life has chucked at us. Like most nicknames, Duck, could not be further from the truth implying in cricketing terms that he was close to useless as the term “duck” refers to getting out for a score of nought. Duck is actually the record run scorer at Villas and the fact that I’m not far off him is wholly due to Duck’s early retirement almost 10 years ago which was far too early and largely the result of an arranged marriage, which I blame myself for not stopping by kidnapping her. By now I would have been released and we would still be opening the batting together.
Although it may appear the weirdest of nicknames he did his best to live up to the weird tag for many years mostly in a very funny and harmless kind of way unless that is he ever bit your bum – yes I did write that but more later. Growing up we shared everything from food, drink, a fat American bird, our first serious girl (same girl which just showed how much we shared), our first foreign holiday and many hours batting together (though sometimes not for long because he had a tendency to run me out), verbal abuse (after he ran me out), a police cell and weddings (his not mine and the last time I saw him for a very long time) so you could say like most best mates our paths have been intertwined for generations.
Total Mental Disintegration
In our junior days you could always rely on Duck to dig the team out of a crisis although his dogged batting style saw us witness the first signs of what that flint-eyed Pom-bashing, Australian captain, Steve Waugh, famously referred to many years later as Total Mental Disintegration (TMD). This was when he spoke fondly of his love for all things English – as long as the Aussies were stuffing us as they ritually did throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Sadly, probably the first sufferer of TMD at Villas though only through watching Duck bat was his dad, Billy Stockdale. Nobody knows if Billy had ever played cricket but he supported us as juniors tirelessly from day one even in his choice of company car with the Datsun estate proving a versatile team bus as long as we did not mind sitting on copper-pipe; Billy was a plumber by trade.
He never ever missed a game and was as down as we were when we lost and shared in the many successes too. Without dads like Billy, in fact like most of our dads who supported the team tirelessly, junior sport simply does not exist. And yet when Duck went into bat the man became a frantic and hopeless bag of nerves and everyone avoided him like the plague. It was not selfishness simply a desire to see his lad and the team succeed and probably to set a world record for continuous laps around a cricket field. It did help if Duck won the batting prize but that was a given most seasons.
Every innings Duck played would see Billy circling the ground, eyes glazed, fidgeting nervously and playing every ball, wincing each time his lad was struck, which was quite often as Duck would be the only guy guaranteed to cop one even on the most placid of wickets. He was like a magnet for the ball we all call a “snorter” and long before helmets became mandatory Duck had donated teeth and blood to the cause; the prospect of a Hollywood smile had vanished forever. I once saw him pinned on the head playing for school with the ball flying off for six leg byes and yet there was not another nasty delivery all game. Sadly, twelve thousand plus runs later and the cost to Billy is measured in TMD, two hips, two knees and twenty years on crutches.
The Day The Camcorder Came To The Villas
Billy was also keen on filming his lad bat for late night tutorials and one day invested in a new camcorder – anybody remember those? One day he turned up with his new toy to film a game at Villas for the very first time – way before Sky Sports came; I’ll tell you more about that later. Humiliatingly for us was the fact that setting up the giant tripod needed to take the weight of this early model took longer than the game as we were bowled out for twenty. This remains one of the lowest scores ever recorded by a senior team at Villas; worse still we were rolled over by the yokels from Oxenhope, a village so remote from Bradford they would have been justified in charging us travelling expenses and booking in overnight. That day overnight stops was certainly not required but at least nor were edited highlights as Billy skulked off never to bring the camcorder again running the risk of having the tripod stuffed somewhere very uncomfortable.
Duck and I met through cricket and became firm friends through our days at Villas although Duck did venture off to ply his wares at the odd Bradford League club from time to time displaying a touch more ambition than myself on the cricket field although his agent, Billy, was influential here. He always came back though a testament to the lure of the home stomping ground or the fact that the Bradford League grounds were much bigger and Billy simply got knackered circling those arenas.
Girls
The first serious interruption to our friendship, inevitably, was a girl. Her name was Jen and as she knew me already through school my card was well and truly marked. True he had had other girlfriends but they soon got scared off by his various weird habits such as sleeping in a dormer bedroom with a potty to save the walk downstairs, often by-passing that for the loft hatch. Billy could never fathom out the growing mildew on his bedroom ceiling beneath. However, Jen was either more durable or equally desperate and showed signs of stick-ability which meant my days were numbered especially as at school I generally got up Jen’s nose by regularly stealing her coffee and biscuits, throwing things at her and, as she later accused in later life, depriving her of a good education as if that were ever possible at Hanson Upper School.
When she nicked my best mate, because that’s what it was, my life was in danger of crumbling. Suddenly I had nobody to collapse with at the weekend as Duck swapped the Five Lane Ends pub for meals out at Toby Inns; what was wrong with the chippy all of a sudden? And then came weekends away, which to me meant the Greenall Whitley Sunday League, a bit of a slog and a few more beers but now meant craft fairs, B&Bs in the Dales and “shopping together”; what was happening to him? And then, as every woman eventually does, she effectively branded him as “mine, all mine”, buying him a sheep skin coat more Del Boy than Duck and convincing him that he didn’t look a complete prat with his matching new bubble perm.
Know Your Enemy
Cloning was complete and he was broken and I’d been stuffed by a determined foe. In retaliation I tried my own versions of TMD on Jen as I discovered she was terrified of snakes…know your enemy. As there weren’t many live ones I could get hold of in Bradford I actually spent a whole free double period in the library seeking large colour photos of the most vicious snake I could find. My visit is to the school library were such that the librarian asked me if I’d got lost or was new to the school.
It was all worth it though to deliver a message that I would not be ousted so easily as Jen opened her locker door one morning to be greeted by the sight of the open jaws of a cobra in glorious full colour spread over two giant pages. I had a feeling I had overstepped the mark as she was shaking whilst rooted to the spot. This would have been good at a hip hop disco except this was 1980 and nobody had ever heard of hip hop and then she let out a blood curdling scream and once again I was in the Sixth Form Head’s office being given “one last chance”.
Jen was to exact a far greater revenge on me by allowing me to unbelievably woo her away from my best mate many years later and so for a year Duck and I had an uneasy existence. What attracted this attractive, sensible and intelligent girl to a moron like me God knows but it certainly wasn’t the lure of my rusting, ancient Mini with furry steering wheel. These things happen when you are young, daft and oblivious to the notion of right and wrong especially where Percy is concerned; I was definitely not the occupant of the moral high ground here. Duck, as all good friends do, eventually offered the olive branch and the sanctuary of a resumption of Dumb & Dumber play out again each Friday, Saturday and Sunday night back at the Five Lane Ends pub with our friendship restored and Jen went in search of a grown up partner.
Black Cloud
Many, many happy years passed and I really thought we would grow old and graceless together ending up in some old people’s home with tell tale stains on our Farahs dreaming of bedding the minimum-wage, Eastern European nurses. There would be no relatives to visit us so we would enjoy endless afternoons playing wheelchair cricket funded with a vast ECB (England & Wales Cricket Board) grant having started up the nursing home’s very own multi-racial, multi-sexual, wheelchair cricket team. And then just as life seemed set in stone along came Black Cloud although it could have all turned out so differently.
When Black Cloud – future wife of Duck – turned up at the ground for the first time with her best pal, Julie Lawrence (Rick’s wife) it was expressly to meet this nice lad; Duck. When she pointed my way enquiring if I was the Chosen One, once she had recovered from shock, Julie corrected her and Black Cloud’s intended victim was corralled into the clubhouse for an introductory drink aka interview/compatibility test and the end of life as he had ever known it.
Did You Know He Bites Bums?
Now Julie clearly did a great selling job avoiding any mention of the dreaded potty and a certain bizarre personal habit that Duck had made his party piece over the years – that of being known as the local arse biter. How he developed this passion, almost zest, for assaulting the backsides of mainly men with his giant molars is unknown. Nobody was safe although I seemed to escape out of some form of loyalty for which I remained eternally grateful and given my transgressions somewhat confused. Generally, after a few beers Duck would select his target and then stalk them like a cat in the jungle.
In the early days nobody had a clue but why would you? Out for a pint with the lads so why would you expect some mad bloke to take a chunk out of your backside? He would then approach from the rear – honest – and in a flash clutch his victim around the waist and sink his teeth into the target area. The look on every victims face was incredulity followed by a wave of pain and, in some cases, a trickle of blood, which did not go down well one evening with a workmate clad in white Travolta trousers out for a night of clubbing. Duck was the one who nearly got clubbed. Even the introduction to Black Cloud failed to halt this for some time but she dug deep, paid the therapist and eventually he was cured.
Did You Know You Were Marrying a Jailbird? (How Not to be a Best Man)
Next time I saw Duck I was Best Man at his wedding two years later despite the protests from Black Cloud. The kids had already been named and places reserved at Oxford but I have to give him credit for sticking to his guns and not banning me from the free bash at what I called his wake. It was ten whole years before Black Cloud let him out with me again as her paranoia stemmed from her belief that I would lead him astray into the clutches of another woman – some irony there for the inner circle. Had she known that we were two of the worst potential womanisers ever and took refuge and safety in Dr Tetley maybe she might have been more accepting albeit what a scary thought.
How bizarre that the wedding actually coincided to the day ten years earlier that Duck and I woke up in separate cells under the clock tower in nearby Shipley’s Police cells? What beautiful material for a best man’s speech especially as the bride had clearly not been told about this turning point in her new husband’s life? Imagine the scene: stood up at your best mate’s wedding, seeking out your mother before you shame her again, looking down on miserable new bride and then telling all and sundry what really happened all those years ago. Some moments in life really are priceless.
Point of Order
For the record and for those who were not there may I take the opportunity here to set the record straight regarding our conditional discharge for being in possession of a stolen “painting” that even the landlord had not noticed missing– if you can call a two quid print that – and being drunk and disorderly resulting in a conditional discharge – Bingley Magistrates, summer of 1980.
1. Duck stole the picture.
2. It was hardly a Picasso.
3. I would not have given it to my gran.
4. My bruises were not police brutality just an inability to stand up wearing my pastel blue, plastic soled canvas shoes that Wham were wearing at the time.
5. I did not fancy George Michael.
6. I waived my right to my solitary parental phone call fearing maternal brutality more than police brutality.
7. I wish I could have heard Duck explaining to Billy that he would not be taking him and his mum Joan to Manchester Airport in the morning because…
8. I wish I had got a picture of my mum’s expression as I told her where I had been when I rolled in the following morning.
9. I wish she had not leathered me so hard.
10. I am so glad I changed my best man’s speech to tell this tale even if I never saw my best mate again for 10 years.
A Silver Lining
Many years have passed and Duck has become a proud and clearly, much loved father of two children who both obviously and so clearly dote on him. Black Cloud has now vanished and whilst it’s been a very tough time for Duck every cloud does have a silver lining even a black one and Billy and I are deliriously happy again. There’s still time once the kids are off and away for us to revisit the Five Lane Ends again as we enter our sixties just before the nursing home comes a calling. Who knows we might even open the batting together one more time.
And he can have another chance to run me out. Life throws up some strange stuff but I’m sure there will be a few remaining Saturdays with a fond welcome waiting in a dressing room or two with fellow patched-up, gnarled old has-beens. I only hope my juniors are safe from those teeth; as Child Welfare Officer I am not sure how I would explain that one to the ECB.
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