Viva Brighton Issue #60 February 2018

COLUMN
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John Helmer
Old-school
“You haven’t changed a bit, Susie!” says Nick.
“Thank you, but I have.” She runs a hand briefly
over her still-lustrous dark hair as if brushing off any
particles of insincere praise that might have adhered
there. “But John looks like David Bowie.”
“David Bowie with cancer,” I retort.
Some laughter round the table, but also a couple of
shocked faces. Do we joke about cancer?
(Chez Helmer, we certainly do. It’s what got us
through the last two years while my wife Kate was
being treated – successfully, and doing fine now,
thank you very much – as regular readers of this
column will know.)
“So what about this Indian restaurant then? Where
is it?”
I’m in a Marylebone pub, meeting school friends.
The old chemistry is there, but its constituent
elements have seen ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Life has
knocked us about. In the course of all our illnesses,
marriage breakups, bereavements, it’s taken the
piss and vinegar out of us. We’re in the cross-hairs
now; no more big plans to boast of, just stories. We
face each other uncertainly without the protective
carapace of potential. What we are is what has
already happened.
We adjourn to eat curry and fill in the years. And
where are we now? All disturbingly respectable:
Art Historian, Classics Professor, TV Producer,
Architect, columnist for a local lifestyle magazine...
We certainly would have made jokes about cancer
back in the day. We made jokes about everything:
iron lungs, leprosy, Aberfan, Ibrox… We were school
kids: everything was a joke. The sicker, the better.
In the sixth-form art room where I had an easel
alongside two of these people, we performed regular
re-enactments of samurai movies using the medicalschool
skeleton provided for our life study, with red
paint pumping out of squeegee bottles...
Now we’re more sensitive to others, more
circumspect. Though conversely, less guarded.
....43....
Later that night, as Nick the TV producer and I
are having that last one before bedtime, he tells me
exactly how difficult things were for him back then,
with his parents going through a break-up. I never
knew. In return I tell him about the meltdown in the
Helmer household that made me glad to leave home
when I did to come to Brighton.
He looks astonished. “But those parties at your house
I went to: you were all laughing and singing the
whole time. It was like something out of Dickens.”
“Smiling through the tears.”
We talk about the others. I tell him about my
shocked reaction when Susie – my best friend Nev’s
girlfriend in those days – turned up on the Top of the
Pops one evening without warning, dancing to Thin
Lizzy in her Biba top and maxi-skirt. “Somehow
I couldn’t quite believe it was her. She looked
too grown-up and cool to be anyone I knew – no
offence.”
“And now she writes art books.”
People change. And the past, too, changes.
Illustration by Chris Riddell