EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Just one turn away from a life so different
VICTOR Tattum lived next door to The Church of Christ the Scientist. Andrew Mynes’ mum was extremely religious. Sadly, Vic and Andy appeared not to be the chosen ones when it came to Jesus’s “my office door is always open” policy.
The second was one of my best friends as a youngster, the first an acquaintance in what might be referred to as a not altogether wholesome period in my life.
Looking back on it, Andrew was always a bit odd, but you don’t realise when you’re a kid. After all, at the age of 12 I was hanging around with 21-year-old Ian Foster, who attended Leeds United football matches and shouted out the score of the game he was at when it was announced on the radio that was permanently glued to his ear.
Andrew went missing for years and eventually became a long-term resident of what my mum called the “psychy ward” at the local hospital. He told everyone he met he’d been in the army and was struggling to adjust to life on Civvy Street.
The last time I saw him he was being bundled into the back of a police van while cheerily asking how I was. He had, he said, held his dad at gun point but you wouldn’t have known from his demeanour. That’s what the early morning cider does to some.
Vic was an altogether more sinister case. He had been married and, if you believed what he said, had ten children.
He called those he knew his family in homage to Charles Manson, whose look he copied.
He was extremely intelligent but could remember little, mostly, I imagine, due to the amount of vodka he necked on a daily basis. I once saw him knocked over by a gas van, the worried driver’s panic only subsiding when Vic told him it was okay as he hadn’t spilt any of his booze.
I was occasionally part of a group who went to the pub with him, even though he could never remember my name or almost anyone else’s, calling most people Darren after the alpha male in our circle.
I left Bolton at the end of the 1980s and ended up living there again in 2004, when I was shocked, but shouldn’t have been, at seeing Vic staggering out of a pub on crutches.
I nearly spoke to him but I knew he would have no idea of who I was.
It’s hard to pinpoint where it went wrong for either Andrew or Vic (I could add many others I knew and know to the list) — easier to determine why Ian Foster and his brothers and sister were like they were, but that’s another story — or where it goes wrong for anyone.
We’re all here with what on the outside passes for normal lives then something happens and everything changes.
It can’t happen to me, you think, but you see it every day walking round town and, unless you are extremely lucky in life, you know it could.
We are all potential Victors and Andrews — well most of us — and often just one wrong or, depending on where you stand, right, turn away from a life that is so different to the one we have.