I think this may be my first piece of published artwork.
Uncredited, unpaid and so popular it returned as next year’s school annual cover. It proved to be then, at the age of 15, a fine introduction into the world of a freelance designer. That cover and those pages, dense with a forced normality, had sat ignored on a bookshelf until this morning. l’d had a request on Linkedin from someone in Belfast, working in NHS admin. He had an uncommon surname - in Ireland at least - though I had known one guy at school who shared it. So I did what I should never have done and allowed myself to dream that there may be some real work tumbling its way across the Irish Sea. That notion got no further than the first sentence on Messenger.
On a September day in 1974 in a perfunctary 1960s classroom we sat together for the first time. Alphabetically placed, one anxious boy per ink-welled wooden desk. Under the sleeves of our new blazers their old varnished tops bore the deep scars of furtively gouged nicknames, football teams and political affilliations. For most days, until O-Level choices weeded us out, that was our lot. Over the course new friendships formed and old friendships drifted away. But all me and my neighbour had really shared was proximity. So in the times since when l’d wondered where life had taken - or maybe, claimed - certain boys around me in that room he’d not been one of them.
Yet there he was, that other Mr H telling this Mr H about the changes at the school. How a floodlit, artificial pitch had replaced The Big Field, where balls had been kicked off the boundry walls of Crumlin Road prison on one side and the largest military base in Belfast on the other. He’d even returned as a governor - I don’t know which of us was more surprised - and his wife was a receptionist there. Yet I didn’t ask the one question I wanted to. In the 49 years since we first scratched our steel-tipped heels over that heavily polished herringbone floor what had brought him back there to think of, and contact me, now.
In the meantime though tomorrow will be another day to think of and maybe thought of. And perhaps even get some work.