In honour of friendship

It was probably in 1960, yes I’m quite sure of that, and I would even say that it was sometime in the spring, but there again I don’t give a guarantee about the exact date but I’m fairly confident that it wasn’t “freeze your balls off” kind of weather anymore or I wouldn’t have gone out to finally try out my roller skates on this pristine, immaculately smooth Swiss road in front of our house. Now, we are not talking here about these modern in-line skates that move along silently and that have more in common with true ice hockey skates than the contraption I attached under my feet.  No, what we are talking about here is something more, how shall I say? something post-war but altogether more basic, more nineteen-fifties. No boots here; these things consisted of some adjustable steel brackets and leather straps to attach my shoes to an adjustable steel frame on four wheels, ah, and not just any wheels, these wheels were made of genuine steel. I leave it to your imagination the noise eight steel wheels can make on an otherwise silent Swiss road; a departing jet was nothing in comparison.

While I thundered up and down this road I had noticed this boy, maybe a few years younger than me, who had the rather interesting habit of sitting on top of a high wall at a road junction near our house. It is, of course, possible that he counted the occasional car going by, but the way he watched me like a hawk it is just as possible that he sat there to keep track of my skating progress. There again, perhaps he was just making sure I would not waken the dead with the racket caused by the eight wheels thundering along; because you see, this particular wall he was sitting on, was and still is, the wall that made sure  the dead would not rise and escape from the adjacent cemetery. I’m not quite sure how he got up there. Did he walk between the graves of monsieur Dunant and madame Favre, deceased since 1939 and politely excused himself as he pushed the bushes aside to take place on his throne or did he walk the entire length of the wall beginning at the lowest end till he reached his supreme view on the world below?

One day, gathering up my courage and testing my still mediocre French, I asked if by any chance he was the boy living next to me, and indeed, he was.

Since then we have probably played Indians and Cowboys in our gardens; we shared each-others bicycles and tried out our “Velo Moteurs” a sort of light motorbike popular in Switzerland and France at that time. Growing up we have listened to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Nights in White Satin. We hiked in the endless forests of Norway and swam in the warm waters of the Virgin Islands, and no, we did not find a single virgin but then, who wants a virgin?

We have boasted or shared our disappointments or successes with girlfriends and no… we have not shared our girlfriends or at least not that I know of. That would be surprising anyway because our taste in women is quite different; in fact, everything about us is different. He was a good student and finished University; I was not, at least not until sometime later in life. I chased adventure, the army, even a war, or was it two..? and then the Air Force, followed by being a contractor pilot, a vicious circle to get out of. Somehow they always seem to remember my name for a mission that may not necessarily have a return ticket attached to it. Meanwhile, the boy who sat on that wall so long ago made a career for himself, got married and had children. Our lives were so different that sometimes I feel, the polite thing to do would be to re-introduce myself and say: “Hi, I’m the other friend you never knew you had; if I look familiar it’s because the one you knew and the one who, at times lived in the shadow, crept stealthily through a jungle or cooked in the desert are really one and the same person.”

We were frequently separated by half a planet but it didn’t matter. Nothing broke the bond; we always managed to pick up there where we had left off. We shared both light-hearted fun and some of our deepest troubles, even the death of those we loved and I hope that in those darkest moments I was of adequate support.  Mostly however we laughed, we laughed till our cheeks hurt.

Today we are in the autumn of our lives but together in the company of our wives, we still share the ski slopes of Zermatt under the approving eye of the Matterhorn. We still eat oysters and share wonderful meals in France, mostly cooked by himself, accompanied by some of the finest wines one can wish for. And today, that boy who sat on that wall so long ago is still my best friend... and all that because of a pair of noisy roller skates back in 1960.