In the seventies, he was my late brother Simon's best buddy. With a bunch of other kids in their late teens they got into smoking marijuana. They would drive to remote locations in the East Yorkshire countryside to prepare and smoke joints. With cassette music playing, they would get stoned together. It became a kind of exclusive club.
This regular use of marijuana changed Simon forever. Instead of the free and easy, cheerful lad my family had known, he became sullen with strange imaginings about his ancestors and God. It was a kind of psychosis that scarred his life right up to July 19th 2022 when he died. Simon always knew best. You could not argue with him.
Anyway, following a tip off from a pub landlord one summer, he was arrested in Bridlington. He had been brazenly rolling a joint at the bar and it contained grass that had been grown locally. The police were very interested in it and two members of the drug squad came to my parents' house to see if Simon had been growing it in their garden. Fortunately, Mum and Dad were away in Spain on holiday when the cops conducted their search.
The police found nothing but in Beverley police station, they kept quizzing Simon about the source of his marijuana.
Soon after the police visit to my parents' home, Farmer Giles appeared at our door seeking Simon. I think he had heard something on the grapevine. I told him about the drug squad visit and his face went deathly white. In a panic, he urged me to accompany him to his family's farm.
In a hidden hollow, near a wood, he had constructed a greenhouse using wooden framing and strong, opaque polythene. There was a padlock on the door and it puzzles me to this day how other members of Giles's family were not more curious about his secret horticultural project.
Inside were perhaps thirty vigorous marijuana plants - four to eight feet in height with stems as thick as a child's arm. The powerful smell in there took me aback but there was no time for admiration. Giles was desperate to get rid of the plants and to destroy the evidence of his wrongdoing. In those days, I am sure that if the police had visited the hidden greenhouse, Giles would have received a custodial jail sentence.
Together, we uprooted all those plants and dragged them to a nearby cesspit where we sunk them all. It was only then that Giles's panic began to recede. Later, I believe that he planted tomatoes in the greenhouse and besides the police never did knock on his door.
Today, I plucked up the courage to talk to Giles at halftime and I was glad to hear that he still lived in the old family farmhouse and that he and his wife of thirty five years had raised two children there - one now a social worker and the other a doctor - training to become an anaesthetist. Neither of us mentioned the marijuana greenhouse incident but we did talk about Simon's death and Giles said he was sorry he had not attended the funeral. He said he had not heard about it till a couple of weeks later.
Oh and by the way - the result of the football match was Hull City 3 Portsmouth 2. Up The Tigers!
A tragic story, regretfully, for your brother. A lucky story for Simon in the destruction of evidence of a crime, and for you as an accessory to same.
ReplyDeleteI had a music pupil, D, who in the dangerous years just after school (19-20) developed schizophrenia. He had been a lovely boy with a sunny disposition and this all changed totally and he cut himself off from his family and became a total recluse. His mother put it down at the time to marijuana use when D spent a "gap" year in Germany just after leaving school though I note that his younger brother (also a musician at school and still active as one, though now making his living as a software engineer, and who in fact got into trouble for marijuana use on a school music camp which led to his mate, now playing in a UK orchestra, not being permitted to play at the upcoming school concert the Franck violin sonata for which I had spent many hours preparing the extremely difficult piano part) puts it down to other factors including the scarring effect of having to achieve from an early age as a musical performer. I feel very sad for D. I guess D is in his mid to late forties by now and may be living with his mother.
ReplyDeleteToo many parentheses in my story.
What a dangerous loose wheel Simon was to light up a joint in a pub! (But also what fierce policing!) What the reliable big brother you were that Giles could enlist your help. Probably best that recollections of it were left unsaid when you met him recently. I'm sure he hasn't forgotten it all the same and yes, maybe he also feels some guilt or at least relief that he avoided the path that Simon took or fell into.