A good man gone

13 Jan A good man gone

Today is the funeral of my lifelong friend Mark Heason.  

It is hard to think when I was younger that I’d ever have to write these words but Mark was one of my oldest pals and although it would be wrong to say we lived in each other’s pockets for the past 50 odd years) we probably knew each other as well as any young men growing up.

Mark and I were often inseparable and shared many of life’s growing pleasures and pains together from the day he was ordered to sit next me in class at Nunnery Wood Secondary School.

We walked to school together most days, played in the same school cricket teams, shared (along with a wider band of brothers) endless summer hours in the impenetrably warm summers of 1974 and 1975 play football, cricket and just listening to music on Ronkswood School fields.

When we left school at 16 (no uni for the vast majority of working class kids back then) we were, by all accounts, the only two lads in our class to get jobs, Mark at Lloyds Bank, myself at the humongous Longbridge car plant in Birmingham, Europe’s biggest factory at the time. 

This wasn’t quite our first paid work.

Having never lifted a paintbrush before we were bizarrely trusted to paint Walsall FC’s Fellows Park ground in the summer of 1975 (Mark’s mum, who’d separated from his dad, had a boyfriend who worked for the club) while listening to the abandoned Ashes test, ruined by ‘Free George Davis’ campaigners who threw oil over the Headlingley wicket.

It was with Mark that, at 16, I went underage drinking every Friday and Saturday evening in Worcester city centre (and eventually clubbing of sorts too).

With Mark I ate my first curries (Chinese and Indian), went on a first parent-free holiday together (Majorica in 1977 where I smashed Mark’s head into a plate glass doorway dragging him back to the hotel worse of wear after an ill-advised Happy Hour onslaught of too many triple whiskeys) and many other rights of passage, illicit or otherwise.

Mark was a trustworthy, reliable friend. Not a maverick, but equally never without a wicked sense of humour, I saw Mark grow from a potentially troubled teenager (his mum and dad’s separation hit Mark harder than he let on) into a man of character and integrity.

Our relationship had none of the matey criminality of The Clash’s ‘Stay Free’ or TRB’s ‘Martin’. We weren’t exactly Likely Lads although my Terry Collier-esque angst and rage at the modern world was often levelled by Mark’s more measured Bob Ferris approach to things.

When Mark married Lindsay it was a perfect life partnership. To those who knew him, Mark was always destined to be a great dad and was incredibly proud of his boys, Matthew and Bradley.

He also had a love of golf, arguably one the few sports Mark wasn’t naturally gifted at – but forced himself to play well.

It would be wrong to say that Mark and I lived close lives. We didn’t or that we didn’t have the occasional falling out. We did.

It is a sad part of modern life that our last communications were via Facebook.

We promised to meet up after a long absence – we just ran out of time. People do.

Another good friend, Steve Mann, recalling those heady summer days of 1975, summed up Mark far better than I ever could.

“I think I know a good man when I see one – and Mark was a good man”.

He was indeed. And now he’s gone.

So long my old friend. So long.

Chris Green