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Non-Fiction
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| Terry | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||||
| 19 December 2006 | ||||||||||
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I first met Terry LeQuesne when I was 10 years old. We had recently moved to Maidstone, where I was to live for the next 9 or 10 years. Mum and Dad had got a job as stewards in the Conservative Club, and we lived in the flat over the top. It was a grand old building, 62 steps to our flat door, with a square stairwell that I am amazed did not claim the life of at least one of us four boys. To my horror I recall climbing over the banister and walking the length of the landing holding onto the wooden handrail, feet wedged in the wrought iron railings, 60 feet above a concrete floor. The Conservative Club was in the centre of town. There were two pubs in the street; otherwise we were the only domestic residents. Everything else was an office or a shop. We were certainly the only kids in the street. Opposite was an incongruous shed of a building, Saint Faith’s church hall, where Mum packed us off to Sunday School. There Peter Atkinson invited me to join the Boys’ Brigade. Now, I had been a cub, and was on the waiting list to join the local scout troop, but hey, there was no waiting list for BB. So the next Friday evening I crossed the road and attended my first drill night. This was worthy of note for two reasons: Terry and Bob. Let me take you back to a few months before my birth. Patience. This is my story, and it’s important to me. Mum and Dad were newly married and within months I was conceived, but Dad was doing his National Service, fighting for Queen and Country on Salisbury Plain. If it wasn’t for my Dad this country would be overrun with rabbits. Mum lived with her parents in Carshalton, Surrey. They wrote frequent letters to each other. Mum kept some of them from Dad, and they are still in my possession. None survive from her, but she would write to tell him all about me and my life in the womb. I was always ‘Kim’, inspired no doubt by the film of Rudyard Kipling’s book. It wasn’t until I was safely delivered and they were at the registry office that Mum had her doubts. It had always been a family tradition on Dad’s side to name the first-born son of the first-born son ‘Robert’. And ‘Kim Simms’, it had a twee sound to it. So to Dad’s surprise, Mum registered me as Robert Kim Simms. I was, however, always ‘Kim’ to my family, friends, teachers, et cetera. Isn’t it funny how snippets of conversation stick in your head, irrelevant to their importance? I remember asking Mum when I was very small why everyone called Dad ‘Bob’. Why didn’t they call him ‘Dad’? She explained that his name was Robert, but that Bob was a nickname for Robert. “I expect that when you grow up, people will call you Bob as well.” Envision if you will pages falling from a calendar, hour hands spinning unnaturally fast. The date is now 1967, and here we see a nervous and shy lad of 10, standing in the hallway, anxiously scanning a mixture of boys from 11 to 18 years of age. Terry LeQuesne walked up to me, tall, grinning, wearing the sort of beard I can only describe as The Master beard. You saw Doctor Who, right? “Hello, I’m Terry LeQuesne. What do we call you?” From nowhere, completely unplanned, I told him, “Bob.” The first occasion I ever used it for myself, and the days of introducing myself as ‘Kim’ were dead. I was grown up. It’s difficult for me to think of Terry without his laugh. He laughed easily and often. Later I found out that he was also a practical joker, getting himself in trouble more than once at the printing company that he worked for. He would recount stories of his or his brother’s escapades, his tee-hee’s becoming more frequent as the story built to the pay-off. He would invent all sorts of games for us to play on BB evenings, the most popular was one that involved beating your neighbour with a cardboard baton. For some reason, it was always an officer that happened to stand next to the baton carrier. He was originally a Guernseyman, which explained his French name. He was proud of his heritage, in the way that islanders often are. He had a record that he would sometimes torment us with: ‘Guernsey, my home’. I can still remember the chorus to this day. Alongside his sense of fun, and his earnest desire to do something for us kids, he was also a Christian. He and his wife Jenny were active members of the church, he sitting on the committee, singing with a rich, loud bass in the choir, and taking on the duties of church warden. She involved in all the little day-to-day tasks that grease the wheels of any community. He would share his faith with us kids, telling us about his beliefs and how they affected his day to day life. That was a lesson I learnt from him that no-one had really explained to me before. If religion didn’t change the way you lived, then what use was it? His faith was above all a practical one. He saw his God in the minutiae of his existence. Terry and Jenny, together with their kids, would often join us at Boys Brigade camp. At first we would camp traditionally under canvas, joining forces with the other Maidstone companies. Later we started a tradition of camping on water, renting some tourist cruisers on the Norfolk Broads. In these socially responsible days we probably wouldn’t do it, probably couldn’t do it. Nevertheless they, together with the occasional parent or responsible adult, would take up to 20 boys cruising around the Norfolk Broads with no experience or training. But that all added to the joy. In 1973, towards the end of a Norfolk Broads camp distinguished by the number of boys we had had to fish out the water and by the awful weather, Terry and I were discussing life, the bible and everything. I was sixteen, awkward and unpopular at school, but an NCO in the Boy’s Brigade and one of the senior members. He asked me whether I wanted to take the next step, to be confirmed in the church. There was no pressure, and of course I should discuss it with Mum and Dad, but why didn’t I think about it? Later I would hear about people’s conversion stories. Sometimes they would be Road to Damascus stuff, dramatic and thrilling. Sometimes they would be ordinary and quiet. But I could never point to a moment when I became a Christian. For me it was, and in some way still is, a progression. My first step was meeting Terry, and slowly learning through him. There were dramatic steps later in my youth, and then again in my adult life. But it started with him. Later on Terry handed the reigns of the Brigade over to someone else, and took over the leadership of the Youth Group at the church. I was already firmly established there. Later still I messed things up in my life pretty bad, and had to take up 60+ hours a week shift work to pay back my mortgage. It meant leaving the youth groups and Boys’ Brigade. I know messing up hurt a lot of people that I loved, not least Terry. His immediate reaction was to invite us over to dinner, laugh and joke afterwards, and then as I was about to leave tell me if there was ever anything I wanted, he was just a phone call away. Christian love and forgiveness in action. By the time I got a decent job, which allowed me to attend church regularly and help run the Youth Club again, Terry had moved to an outlying village. He had given up his Sales Manager role and was now managing a Christian charity’s home for men with drink, drug and emotional problems. Always a practical application. He attended my church less as he attended his local one more. And as these things often happen, we gradually lost touch, never realising it was happening. More pages from the calendar. 2005, and on one of the technical newsgroups I subscribe to someone asked who the three most influential people in our lives are or were. Mine were: My Dad, who gave me my moral and ethical base, and the Simms Sense of Humour; My wife, who has influenced every aspect of my life for nearly 30 years to a greater or lesser degree; and Terry. I realised how long it had been since I had seen him. I resolved to track him down. I would like to detail the dogged determination with which I pieced together the trail. I would like to tell you of the dead ends I encountered, yet never gave up. I would like to tell you all of this, but in reality I opened the phone book and there he was, still living outside Maidstone, some dozen miles from my home in Medway. I phoned him, for some strange reason a nervous sickness in my stomach. He answered, “Hello, Terry LeQuesne.” His voice was exactly as I remembered, rich and sonorous. “Hi. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Bob Simms.” “Bob! Jenny and I were only talking about you on Friday, when we saw you on television.” (Another story, when hordes of baying Snodlanders chased me from… but as I say, that’s another story). Some weeks later we went round there, my brother Tony (who had shared a similar journey), me and our wives. He was older, and had put on a few pounds. But then, to be fair, so had we. But it was as though no time had changed. He still tee-hee’d through his stories as they reached the climax. He and Jenny were still generous hosts. And he was still the best living example of practical faith in action. The Conservative Club is now a Pizza Express. The church hall was demolished whilst I was still in the Boys Brigade, and is now a Ryman’s store. But people remain.
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