The Hero

Some people never really leave you.

I've been a writer for a long time, even when I wasn't. I always wrote in the background and it was my one true dream in life. But two decades ago, I was a different person.

After I left school aged 16, I decided to take an NVQ in Catering, studying at college for two years. I say I decided but it was a joint decision. I could cook, and my parents thought it would be best if I pursued a career based on security and competence - those aren't bad wishes and I had no clue how to do what I really wanted to do which was either act or write for a living. So I guess I caved.

Any creative career takes immense hard work, enormous luck and almost superhuman tolerance of rejection - and that's just to scrape by. I didn't have the confidence to follow through my initial desire. My first year at catering college was difficult, of the twelve or so people on the course, I felt a fraud to half of them and bored by the others. The friends I made let me down, and by the start of the second year, I was considering whether to even stay on the course.

Then I met two new friends. Bobby and Hank had been on the course the whole of the first year with me, but we'd generally been split up by work placements or teaching groups and when in their company in the whole class, I'd felt daunted by their passion and skill in cheffing or their general sense of knowing what they wanted to do. Eventually though, I got to know them. They became good friends outside the course too, both participating in the cadets, and the sense of camaraderie they both shared was something that kept me going more and more.

The three of us ended up doing some casual work at our local sports centre, cooking, serving, working behind the bar or catering for 40th birthday parties, that sort of thing. The work wasn't fun, but their company was, and I developed a bit more character just by being their mates.

I got on well with both Bobby and Hank equally, and over that year I found a bit of direction in what I wanted to do with my life. It wasn't catering, that was for sure. Both of them listened to what I rambled about, films, books, plays, music. Many was the time we'd be out after work or college, drinking like only 18-year-olds can, with abandon and a sense of novelty. A night out would end with a kebab with mayonnaise and mint sauce (Hank’s insistence - it works!) and stories, ideals and morals were formed, shaped, abandoned and reformed. Plenty of my young ideas about my own skills, beliefs and ambitions came from those days. My confidence grew due to the pair of them.

I remember one day on the course, I was speaking with Hank about writing, and he told me about how he wanted to be in the R.A.F. but how he wasn't able to pursue it because of how difficult he found reading or writing. He was dyslexic to an awful degree.

I recall thinking how terrible that was, and I felt guilty too; I found it all so easy. Writing was fun to me, every time I picked up a pen, and I was struck at that moment by how I should be doing something with it. We used to go driving in either Hank or Bobby's car (I didn't drive at the time) and many was the journey that So Far So Good, the best of Bryan Adams blared in Hank's car while we roared around the town, looking for a laugh, a few drinks and conversations that only friends that age can have. When I left the course, I got a job in cheffing, but I pursued stand-up, writing and acting, all because of the person I had turned into over that second year of the course.

I left college a better man not because of the course, but because of Bobby and Hank. Bobby wrote me a note when we all left and I've kept it to this day. I left the Bryan Adams tape in Hank's car. Like I said at the time, it wouldn't sound the same anywhere else.

I went to the Edinburgh Festival that year, took my pursuits onward and upwards, and drifted apart from my two friends. They’d helped me move in different circles and although I briefly got a job as a chef in a weird village pub, it wasn’t for long. We spoke for a while, met up before I left the county, and it was only when I moved to Gloucestershire and then London that contact ebbed away, through no desire for it to happen but just from racing around to forge a path for ourselves in different industries.

Years later, Facebook came along. It may be many annoying things, but as a social tool it is unparalleled, and I found Bobby almost by accident. When I asked him whether Hank was on Facebook, the answer came fairly quickly.

When it did, I wished it hadn't.

Hank had passed away a couple of years prior to my getting in touch, in a diving accident. Aged just 25, he and his girlfriend both died whilst diving at a National Diving Centre in Gloucestershire.

Bobby broke the news to me gently, but it still shook me up a fair bit.

I read the news articles at the time and was overwhelmed by the tragedy. To me it looked like Hank died trying to save her, but then, that was the kind of guy he was. He would have done that without thinking. He never had a bad word to say against anyone, and was a hero to the end. In 2009, they named an Ascot road Austin Way in his honour. Each year, the Hank Austin Award is given to the air cadet who is heralded as most improved over the previous 12 months.

I have thought about Hank many times since college despite us losing touch, our conversation over English returning to me in the midnight hours during the writing of my first novel, then the second, and third. And every one since.

When I heard of Hank’s death, I felt such loss, not just for Hank, but our friendship which I would never get a chance to renew. It was like the years between disappeared, and I was right back in that car, belting out Summer of '69 like we were the first kids to ever do that. He was alive then, in that memory as he is now in all the ones I've just mentioned and a million more.

I met up with Bobby last year for the first time in 15 years and he went into a bit more detail about Hank’s tragic death. According to findings at the time, they could establish how near to the surface Hank was when he ran out of air, carrying his already deceased girlfriend on his back.

Two metres. Two metres from the surface and precious air.

As Bobby said, whatever happened from the point his girlfriend died, Hank would have died that day. If he’d abandoned her to the depths, then that heroic centre of his being would have died. It would never have happened.

Hank died as he lived, a hero, 21 years ago. I've made many friends since, and spoken about many heroes.

I miss both in him.

* * *

“Now that we’ve done our best and worst, and parted,

I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.

(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)

I’ll think of Love in books, Love without end;

Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;

And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;

And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;

And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;

And evening hush, broken by homing wings;

And Song’s nobility, and Wisdom holy,

That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,

Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,

One after one, like tasting a sweet food.

I have need to busy my heart with quietude.”

Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915)