Letter From America: Erkie Day
Erkie Day was a bright and cheerful lad - but the cheerfulness probably hid a dark pool of sadness. Ronnie Bray remembers, with deep compassion, one of his school friends.
I suppose that Erkie Day started school the same day that I did, and probably left at the same time or a few months later. How Keith managed to become “Erkie,” I have no idea. It just seemed that he always was and it seemed to fit his cheerful smile and disposition.
A poetry lesson about ‘Coppelia” gave lasting fame to him through the line,
“It is no wonder,” said the Lords, “she is more beautiful than day!”
And thereafter Coppelia belonged to Erkie, a distinction that he took in his easy, good-natured way, and there was never any malice with this gentle humorous reference, to the dark-haired cheerful boy from Springwood Street where he lived as the only child of Mr and Mrs Day.
Yet Erkie’s pathological cheerfulness hid a dark pool of what must have been sadness for the boy. Sometimes he would talk about his mother who was incarcerated in Storthes Hall Hospital and laughingly tell about some of the things she had done, such as put cobs of coal in the front window to try to sell it. In more enlightened societies this kind of harmless eccentricity, whatever its cause, would be smiled upon benignly, but Western society likes to isolate and keep from sight those with sufficient creativity to dare to be different, whether they could help it or not, and so Mrs Day was taken away one day and put amongst gaunt and tense strangers in the big house up the hill to be hidden and forgotten.
It does credit to Erkie’s school fellows that they did not rag him about his dread secret, but rather held it carefully and only showed interest in it when he raised the subject, which he did with rather more cheerfulness than was comfortable for him. Of course, we were not able to feel the hurt and sense of abandonment he felt inside, and I do not recall that the idea that he might be hurt by it ever entered my mind, and no one else spoke of it. Perhaps Erkie cried himself to sleep at night, alone in his room with his lonely father sitting downstairs thinking about life and its responsibilities and its twists of fate and, perhaps, what had happened to the girl he had taken as his bride in happier days before the obfuscatory haze came to settle inside Mrs Day’s mind where the whole world changed violently into something unrecognisable and terrifying without warning and no one could understand it, least of all Mrs Day.
I have not seen Erkie since December 1949 when I left Spring Grove School nor have I had any news of him or how his life has been, or whether the haze that claimed his mother came to visit him to clothe him in its icy fogginess, robbing him of life as it did his mother, and if there happened to be another young Erkie who wept in his lonely bed for his seemingly absent, detached, and disengaged father.
And I do not understand why I could not have remembered before it was too late for me to do anything about it, even if it was only to hold the hand of a man I had known and liked as a boy or, if life had given him a bye on his mother’s disability, to have talked about old times and been a friend when our pathways crossed in our later years, which they never did.
Apart from his amusing revelations about his mother’s funny ways, I remember only one clear incident about him. When we were seven, we were in Standard Three being taught about Moses, who had been placed in the ark in the bulrushes of the Nile. Our teacher asked,
“Why did Moses’ mother put him in the basket on the river?”
Erkie’s hand went up,
“Yes, Keith,” asked the teacher.
“’Cos she was fed up!” volunteered Erkie, and we did not laugh because it seemed right to us seven year old boys and girls who were used to their parents getting fed up with them.
I think I did hear that Erkie Day joined the Royal Navy, but more than that, I know not. I asked in my local newspaper for contact with any who were in my class at Spring Grove, but answer came there none, and maybe those days will never be remembered around a dinner table as old school pals recall what they can remember, and are kind enough to forget what they should forget of their lives sometimes together while they report the complexities of their lives apart, and continue to wonder about dark things that kind people do not speak about, and friends forget.
