RIP VAN PRINGLE

This is a tale told to me more than a month back. If I have hesitated to bring it to the attention of my readers, of the wider public in general it is for good reason. Not so much for its credibility but for the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it which I, myself, found it difficult to believe. At first, I genuinely believed myself to be the victim of a hoax. An ingenious story made up to push my imagination, my sense of credulity to its furthest limits. Quite frankly I refused to accept at face value what I was hearing. It was a joke. The whole thing a plain pack of lies. Then as the days passed I stopped to think and asked myself the one simple question. What if… Nothing more, just what if?

It was then that I paused, with the cynicism still washing over me. Crazy as it seemed what if there was an element of truth in the thing? It was then that I began thinking. It all sounded so plausible. Most of the facts he’d given me could be ordered. Put into some form of rational sequence. It was then that I began what I’d best describe as an initial investigation. His name, the place from where he’d been confined for so long, his illness if you can call it that, the exact timing of the events that made up the story. That and so much more. As I pursued my enquiries my investigation took a remarkable turn. I had travelled to one of the quietest, most rural parts of the Welsh borders, patiently undertaken a discourse with persons, a very select few I have to say, of those still alive who’d been acquainted with the mental health service as it was then back in 1950’s. People initially reluctant at first to confirm or deny anything I had to say or questions I asked but from whom I painstakingly put together shreds of evidence that collectively, slowly but inevitably pointed me increasingly in the direction of what could only be true.

From these I was able to confirm the institution in which the incarceration of my friend began. Who he indeed was and what had happened to him. And further confirm the fact that was the most incredible of all. That his coma, which had lasted an astonishing five decades or more, had not seen him age. He’d been admitted as a mental patient while in his mid-twenties and for medical reasons commonplace within the broad, crude institutional treatment of the time, to our way of thinking these days bordering on the barbaric, had been induced into a coma in the belief that it would progress his treatment. This had seemingly failed and the authorities at the small rural hospital had decided that the situation was best left as it was. That he’d somehow emerge from it on his own without further treatment. Only he didn’t. When the hospital was shut down he was transferred elsewhere and left to sleep.

The tale seemed impossible. Such things just didn’t happen, only all the evidence I had piling up told me that in this case they had. All the same it just couldn’t be true. The dates checked out only there was one impossible, utterly impossible fly in the ointment. The man had been admitted in the mid nineteen-fifties aged twenty-seven. This I was able to verify from the records I traced and the persons I spoke to, and both supported each other. What I didn’t reveal to my contacts however was that he was still alive when of course they’d supposed him deceased. This was because of the once simply impossible fact. That I was looking at and listening to someone with the physical appearance of a man in his mid-twenties. Someone who’d be in his mid to late eighties but didn’t look any older than thirty. In short, as impossible as it seemed, the man hadn’t aged! For some reason, while asleep for half a century or more he’d remained in biological stasis. His ageing process had ceased.      

I spent weeks consulting medical texts. Spoke casually to various medical experts without revealing any pertinent facts. It was just a matter of curiosity on my part! From what I learned such a medical condition was, though not impossible, exceptionally rare with less than a handful of cases ever recorded. Clearly my own contact was someone who’d slipped the net. The lengthy history of his circumstances never recorded. I indeed, was the first and only person to know.

From his early part of his story it seems that he’d woken up in a dark room, the smell around him strange, even forbidding. He didn’t know where he was or even why. He had little memory. Only fragments of his childhood and teenage years. He’d staggered up, explored the room he was in then opened the door, eventually emerging into the gardens of a large rural house. It was daylight and he saw everything clearly. For a while he sat on a bench besides a small lake then gradually everything began coming back as if out of a fog. One thing after another. His fear as he recounted it to me palpable. He was unsure of his circumstances. Terrified of talking to anyone. All he knew was that he’d somehow been confined. That he somehow had to get away.

His early experiences as he related them to me were a long and conflicted story. He’d slept rough at first then reached a nearby town. Eventually managed to find shelter and accommodation and soon after employment. His most remarkable most terrifying experience was when he learned of his temporal circumstances. That he’d awoken in the twenty-first century. That most of his family and all those that he’d known were deceased. It was a crushing, incomprehensible blow. He’d struggled to come to terms with his fate but found it impossible. Intelligent man that he was he’d put together what had happened to him but didn’t know why. And then that most terrifying realisation of all. He couldn’t turn the clock back! He didn’t look the way an old man might look but it was small consolation. Everything and everyone he’d known had gone. All of it lost in the past and he a complete stranger to the present! He was fifty years out of his time. A stranger in an entirely strange land and he couldn’t go back.

At first he found everything around him extraordinary. He tried making comparisons. Tried understanding his circumstances. Eventually overwhelmed with curiosity and wonder. And it is this part of his story perhaps that fascinates me the most and which I wish to relate.

I’d first come across him sitting on a bench among the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens, Central London. The air was warm, indeed pleasant, and most of the other seats occupied by tourists, munching sandwiches and sitting out taking their ease. A space was vacant and I politely asked if he wouldn’t mind me sharing the seat. A brief nod seemed to confirm it was okay so I sat there, enjoying the fine view of the flowers. All the same I sensed what I took to be an awkwardness in my companion. A morose strangeness as though he felt an unease with my presence. Naturally I said nothing. Clearly the man wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

It must have been fifteen minutes or more that I noticed him glancing my way. A brief look that I put down to nothing more than curiosity. Fine time of year I remarked casually, wanting to do nothing more than be pleasant. Is it, he muttered, is that what you think?

Quite frankly I wasn’t sure how to respond. Well the weather was fine, I said evenly, waiting for him to continue, only he didn’t. He just sat there looking at nothing in particular, a blank expression on his face. He had to be one of the local office workers I surmised. Already worn out by the tedium of a morning’s dull work and taking a break during lunch-time.

Again that curious look… prompting in me a certain small affability. Was he alright I wondered, putting my thoughts into a quiet friendly question. As alright as it’s possible to be, he snarled, and I’ll ask you to mind your own business…

I got up immediately, turning to leave. Aware I’d said the wrong thing. Clearly he preferred to be on his own. My gesture must have disturbed him. It was his turn now to look apologetic. He was sorry! He hadn’t meant to upset me. He had a lot on his mind!

I resumed my place on the bench saying nothing. Just resolved within myself to stay quiet. The fine view of the flowers was everything I could ask. Half an hour ran by with a silence between us, and it was then, gradually, with a few words about the fine weather, and a spattering of remarks about work, and life in general that he began talking. Everything unremarkable at first, just a flat discourse until I began noticing a strangeness in his remarks. Certain things I hadn’t expected, like the differences between life now and how it had been fifty years back. He was a young man and I middle-aged and I found his comparisons interesting. I let him go on, expecting some kind of scholarly discourse though as I observed it was nothing of the kind. It was all peculiarly personal. As if in some way he’d had a personal  involvement in those times of the past. As though there was some deeper connection between them that was more than a matter of study. 

I felt intrigued and responded with a few easy questions. Nothing intrusive, just a pleasant curiosity that seemed to me harmless enough. It wasn’t long before his story unfolded. A series of events, of places and times… An account of times in the past… Of a past life, all of which so remarkable that I found it impossible to believe were in any way true. This was a wonderful tale I was hearing. Whoever he was he had a really great aptitude for making up stories! The most amazing piece of nonsense I’d ever heard only I didn’t say so! Finally he stopped and looked at me hard. He’d never related his story till now… If I didn’t believe him here were some of the facts. I could check them out if I wanted.

I shook my head. Why me I wanted to know?

His reply came with little emotion. Strangely flat in the warm summer air. It’s been a very long time he said earnestly. It had to happen sooner or later. Just you though. Nobody else. I gave him my immediate assurance. There wouldn’t be anyone else.

We arranged to meet a month later. Same bench, same time, same day of the week. I made him a promise. Rain or shine I’d be there!

The month went by. As I said earlier. I travelled. Talked to people. Checked out the documents and medical records. All with increasing amazement and horror. Everything he’d said came together. The whole impossible story was true. Then a month later, on the day and the time I made my way through the Gardens. I had so many questions. There was so much more I wanted to know. Three o’clock at the bench. The exact time. I rounded the bed of white roses. Yes he was there only something was wrong. Someone was sitting there all right only not him. An elderly face stared up at me curiously.

I looked down, thinking for a moment I was in some kind of nightmare. Somehow the face looked familiar. Even so it couldn’t be him. Suddenly a voice came from behind. Let’s try the bench further down.

I turned. It was my friend from the past. We shook hands, me feeling glad he was there. Taking the seat I told him what I’d been doing. How I’d checked out his story. His expression darkened. Well then, did I believe what he’d told me?

I knew what I wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to say it. The whole thing just didn’t seem right yet the evidence was plain incontrovertible. Improbable as it seemed the truth was as stated. Yes, I quietly acknowledged, his story was borne out by the facts. He was who he’d said. A man in his late eighties straight out the deep past. My reply must have pleased him because now I heard the story related above. How he’d awoken and returned to the present. Began to live life all over again.

His wonder and amazement at reawakening in the twenty-first century is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the whole story. The account of his remarkable discoveries something I learned over the following weeks. Yes they were indeed tales of discovery, related with a fluency and delight that made me realise at once that he’d overcome his dilemma. That he was truly a man of two worlds. That everything he’d lost in the past could be made up in the present. Lost wasn’t really the right word. He still had his memories and now he could start living all over again.

His first impressions were naturally of people, and the differences between those he remembered and those he saw and knew now. People today were so very different. Not only in their appearance but in their values. In the way they behaved. In the early 1950’s, not long after the Second World War, much less food was available for general consumption than today. People ate less and were slimmer. There was no universal habit of snacking at lunchtime and there were no great stores, supermarkets, from which to purchase ready- made foods. Yes, people in general looked leaner, especially women. He was surprised to see so many grossly fat women, and the men too looked overweight.

It was because of the cheap food that was available now I told him. Food with a high content of fat that so many poor people ate. What we now called fast food. Surely he’d noticed all the places that sold it?

His expression confirmed.  Countless ready-made fast food outlets selling pizza, chicken and portions of grilled beef in rolls. Little to nothing like it at all in the fifties. People eating all the time in the streets, in restaurants where they could order and consume a meal in minutes rather than hours. People had acquired a seriously unhealthy eating habit that had made them diabetic with an overconsumption of sugar and prone to heart attack with an overconsumption of fat. The health risks from an overconsumption of food were so very different today to that of only fifty years back. To his eyes people simply looked fat and unhealthy.

But then that was only one side of custom and habit. People today drank astonishing quantities of alcohol, particularly the youth. In the fifties most working men drank together down at their local pub. Maybe a pint. More like two at the maximum. And it was indeed mostly men. Women were rarely seen in public houses on their own. They were always accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends. Today, he’d observed, teenagers drank huge quantities of alcohol, both beer and spirits drunk by girls as well as lads who became intoxicated and behaved in a simply appalling manner. They became drunk, got into fights and swore. And it wasn’t just the lads. The way that girls behaved was astonishing compared to what he had known. It reflected an astonishing shift in values that governed the behaviour of young people.

I understood his thoughts only too well. True, they had more money to spend these days than they’d had back in his time, but then not all of them. Many were unemployed and too many others in poorly paid jobs. All the same the old habits had changed. All the old family values. There was less control. Too much family breakdown.

He knew what I was talking about. All these things being a result of fundamental changes in the economy in the last fifty years. Changes in the way people worked and what they did for a living. All the old traditional industries that gave men and women work and a wage like mining and manufacturing, engineering and shipbuilding, textiles and cars had all but disappeared, along with the big working communities they’d once sustained. In the mid 1950’s they employed 75% of the working population, today it was less than 20%. It was light industry these days that kept people employed. That and the financial sector and of course tourism and what was called ‘heritage’. Sectors of the economy that had once employed 20% of the population had doubled and trebled in size in the last three decades of the twentieth century. These changes, profound in themselves, had created astonishing social upheaval and fast changing values. A whole section of the working class had disappeared. Become a semi-literate, socially dysfunctional underclass with great social and psychological problems.

Physical changes within the population and those that were social and economic. He’d perceived it all very clearly I said. So what else had he noticed? What other major differences had he observed.

His eyes shone as he spoke. There was so much that he’d seen. So much that he wanted to tell me about. 

I sensed his excitement. His enthusiasm as an observer. There were many more cars now. In his time most people travelled by bus. Public transport was everything. The buses and trains all part of the great state owned industries like electricity, water and gas. These days everything had changed. Everything privately owned. Especially transport, like cars. It was a fundamental change in just fifty years. Most public services privatized. Even the Post Office and the Royal Mail. There was even talk about doing away with the free National Health Service. Today social and economic life was far more fragmented. Far less communal with a community spirit. Everything altogether more personal. More individual. The Conservative Government and its Liberal partners were even scrapping the benefits people once got for being poor or sick or out of work. Benefits ordinary people had paid for themselves were being taken away.

I found him fascinating to listen to as he went on. Most people alive today were born well out of his time. They knew little of recent British history and really didn’t care anyway. The contrasts and comparisons he was able to make were beyond them. He was a man of two different times. The world had changed only he was someone of both, the past and the present. As a keen observer his mind was a bridge between them. There were things that astonished him, especially the wonder as he put it of modern technology, especially in the fields of personal communication and entertainment. There’d been a great miniaturization of devices for private use such as mobile phones that also acted as computers or played music directly into the ear. There were tiny computers that performed the function of television. The whole mechanical process of communication had disappeared and had been replaced by a new age of electronics and the digital. Colour television had replaced monochrome. It was also a new information age where knowledge could be internationally exchanged through a globally interlinked network of stored data.

Naturally I knew all of this and while I understood all his enthusiasm and wonder I just couldn’t share it. Get excited and thrilled the way he was. These modern times were a part of me. I’d grown accustomed to everything there was around me. To him it was new. Something to be marveled at.

He paused for a moment as though thinking. But perhaps most fantastic of all he went on was the arrival of the Space Age. He’d disappeared from life before the first Russian Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. Learning of this when he awoke then hearing about the great American triumphs of men landing on the Moon, of satellites exploring the Solar System, the outer planets then landing exploration rovers on Mars were things he found utterly incredible. And all in the short time of fifty years. In fact, looking back on the time that he’d known, of the time he’d come out of, it was all very sombre and dark.

Of course it was, I cut in. We’d just come out of a War that engulfed the whole world. A hundred million people died. Even ten years later there’d been little progress made. Things only began taking off in science and technology from the 1960’s around fifty years back, and look at everything that’s happened. It’s only been fifty years!

There’s a United Nations organisation these days, I went on… And no more British Empire. All those colonies we once owned in Africa and Asia, like India, are all independent countries of their own these days!

He laughed. I didn’t have to tell him! And there was no more Soviet Union either he added.

I took it all in. Clearly he’d been doing a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of thinking. He had a place of his own now in London and a job which enabled him to travel and see things. We met again over the next three months. Every couple of weeks while the weather was warm and always on that same bench in the Gardens. Then one day he never appeared and despite my frequent visits I never saw him again. He’d left me with no phone number or address so as time passed I often got to wondering. Over the three months though I learned much more about his perceptions and what he thought. His main interest it seemed had been people’s habits and how they had changed. Particularly their appearance, their eating and drinking, as much curry and rice now as fish and chips, and of course that so many lived in their own houses. He’d noticed with genuine dismay the proliferation of a drugs culture which he found disturbing and sad. A displacement activity as he put it and a waste more than anything.

What equally fascinated him was the way people spoke. A new informal kind of language more than anything along with their propensity to snack. The common favourite being crisps, a favourite during his time thought to a much lesser degree. It was the sheer variety that he found so extraordinary, something to which he found himself falling victim himself! He now had a favourite munch of his own. Something I observed with no uncommon fascination when he began turning up with them again and again! He’d taken the tube out of a carrier bag and to my amazement offered me some.

I could barely take my eyes off his face as he guzzled. Clutch after clutch with an almost hypnotic abandon. As for myself I’d found them salty and moreish but nothing desperately special. He on the other hand loved them to pieces. Pringles, plain Pringles had become his firm, even addictive habit! Where his salivary glands were concerned the Pringle was king.

It was not my way to criticize him for this. Look down on his prize confection with snobbery. If that’s what he liked so be it. It was though, to my mind, one of the strangest, least considered aspects of modern life that had clearly got under his skin. The common salty Pringle! So now I see him somewhere or other, marveling at all the wonders of modern life and reflecting on some of the worst aspects of all the changes. Somehow coping and increasingly more at ease with his fate. And yet through it all finding a no uncertain solace in one of those things that these modern times has provided for his pleasure. The ubiquitous and ever crunchy Pringle Original in its tight fitting tube.

So there it is. The true story of a man who slept through five decades of turbulence and awoke to all the miracles of these modern times, only to be captivated most by one of the humblest, most basic of human activities and instincts. The making and eating of a tasty confection.