The memory keeper

This is Tommy, one of the old fellers I regularly chat to. Most days he travels on the bus into town where he picks up a paper, visits the bookie and drops into the pub. Gaunt and dishevelled, his gait is a wild stagger and when he can't steady himself on a wall or piece of street furniture his arms flail alarmingly. It's clear he refuses to use a stick even at a level of infirmity which would have most people of his age (eighty-eight) clutching a zimmer frame.

Until a few years ago Tommy lived alone in a caravan by a farm where he seemed to have old retainer status. I used to meet him out in the fields doggedly tackling overgrown hedges with just a spade and a scythe (no mechanical devices for him). Once those briars and suckers were cut, uprooted and burnt they never came back. I imagined he'd always worked the land but one day he revealed that he (and his brother a few years younger) had been in the merchant navy and travelled all over the world; a litany of distant ports tumbled off his tongue.

Although our conversations usually recapitulate much same ground something new and surprising often emerges.. It was Tommy who has recently told me many of the old field names on the land around my house, information that may exist nowhere else but in his memory now. Today, standing in the bright sun at the bus stop, he confided that he used to go on holiday to France and Germany for months at a time, touring around on a bicycle and sleeping under canvas. He'd eat in cafes and get by without the language - most people knew a few words of English. (I should have asked whether he's been to Brittany and conversed in Welsh. There's enough similarity to make the languages mutually comprehensible up to a point.) He explored Ireland the same way, just him with a bike and a tent. Somehow I imagined Tommy doing all this as a fresh-faced youth but he said oh no, he done it in his 70s!

When I first met Tommy 20 years ago he'd recently found a neolithic stone axe in a ploughed field near his home. Something about the clod of earth had made him stoop to pick it up and take it home to wash off the mud. It was a beautifully shaped weapon something like the one seen here. It's in a museum now but he brought it round to show me once, wrapped in a canvas bag, and held it proudly up for a photograph. It seemed right that he should have that piece of ancient history in his hand, the legacy of distant ancestors who walked the same land and travelled the same old ways.