A man is not measured by his misfortunes, but by the quiet joys he leaves behind.
Afflicted, dispossessed, shunned – reconciled to drowning his woes in merciless torrents of alcohol – he slumped among shrubs, benches, doorsteps, and bus stops, his presence a shifting ghost in the landscape of our town. That was Derek, our window cleaner. Long dead now, and when his name surfaces in conversation – sporadically, tentatively – it evokes only the vaguest recollections. To most, he left behind no more than a splinter of an impression, a mere torn corner from the single, meagre page that might have been written to chronicle his life.
Not so with me.
Had one wished to catalogue the wretchedness of his existence, they would have required a library bursting at the seams.
Some lives fade like whispers, but the echoes remain for those who listen.
Derek was a hopeless liar, but oh, what a storyteller. He spun his yarns with such flair that I carry them with me even now, and within a few sentences, he could conjure a masterpiece – an oil-painted impression so vivid and textured that even the greatest of the Masters might have envied his skill.
He was a ruin of a man by the time I knew him. His weathered face, those glazed, troubled eyes, his tough, tanned skin etched deep with lines of hardship – all bore testimony to a life lived hard. Tobacco-stained teeth framed a smile that was nonetheless wide, untroubled, sincere. Yet, beneath the wear and tear of time and suffering, I sensed the ghost of handsomeness, a flickering remnant of what he must have been in his youth. What had shaped him into the creature he became? The life he had lived? The choices he had made – or the choices made for him? The roads he had walked, the corners he had turned, the injustices he had suffered?
And yet, Derek was a masterpiece in his own right. A singular specimen of human endurance. The worth of his character, to me at least, remains immeasurable, and I can only hope – though I doubt it – that somewhere, in someone else’s memory, he is preserved as vividly as he is in mine.
Orphaned and discarded in that wretched village as a child, Derek had been left to fend for himself, the perfect quarry for bullies and brutes. Passed from one indifferent household to another, abandoned at every opportunity, denied the dignity of a proper education, marked out for trouble before he had a chance to prove otherwise – his was a life decided by others long before he could decide it for himself. Whenever mischief arose, the blame fell upon him without question. After all, it was ‘more than likely him’.
What chance, then, that he was ever someone’s ray of sunshine?
And yet, I knew enough of Derek to feel the ache of his sorrow.
Between bouts of stupor, he cleaned windows to support his meagre existence. It always thrilled me to see him working his way up the terrace, and never once did I hear a complaint of shoddy work or ‘port-holes’ left behind. He took his job seriously. But beyond that, Derek had a gift for simple joys. He was an expert at making paper aeroplanes – a skill of infinite value to a child. I would race to him with sheets of paper and coloured pencils, and if he had the time, we’d sit together in the yard, shading and decorating his handiwork.
One afternoon, he regaled me with a tale of fishing, and with the same care he gave to his aeroplanes, he fashioned a net for me. He used an old cane and some nylons – what I innocently (ahem) thought were discarded nylons, which I had, with great cunning, retrieved from my mother’s drawers upstairs. I wasn’t the only one to benefit from his craftsmanship, either. Several of my friends soon possessed nets of their own, courtesy of Derek’s generosity – and my mother’s smalls.
I see him still, in my mind’s eye – stooping to my height, half the look of a lost boy himself – cleaning my mother’s windows gratis, as though this might atone for the ruined nylons she later discovered in our possession.
Bless you, Derek.
The world seldom remembers the broken, but kindness leaves imprints where history does not.
Wording 