Skating on thin ice of a beautiful memory
You didn’t gasp at the skill, you gasped at the effect of the skill. You gasped at the beauty.
I’d like to apologise to John (or it may have been Ron) Murray. A week ago, you see, the phone rang.
‘Joe Bennett?’
I admitted it.
‘My name’s John (or it may have been Ron) Murray.’
‘John Curry?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘Murray.’
‘Oh,’ I said, but it was too late. Mr Murray wanted to discuss the perfidy of Australian cricketers, which was the subject of last week’s column and which I had far from exhausted in 800 words.
Yet to the conversation I contributed only the occasional mmm. For I was distracted. The misheard name had sent me, as can happen to ageing men, down a memory tunnel. The tunnel was labelled: John Curry, ice-skating, beauty.
I have ice-skated twice. The first time I chaperoned a class of school children to a rink and they insisted I had a go.
I rented skates, set off, thought I’d got the hang of it, then found myself horizontal and a metre above ground. Landing taught me that the difference between ice and concrete is, from a hipbone’s point of view, immaterial.
A decade later I was in the city of Quebec at Christmas.
Rounding a corner I came across a small outdoor ice rink with a band playing in a rotunda and perhaps 200 Quebecois skating round and round in time to a Strauss waltz, at ease and chatting.
It would be hard to imagine a prettier scene. It was like the nice bits of a Brueghel come alive. Skate rental was free. I joined in.
The Quebecois could not have been kinder. That only made it worse.
Little children helped me back to my feet. Pensioners offered limbs for me to cling to.
As soon as I let go I fell back down. The bruising was impressive, but it was the humiliation that drove me from the ice.
And that’s the whole of my history with ice-skating, except for John Curry. And I’ve barely thought of him in 40 years.
John Curry was a British ice-skater. When he started to win medals in the mid 1970s, the local media, as jingoistic then as now, made much of him.
Thus, just like everyone else, one day I saw him skate on television. And I was transfixed.
You needed to know nothing about skating. You needed only an aesthetic sense.
What he did was obviously difficult, but you didn’t gasp at the skill, you gasped at the effect of the skill. You gasped at the beauty.
And as with all art, the limits of the medium set the artist free.
Here was the whole of John Curry, the man himself, expressed on ice. It isn’t given to many to convey themselves without restraint.
What Waugh did with words, and Tchaikovsky with a piano, Curry did with a pair of skates.
You would have had to be dead of heart not to reach out to him with gratitude and delight.
One image stays seared in my skull, of Curry leaning backwards, his skates splayed, his arms outstretched, skating in a vast arc, cruciform on the rim of the world, relaxed and flawless and lovely.
When John who may have been Ron rang off, perhaps offended by my un forthcoming ness,I went to the internet, though I was nervous of what I might find.
For there’s a purity to memory that it is sometimes better not to disturb. Time distils things to their essence. That essence may not be literal, but it is truer than literal. I need not have worried. There on YouTube was Curry skating. The leaning arc of loveliness was not as long as I remembered it but it was every bit as easeful, every bit as glory-drenched, surrendrous to the sky and crucified.
To see it again was to feel, almost, what I had felt then.
Set against it was the literal detail of John Curry’s life, as messy and disappointing as yours or mine or anyone’s.
As a boy he wanted to attend dance classes. His father forbade it as unmanly. But grudgingly he let his son skate.
Fate is written by such pettiness. Throughout his life Curry worried, as most of us do, about money and love. He died in 1994 of Aids. He was 44.
Was it any consolation as he lay dying that he’d done what he’d done? It is presumptuous to wonder. But it was consolation to others.
So Mr Murray, if I was quiet on the phone, I’m sorry.
I was elsewhere and elsewhen, with beauty.