Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting Page A

and lonely, I have become increasingly restless, trapped in a claustrophobic house in a small town and unable to share my frustrations with anyone. Neither is there any improvement at all in the relationship between my parents, just a grinding war of attrition that wears us all down.
    In addition to all of this, my alienation from my old school friends is now total. One evening as I walk home from the station I see Tommy selling the
Chronicle
on the corner. He has a sheaf of newspapers under his arm and catches sight of me trudging up the hill in my uniform, a satchel of books on my back. We had been close for six years, but our friendship cooled in the aftermath of the scholarship results and I haven’t seen him since I started at the grammar school and he went up to the secondary modern. He is wearing blue jeans and shiny black “winkle picker” boots with a Cuban heel. There is nothing remotely fashionable about my claret jacket, my careworn gray flannels, and my hideously sensible shoes. Even a hundred yards away I recognize him, and I can also see a vague sneer playing around his lips. As I get closer he looks me up and down with barely disguised mockery, killing dead any idea of a greeting. I am suddenly angry and ashamed. Our eyes meet for a second and we both look away in confusion. As I walk past him toward the dairy I feel his eyes on my back.
    From then on I will avoid the corner of the
Chronicle
office by usingthe tunnel to the other side of the station, walking four streets and doubling back. I don’t see Tommy for a long time and we never speak again.
    It will be almost ten years later, when I am at college, that Dad asks me if I’ve heard about my friend Tommy Thompson. He still thinks that we are best friends even though I haven’t seen Tommy in years.
    “He came in from the Penny Wet on Saturday night, must have had a skinful, got home, put the gas fire on, forgot to light it, and fell asleep. They found the poor lad dead next morning.”
    I will take myself down to the river with my thoughts, and from the ferry landing look across to the town of Hebburn, ghostly under a veil of fog on the other side. The lapping of the slow gray waters seems to soothe me as they move inexorably to the sea. When I was younger and listening to the pulpit brogue of the Irish priests I would confuse Hebburn with the heaven that would be our promised reward for remaining good “Catlicks.”
    “Is that where ye are, Tommy?” I whisper quietly as if he could hear me, but there is no answer.
    The boy who was my best friend has died, and for the first time I am aware that there is a strange and terrible guilt attached to death and its survival. Part of you rejoices that it was not you who was chosen, part of you is ashamed and regretful that you made no effort to rebuild a bridge to someone whom you’ve had the privilege of knowing intimately, and now it can never be built again.
        Music has always been my refuge from sadness. The guitar I inherited from my uncle John now has decent strings, and I’m no longer making the “broken” music that so upset my grandmother; in fact I’m making a lot of progress, but the limitations of my first instrumentare holding me back. There are things that I simply can’t do with this primitive heirloom.
    From the money I earned on the milk rounds I have saved up enough for a new acoustic guitar that I’ve had my eye on. It has been hanging from the wall in Braidford’s Music Shop for three months now. I go and see it after school every evening, praying that no one has bought it. It is a beautiful steel-stringed instrument with a blond finish, an ebony fingerboard, and delicate marquetry inlaid around the sound hole. It costs me sixteen guineas, which is a large amount of money, but I’m in love for the very first time.
    I first heard the Beatles in my final year at junior school. I remember being in the changing rooms of the swimming baths. Mr. Law had just supervised one of