Eric’s life was not helped by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Higgins. The only reason I knew that their first names were Cecily and Fred was because one day the mailman delivered one of their letters to our house by mistake. At first I thought that Mr. and Mrs. Higgins were Eric’s grandparents, and that he had been orphaned when younger and raised by his grandmother and grandfather, but no they were his parents. I also speculated that perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Higgins were unable to have children, and had adopted Eric from a children’s home. But that wasn’t the case either, Eric and his father both wore the same thick glasses and looked similar facially so they were biological father and son. However, Mr. and Mrs. Higgins must have been aged at least in their mid-40s when their son was born.
Having such older parents was definitely a hindrance to Eric’s social development, as was the fact that he had no brothers and sisters. He was the only true only child I knew. Nor did he have any cousins. His grandparents were all long dead, and the only relative we had ever seen visit the Higgins house in all the time we had been neighbors was his Aunt Edna his mother’s sister.
Aunt Edna was very similar to her sister — I think the two sisters were quite close in age — but was a lifelong spinster. Both women who sported grey curly hair and glasses constantly looked like they drank juice from unripe lemons and limes, and seemingly disapproved of everything fun in life. Just how Eric was born at all was a bigger mystery than Flight 19. Maybe storks really did deliver infants to families?
While I more rarely encountered Eric’s Aunt Edna, I knew Mrs. Higgins had absolutely no time for me. Well not just me, but my brothers and parents too, and the same was true of Eric’s father, although Mr. Higgins seldom spoke at all, just mumbled and let his wife do the talking for both of them. Dad had once invited Mr. Higgins and his family over for a barbeque, and the man just stared at him before turning and walking inside and of course they did not come over. Likewise, Mom’s invitations to Mrs. Higgins to come over for coffee were always refused.
In our younger years, Johnny and I tried to make friends with Eric, feeling bad for him living all alone with his much older parents. But his mother was having none of it, thinking my brother and I were bad influences upon her son. We invited him to play basketball with us one day in our driveway, an invitation Eric shyly accepted and just when he was coming out of his shell and starting to enjoy himself, his mother came storming across and marched her son back to our house, admonishing Johnny and I for ‘introducing her son to contact sports where he could get hurt.
Mrs. Higgins’ fears that we were a bad influence only stepped up from late 1941, when America joined the war and our father enlisted in the Navy and our mother had to go back to work. This meant that Johnny and I had to collect our younger brothers from their school, walk them home and babysit them and do chores until our mother returned in the early evening. It taught us responsibility that was for sure, but Mrs. Higgins and her sister were horrified by the situation, referring to us as ‘Latchkey Kids’ and taking even more steps to protect Eric from us corrupting him.
And it seemed that anything that I did was corrupting upon Eric. Once when I was 13 I accidentally hit a baseball into the Higgins’ garden, and Mrs. Higgins was outraged that I asked Eric to throw it back, thinking that I was again trying to get him into sports without her permission. Then in 1943 my grandparents bought me a new Andrews Sisters record for my 14th birthday, and when Eric was passing by with rain starting to fall I invited him in to listen to it.
Eric seemed to like the Andrews Sisters’ catchy tunes, shyly saying that his parents only had a wireless to listen to the news and a gramophone on which they would play old records from before 1920, but unfortunately what we didn’t know was that Eric’s mother had seen him come to our house and followed her son across. Eric was marched home and promised a grounding, while I was afforded a lecture, some glaring and my mother received a letter of complaint about my behavior, this time by encouraging her son to listen to corrupting and hedonistic music.
Five years on, it seemed Mrs. Higgins’ attitude to modern music hadn’t changed and I was still as bad an influence as ever, Mrs. Higgins clearly having identified me as a floozy in the making. Just several weeks ago I got on Mrs. Higgins wrong side again in town, when I got talking to Eric outside the diner where inside other teenagers were playing the jukebox, listening to Dinah Shore, Jo Stafford and Doris Day. Soon we heard not one but two women clearing their throats in disapproval, and tuned to see not only Eric’s mother but his aunt as well. I was glared at like I was a cockroach, rodent or some other type of vermin, while Eric was led away to his aunt’s car while getting a lecture from both women.
I think his Aunt Edna’s car was the only car that Eric had been in in his life. That he didn’t drive wasn’t a surprise given his parents did not drive. His mother took the bus everywhere, and his father caught a bus to the office each day and returned every evening the same way. He had done this every day for years, leaving the house at the exact same moment and returning always at the same time, even during the war. Admittedly Mr. Higgins was probably was too old to enlist by 1941, but still, it was odd that his routine never changed during the war, not once. Perhaps he had served in the Great War, but I never asked him, like his wife he didn’t like me and I think I had probably exchanged three words with the man in all the time I had known him.