The man most likely to Succeed. 

By Len Morgan

  When I look back on my childhood, one person immediately springs to mind. Barry O’Donnell ~ was a handsome lad ~ and the one most likely to succeed in life.  Dough to his friends, was a charismatic guy, intelligent, witty, and inventive. His passions were modern & traditional Jazz, and Science fiction.   In 1960, at 15 years of age, he was a gifted artist who could paint incredible Sci-fi panoramas so vivid you could imagine you were there.   He idolised an artist, in Weird & Astounding Sci-fi comics, who simply signed his work as DITCO.   Dough was a poet and songwriter, who also wrote stories that could make you laugh or cry.    He would spend endless hours drinking brown ale, and listening to Elvis, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane, Jerry Lee and other rock stars of that era.   But mostly he loved the Jazz of Chris Barber, Bix Beiderbek, the Dutch Swing College Band, Duke Ellington, Earl Bostic, Dizzie, Bird, and Ella Fitgerald.  

   At school, he was a gifted ‘A’ stream student, always top of the class.   It seemed that the world was his oyster.   If anybody from Eastbury Secondary School for Boys was going to make a name for himself it was Dough!   But, he had one enormous flaw.   An anarchic antisocial streak that left us, his friends, embarrassed and feeling obliged to apologise for his thoughtless words and actions.   You see we loved him, we appreciated his finer qualities, and wanted others to do likewise.   But Dough, predictable as the weather was guaranteed to do something offensive to alienate somebody - often violently.

“Sorry he behaved like that, he’s really a great guy but, when he drinks…”   Whilst we apologised Dough would wander off, doing his own thing, wreaking havoc, oblivious to the trouble he’d caused and the efforts we put in to make things right! 

   On a school trip, to France, he got drunk and rode off on the local gendarmes bike - there was a gun pointed at his back as we remonstrated with the officer.   We retrieved his bike and apologised, but Dough still spent a night in the cells learning gutter French, and how to drink cheap red wine, with the town drunk; skills he would make use of, in later years, as he travelled the continent as an itinerant grape picker in France, Italy, and Spain.

   Back home he continued to paint and write breathtaking stuff but refused to submit anything for publication.   I believe, that above all, he feared rejection.   But, we will never know, on 5^th Nov 1961 he burned everything, on a bonfire, in his parent's back garden.  

  When he left school he worked in a succession of menial jobs from which he was sacked for disrespect, verbal abuse, bad timekeeping, unreliability, turning up drunk, and fighting.   His longest employment lasted less than six weeks, he didn’t give a toss; he was unemployable. So finally I gave up on him.  I joined a rock group as their singer and saw less and less of Dough.   When we did meet I found myself repelled by his outlandish antisocial behaviour.

   In 1964, I joined the Army for 9 years, serving in Germany, Cyprus, and the Trucial Oman.   I was home on leave the last time I saw Dough, it was in 1969, at 2am in the morning, he was paralytic drunk, and urinating up the front doors of the Barking Town Hall; showing his regard for authority.   I didn’t stop to talk I just looked him straight in the eyes, thinking of all that wasted potential, he glared straight back at me without a glimmer of recognition, and I walked on by.

   In 1974 I read, in the Barking & Dagenham Post with regret, that Barry O’Donnell, aged 29 of no fixed abode, died on the streets of a drug overdose.  Should I, Could I have done anything to change the course of his life?  I think not.

  Some people are like moths.  Try as you will to keep them away from a candle flame, they will inevitably crash and burn.  Sadly, it is their nature.

 

Copyright Len Morgan