the boy who wasn't there

I'll always take a moment to stop and read a blue plaque, when I see one affixed to a house or building, to see who is being honoured, or remembered. Who once lived, or stayed, visited briefly, or otherwise bestowed their glorious presence upon said house or building. By definition, the plaques memorialise eminent people; the great and the good (but hopefully the slightly shady too), otherwise, what's the point? Who would care about a plaque dedicated to someone who achieved nothing of note? Maybe their close family would care, but the rest of us? Probably not. And what I would be curious to know is the minimum amount of time an eminent personage needs to remain in a building before that building can claim bragging rights and raise a plaque dedicated to that personage. The case of Charles Dickens is the reason I ask this question.

I have spent years, all my adult life, living in various towns along the south coast of England, and almost all of them have had a blue plaque dedicated to Dickens on a wall somewhere within their boundaries. Currently, I live in Eastbourne, and there is a plaque here with his name on. Dickens was actually born in the south coast city of Portsmouth so, besides a blue plaque, he even gets a museum there. Prompted by all these plaques, my curiosity once got the better of me and a quick internet search revealed that Dickens has over 40 plaques dedicated to him (the second highest amount of anyone), spread in and around various towns and cities in the UK. Common sense dictated that he can't have lived in all of these places, so some further digging revealed that the most common reasons for a Dickens plaque on the front of a building are that he 'Stayed Here', 'Visited Here', and 'Read Here.' Now we're getting somewhere, and I'm going to make some sweeping assumptions - a Stay might stretch from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, a Visit, in this context, suggests he came for afternoon tea, even stayed on for dinner, but he didn't bring his pyjamas. A Reading might take, what, a couple of hours? Throw in a Q&A afterwards and it might possibly have stretched to three. So a building could install a blue plaque to Dickens when he had spent as little as three hours in it! What the Dickens? Anyway, Charley isn't really the point of this post, Jeffery Farnol is the point.

On a recent wander, I was thrilled to come across a plaque dedicated to Mr Farnol, the eminent author (so says the plaque), and the reason I was so pleased to find it is that this was the gentleman responsible for naming me. Perhaps I should explain. I remember asking my mother, many years ago when I was a boy, why I was called Charles, why she and dad had chosen that name, and she told me that she wasn't really sure since, if my older sister had been a boy, my father had been keen to call him Simon. I was shocked. Simon. The name Simon still holds a resonance for me. He's the older brother I never had; named but not realised. I love my sister, but how badly I had wanted an older brother at the time. And because I was young, and didn't really understand how these things worked, I fully believed it was somehow possible that this elusive older brother could still be born, two years my senior, and slot seamlessly in between my older sister and myself in the pecking order. The fact that this (obviously) never happened, meant a tinge of longing always attached to the name, and a certain sense of mystery, adventure and excitement.The name Simon embodied all of that, and had the added, bullet-proof, quality of symbolising someone who had never done me wrong or disappointed me, because he never existed.

One question I didn't think to ask at the time, but perhaps should have done, was why had I not been called Simon? If it had been such a favoured name a few years before I was born, then why had it fallen out of favour by the time I came along? For many years, Simon had actually been a kind of alter-ego for me. I'd try the name on, imagine myself as he, and imagine how different my life would have been. Surely it would have been easier, my problems fewer, my personality more popular, and I'd definitely have been taller, and more athletic. But it wasn't until years later, long after that first ask, that I thought to raise the issue again with my mother, 

Me - 'If not Simon, then why Charles?'

Mum - 'I think it was the name of a character in a book your dad was reading.'

Me - 'Really? Why didn't I know this? Which book?'

Mum - 'I don't remember.'

Me - 'Can you try?'

Mum - 'I think it might have been something by Jeffery Farnol. He was your dad's favourite author at the time.'

I'd never heard of this Jeffery Farnol, so another hasty internet search delivered a biography of the author. He had been wildly popular, and well regarded in his day (the plaque had warned me of such). He'd practically invented the Regency Romance genre, but had also written some hugely popular swashbuckling adventures. I decided it was surely the latter, rather than the former, that my dad had enjoyed reading, and titles like Adam Penfeather: Buccaneer, Black Bartlemy's Treasure, and Murder by Nail, supported my assumption. Farnol wrote over 40 novels and collections of stories, and my father had been a fan, and I'd been named for a character in one of those novels. I did once think that I could/would/should read through his works until I found a character, called Charles, who seemed a good fit for my fantasy namesake. He would surely be a pirate, a spy, an adventurer, a prince. Wouldn't he? Maybe, maybe not. I never did pick up one of Farnol's books, but I am happy, now, to know that he once lived nearby. And I decided I didn't really need to know anything about that other Charles character. It's enough to know that his name shaped my life, as I believe names have a tendency to do. And, anyway, I don't need another imaginary hero in my life. I once had a heroic older brother, called Simon, and he was just the best.

Note; it looks for all the world as though the year of Farnol's death reads 1972, but he actually died in 1952. Perhaps someone, for whatever reason, has tried to change the date.

Photos are the author's own.