Twenty Years ago today::
..... and my mind turns to Potter.
Phil Potter was a tough rough loud dirty foul fast talking 15 year old club kid some sheds of years ago.
And I loved him dearly.
He had hair which was long. Hanging into his eyes and ears - all of them not well washed. His eyes were full of puss and infection. I could not see his ears.
He was great at talking but ......... er .... listening? ....... cough.
For some reason he decided that he wanted to keep his denim covered leather jacket and follow God at the same time. I have a great audio tape of me interviewing him in a derelict farm in Wales about his faith. All the time he was being interviewed he was being abused and jested with by passing peers. It is a fascinating item of history for me Joan and the Sheilas.
When he left school he aspired to working on the Waltzer on the travelling fairground. He did and he went missing for periods over the next few years. But we kept good contact and Potter became a welcome guest to both club and family.
Eventually we moved on from that project and went to work with the YMCA for the first time. We kept contact too when he joined the Army and we, after a few years, moved to work in London's east end.
As a Royal Marine Commando he was first on the boat to the Falklands when the armada set forth - and that moment in history was featured tonight in the news. So Potter, still a regular visitor to Wilson Mansions, our East-End Estate, sailed away from us and wrote his regular letters - this time from the 'at sea' Canberra. The tough East End kids had met him and yearned for news of him - especially those serving Borstal and Prison sentences. They got letters too from Potter. He was a man of struggling faith -aren't we all? It was all real-during that battle and he returned to us alive and well.
In the following months, after his return, he often visited us in his battered Datson car, following days of running up and down Welsh mountains with a back pack full of house bricks.
He was training to be the fittest of the fittest because he wanted to join the SAS elite. He applied. He joined. He continued to visit ........ strange ...... he just showed up at anytime and sat at the family table and slept on the floor and ...... ..... next morning he was gone ..... back to some secret SAS venture he never talked about.
The most professional of armed robbers and violent robbers from both in and out of prison - respected him good and proper.
He came to Greenbelt and hung out.
He did a few trips to the bank with the ticket income.
An SAS man alongside the cash transit was an extra security.
I have photographs of him.
Many of you may have met him.
This man who always talked without any 'full-stops'.
That was Potter ....... he used to call me 'Wilson'.
A true and through obnoxious man, to some, - to me a beautiful human ...
20 years after there was a massive unexpected storm in the south of England.
7 th October 1987.
Well remembered because it brought the south to a standstill - trees down - trains and traffic still - disaster in fabric terms too.
Michael Fish was the weather man in those days - that day - and he is famous because he said the weather would be fine!
That same day Joy and me were at a funeral in the North of England.
Home town St Helens.
We missed the disaster.
But we had our own.
We were at the funeral of Potter.
He died, they said, of natural causes ..............
We will remember him ..............
.
