Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

A wander through the foggy ruins of time …

We had been having conversations at home about Jewish people I had known when I was young – we’ve had a lot to talk about on things like this in this hate filled times – and I recalled that there were not many to speak of. In those days, in the early and mid-1960s at Moseley Grammar School in Birmingham, there were, as I remember it, only three Jewish boys in the school. There may have been a Jewish teacher, but I’m not certain. Though Moseley was non-denominational, it was very much C of E in plain clothes. The Jewish boys and us Catholics – not meant of those either too –  would enter the daily school assembly after the routine prayers and hymns, and we were excused from scripture lessons even though these studied the same Old Testament.

Now, we often talk about memory here at In That Howling Infinite. Memories of our pasts, our younger selves, do not arrive with trumpets. They present themselves all of a sudden, unannounced and often sideways: through a stray remark on the couch of an evening; through a conversation about people once known; through one of those odd moments when the mind, unbidden, opens a door long thought shut and a forgotten face enters the room.

And Nicholas Molnar walked through that door …

On impulse, i went searching for one of those Jewish lads, one I had been friends with during my final years of Grammar School; and google brought up an obituary written by loved ones who bring you up to date, informing me that while I was busy becoming older, so was he.

It was written by members of the the Forres Friends of Woods and Fields, environmental and community garden group based some 40 km east of the northern Scottish town of Inverness, and it paid tribute to the their founder and chairperson who had just passed on. It got me wandering through my backpages

We were born in the same year, 1949, and arrived at Moseley at roughly the same time, around 1960, remaining there until the summer of 1967 (though I stayed another year). The son of German/Austrian parents who had escaped from Nazi Germany, Nick was small of stature, with curly hair, a prominent nose, and friendly, laughing eyes – an expression that always seemed on the verge of amusement. He was very bright, academically gifted, and a natural actor.

School drama productions in those days had a peculiar and often unimaginative tendency to cast according to what teachers thought somehow “fitted”. Nick, being Jewish, often found himself cast in Jewish roles. Looking back now, one raises an eyebrow at the assumptions involved, but at the time it seemed merely how the world worked.

I remember him particularly in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Wolf Mankowitz’s dark comedy The Bespoke Overcoat, a poignant and comic reimagining of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, itself a story carrying echoes of Jewish life and exile. These were esoteric two-handers (not quite what one would expect in grammar school drama production*) with one of the other Jewish boys – Chris Field, another outstanding student and gifted actor. The pair of them together had an ease on stage that some people spend a lifetime trying to acquire.

I cannot recall how we became pals. Nor do I remember much about the details of our friendship. But I often visited his home – in Moseley, I think, not far from our school – probably during school holidays.

I do recall that he bought a canoe and took to paddling Brum’s many canals. “Canoe, canal,” he would often refrain. At the time I thought it quite eccentric.

He then bought a second-hand Lambretta scooter. Those scooters possessed a strange glamour, belonging to a brave new world of Mods and movement and urban freedom – and, indeed, rebellion. A couple of my schoolmates had one and sported those long-tailed parkas that later featured in Quadrophenia. I envied them for the speed and freedom and would have loved to do likewise, but that required means and parental permission, and I had neither.

And then our schooldays drew to an end and we put off schoolboy things and ventured out into the wide world – the great divide that so often arrives at the end of adolescence: university, cities, the widening world.

Nick went up to university in London. I am fairly sure it was the LSE, or somewhere very near it in central London. I hitched down to visit him and stayed in his bedsit –  an atmosphere peculiar to student life where one exists in a halfway house between adolescence and whatever comes next.

Was it once or several times? I cannot recall. But I have an image of scooting through wet, wintry streets on the back of a Lambretta.

And he took me to what I recall as the Soviet Bookshop, though it may well have been Collet’s in Charing Cross Road. We had both developed a left-wing outlook on the world, and London at that time possessed a whole ecology of ideas. One could drift through central London moving from second-hand bookshops to political shops to cafés where everybody seemed convinced history itself had reached a point of imminent transformation.

Young people have always believed they stand on the threshold of a new age, but the late sixties had a particular confidence in this regard. Revolutions seemed possible. Societies looked malleable. One felt that history had become less a thing to study than a thing with which one might personally engage.

This was the life, I thought, mindful that I too would soon be taking that road.

Within a year I had left Birmingham for Reading in Oxfordshire and my own particular diversions, and, distractions. Unlike my upper sixth peers, I spent an extra year at Moseley, an unplanned and strange sabbatical during which I hitchhiked around Britain and nurtured my interest in history and politics. In what looks now in retrospect as one of life’s strange coincidences, in the Spring of 1967, I traveled the A98, the long road linking Aberdeen to Inverness – passing through Forres. I slept on the roadside somewhere near the Culloden battlefield and woke in the morning covered in snow.

Though London featured prominently, creatively and romantically in my university years, and I lived there from 1971 until 1978,  and though Nick and I may often have been in close proximity – I returned to that Russian book store several times , buying Lenin’s polemical pamphlets for my uni studies, Russian Revolution posters, and even, inspired by seeing Jethro Tull live, a balalaika (which I never learned to play) – I was never to see him again.

Until he walked through that door in our conversations here in the Tarkeeth forest – in the form of an obituary.

We lost touch – around 1968 –  as people sometimes do. Lives branch quietly. Then suddenly fifty or sixty years have passed and one discovers that entire lives have unfolded beyond one’s sight.

The strangest thing is that memory often preserves people at a fixed age. In my mind’s eye Nick remained perpetually young: climbing onto his Lambretta in his mod anorak, wandering through London, talking undergraduate politics, dropping me at the Tube station for my hitchhike back to Birmingham for school on Monday morning, and then heading off toward some unknowable future.

There is something poignant and bittersweet in discovering that the person you met a lifetime ago had not vanished after all, but had simply carried on further down the road, a.road that, for all its geographical, cultural, and social differences, might have been running parallel to my own.

Riffing on Nick’s biography – a life of service to community and environment as described below in the Forres Friends tribute –  I too became involved in student politics and protests in 1968 and 1969, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War in London, though I later parted company with politics in pursuit of more hedonistic things. I too travelled after graduation – my destiny lay in the Middle East and along the famous Hippie Trail to India and back.

My journey eventually carried me to Australia, where I now live out my latter years in a wildlife reserve and conservation area in the forests of northern New South Wales, caring for the bush while my wife tends our large vegetable garden. En route I have been an accountant, a folk singer, and an activist in Australia’s interminable forest wars.

People often imagine lives changing direction dramatically. We speak of transformations and reinventions. Yet perhaps character is more like a river than a sequence of disconnected events. It bends; it narrows; it widens; but somehow remains recognisably itself.

I had gone looking for a boy I once knew and found a life instead – a rich, generous, deeply lived life that had unfolded beyond my sight. We began with a door opening and a familiar face walking back into the room, but behind that remembered face lay an entire unseen life. There is a curious sadness in such rediscoveries. I found Nick again after all these years, only to discover that he had already rounded the bend and passed out of sight.

As Bob Dylan’s lines at the head of this memoire tell us, it is a reminder of how finite life is …

Paul Hemphill, May 2026

* But then again, maybe not. The young teacher who looked after school drama was of a bohemian bent, and in extracurricular drama classes, he introduced us sixth-formers to the plays of the “Angry Young Men” (a prominent group of working- and middle-class British writers and playwrights who emerged in 1950s postwar Britain), including Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton, and organised outings to the old Birmingham Repertory Theatre (back then, in its Stevenson Street location) to see contemporary plays.

In Tall Tales, small stories and eulogies, see more about my London in the nineteen sixties and seventies:  A Window on a Gone World … London days; Something about London; Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days;; and Ciao Pollo di Soho – the cafe at the end of the M1

In That Howling Infinite has also written more generally about the nature of nostalgia. See: Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment (There is a précis of this below), and Blue remembered hills (2) – the history we hold within us

Forres Friends of Woods and Fields founder Nick Molnar passes away peacefully

Nick then lived in Camphill communities in Norway, Ireland, England and Perthshire – supporting people with additional needs through work on the land. Camphill communities are residential communities and schools that provide support for the education, employment, and daily lives of adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental health problems, or other special needs.

But I would still choose today.

For all its noise and absurdity, for all the algorithms, grievances and existential clutter of modern life, today contains wonders unimaginable to my younger self. Medicine keeps people alive who once would not have survived. Knowledge sits literally in our hands. Distances have collapsed. Possibilities have expanded.

The trick perhaps is to hold memory gently: to enjoy nostalgia without becoming captive to it. To remember that we are, as Maria Popova put it, all our previous selves stacked inside us like Russian matryoshka dolls –  not discarded versions, but incorporated ones.

The little boy still exists somewhere in the old streets and schoolyards and songs. He is still playing in the enchanted forest with Pooh and Christopher Robin.