about frank

I realised a while ago that in none of my writing have I ever explained exactly who Frank is. This website has an About Me page, but if you’re reading that then you probably already know enough About Me to get by. It does not — did not — have an About Frank page, unless you count that as being literally everything I’ve written since 2022, in which case you’re right but it doesn’t matter because I’m writing this now anyway. I am probably going to fuck up the tenses. I am probably not going to revise the fuckings up. I am really sad. Not all the time but enough of the time that it’s inescapable. Everything — everything — comes back to him. Frank. Frank who was my neighbour.

Frank was not really my neighbour. His garden backed mine but his house did not, and the path between our houses was either up a gravel track and along the road twenty metres or the stream which connected everything. The stream was a lifeline, an unofficial route which took you beneath a fence from my garden to his, or his to mine, or technically through Pam and Graham’s garden first because the only route out of the water on his side of the fence was clambering out on the left, crossing a tiny wooden bridge, and then doubling back on yourself through the undergrowth five paces until you were in the right place. Pam and Graham are a lovely old couple who are Frank’s actual neighbours by technicality, and Graham is a keen golfer whose golf balls would often end up in gardens that were not his. I think Frank and I went over and used their paddling pool once but the memory is hazy so that could have been something else. Frank lived in his house with his mum, Kate, his dad, Dave, his older brother, Stan, and his two cats, Rory and Murphy. There was a third cat. I have forgotten his name. I have forgotten so many things and they all haunt me. I spent so much time in Frank’s house and I loved it endlessly. His parents are the best; Kate whose hair was rebellious purple for a time and whose smile is all crinkle and entirely contagious; Dave whose eyes are kind always and whose Sunday roasts were possibly the best on earth. They are both amazing people. I loved them a lot. Stan was quieter, a drummer with a fish tank in his room, very cool and very moody and very much the archetypal older brother who I thought was just awesome. He mostly kept to himself but he was lovely when we did speak. Frank was a combination of everyone and everything, his mum’s laughter and his dad’s wisdom and his brother’s creativity and a lot of things that were his very own. His fashion sense, for one thing. He skipped a lot, was always moving. Very few of my memories involve him standing still.

Frank’s birthday is the 20th of August, 2006. We met when he was nine and I was ten, because I was brand new to the area and about to start in his class at school and it just so happened that we were basically neighbours. He knew my garden before I did because he was always crossing the stream into it to get back his footballs from the old owners, Tim and Judy, and I knew Frank’s cat before I knew him because the cat was always coming into my garden, too. We probably wouldn’t have met before school started except my mum really wanted me to make friends and so she brought me round to his house — the proper way, not through the stream — with a tray of oatmeal and raisin cookies, and the first thing that Frank and I ever bonded over was how terrible those cookies were. Replacing chocolate chips with raisins was, we decided, a capital offence. And then we were friends. I don’t remember ever having a sense of becoming his friend, he was just there one day and that was that. I guess that is just how friendship works when you’re that young but it was still pretty great that we ended up getting on so well. Frank was voted the funniest person in our class in the Year 6 Leaver’s book and there really wasn’t any competition. He could make anyone laugh and so everyone loved him, obviously. I like to think that I loved him the most out of anyone but plenty of the girls did actually fancy him so actually it’s hard to say. Frank wanted to be a lot of things and I believed wholeheartedly that he would manage one day to be absolutely all of them. He wanted to be a writer and an actor and an architect, and to change the world. He had plans. So many plans. We started writing a book together, a sort of survival guide which ironically died in its early stages but was still incredibly fun to brainstorm for what felt like months but was probably only an afternoon or two. We designed an entirely novel form of transportation — the Triple C Mobile (Constantly Causing Chaos), which was in fact just a recycling box strapped to a pennyboard which was tied to a scooter. Diagram as follows, because we did in fact take ourselves very seriously. The HF in HF Industries™ stands for Hana and Frank, obviously.

We also had a treehouse. My dad built it, not us, but it was still the best place on earth because we got to customise it forever after. You might be picturing some sort of multi-storey work of architecture splendour when I say treehouse but probably quite an important detail is that this thing was very much a tiny carpeted box in a tree. With a roof. It was perfect. For Frank’s eleventh birthday I spent thirteen whole pounds on a slate sign that read Frank & Hana’s Chill Out Zone and he showed everyone in his family before we hung it up inside. Also in the treehouse was a piggybank which consistently contained about seventy pence, and a thoroughly weathered sheet of A4 paper displaying only the Middlesbrough FC badge that I printed out for him one day because we kept spending our pocket money on snacks and neither of us had the funds for an actual decent poster. We ate a lot of sweets and got told off a lot for eating so many sweets and so a lot of the time we spent together was spent sneaking back and forth from the Co-op with bags of confectionary hidden beneath our t-shirts. Back then a two pound coin could get you three bags of fizzy rainbow belts and two chocolate bars to boot so we were rolling in it, really. Frank really loved Squashies. Like, big time. Once he ate so many of them at once that he threw up on my driveway and the pink-and-white sick was so clearly Squashies that there was entirely no hiding it from my parents, who were consequently rather pissed off.

The time that we didn’t spend sneaking around we spent doing basically everything else, because that’s how it is when you’re kids, cycling up the lane and then left to the rec or roasting marshmallows on homemade back garden campfires or setting up the sprinkler in the heat of summer and leaping through the beads of water for hours and hours until eventually a hose war breaks out and freezing wet chaos takes over until the sun goes down. We watched a lot of TV and played a lot of pool. We went on trips through the fields to see the lake and the horses. We sat in my room and talked about the universe. When we met Frank had a bedroom at the front of his house, the smell of which I can remember always, a slightly raised bunkbed all space blues and planet reds with treasures abound in the storage space beneath. His duvet cover was rockets and constellations. So was he. Then when he got a bit older and too big for his bedframe his parents let him move into the guest bedroom towards the garden end of the house and to the right, which was a double bed — revolutionary — and a huge desk beneath the best window ever and a plant on the desk and a chest in the corner which you could fit a whole person inside. Was the wallpaper trees? Yes, I think so, a forest. I don’t know what the room looks like now, if it’s changed at all. I haven’t been in there since he died. Frank had lots of trinkets and for one birthday or Christmas maybe he got a squat little Google Home thing that sat in the corner and answered all his questions when he said okay Google and could turn the light in the middle of the room different colours on demand.

We did a lot of building. Many attempts were made at Rube Goldberg machines and precisely none worked out; once we built a ski slope for tangerines on his dining room table and that was about as good as it got. We tried to build parachutes for dropping Lego constructions out of his old bedroom window without them breaking and then we realised that it was actually just so much more fun to chuck stuff out the window parachuteless and film it smashing in slow motion on my little rose gold iPhone 5s. I specify my phone because his was a hideous yellow Nokia which wasn’t fit for much other than us chucking it into the air and letting it hit the driveway to see if it would ever break, which it never did. We also did a lot of putting Frank in helmets and letting nature take its course, namely the zipline that we built out of blue rope from the treehouse but also that time he suited up in full biker garb, no skin exposed at all not even on his face, and launched himself into various nettle patches to see if he’d get stung. He loved his bike and his scooter and his penny board. He loved a lot of things. Baking, creating, his family, his cats. Hopefully he loved me but I never asked. When the roof of my house was getting re-tiled there was scaffolding up for weeks and it went up so high, so dangerous, and each night we’d clamber out of my bedroom window and take all the ladders to the very top layer and sit there, hearts racing, watching the sun go down to the west and the teeny tiny dog walkers on the fields to the east. It was love then, I think. It was love for me.

Frank went to America one year, I think the West Coast but I don’t remember, and he brought me back a starfish necklace that I wore until the pendant fell off but I never did figure out where exactly the falling off occurred and so now it’s gone forever. I lost it when he was still alive but that doesn’t help things much. He really liked America. The surf culture mostly, the sea. He loved the sea and now his mum spends a lot of time swimming in it, which she probably did before, but it’s probably just a little heavier in the aftermath. Most things are. I miss my friend. Most days we’d walk to and from school together, and on my last ever day at school with him we took all of my books and buried them beneath snow and then stomped on the slushy book mixture until everything was mangled and brilliant. There are things I don’t remember; there are things I do remember but just probably am forgetting to mention right now. The first time I ever went on a bus without my parents was with Frank, to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the cinema there where we watched The Lego Movie 2, I think. We went to the cinema a lot and I can never remember what it was we watched that first trip. Lego Movie or the new Spiderman. I don’t know. We’d sneak sweets in from Poundland and feel thoroughly entirely on top of the world. There was sledding and swimming but mostly it was always just Frank in the middle of it all, Frank the centre of the universe, Frank who lit up all days until he didn’t, doesn’t, died.

Frank was one of three passengers in a Ford Fiesta when it slammed into a Fiat 500 on the B4305. It was Friday the 21st of April, 2023. Ed Spencer, who was in a Year 7 tutor group with Frank and me, was behind the wheel. He’d had a license for six weeks. At 64mph he lost control on a Z bend, took his foot off the accelerator, and spun onto the other side of the carriageway. This could have been more survivable if not for the oncoming Fiat 500, which was being driven by a woman with two children in the back seats. Also in the Ford were Harry Purcell and Tilly Seccombe, both of whom died the same day in hospital. Frank was airlifted alongside them both and he survived until Sunday the 23rd on life support but there was no saving him, either. His organs were donated. The ventricles in his heart went to two little babies. Even in death he was brave. Selfless. Kind.

He was sixteen. It was April. My friend Lois messaged me at 20:08 that day to say have you heard about frank? At 21:23 I replied to say no what happened to him. Her response came in at 21:24. It said car accident. It said passed away this morning. It said you two were close. I thought you’d want to know.

There are videos of Ed Spencer from the weeks before the collision. I’m going to crash, he says in one, and it’s going to fly down. In another he passes a mobility scooter at 50mph. In a third he is blasting music, staring into the camera, driving one-handed, disco time. Frank would not want me to hate him. Frank never hated anyone. But I do.

Judge Andrew Lockhart KC presided over the case. His words do better justice to this whole thing that mine ever could. To Ed: It is the cross that you will bear. I make it clear that any sentence cannot put a value on any one of the lives of the children who died. You’re a habitual bad driver, fascinated by speed. It is of note that you were warned of this behaviour. There was a terrible inevitability to what was going to happen on April 21. It was 3.5 miles before the collision that your car was caught on CCTV. It is clear from that footage that your car is significantly speeding. A careful driver would have realised the risks of driving on a rural road with bends and undulations. At the point where you lost control there is a chevron. A competent driver would have braked on the approach to this bend. I note that the national speed limit is 60mph and it is applicable to this stretch of road. I further note that this is a limit not a target. This was a road you knew with hazards you knew; that knowledge did not cause you to slow down. This was a car driving way too fast, through severe bends, by a young man with a penchant to show off. This has all the trademarks of lift-off oversteer. None could, or did, survive such a disaster.

Frank did not deserve to die at sixteen. Nobody does, not really, but especially not him. Frank deserved to design and build a house for his mum, which was always his dream. He deserved to grow into a man with blue eyes and a grey beard and wrinkles, like his dad. His dad, who exists now in a family so harrowed by loss that, in his words, the people we were no longer exist. Everything died when Frank did. The whole world stopped turning. He was the ocean and the passing of time. He was cremated, and his ashes were placed into a casket decorated on all sides with photos of his beautiful smiling face, and it was a funeral of Hawaiian shirts and The Killers songs and so many endless tears.

I am going to write a book for him and it won’t be enough, nothing will ever be enough, but Frank I will write it your name and I will tell anyone who asks exactly who you were, exactly who you are to me. I love you. I miss you. You read everything I’d ever written in one sitting and then you sent me your longest text ever — about my stories that were geiunley amazing it was so spohiscated and the lanuage was so griping they werent like stories they were like long riddles and as you read them you sort of unraveled more and more it was so descriptively brilliant and the imagery was crystal clear and i really felt the pain for the boy in the dessert and then when he said that his mother would have two servings my heart dropped so i just wanted to say credit wheres its due they are truly honesty brilliant in every sense of the word maybe you are a insomniac but i there are very few people who are insomiacs who can create anything close to that. 

You are really bad at spelling. You were my best friend.