Mark Catlin’s resolution this new year was emotional, highly personal and tremendously daunting.
The 49-year old former groundskeeper at RAF Uxbridge would find the ashes of his best mate, Adam Cree, then organise a reunion for friends and former colleagues in his memory, more than three years after Adam was found in an Uxbridge river on the night of his 51st birthday.
Now, after a moving telephone call to Adam’s sisters, May and Anne, in Scotland, Mark is preparing to travel from his home in Wales to pay them a visit, lay a gentle hand on the urn and to raise a glass to the pal everyone knew as ‘Jimmy’.
But getting hold of even so much as a telephone number for Adam’s family had been an uphill struggle.
“I have been full on at it since January 1 – Facebook, Google, the electoral register and so on,” said Mark, who says he has told his story about a dozen times in recent weeks.
Mark last saw Adam in The Red Lion, in Hillingdon Road, in July 2010. The pair had worked together in the 1980s for Turfsoil, which held MOD grounds maintenance contracts across west London.
They were familiar faces at RAF Uxbridge, a stone’s throw from the pub, and also at RAF Northolt, in West End Road, Ruislip, and at Northwood Headquarters, in Sandy Lane, cutting grass, trimming foliage and keeping the bases in order.
As the friends enjoyed their drink that day, Adam was preparing to mark his 51st birthday the following month.
“I was supposed to come to see him, and for some reason or another I didn’t,” said Mark, who wonders if things might have been different had he made it to the birthday celebration.
Adam’s body was recovered from Fray’s River behind The Abrook Arms, in Harefield Road, Uxbridge. It took a week to formally identify him, with no identification on him and his mobile phone’s memory obliterated by the river water.
He had been in The Abrook Arms on the night of his birthday, having a quiet drink before leaving to make his way along the track that runs from the pub’s car park alongside the river to the spot where his caravan stood.
It was about 12.15am, and would have been dark down the unlit pathway. A walker later spotted his body in the river.
A post-mortem examination at Uxbridge Mortuary, in Kingston Lane, on August 27 found Adam had drowned and as there were no suspicious circumstances, Hillingdon police released his body.
Adam was cremated at Mortlake Crematorium a few days later, but Mark was still unaware of events.
“My mum rang me about a week afterwards and asked if it was the friend of mine, Adam, who had died. It was a real shock,” said Mark.
Attempts to contact Adam’s family proved fruitless, and due to understandable privacy considerations by the funeral director things were harder still.
Mark and Adam had worked together from 1981 to 1988. Adam had come south from his native Prestwick, in Ayrshire, to visit his brother, John, who was in the RAF and stationed at Uxbridge.
He liked the place, got a job with the grounds maintenance company and stayed.
His father, also John, was a Labour councillor in Prestwick, and Adam also had two sisters, May and Anne.
But when first his mother, and then his father, died, Adam seemed to go into decline, says Mark, who said his father’s death had really hit his friend hard.
Although he held down a job as a bus driver, taking the U7 from Uxbridge to Harefield and back, Adam’s life appeared to be unravelling, and from living in a house in Attlee Road, Hayes, just a year before, he was now returning to a caravan at Fray’s Farm, down the track from the pub, on the night he met his death.
Now, at long last, loyal friend Mark can say a proper goodbye, thanks to his dogged research.
A lucky ‘hit’ on a fuzzy picture online led him eventually to a cousin of Adam’s father, who was able to supply enough information for Mark to call May at her home in the same area where Adam grew up, and where she keeps her brother’s ashes.
Mark will pay a visit to May and Anne soon and he has already told them about the reunion, to be held, fittingly, in the grounds of the former RAF Uxbridge base in Hillingdon Road, at the Battle of Britain Club.
Anyone who knew ‘Jimmy’ and would like to attend can call Mark on 07756 108 501.
