[johnsadlerillustration.com]

GROWING up in the Home Counties, my friend Nicola and I prided ourselves on what we believed were our reputations as young sleuths.

We trailed the local policeman on the beat, dodging behind trees and lampposts as we endeavoured to check whether he was off to solve crimes or actually a villain in disguise. We stopped by the gates of wide driveways, got out our notebooks and scribbled down anything “‘suspicious”. Why, for example, were the curtains of a single window closed? What were they concealing?

Heading down to the deserted mansion at the end of the lane, we crept through the grounds and empty rooms, searching for clues to mysteries we invented.

Then came a summer when we wanted to have a reputation as daredevils. We tore through the leafy streets on bikes, arms lifted high in the air from the handlebars. We jumped in the soot in industrial units by the station. We slept summer nights in the back garden, the stars our only canopy, running inside come daylight with made-up tales of near sabotage, or of being almost kidnapped by a man who came out of the woods. My parents acknowledged us with distant, tolerant smiles. But it was not them I was trying to impress. It was my much older brother.

My brother sported long hair and a black, wide-brimmed hat. He produced beads from his ears, and silken handkerchiefs from the air. He told us he was a wizard. In turn, I wanted to show him I also had eccentric powers and was fearless.

The importance of reputation has always meant imaginative, even outlandish, ideas have evolved around it. In literature, Dr Jekyll comes up with Mr Hyde initially to cover up activities not befitting of a Victorian gentleman. And in PG Woodhouse, Jeeves spends much time trying to save Bertie Wooster’s standing.

In our own, real-life legal world, suits launch for defamation of character or libel trials should a fictional character too closely res­emble someone real. Online, people also safeguard their reputations, building and maintaining them with the most specific information.

Safeguarding a reputation matters because, once shattered, it is almost impossible to restore. You cannot un-see either the shattering or, much more damagingly, what has been exposed underneath.

Which is why, no matter how much Jekyll tries to recover his, blaming anyone, including society, for the evil he practised in the guise of Hyde, it doesn’t wash. The only person fooled by his self-justification is himself.

I think back to my eight-year-old self. And, in particular, to the day I squandered my upcoming daredevil reputation and became known instead as a fantasist.

That summer, our avenue was being re-tarred. It was a lengthy process. The hot afternoon it was finished, new, black tar stretched out, luxuriously soft in the sun. And suddenly, I hit on an idea on how to impress my brother, an illusionary act that would define me forever in his eyes and establish my reputation as a daredevil.

In my shorts pocket was a bag of black jacks – chewy sweets, eight for a halfpenny. Add Nicola’s and in total we had 16. The black jacks were the exact same colour as the freshly pressed tar. Unwrapping the sweets, we pressed them at various spaces into it. Then we ran inside and called my napping brother from the sofa. He must come outside! Something incredible was about to happen. We were going to eat the road!

Yawning, he got up nonetheless and followed us up the gravel path. Nicola and I squatted down. But disaster struck. The black jacks had disappeared.

They had melted into the tar and were indistinguish­able from it. I stared down at the road, peering ever closer. There was no hint of where tar ended and black jack began. I glanced up at my brother. My whole reputation was at stake. The most important thing was to save face.

Picking up a piece of blackness, hoping it was a sweet, I put it in my mouth. Friendship being friendship, Nicola followed suit.

We chewed the tar. All energy was now directed to a show of nonchalance and to stopping the bitter taste from ruining the trick.

We finally managed to swallow. And at that point, we looked up triumphantly to where my brother was standing watching. I grinned. My place in the hierarchy of daredevil, fantastical acts was established.

But to my dismay, our feat was not met with gasps of admiration. My brother merely yawned again, laughed, turned on his heel, and said: “You two are pathetic.” He had divined something not right. Intuited a desperate salvaging. As I watched his retreating figure, I intuited something, too: desperate acts to save face don’t work. Rather than help, they in fact destroy any burgeoning reputation.

And, fictional or non-fictional, reputation determines us all.