First, I need to quickly apologize to my biographer, Lili de la field. I know she is the one whom I have entrusted with the task of committing to paper (as it were) the various adventures and events of my life, but I had a call from her last evening, and she seemed so upset it took me a while to fathom out what the problem was.
It emerged that she has been on the internet again, reading through all those myriads of fictional stories that people have posted about me and my family over the years, and she was quite upset about the number of times either I or one or more of my brothers have been killed off. She tells me she doesn't read deathfics if she can avoid it, but, apparently, they are not always quite so clearly marked, and she was caught out more than once. So, I guess now is as good a time as any to set the record straight.
My name is Alan Shepherd Tracy. I am ninety-two years old, and I'm not dead yet.
I might as well say right away for anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with my name…there must be a few…that I was born as the youngest of five boys. My eldest brother Scott was twelve when I was born, John was ten, Virgil was eight, and my youngest brother, Gordon, was six.
Our mother died when I was born, so we had all grown very close over the years, especially during the first few years of my life when our father, Jeff was setting up his new business. That did well, and dad became one of the richest men on the planet. That served him pretty well when he decided to create the International Rescue organization that I know you will have heard about. With the help of the scientist-cum-engineer genius known as Brains, they created the Thunderbird machines. The rest, as they say, is history.
I suppose we had plenty of narrow scrapes and near misses over the years, but the five of us all survived our adventures in saving lives.
That is not to say we never got hurt. Things happened over the years. I got shot by a madman on one occasion, I fell from a cable car into a snowdrift, I've had broken ribs more than once, the odd broken bone, and my brothers all suffered various injuries at different times, but we came through it all. Being close-knit meant there was always a crowd of brothers to help you out when things went wrong.
I still miss them.
Excuse me whilst I…sorry about that. You see, when you are young, time goes by so slowly, you imagine that you are going to be young forever. Then one day you pause in your daily routine and look in the mirror and see your hair changing colour, your smooth skin disappearing forever as the wrinkles appear and gradually deepen. Then suddenly, you start losing people.
We lost dad first, almost sixty years ago now, when he was just seventy years old. He just pushed his luck once too often, and insisted on flying himself home from a conference; (yes, he still hadn't given up work even then), when his plane experienced a power failure during a storm and crashed into the ocean just five miles from Tracy Island. He had bailed out, but he drowned before we could get to him. Grandma was devastated at losing her only son so young, and she went downhill after that, and died just two years later aged ninety-seven.
John married his friend Ridley of course. We had all noticed how our scientific, logical spaceman lost all his logic and calm thinking when Ridley was around, and became emotional and frequently illogical. They married when John was just thirty-five and she was a year older. They were head-over-heels in love. It was wonderful to see Johnny-boy so happy. He became a romantic, and was even willing to return to earth a lot more often so that he could be by her side.
They were blissfully happy for twenty-three years until she was killed in a tragic accident at work. John was shattered, and try as he might, and he did try, he was never able to come to terms with her loss. He died himself of a broken heart just three years later. He was only sixty years old.
John was the first of my brothers to go, and I was devastated. Johnny and I had always been very close, even after his marriage. He only started to shut me out when she died. Part of me died then, too. I can't believe that was forty years ago. It seems like yesterday.
I always looked up to my big brothers. They were always my heroes, and I always wanted to be like them. The four of us that remained drew even closer together. Scott married Kayo, Virgil married his girlfriend Helena, and after a long time plucking up the courage, Gordo proposed to Lady Penelope. Amazingly, she accepted his proposal. Between them all, I have nine nephews, four nieces, and four children of my own, three sons and a daughter. I now have twelve grandchildren and thirty great grandchildren…and believe it or not, two great great grandchildren on the way soon!
You know though, being the youngest, I never had any expectation of ever becoming the family head myself. But at ninety-two, I am the last survivor of Jeff Tracy's sons. I am the oldest of the Tracy clan. My father would be so proud of the family he engendered. If he was alive now, he would be…what? One hundred and thirty years old. He would have seen seventeen grandchildren, thirty-nine great grandchildren, and ninety-four great, great grandchildren.
International Rescue had grown, naturally, given the plentiful Tracys available. Tracy Island is still the main base, but we've spread to mother's family ranch, too as a second base, and years ago Scotty bought an estate in Idaho which was ideal for a third base of operations. The family now run the organization in shifts, much the way we used to run Thunderbird Five in the early days, a month at a time. The head of International Rescue these days, since I stood down ten years ago, is Virgil's youngest son Jeffery.
Oh, Virgil. We all loved our big huggable bear. It was losing Virgil that seemed to signal the end of an era for all of us. Virgil had spent his whole life taking care of all of us, caring for us when we were sick, and was so rarely ever sick himself. At the age of seventy-five, he caught pneumonia, with complications, and he died peacefully in his bed with his three surviving brothers, his wife Helena and his six children round him. That was harder even than losing John. Virgil had always been the very heart of our family. Once he was gone, Scott lost heart. Scott and Virgil had always been the closest of all of us. Kayo had started reporting to Gordon and I, how Scott stopped eating properly after Virgil's death, and like John, nothing seemed able to bring him back to the real world. He spent his days dreaming and reliving the past, when we were all young, when he still had all the family around him. Scott always had taken it personally when something happened to any one of us. I guess he took it hard when John died, but losing Virgil was the final straw. Scott gave up his fight just three years later and died at the grand old age of eighty-two.
He still had a lot of his own hair colour, and he was still fit and strong for an old man. From having four older brothers, suddenly, I had only one. Gordon.
The terrible two. Gordo and I were always pretty close, but finding ourselves the only remaining survivors of Jeff Tracy's five sons, and then both of us losing our wives to cancer within a year of each other, we became closer still.
We shared a room for a few years after I was born. Once my wife Mandy died, I left our family home to my children and I returned to Tracy Island and once more shared a room with Gordon.
What goes around comes around.
This place is still full of people and full of life. The children and grandchildren of our father, Jeff Tracy. Thunderbirds still react to emergencies as they always did. Kayo comes by every so often, but she finds the memories hard to face here on the island. Very little has been altered over the years, and everywhere we still see pictures of all of us as we were seventy years ago, when we were young.
I understand how she feels. I feel like running away myself sometimes, but my heart is here. My brothers are still here, in every corner of this house. The memories are not torturous to me. They are comforting. I still remember the smell of John's aftershave; the twinkle of Scott's eyes when he laughed. The comfort we always felt after a Virgil bearhug, and I remember vividly the way my sides ached after laughing at one of Gordon's pranks; especially at the expense of one or more of our brothers.
Gordon passed away peacefully in his sleep, here on Tracy Island, just three weeks ago. He was ninety-eight. The cause? Heart failure. Caused by old age. It comes to all of us, I suppose. It'll be me next, I suppose, but I'm not ready to go just yet.
I am Alan Tracy, I am ninety-two years old. And I am surrounded by a huge and very loving and supportive family. Don't be sad for me. I am still living a wonderfully fulfilled life. And its not over yet . . .