Absent friends

It has been a quiet taxi weekend.

Last night I could not concentrate on my book. It is a very good book, being a biography of Margaret Pole, who was the last of the Plantagenets, or at any rate, one of the last ones of whom we take any notice. There are probably lots of Plantagenets still around but not called Plantagenets any more, these days they will be called things like Ramsbottom and Pinkerton and Cooper, but since they are not having their heads brutally hacked from their bodies in ghastly bloodthirsty public spectacles, we are not interested in them. In fact Margaret Pole was not called Plantagenet either. She was called Margaret Pole.

Anyway, despite the bloodthirsty elements and the shocking imprisonments in the Tower and the capriciousness of Henry the Eighth, the book has got long words and very small print, and as the evening wore on I put it to one side. It is not easy to be an intellectual when you are almost asleep.

Instead I fell into a reverie and began to reminisce about my youth. This led to my wondering, with mild curiosity, what had happened to some of the people I knew then.

These were not people from school. Thanks to the marvellous wonders of Facebook I know perfectly well what has happened, and in most cases, is still happening, to them.

These were people from later, from my college days.

These were not happy days, and I have generally avoided thinking about them in subsequent years. In fact, when I came to think about them now, I found I could barely remember anybody. A handful of youthful faces came to mind, and a few, who perhaps were friends, still had names.

This is a loss, because there were some bright and splendid people with whom I have for ever lost touch. 

Nobody was coming out of the nightclub, so I dug my computer out and fed some of the names into Google.

Goodness, this woke me up.

Some names produced nothing at all, what a tiresome system it is that makes women untraceable once they have married, why we don’t get a name to keep for ourselves I don’t know.

Others turned up some astonishing results.

There was a preponderance of teachers, and a smattering of head teachers. This was unsurprising, considering that we had all been studying education.

I was captivated to discover that one chap had diverted from this respectable path in order to become a drug dealer. He was quite obviously no more successful at this than he had been at teaching, because mostly I found out about his career path from a series of local newspaper articles detailing his arrests and periods of imprisonment.

One chap, to my horror, was dead. We had been friends, in a time when I had made very few. He had come round to my rooms every weekend when I was young and miserable, and we had cooked curry and laughed together. I had liked him very much, and had wondered, occasionally  the intervening years, what might have happened to him.

Now I knew. He had been killed whilst he was crossing the road when he was thirty three, hit by a teenage drunk driver. He had left behind a wife, a three year old and a five week old baby.

It is so long ago that the baby would now be in his twenties, but the shock rocked me all the same. I felt uncomfortably guilty to be grieving for a life in which I had played no part whatsoever since my youth, but I felt heavily sad anyway, and peculiarly conscious of a hole left behind in the fabric of life. He should have been there for me to send him an unexpected email and wonder how he was getting along, and instead the recollections of being exiled Northerners eating badly-cooked curry in Kent are mine alone for ever.

A third friend, who had scored startlingly high marks in the personality tests given to us to determine whether or not we were psychopaths, had gone on to be a stock market trader. She had ditched this glorious career to go off to India, where she had opened a school for slum children.

I was thrilled by this, and read on with interest, trying to reconcile the slender girl of my memories with the determined matron shown in the pictures on the school’s website.

I think she might have become my new hero.

She has thrown herself into teaching slum children the skills that they might need to give themselves a chance in life, and the charity has grown, until now thousands of children have passed through her care, and the school is a real and vibrant thing.

I read all about it with astonished pleasure, imagining her whirlwind energy in the heat and the dust of India, and felt terribly regretful that I was too old to go and do a gap year. I even felt a small glow of pride that our year, our group, had produced somebody quite so magnificently tenacious, what an amazing thing.

I have sent her an email through the charity’s website. I do hope she gets in touch.

If she does then I promise that you will hear more.

Have a picture of the Lake District.