Went to a school friend’s place for tea this afternoon. She and her mother live alone and were our closest neighbours when I was in my teens. We carpooled together. The house looked and felt much the same, but the occupants were older and less angry than they used to be. Age comes to us all.
The friend used to be my very closest friend and then there was a strange falling out which I never quite understood and things never quite recovered, though we slowly made our way back to occasionally meeting, stiltedly, whenever I come to visit. But strange how intertwined our lives and minds were, and how separate they are now.
The mother was a terror, all us girls were terrified of her and it was the purpose of our lives to make sure she never ever suspected we were having fun together. My own mother was our co-conspirator in this, as she heartily disapproved, while also feeling for her and respecting her as a woman widowed young, with three children under 10, from a conservative family and in-laws eying her survivor’s pension. She decided to live alone and send her daughters to a school the family disapproved of, and to become friends with a person like my mother whom they definitely disapproved of, as a symbol of a louche upper class.