Even though some of us may fight against it, friends seem to become ever more important as we progress through life. On the other hand it would be true to say that those you thought you were unable to live without when you were much younger can be somehow outgrown with the years as you develop as an individual and circumstances change. You might even be left wondering what it was that drew you together in the first place. But some people simply don't seem to have a Use By date and they are the ones destined to occupy the space of Best Friends.
Molly became my Best Friend when I was three years old and remained so for most of my childhood. She was also my first friend, some months older than me and I always saw her as ultra-sophisticated and oozing life experience. I still think she was a most unusually imaginative and creative child, emerging determinedly from the poverty stricken depths of those grimy North Kent streets with a positive attitude that was always hard to suppress. We played together and exchanged confidences on a daily basis and we were never bored. When we were still very small our favourite game was making perfume with the aid of flowers purloined from the backyards of those dedicated towards beautifying their surroundings. We definitely had no idea why this activity made us less than popular. Molly thought it might be because the flower growers were fearful we might be aiming to sell it and make our fortune. However, we soon discovered the joys of creating vast dioramas with the chunks of chalk that lay all around us and for years we decorated local walls and pavements in a manner that might well have been the envy of Banksy himself.
We were dedicated readers but in no way high-brow or even intellectually curious and our reading matter of choice was Enid Blyton, later coupled with film star magazines. By the time she was ten Molly had already allowed Doris Day to become her alter-ego and a year or so later we had both decided on careers in acting and/or writing, or perhaps both. Molly's innate optimism meant that we didn't consider for a moment that we might have to reach these goals via shifts in Woolworths or the typing pool.
Neither of us was considered suitable as academic prospects for the local Grammar school despite my father's firm conviction otherwise and so we were shunted on to Northfleet Girls' Secondary Modern. Because of the way our birthdays fell Molly was in the year above me and had already regaled me with the exciting fact that it was exactly like being in an Enid Blyton boarding school with Form Captains, Prefects, lots of rules about where you could and couldn't walk, and a headmistress called Miss Dennis. The only fly in the ointment was that you couldn't actually sleep there so there was no possibility of a midnight feast.
I came across my next Best Friend at my next school, Wombwell Hall, where I went to learn shorthand and typing. Joyce was in no way similar to Molly and she became my friend largely because neither of us were popular enough to be included in the groups of those who were. We were still friends during our first year in the workplaces of central London and it would be true to say we were a very bad influence on each other. We changed our names to Lyn (her) and Toni (me) and took as many sick days off as humanly possible meeting up in the Ladies in Trafalgar Square to apply make-up and pretend we were showgirls. Later we ran away from home and slept rough in North Kensington for several weeks before the misery of the early onset of winter drove us back to normality. Joyce's parents decided that her friendship with me was the precipitating factor in her descent into delinquency and we were then forbidden to see each other which was a good thing.
For several years I had no Best Friend but a great many acquaintances, none of whom I liked terribly much and I'm sure they felt the same about me. I met Michelle at Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho where we both felt important, alluring and glamourous because we were allowed to be part of the cabaret. It was for me a dream come true and I was convinced that I was at last on the way to stardom. I'm not sure that Michelle felt the same. She was older than me and had worked in night clubs for a number of years whereas I was a raw beginner. I was thrilled that she seemed keen to be my new Best Friend, though we had little in common. It was she who introduced me to Vidar the man who was to have a disastrous effect upon my life and with whom I fell precipitously in love. I can now see that Michelle herself had become accustomed to living a life largely devoid of friends and between her demands upon my time and those of the man who now dominated my affections there followed five years where I tried to please both of them and eventually failed completely of course.
The most significant Best Friend of my adult life was Stella who had a bedsitter on the floor below mine in Onslow Gardens, South Kensington. She and I took to hitch-hiking in a big way and our weekends during the summer of 1962 were spent determinedly travelling out of central London and into the depths of Surrey or Sussex and once, over a Bank Holiday, as far away as North Wales. A little later, as confident and seasoned hitchers we decided to head to France and Spain, inexplicably taking Maggie, another young woman from bed-sitter land with us who was in the latter stages of pregnancy. You might say that we made curious and foolish decisions. In Northern Spain we were given a lift by a priest who was alarmed by Maggie's obvious condition and took us to a convent he knew of in the Cantabrian Mountains directing the nuns to care for us until he returned.
He never did return but the nuns did as he directed, even delivering Maggie's baby and eventually getting rid of us via yet another passing priest who was intent on spending a few days of rest and prayer on his journey South. When he resumed his journey we went with him and eventually returned to London via sea from Gibraltar. Maggie's baby therefore had an interesting start in life. She had been named Trini because she was born on Trinity Sunday and this choice had pleased the nuns enormously. We all thought it was the least we could do.
Stella remained the most significant Best Friend of my life until her death from Multiple Myeloma in the early 1990s. I still miss her. She and I went on to share a flat together in Paddington which at the time we described as Maida Vale. We had both become single parents, each of us delighted to defy the conventions of the time, convinced we were superlative mothers. We had long decided that children lucky enough to have mothers as perfect as we obviously were, did not need fathers. It was to be years before we began to rethink this conviction. Meanwhile we lived a life of some ease, babysitting for each other, ensuring the children were exposed to all that life could offer and that we could afford, and engaging in gentle activism by pursuing the Rights of Single Mothers.
Later I went on to get married to a New Zealander, move countries and have more children. My friends became the people I met at playgroups and kindergartens, ballet classes and Children's Chess Clubs. As a somewhat mundane wife and mother I had stopped having Best Friends and people became easier to relinquish because overall they lacked importance and the relationships were not as necessary as they might once have been. Sometimes this seemed a pity but it is only more recently that I've begun to consider what it was about those individuals who still stand out in memory as Best Friends that made them so special. Why is it they will never be forgotten?
