Reunion

Our 3 shadows 

Saturday just past, I met up with two friends who until very recently I had not seen in nearly 30 years. It was one of the most magical days of my life.

In November last year I met up with my friend Tess who I hadn’t seen in 27 years. Thanks to social media Tess got in touch with me about a year ago and we’ve stayed in touch this time. On Saturday Charlotte joined us for another meet up. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since May 1988, when I left Cornwall to move to Yorkshire.

Leaving Cornwall at 14 was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do. Although we had only lived there for 2 years and 3 months those months coincided with becoming a teenager, and all that entails for a girl. I was 11 when we arrived in Newquay and my head was full of smugglers and pirates and a childish hope for being somewhere new and beautiful. Instead I encountered so many strange things. I went from a school of 200, 9 -13 year olds to a school of over a 1000, 11 -18 year olds. For the first 6 months my life was spent in a bewildered attempt to fit in and be accepted or in a self imposed, dignified isolation.

But I eventually made friends with Charlotte and Tess and things began to change. We were the rejects. The group of girls who didn’t quite fit in with the rest. I was finally accepted for who I was and I felt like I belonged. By 1987 I was extremely happy. My life revolved around my friends. reading and writing romance stories, buying records, singing in the choir, hanging out in Newquay town or on the beach and the crushes we had on various boys (and embarrassingly one of our teachers.)  At one point we even formed a girl group! 

Then all too soon it came to an end when my Dad was posted to Yorkshire, which back then with out cheap phone calls or the internet might as well have been Mars. I tearfully bid farewell to my Cornish friends and had to go through the whole “new girl” thing again but this time as an angry 14 year old, Not much fun for my parents! Luckily Doncaster also produced some wonderful friends who I have in my life still.

Tess and Charlotte had been friends long before I turned up in 1986 and have remained friends ever since. I just popped up for a tiny amount of time. Yet, they still wanted to be friends with me then and now. I feel so incredibly grateful and blessed. When we met up it was as if no time had elapsed. We were so comfortable together, it was so simple and easy. We are quite different in some ways and similar in others, but I think we share a similar outlook, which holds true as much now as it did then. 

The path to Waland's Smithy through the trees

Our day together was so perfect I don’t think I can do justice writing about it. So I am just going to focus on one thing. After walking up and around the white horse at Uffington and a brief stop for a cup of tea in a local pub, we walked to Wayland’s Smithy. We took a detour through the trees and found a log to sit on to eat lunch. There we were three women in our early 40s, wrapped up warm, sitting on a log drinking soup which Charlotte and Tess had brought in flasks and eating cheese pastries I’d picked up at the station. It was freezing although the sun was slanting through the slender trees. We were chatting about our memories of school and our lives. At that point it was if the rest of the world had slipped away. It was just us, the trees and our laughter. I keep thinking we were like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, meeting up again to recount our parts in the adventure and reminisce about our time in the Shire. That act of sharing each others food and company, comfortably, with out effort, with out drama, with gratitude and kindness, was precious and priceless. 

I just wanted to say thank you to Tess and Charlotte for welcoming me back. 

Wayland's smithy in the afternoon sunlight