Unsent letter to a long lost, almost forgotten, School friend (2012)
Dear Nicole
I am writing this letter to you, as somehow I think it will be less sad than the letter I wrote to another absent friend that, at the moment, I do not want to think about. I am caught tonight in memories I would rather not have.
When I look back to my teenage years I am astonished at my ignorance, my total lack of understanding of the mechanisms of conversation and just everyday living which, I suppose, continues to this day.
I had left boarding school, full of bitterness because we had been promised that that would be the last school we would go to and that that would make up for being away from home for so long and now I was a solitary figure in a new school; the sixth form college in Brighton. Being grumpy.
I was mainly silent at school. I didn’t speak in class and I didn’t speak to the other students. It had never occurred to me that learning would be something you wanted to do. It just seemed to be something you endured and teachers; a presence that you did your best to avoid. You certainly wouldn’t dream of talking to a teacher unless absolutely essential. It was strange to see students excited to be at school; wanting to be praised, sticking their hands up eagerly in class.
I was sitting in the library, sitting there with my skinhead hair cut that was meant to be a punk cut but which had somehow failed and was now growing out. I would have been scowling and my jotter would have been sat on the desk; covered in swastikas and the names of punk bands.
You and Rachel came and sat at my desk and asked me about the swastikas and, startled, I realised that I didn’t have the first idea why they were there. I think I babbled about anarchy and rejecting the system but generally, I got confused. In the back of my mind I would have been recollecting pictures and games and comics as a ten year old, with stick planes and bullets and lots of Germans dying, as we played war games in the classroom.
We talked right through the afternoon and I was exhilarated. I hadn’t talked to anyone since I had come to this school.
A few days later you came and met me outside my classroom where I lingered alone in the breaks and I remember your long black hair, your dark eyes. I remember thinking you looked like a film star.
In a pause in the conversation you said you were Jewish and I replied that I was Christian and felt a faint flush that this could somehow be a romantic connection; our difference. You talked about how your family had left South Africa and how your dad was a chemist and worked in London.
In the months that followed you introduced me to Nadine Gordimer and Anne Frank and a host of books about the holocaust and apartheid. I never had the faintest idea that you were very gently educating me. We moved on to Dostoevsky and Chekov and I was entranced. The limit of my reading range had been people like Wilbur Smith.
I was far too shy to walk into your classroom to find you, or to go to somewhere as intimidating as the student’s common room where you hung out with your friends but sometimes you would bump into me and we would talk. Sometimes you would accompany as I walked the streets around the school, where I smoked my cigarettes. You tried to persuade me not to throw my fag ends in the road, took along a small box to put them in instead. You talked about the environment, talked about socialism; it was like I was discovering things I had never dreamed of.
You once invited me to dinner with your family and I found a wild, exuberant group of people constantly arguing and laughing and challenging each other and although I couldn’t understand half of what was being talked about, I was again entranced.
I would never have dreamed of inviting you back to my house. It would have been unthinkable to me. I never had friends come home with me.
You made me realise just how bad it was at my old school, when we heard the noise of pounding feet and panting breath as a pale, frightened Jewish boy was chased by whole classes up and down the corridors by the sons of the landed gentry; the gentleman farmers. You made me realise how strange it was that every boy in that school was white.
You were the only person I looked forward to meeting in those two years, to be more honest you were the only person I ever met outside of the classroom. You made my life bright when I met you. I had the most incredible crush on you but didn’t tell you that until long after we had gone to different universities and I wrote you a letter telling you so. But you didn’t reply and I never saw you again.
You were always telling me off for saying sorry. “Stop saying sorry.” you would say and I would say I was sorry for saying sorry and we would both laugh.
My letter to you is to say sorry again; sorry for the ignorance, the shyness; above all, sorry for the swastikas and to say thank you. Thank you for the companionship, thank you for breaking through that terrible, terrible, loneliness and thank you for the education.
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