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6 BEST FRIENDS… BUT HOW MANY BFFS?
Hitting 50 feeling lonely, a writer tracked down the bosom buddies she'd left behind decades before – with mixed results
Four years ago, palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware published her bestselling memoir The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which drew on her years of experience caring for patients at the end of their lives. She noted that among her patients’ greatest regrets was not that they hadn’t travelled the world or had sex on a mountain top, but that they had failed to stay in touch with old friends. ‘Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip over the years. There were regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved.’
This touched a nerve. I may not be on my deathbed but, as the years have passed by, I’ve grown to regret losing touch with old friends. I felt better knowing that this is a universal sorrow and not just my own.
In the early 90s, when I was 28, I left my husband. At the same time, I shed good friends I’d known since school and became a party girl in London, featuring in the social pages of glossy magazines. I was quickly embraced by the ranks of It-girls and am ashamed to say I thought my old friends were boring compared to my glamorous new ones and stopped returning their calls. This continued throughout my 30s and 40s; I found it easy to form new friendships, but did little to stay in touch if it required any degree of effort.
But all this changed when I reached 50. My mother had recently died, my long-term relationship was coming unstuck, and I felt so wretched that I began to question the point of my life. I have no children and my only family are my elderly father and an indifferent brother. After the age of 50, you find yourself going to more funerals than weddings, and I began thinking about my own. Who would give the eulogy? Would anyone turn up? For the first time in my life, I felt lonely – so I decided to track down six of my closest friends from times gone by. With the internet, this was easy but, initially, I held back from contacting them, nervous that I would be given the cold shoulder. However, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying persuaded me put to aside my doubts and make contact. Some reunions were a success, others less so…
When Julia Stephenson (above) got divorced in her late 20s and began a glitzy new life on the London party scene, she left her oldest friends behind. But after turning 50 and realising she was lonely for the first time in her life, she decided to track them down
Caroline and I met at boarding school in 1973, when we were 11, and soon bonded over midnight feasts and a shared passion for the Beatles. We were swotty, skinny and studious, and formed a little gang called ‘the weeds’ because we weren’t cool enough to join the popular girls we christened ‘the groovers’. After leaving school, Caroline and I shared a flat in London and I introduced her to the man who later became her husband.
After marriage, she settled into a life of blameless domesticity and earth motherhood, and we drifted apart. Just as I was embarking on my reunion project, she contacted me out of the blue and invited me to a get-together of old friends she was organising. While it was lovely meeting up with ten older, happily married pals from the 80s, it was also somewhat disturbing. They had all stayed in touch with each other and seemed very close, even taking skiing holidays together every year. This was the life of smug married-dom I had eschewed when I bolted from my husband, and I felt a frisson of wistfulness and envy that I had missed out on being part of the kind of close tribe I now longed to belong to.
At the end of the evening, as they cheerily waved goodbye to one another, I wondered how close they really were because it was only the beginning of October and they seemed obsessed with Christmas preparations, insisting they were all too busy to meet up till the following year!
I spent the next day alone with Caroline and she confided that she’d had cancer a few years ago but her group had not been the support she had hoped, and I began to feel the grass might not be that much greener after all. Later, she told me about her charity work sorting clothes for the British Red Cross with her girlfriends. ‘My mother always told me how important it was to find the right sort of charity so that one can meet the right sort of people. I like the Red Cross because it’s full of people like us.’
Gaah! We vaguely discussed her coming to London to stay. ‘But it will have to be after Christmas,’ she said. ‘I’ve got too much to do until then.’
On the train back to London I realised that Caroline had done most of the talking, and while I had made the required congratulatory noises about her children’s achievements, her beautiful home and her successful husband, she had not asked me one question about myself.
I no longer felt envious and began to hope that this foray into married, middle-class middle-England would be my last. I’d had an idealised vision of how my life would have turned out had I not divorced, and I was weak with relief that the reality wasn’t quite as perfect as I’d imagined. I intuitively knew that Caroline and I would quietly let the friendship drop, which is exactly what has happened.
Imet Jane on our first day at Godalming College in 1978, when we were 16. We hit it off straight away. She was bright, lively and always wore neon green eyeshadow that I thought was marvellous. We were soon as thick as thieves, travelling round the country to attend Police concerts (she liked Sting, I liked the good-looking one on the drums).
Jane and I were inseparable and she was my bridesmaid when I married in my early 20s. But when I got divorced, I felt our lives had become too different. I stopped returning her calls and allowed our friendship to fizzle out. Jane used to drop into my mother’s charity shop in Guildford occasionally and ask after me, and my mother would tell me to get in touch with her.
‘You’ll regret not having girlfriends when you’re my age,’ she warned. How true! Jane wasn’t on Facebook and it took me several months to find her, but we finally had an emotional reunion at Waterloo station before going for lunch, which went on for hours as we caught up on 20 years’ worth of news.
Ironically, Jane had been the academic high-flyer at college, but she gave up any thoughts of a career in order to bring up her family; I, on the other hand, was the dunce who left college with no qualifications yet went on to have an interesting career as a writer. Jane is happily married with two beautiful daughters. It gives me a pang of regret that I dismissed the sort of choices Jane made and only now see the value of prioritising family over material success.
Rather wonderfully, our friendship has resumed with all the closeness we enjoyed before. Last year, I set up Chyfields Wildlife Sanctuary and UK Romanian Dog Rescue centre near Guildford, close to where she lives, so we meet regularly.