Why we could all do with an older friend
Society says it’s now ‘upper class’ to have chums advanced in years and wisdom. The secret is finally out, says Rowan Pelling
It had never occurred to me that having dear older friends was a sign of my innate class – although not having pals possessed of greater life experience strikes me as lacking curiosity to a point that could be considered vulgar. I blame Tatler magazine for these slightly snotty reflections. The glossy has just issued a new list of “U” and “non-u” (upper class and non-upper class) rules in homage to Nancy Mitford’s 1955 essay The English Aristocracy.
Mitford created a lexicon of key words and phrases to help anxious snobs distinguish properly posh people from the ambitious middleclasses and nouveau riche. It’s a sly joke we hierarchy-obsessed Brits find hard to relinquish, and someone somewhere is always updating Mitford’s diktats. I don’t feel qualified to say whether Xanax, Athens and “eating bread” – all “U”, according to Tatler – are signs of being blueblooded, but it’s clearly smart (in every sense of the word) to be in possession of “a much older friend”.
I’ve always had a keen eye for older role models, feeling this world’s mysteries are best unlocked by those who have endured pleasure and pain at its hands. My sixth-form days were enhanced by a fierce, wry new head of the English department, Anne Evans, who rapidly became my literary heroine. She steered me off-piste, introducing me to the novels of Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Because of Anne, I decided to study English Literature rather than History at university and when I was turned down by Oxford, she insisted I apply again the next year. She even phoned me at Hamleys, where I worked during my year off as a Christmas elf, and invited me to her London house for a little refresher tutoring. In short, she’s the person who turned me into a writer and we stayed in touch, swapping book recommendations, until her untimely death in 2012.
Older friends give you guidance – although rarely in any prescriptive sense – in ways chums your own age never can. You know they’ve already wrestled with thorny issues and have better perspectives to offer from their place higher up life’s ladder. A friend with a couple of decades on you is, ideally, the person you’d like to be when you reach that age – and just might be, if you watch them keenly enough. If you’re truly lucky, they will look out for you like a fairy godmother, warding you away from bad men, duff jobs, unflattering haircuts and pyramid sales schemes.
I met my beloved friend, the businesswoman and Variety Club Ambassador Nikki Page, when I became her part-time PA and she was a busy Westminster Councillor in her early forties, but the assistance came very much the other way. Nikki was and is a font of life lessons, from how much Vitamin C to take (a lot, then double it), what church to go to (St Mary’s Bourne Street), and how to dress for a business meeting (buy M&S and change the buttons for posh ones, everyone will think it’s Chanel).
And she pretty much stage-managed my engagement: I’d told her that I’d met the love of my life, but didn’t know how to move things on. She briskly replied, “No man ever proposes of his own accord. You have to tell your boyfriend that if he doesn’t marry you swiftly, someone else will have the same idea.” A month later, I had a diamond ring on my finger and an autumn wedding date.
It was the friendship version of love at first sight when I was introduced to the writer Deborah Moggach at a publishing party in 1998. I was entranced by her vivacity and wit; her magic knack of making others feel radiant while in their orbit. I developed a lifetime’s pash, like a besotted schoolgirl. My admiration was so obvious that it became a holiday joke: I would sit staring doe-eyed at poor Deborah, watching her tell anecdotes. Most of all I adored the fact that she never judges others, but regards most human foibles as a form of collective woe – she is particularly astute about the folly and glory of human love affairs. Since our first meeting she’s been on speed-dial for “matters of the heart”.
My dear closer-in-age friend Christobel Kent takes similar solace in her long, “exceptionally frank” friendship with 100-year-old author Diana Athill, who she’s known since she was a young publicist at the publisher André Deutsch. She says of Athill and another senior colleague, the late Ilsa Yardley, “they both provided me with more stories than I could use in a lifetime: of affairs and betrayals and pregnancy scares and humiliation and exultation.”
We agree that these kinds of influences in your life are vital, both for our mentors’ sagacity, but also because, as Kent puts it: “They’ve reached an age where things like remorse and shame and embarrassment don’t seem to matter any more.” Your own peers judge you at times, but beloved older friends listen to your misdemeanours and then top them with a tale far worse, all their own.
“We’re so ‘U’,” I tell my 66-year-old housemate, Peter, over Fortum and Mason breakfast tea this week. “I told you I don’t understand youth speak,” he says, taking a bite of artisanal Italian toast. The day before I’d told him using the word “sick” was more modern than saying “cool” because he’s dating and trying to rejuvenate his language, and he’d replied: “As in the Latin?”
I’m 28 – hence the misunderstandings – but our age difference is also the fact we’re so “U”, according to Tatler’s new rules. The fact “U” stands for “upper class” in our case is probably helped by the fact that Peter’s an antique silver dealer and hashtags George IV stirrup cups (circa 1829) on Instagram. If he was a roofer, I’m not sure it’d have the same effect.
I met Peter through his son Hugo, a university friend, and we instantly clicked over books. His house is my heaven: a library to which I don’t need a card. When Hugo moved out of their South London home last year, to New York, I moved in. I needed somewhere to go and Peter wanted the company. “Look after my dad,” Hugo said, and I like to think I did – and do.
At first most of my friends thought it was “well weird” to move in with someone my dad’s age (older men and younger women are still deemed suspicious companions) but now they ask: “How’s Peter?” One of them went looking for him at Portobello Market in Notting Hill last week where he has a silver stall every Saturday, and my new netball team want him to become our cheerleader.
We might be unconventional friends but we’re great ones and if someone doesn’t get the older friend thing, I know why. They’re so non-u.
‘Peter’s twice my age – we instantly clicked’ Lucy Holden