Friends for Life. Jan Fennell

painful connotations for me.

      I had been looking forward to starting school for one reason: my cousin Les was due to start at the same time.

      I had come to know and love Les when my mother returned to work. Mum’s absence meant I spent most of my time at Nan Whitton’s flat in Alistree Road. For the first time I got to know her niece Joan and her son Les, who lived on the second floor of the same block.

      Les was two months younger than me. His father, Uncle Alex, was an ex-Army man and very strict and austere. We weren’t allowed to play together often, but when we did we really got on like a house on fire. He was as close as I had to a brother and I treated him with all the affection I would have shown a brother.

      I can remember that in the run-up to my first term, Les and I had heard a lot of talk about us starting school. We both fully expected not just to be in the same school but in the same class.

      On the first morning of term we discovered our parents had made other plans. I was being walked to school by Nan Whitton while Les was being taken by his mother, Aunt Joan. I have a memory of the two of us skipping along, tugging excitedly at the adults’ arms, hardly able to contain our excitement at getting to the school gates. Our mood changed when we reached a zebra crossing on Munster Road.

      ‘Say goodbye to your cousin Les,’ my nan said to me.

      ‘Why?’ I replied, baffled.

      ‘He’s going to a different school to you,’ she explained.

      I was devastated, as he was. We both started crying. As he headed off in one direction and I went in another, we were both tugging again, but for different reasons. I can still see Les looking back at me, tears in his eyes.

      It was only in the ensuing years that I learned what had happened. Les’s father Alex had very clear ideas about what he expected for his son. From the beginning the family had plans for him. He was to study hard and go to university. He was to get a profession and get on in the world.

      When he and I had reached school age, it had apparently been decided that it was ‘for the best’ if we were separated. Basically I was considered a ‘bad influence’ by Uncle Alex and Aunt Joan. Apart from anything else, I was a girl, and the family’s expectations for me were zero. This could only mean that I would be a distraction for Les. So while he was put down for the better school in the area at Munster Road, I was to be sent to Sherbrooke Road.

      My early memories of Sherbrooke Road school are dominated by that moment. All I can remember feeling is a mixture of anger and confusion. I felt as if Les had been taken away from me.

      I fitted into my class well enough. The teacher, a Welsh lady called Miss Davies, took a bit of a shine to me and treated me well. But, if I’m honest, my heart wasn’t really in it. I made few friends, probably because I was afraid of losing them like I’d lost Les. I settled into the routine of being an average student in an average school. I began fulfilling my family’s expectations of me by achieving precisely nothing.

      As I set off on what was to be an unhappy school life, the one consolation was that my parents’ resistance to my having a pet had finally begun to crumble. My father in particular sensed my desperation. I think he knew I needed something living and breathing to take care of and to keep me company at the same time. So it was that he and my mother agreed to get me my first pet, a hamster, which I called Bimbo. His brief stay with us set the precedent for what was to become a depressingly familiar pattern over the following years.

      Mum had only agreed to the hamster on strict conditions. She really objected to the mess, so it was Dad’s job to clear up. It was soon clear that Mum’s requirements were more important than mine. My parents hadn’t thought that hamsters are nocturnal creatures. So Bimbo would sleep all day then come out to play when I went to bed. I barely saw him. At the time, of course, I wondered whether this was deliberate but there was no point in my complaining. ‘You’ve got a pet, what’s the matter with you?’ I’d be told in no uncertain terms.

      As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. One evening my mother decided she should get to know Bimbo a little better. I have no idea why she did this. She hadn’t shown much interest in him until now. And she approached the cage with gritted teeth.

      Animals sense things and Bimbo, it seems, sensed my mother’s disdain. So he nipped her on the finger. I can still remember the yell. Before I knew it, Bimbo had been banished to school. My father had a word with the headmistress and so Bimbo became the school’s hamster.

      This only served to make my sense of loss even worse, of course. It wasn’t just that I could see him in his cage every day at school. Every weekend and holiday a child had a turn in taking him home. Every child, that was, except me. I wasn’t allowed to take him home.

      It is only now, looking back on that time, that I realize just how desperate and pathetic my desire for company must have looked to other people. Soon after Bimbo’s departure I headed off, in cahoots with a friend of mine called Eric, to the graveyard at the local Catholic church, St Thomas’s across Escort Road. Armed with a bucket, Eric and I snuck around the gravestones scraping off snails and had soon collected hundreds.

      I took them home. I hadn’t thought about where I was going to keep them, I had only thought to myself that I had some pets. I seem to remember I had even started giving each of them names. My hopes were soon dashed, though. I got to the front door and my mother opened it. She just screamed.

      She went absolutely mad. ‘Get rid of them, don’t you dare bring them into my home!’ On reflection, slimy snails are not the most natural domestic pets, but that’s how desperate I was.

      So I had to take them back to the churchyard. I can remember tipping the bucket and the snails just sticking there. They wouldn’t budge. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me: ‘Can I help you?’ It was the priest. I was ever so scared. ‘I think we can help them on their way,’ he said and he took me and the bucket over to a tap where we poured some water in. He was ever so gentle and kind. And he tipped them out into the grass.

      ‘One day you’ll have a pet of your own,’ he said.

      ‘One day I’ll have hundreds,’ I said with a trembling lip.

      Perhaps inspired by the snails, my father’s next gift to me was two tadpoles, Alfie and Georgie, as I had soon christened them. Again my mother had accepted this under extreme duress. She let me use one of her best fruit bowls, a boat-shaped glass affair, as Alfie and Georgie’s home. I can still see the constant pained expression she wore whenever she passed anywhere near them. It was saying: ‘Do I have to have this in my living room?’

      She must have been quietly delighted that their stay was so brief. Once more, things hadn’t been very well thought out. Georgie died just as he was metamorphosing into a frog. His tail had begun to shrink, some rear legs had grown and a set of front legs had begun to develop too. Then Alfie died at the same stage. We didn’t realize they needed a pond. It had been another disaster and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Especially when I found out my dad had flushed them down the toilet.

      When my father suggested a budgie, I thought my wait for a proper companion was finally over. The green hen bird he brought home, Bobo, quickly reduced my mother to a state of nervous agitation, however. Bobo wasn’t the friendliest of creatures, it turned out. Every night she’d be allowed out to fly around for a while, with my mother following her around sweeping up wherever the bird had been. She was petrified of Bobo defecating on her best china, I think.

      Their relationship was clearly doomed. And it came to a head one evening, in unforgettable circumstances.

      I can still see the scene. Dad was in the kitchen and Mum was in the living room in front of the mirror getting herself ready to go out, which was a regular sight. She was putting on her make-up and Bobo – out of his cage for his evening exercise – was sitting on top of the mirror. To this day I don’t know why, but all of a sudden Bobo flew down and got hold of my mother’s lip.

      Pandemonium broke out. My mother screamed in agony then started leaping and running around the room with Bobo swinging and flapping