Forty years on

boarding school and friendships

On Monday I had lunch with my three best friends from school. We see each other in various combinations every now and then, but it was the first time in 41 years - FORTY ONE YEARS: literally, a lifetime - that we’d all four been in a room together. It was pure joy and ease from start to finish, one of those golden, almost magical-seeming afternoons that immediately sears itself on the memory. We picked up from where we’d left off, and that was that. We could have chatted for days. Weeks!

The school in question was a boarding school. My friends had been sent away to school as, basically, babies - they were seven years old - and were familiar with the brutal and deeply fucked up peculiar ways of the English upper castes. I went at 13. I’d gone to the local state primary school in Brussels. My friends were Moroccan and Congolese as well as white Belgian. When we moved to London I went to the Lycée, a French school in the Cromwell Road, where the diversity often had more to do with children of diplomats - but still, it existed.

I was used to scooting about town on my own, inspecting the punks in the King’s Road, bunking off Maths to go and look at the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum (I am not really fully numerate but my dinosaur knowledge stood me in excellent stead when my children were little, so).