lesleyjonesberry

At my mum’s funeral, her best friend Joyce looked at my daughter and thought ‘that’s her, that’s Pat’. My daughter, then 18, was about the age mum had been when this friendship had kindled, and family likeness did the rest. I think the moment was both pain and pleasure for Joyce, there to say farewell to her friend of 70 years, co-creator of vivid war-time memories of two young WAAFs, who stayed close in heart thereafter.

One of the deep pleasures of old friendships is that we still see past selves. Especially how the person was when we first met. My best friend is always the slim-waisted, chic blonde student crossing the courtyard with purposeful vitality, even as the present presents otherwise.  So also with siblings:  my grey-haired, bearded brother in my mind’s eye is yet a small boy offering me his birthday money so I could buy a stuffed toy dog (the lack of which threatened to be the biggest tragedy of my seven year old life). The colleagues I work with, they only see my grey hair, they only know me with grown-up children.  They cannot know more than that. Perhaps that is why, as we grow older, we reminisce more: not simply for the pleasure of sharing memories, but to assert that we are more than we appear to be.

Presently (as my son would say), I live alone.  The closest I’ve come to this before was as a fledgling undergraduate.  Term times in a small self-contained College room, home still a safe refuge.   There followed many years of shared domestic environments – house shares, marriage, family life – which expanded, for a short while, into three generations, not to mention cats and dog, then a return to coupledom and now it’s just me. 

At the start of the Zeffirelli film of La Traviata, the overture plays lushly on the soundtrack, while Violetta drifts through deserted rooms like Miss Havisham. At least she does in my head – I haven’t watched the film for over thirty years. She is waiting for her lover, and she is waiting for her death: this being full blown Romantic opera, both come, the second hard on the heels of the first, just allowing for some impassioned heart-rending, full-lung-capacity singing to stretch – nay blow apart any pretence at – verisimilitude.

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Presently, my days are filled with tears.  As children, we cry easily.  Perhaps, as Shakespeare says, ‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’.  Babies cry from frustration, from pain, from fear, and this is largely a vocal activity – it is crying more than weeping.  Somewhere in Gareth Malone’s book Music for the People I think he says that a baby’s cry is, as it were, designed to be intolerable.  It’s pitched in a way to pierce through all other noises, it demands attention.  It summons succour.