It’s disconcerting in an age of instant communication of so many things (that often don’t even need to be communicated) when you come across a notice of something that happened several years ago, that you would have liked to know about sooner.
So it was this afternoon, when I opened the Winter Newsletter for alumni of my old school (Latymer Links: Always A Latymerian). Naturally I clicked on the link to the Obituaries page, as I find myself doing more and more often. And find that one of my cohort of 1960 joiners appears there.
Let’s call her J. At the most recent school reunion, in July, there was a special table for those who had joined the school 65 years ago. There were fewer of us than there used to be, though a number of ‘the missing’ were absent not because they’ve died, but because they were ill or just don’t like to drive on the M25 or A10 these days. J was one of the people I hoped I might see there, but she wasn’t there, and no one knew anything about her. And today I read that she died in April 2022.
I last met her at our 55th anniversary reunion in 2015 (the 60th in 2020 one was cancelled because of COVID…) and our conversation that day was a Blessing to me. Because, you see, for years I had had a bad conscience about J. Long ago, in our schooldays, I Did Her A Wrong. Back in the Sixth Form, I and some other lads took it upon ourselves, or maybe were asked to take it on, to edit the Sixth Form magazine. A scruffy and poorly-duplicated thing called i. J submitted a piece for the magazine. And we told her we would print it if she changed it. I can’t remember whether it was a poem and we asked her to put it into prose. Or a piece of prose and we told her it had to be broken up into lines of verse. The point was there was nothing at all wrong with her contribution. We did it solely Because We Could. It was the raw, posturing power of adolescent males. And I really really hope it wasn’t laced with the misogynistic possibility that we were doing it because she was a girl. (But alas, I can’t be sure of that.)
So the last time I spoke to J, I reminded her of what we had done, and apologized. I can’t be sure she even remembered the incident, still less whether for nearly 50 years she had harboured the seething resentment we richly deserved. Instead of that, she graciously accepted my apology and assured me I was (or had long been?) forgiven.
What I read in her obituary made me wish I had known her better… But of course 59 years ago I was terrified of the girls of my age, already women when I was some way off being a man. J had had a tough childhood, but she was a nice person, and went on to be a good woman.
Godspelled 