Familiarity - the bridge to family?

Have you ever wondered why one person you meet becomes a friend, whilst another does not?

When I started high school in East London in 1959, three days before my eleventh birthday, perhaps I was dreaming of an absent brother. My parents had increased their stock of offspring by just two girls since my birth.

Some social groups in the new school intake came fully formed from previous primaries, but I had moved up on my own, and so had Chris, who additionally and unusually travelled at least fifteen miles each way from deepest darkest Essex.

I cannot remember whether we had visibly similar common interests or what they might have been, but we soon discovered an affinity, and over time, became best friends.

In the nineteen-sixties, parents were often picky in who their children associated with, but in due course, Chris and I visited each other’s homes as well as meeting every day at school. Fifteen miles then seemed a lot further then, than now.

Over seven years, our friendship extended and deepened as we found common cause in the burgeoning growth of pop music, technology, air and space travel and electronics, elements of which we applied in various personal projects.

We both did well academically, and we enjoyed much of school life, if not all the teachers. In 1966, Chris left for the London Veterinary School, while I went off to Glasgow University, eventually achieving a degree in geology and working in South-East Asia.

We had not met or spoken again since.

Fifty-five years later, a ‘friend request’ appeared on my Facebook page. Chris’s surname was sufficiently ordinary that I had never found anything worth following up on the rare occasion I searched there for ‘friends’.

It happens that my name is much more unusual, and his search had been successful.

We have had a number of friendly and welcome email exchanges over several years, but I have at times delayed responding for periods of months, the last for well over a year. The familiar interactions of many years ago, our daily association, had become unfamiliar.

This is a pattern of behaviour I have followed over my entire lifetime, where the few significant friendships I have enjoyed have eventually withered on the vine of inattention I have allowed as distance and time increased.

And what of my missing brother?

One dictionary defines the word ‘family’ (from Latin: familia) as a group of people related either by blood, marriage or other relationship. I would suggest that this includes friendship.

So friendship for me turns out to grow and flourish on the root and stem of familiarity, one of whose meanings is ‘of or relating to a family’.

Friendship can sometimes look and feel like a bridge to the past. In his first Facebook contact, Chris had posted a photo of thirteen-year-old me holding his model aeroplane.

In another, he referred to a trip he and I had organised as the leadership of the School Science Club, contrived each year to inflate commendable qualities as we hopeful school leavers applied for university admission. He had borrowed his neighbour’s car, and driven several of us in convoy with a minibus carrying other prospective undergraduates to the Bankside power station, now the Tate Modern, London, where my uncle, who worked there, would show us what he knew about electrical power generation and distribution.

More recently, contact from Chris through Facebook had looked like a bridge to the future, with the possibility of the new and unexpected.

Reflecting further on bridges, the person I think I would most like to have been friends with is my father.

My Dad and I went on a cycling holiday when I was about fourteen from our home in Ilford to the Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, a distance of about one hundred and fifty miles. We took four or five days and stopped overnight in Youth Hostels, visiting, among others, Stonehenge, Wells Cathedral and the Cheddar caves.

During my childhood, my father had typically been out of the home either at work or travelling to and from work for nearly twelve hours a day, Monday to Friday, and half a day on Saturdays. I felt, and still feel, that I hardly knew him, and that apart from the family connection, he was pretty much a stranger.

Only one photo was ever taken of the three male generations of my son, then aged eighteen, me, and my dad. The very blurred image wasn’t printed until after his death, a few weeks later. Nonetheless, the connection by familial appearance between us was obvious.

When I returned to my parents’ home in the Outer Hebrides after his funeral, I was impressed by how much the fabric of the house spoke of him, since he had decorated, placed and installed a good number of fittings himself, and not at all accurately. Shelves and pictures were off the level, wallpaper edge patterns did not align and adhere properly to the wall, coat hooks were, in the vernacular, shoogly.

This is the very opposite of my style, which is precise to the point of obsession.

But for all that, my impression at that moment was of a man bearing more than a passing resemblance to me, who had made some impact on the world and lives of those around him, but who for, whatever reason, I had failed properly to familiarise myself with over the fifty-eight years our lives overlapped.

In this life, there is no bridge to a future with him.

I missed much of my son’s earlier life as the result of divorce and mental health challenges, but I am determined that he will not see me to my grave as unknowing of me as I feel I was of my father. I hope he will hold a proper sense of who I am and what he and his sisters have meant to me, for all the difficulties we have shared.

Friendship must involve work, as well as fun.