My First Best Friend – Where Are You Now?
Have you had a friend you adored, but have misplaced? This is my love letter to the one I loved and lost… S.W.A.L.K.
I was 10, extremely clumsy, super self-conscious about my frizzy mud-brown hair,
my too big eyes, and was a total bookworm. I loved: nail varnish, shoes, writing stories, shiny rainbow hair clips, horses and pink. I hated annoying little brothers, being the only kid whose parents were divorced, tomatoes and worst of all being the new girl in a new school.
What I wanted more than anything in the whole world was my
very own best friend.
I read a lot of books and one thing they taught me was that new girls, especially ones who had been nicknamed at their previous school ‘weirdo’ for having the audacity to be the only one to bring in a packed lunch because they were the only vegetarian – didn’t swan in and make new friends. In the ‘80s, they sat alone at break times and pretended that they really, really wanted to finish the book they were covering their face with on the bench which was the furthest away from everyone else.
Plot twist
But hang on… plot twist! This is where the storyline diverged unexpectedly. On my first day I was taken into a pastel-coloured classroom and shown to my place on one side of a double desk. My desk mate was a golden-haired, amber-colour eyed goddess of a girl who turned to me and said in an accent I’d never heard before, “Hello, I am Fiona, we have just moved to England – I have never seen snow. I don’t really know anyone, do you want to be friends?” Without a second thought of course I agreed and then we were.
Pic: The only photo I had of Fi is missing… me at the birthday before I met her
I got thinking about her because – if I still knew Fiona it would have been her birthday on the 22nd of the month – my birthday is also on the 22nd of a different month. At 10 this was a sign, a cosmically amazing sign of our pre-destined compatibility.
When that first lunch break arrived, much to my delight the whole class didn’t rush to a canteen leaving me to mope slowly behind trying to hide my lunchbox containing my homemade lunch. The teacher just told us all to, “eat lunch and then run along outside”. I looked around and to my utter surprise each pupil opened up their desks and took out their own packed lunches as there wasn’t a school canteen. With a furtive look around I saw that some classmates even had homemade brown bread sarnies just like me.
By the end of the week, we had become best friends. Why? We both had annoying little brothers in the same class – imagine the coincidence! We decided that we were two parts of the same person. We thought that usually girls with brown hair have brown eyes and those with blue eyes have blonde hair – we were the opposite so we matched – spooky! We started at this school at roughly the same time, we loved the same things and we particularly adored having our nails painted by Fi’s older brother’s girlfriend when I went to hers for sleepovers.
Sealed With A Loving Kiss
I rapidly transformed from the upset girl who didn’t understand why she had to start a new school to one half of ‘Fi and Leigh’. These were the names we announced to our class we would be like to be known as. “Like two French poodles”, our teacher muttered when he heard this declaration. With my hair, I didn’t like the comparison to a frizzy-haired dog so these names became our personal ones that we used in our many multi-coloured, rainbow and sticker-filled letters to each other. With the obligatory sign-off, Sealed With A Loving Kiss, S.W.A.L.K.
There was nothing that we didn’t know about each other or somehow find some magical connection to bind us. Fi had lived in tropical climes before coming to a school on a soggy farm in Kent – hence never having seen snow. My dad lived in California – so also meant I understood what *real* hot weather was. Our mums both had glam, swishy, flicky, blond hair like Christine Cagney from the hit show Cagney & Lacey, we had two siblings each at school. When the playing field wasn’t a mudpie we bought the same fake alligator shoes albeit in slightly different variants of the shade mushroom and to top it all off had matching, but alternate colourways, of Dash (R.I.P. Dash) outfits.
Fi and Leigh (absolutely no one else called me Leigh I had to wait over two decades to get a nickname that I hadn’t tried to give myself, lesson: you can’t give yourself a nickname) both wanted to be magazine editors and we spent hours cutting up catalogues making our own publications. I had never been so happy in a friendship in my life.
Absolutely no one else called me Leigh, I had to wait over two decades to get a nickname, Lel, that I hadn’t tried to give myself.
We had many adventures, including ruining and then hiding terribly a broken nail polish bottle she’d ‘borrowed’ from her mum, we wrote and performed songs to my nan, wanted to be in Culture Club, loved Madonna and then got into a lot of trouble over a soggy, sticky, dirty magazine a boy in our woodwork class found in the actual woods. However, that is another story and in a way was also the death knell of our beautiful friendship.
Pic: The song lyrics we wrote and performed to my nan
We got into big trouble over the jizz mag, were both grounded and then my memory of the sequence of events was that Fi told me through a note passed to me that she was moving to the… Midlands.
We were distraught. Somehow the move cancelled out the grounding and we were allowed to have a terribly tearful goodbye. Promising to stay in touch forever. S.W.A.L.K.
Initially, once she’d moved we communicated over the phone. But it was the ‘80s, so the phone was on a table in the hallway and as much as I wanted to drag the cord up the stairs it only reached to about the third step, so everyone could hear everything and every word counted and cost so much more because it was… long distance.
Me and my first best friend fizzled out. No drama. No huge argument. Just distance and difference
Of course we wrote letters and I went to visit once but then we changed. Who knows if we would have if we’d stayed at the same school? She went down a gothy path first, meanwhile I was still more into pop and Elvis. She adored horses, I ditched them for magazines and fancying boys. Me and my first best friend fizzled out. No drama. No huge argument. Just distance and difference.
Where is she now?
Over the years I have often wondered what happened to her, I have no shame in admitting I looked on Friends Reunited and then Facebook, googled her but never found her or perhaps she changed her name or isn’t online. But I will never forget that beautiful smile and question; ‘do you want to be friends?’ It set me up for life, showing me that your biggest fears don’t always come true and it pays to be kind. Thanks Fi love Leigh. S.W.A.L.K.
Oh I love this! All I know about my first “best friend” is we were briefly in reception together in Pontypridd in the mid-1980s and her name was Jemma. Then we moved to Australia. 😢 I would love to know what happened to her!
I also now really want to know what happened to Fiona!
OMG friends reunited! Who didn’t look up a lost best friend on that? I know I did. It wasn’t all old crushes