50 years on: Growing up the hard way

50 years ago this week, my best friend at school was killed in a car accident. She was 8 years old. It was the summer holidays and I was staying with my town Granny at the time. She saw something about the accident in the local papers but didn’t mention it to me as she wasn’t sure that I would know who was killed.

I remember it was the evening of the Sunday when I got home that my mother finally told me about the accident. I was sat on the toilet and she stood the other side of the door and said to me that I wouldn’t be seeing my friend anymore. I asked her if my friend had moved house (friends often moved without notice as far as I was concerned). When she said that my friend hadn’t moved, there was a pause while she waited for me to realize what had happened. I think you can imagine how upset I was.

 As it happens my country Granny was there (probably having brought my two sisters home from her house the same day). My granddad had been run over and killed by a car a few years before, it can’t have been easy for her. She simply told me not to cry as my friend was up with Jesus. That’s all that I needed to comfort me and I still have the picture in my mind of a boat sailing through the stars with my friend sitting in it and Jesus standing at the head of the boat.

Over the years I’ve often wondered what my friend would have been like – would we still have been friends?  When my youngest sister married in our village church, I was one of her bridesmaids and I took one of the flowers I was carrying and left it on her grave. Not long after that I saw her surviving twin brother and told him that I’d left a flower for her; he was so pleased that I still thought of her.

I used to think that my mother was a coward for the way she gave me the news. Now that I have three children of my own, I realize how difficult it must have been for her. I’ve always been grateful to my country Granny for knowing exactly the right words to comfort me.

The first morning back at school made me realize that the news wasn’t just mine. When the teacher walked into the classroom, one of the boys put up his hand and proclaimed “Sir D…… is dead!”

A little bit of family history.

For my last birthday my mum gave me a copy of a local history book of the village where I grew up. It was in the main fascinating and also sad when I learnt that some people I grew up with are no longer alive.

We were talking about the book when I phoned to wish mum a happy Easter and she told me the following story:

The maternal side of my family comes from Great Barr in Birmingham (UK), or thereabouts. The village I grew up in is about 40 miles away which was a long journey in the past. My parents arrived there in the mid-fifties and as far as I know settled in well considering they were outsiders. At first we lived in the village and then moved to farm cottages outside the village.

We have a tradition of finding graveyards fascinating in our family and of course mum did a tour of the church-yard to see if there were any interesting grave stones to read. She came across one that bore the name of her Grandmother’s family – Foden. Yes, this man turned out to have been a distant cousin who had also worked in the village on a farm. When my great-granny (née Foden) visited the cottage after we moved there, she remembered it. Not only had the distant cousin worked on the same farm, he had lived in the same cottage!

What are the chances of that happening?