BBA & HBWC Administrator
Andrea Reece
30 Winton Avenue, London, N11 2AT
Tel: 0208 889 1292
Mob: 07807 893369
Email: branford.boase@gmail.com
Press Enquiries
Andrea Reece
Tel: 07807 893369 | Email: branford.boase@gmail.com
Some places disappear quietly – not through disaster, but through the slow, ordinary work of being outgrown. Not places people pin postcards of to their fridges. Not the kinds marked by skylines or statues or names printed boldly across maps. The place I knew best began at your front gate and ended somewhere around the trampoline, where the springs squealed like they were gossiping about us and the fabric held the warmth of the afternoon long after the sun had moved on.
If I close my eyes, I could still walk through it.
Three steps to the patio stones split with chalk dust. Left past the flowerpots where we lined up our drinks like important people at meetings. The guinea pig hutch smelling of hay and woodshavings and that strange powdery sweetness that clung to our sleeves because we insisted on carrying them around like tiny kings. Somewhere in the grass: a forgotten hair ribbon, probably mine.
Your house had its own climate. Strawberry lip balm. Melted ice lollies. Damp socks from grass still wet even in summer. The muffled rhythm of adults laughing downstairs while evening stretched lazily through restaurant windows or family dinners, time moving so slowly it felt impossible to run out of it.
We believed in forever with indomitable confidence.
On the trampoline, we invented games halfway through playing them, bouncing basketballs badly and changing the rules whenever one of us was losing. The only rule that stayed the same was: don’t let them touch you. We shrieked whenever the ball flew unexpectedly towards us, collapsing into the sort of laughter that made your ribs ache. We did not yet know how to feel embarrassed in our own bodies. We belonged entirely to ourselves then.
And we planned our futures carelessly, like children always do. Matching houses. Dogs. Kitchens beside each other. Lives folded neatly together as though friendship were something permanent, something guaranteed by sheer wanting.
Then the world stopped.
During lockdown, loneliness arrived quietly, settling over everything like dust upon unopened books. So we posted ourselves to each other in pieces. Small parcels every week: felt-tip drawings in shades too bright for those strange months, bracelets, tiny objects we were suddenly certain mattered. Notes disguised as jokes that really meant: I miss you. I still know you. Please don’t disappear.
As if we already sensed disappearing was possible.
We made a scrapbook once. I still have it in my room. Glitter lodged stubbornly in the spine. Stickers curling at the corners. Feathers pressed flat between pages loud with the kind of colour only children use – because when you are eleven, subtlety feels dishonest. Sometimes I turn the pages and meet old versions of ourselves there. Girls standing shoulder to shoulder, certain closeness was permanent simply because it had always been.
The strangest thing is that nothing happened.
No argument. No spectacular ending. We changed in the quiet way seasons do – slowly enough that nobody notices until suddenly the evenings feel colder. One day we stopped speaking. One day we stopped looking at each other. Our friendship loosened like pink and green ribbons untied by accident.
Now, if we pass each other, it feels like hearing a language I once spoke fluently and no longer know how to answer.
But I still remember the exact shape of your front step.
And somewhere, I think, the country of childhood still exists untouched: the trampoline still warm, the chalk galaxies still bright on the patio, two girls singing ‘We Are the Champions’ terribly off-key before saying goodbye – completely certain that growing up was something happening to other people.