Cathartic kicks in Kent

I’m just back from a trip down memory lane, having met up ‘down south’ with three pals from university. The four of us were together at the University of Kent at Canterbury – “UKC”- in the early 1980s and have kept in touch ever since. By that I mean letters long ago, Christmas and increasingly sporadic birthday cards.  We managed a reunion many moons ago, and two of us made it to a 50^th party a decade ago, but this week was the first time in more than 20 years that the four of us have been together. As none of them are on dear old open Facebook there was a lot of ground to cover when it came to catching up!

Turning 60 this year prompted us to get together and following a Zoom meeting to plan it, we booked a super Airbnb in Whitstable. We convened on Sunday afternoon, each laden with bags of food and drink to fortify us all, carefully organised on WhatsApp to accommodate our respective intolerances, immune disorders and general preferences!

On Monday we piled into one car and headed over to UKC where, as ever, we headed straight to the library. We’d been a studious bunch back in the day, all working crazily hard to keep our heads above water in the academic world of compulsory reading and essays. We basically lived in the library. For one thing it was warm in there – a huge plus compared with our respective second year digs. More of that later.

Gathering on the library steps this week we tried valiantly to achieve a selfie and were fortunate that a member of staff appeared, who not only did the honours with our phones but also invited us to come into the library and buzzed us through the (new) security.

It was that strange mix of familiarity laced with change. Our old wooden study carrels were mostly gone, in favour of a more open plan digitally configured alternative that just wasn’t the same. Yet, hunting down the English Lit section, the shelves were deemed to smell the same. A café replaced the old crappy vending machines and everywhere there were posters filled with pointers to supportive guidance where we had largely been left to sink or swim in a stressful morass.

The next stop on our tour was to Eliot College – our first-year accommodation – which was, incredibly, almost entirely unchanged! We peered through the glass slit of a locked door which revealed the unchanged dim, depressing, prison-like corridor, every bit as unwelcoming as it was when our parents first deposited us there more than 40 years ago. Another member of staff magically appeared in time to confirm that nothing had changed internally either. The rooms, shared loo, bathroom and ‘kitchen’ (no appliances) were the same. She told us ruefully that they “struggle to get anyone to take these rooms”. That’s hardly surprising. Back in the day, I’d arrived, an only child, sick with worry at being allocated a shared room. It was at the end of said hideous corridor. Thankfully my roomie was persuaded to take the top bunk. Nic was a gem then and still is today.

From Eliot we trudged across the (much developed) campus to find Park Wood in search of the house that the three of them had shared in the third year. I had been due to live there too, until I stumbled into a job in publishing during the summer holidays and dropped out of learning in favour of earning, ostensibly for a gap year, leaving them in the lurch (sorry ladies). I never did go back.

We headed to Whitstable for a late lunch – fish and chips, of course – and then had an afternoon tour of our respective second year digs. As we peered, stalker style, at a cottage in Blean, the elderly owners came out and welcomed Karen and Tracey to look round their old place. It had been so damp at the time that Tracey suffered some sort of bronchial issue and they’d had to move out! It has had quite a facelift.

Next, I nagged our long-suffering driver to escort us to Herne Bay (or as we called it then, Hernia Bay) where we visited Nic’s old pad and, round the corner, the dreadful old Victorian pile where I had shared a flat in in the second year with some other friends. Far from a facelift, if anything, this looked even more dilapidated.

Revisiting all the old places was fascinating and fun, but the real joy in the weekend was rediscovering our easy friendship. Everything clicked into place immediately with no awkwardness, we simply pitched in together as we always had and talked and laughed, and laughed and talked, and talked and laughed some more.

I was armed with a batch of letters which, amazingly, my Mum had kept from those days and I found when clearing their old house a few months ago. I had written home pretty much twice a week from Uni and the memories those letters served up were bittersweet. It was great fun to share with the girls some of the funny and mundane details that we’d forgotten which were interwoven amid the evident homesickness and vulnerability of that time.

Catching up on our missed decades turned out to be immensely cathartic for us all – talking, listening sharing and caring as we covered everything from births to bereavements, colonoscopies to Pilates, menopause to marriages – broken and burgeoning, fractured families and countless crises and worries, past and present. We bonded back in the 1980s and we’ve just added another few layers of superglue, I think.

We are already talking about getting together again before too long and had a lovely feedback quote from the AirBnB which read “Nicola and her party were absolutely outstanding guests. Their communication was prompt, friendly and appreciative. They left the house spotlessly clean and tidy. When a problem developed with the dishwasher, they tried to fix it and then took out all the dishes and washed them by hand. We would be delighted to host them again.”  Well, who WOULDN’T wash the dishes up by hand in that instance? At least there was hot water. Back in OUR day….