Please sir, can i have some more?

For a week in 1980 I was a star.  I was Oliver in my school production of Oliver and it is impossible to adequately describe how much of a big deal this is when you are ten. Of course, it was only parents and friends in the school auditorium. If anyone filmed it the tape is long lost. Nobody paid for their tickets and if they had paid perhaps they would have been disappointed. But I was Oliver and my boyfriend, Darren, was the Artful Dodger. Strangely, this was good casting. I was posher than most of the kids at school and had a kind of angelic singing voice, was pale and blonde. He was not posh, but charismatic, funny, confident.  Somehow, this production was the highlight of our primary school careers. Costumes, dance routines, transformation.

Appropriately, the school itself was a Victorian workhouse type deal in a shabby area of North London where a lot of the kids were genuinely poor. In those days poor meant skinny and dressed from Oxfam. The school backed on to blocks of 1960s council flats that were beyond grim. A lot of the kids lived in them. It was gloriously, effortlessly multi-cultural and provided the kind of education that I now pay a huge fortune for. In those days all schools were laid back, child-centred, play-orientated and non-competitive.  Nowadays state schools are too pushy for me. I don’t want my kids to be humiliated by endless testing and learning of meaningless photo-copied sheets. So, I fork out a huge mortgage so that they can play around like we did and actually enjoy their childhood.

One night Darren tossed the apple to me during our dance routine for Consider Yourself. I dropped it and it rolled towards the audience. We danced forward to get it, not stepping out of routine, not needing to agree on it, wordlessly in synch. ‘Consider yourself one of the family…’  Sabah and Sophie were milkmaids, Nicholas Samuels was a chestnut seller and Francis was an orphan. For the Who Will Buy? number I wore a red velvet suit and a big red velvet hat, waist-length hair plaited and bundled up in it somewhere. My dad came all the way over from America to see it, or, at least, that’s what the headmaster announced. I seem to remember that he was over anyway, but, at this point, whatever. The headmaster was Mr Bumble and Mrs Eddington (the wife of Yes Minister’s Paul Eddington) was Nancy. A policeman called PC Hepburn was a terrifying Bill Skykes.
I have shown my children the photos and sung them the songs (a lot). I always wanted to grow up and play Nancy but suddenly I’m too old.

So, on the way to the pub in Winchmore Hill, I wasn’t sure if I’d recognise them. This is what Facebook does. ‘Hello. We did Oliver together. Do you remember? I’m a grandmother now!!’ That kind of thing. A grandmother at 39. Most of my friends are just having their first children now. At 27 we thought we were absurdly young to be parents. We were absurdly young to be parents! Then someone put up our class photo, Campsbourne 1980, tagged everyone and started searching.

What if there was nothing to say? What if they had changed? And yet, as I pulled into the car park of The Green Dragon I saw Sabah and Sophie and waved from the car window. ‘Do you recognise us!’ Sabah shouted. Of course I did. They looked no different at all. Darren and Nick both had gold teeth (clearly all the rage) and Francis (now Frank) had a David Beckhamesque tattoo on his back. Everyone had been through a lot and popped out the other side of it (cancer, bereavement, ‘trouble with the police’), but, it is amazing that people are pretty much fixed long before they leave primary school, and relationships are real.  Perhaps there was a time when everybody knew that. Perhaps even here, in my village on top of my Italian mountain, everyone knows that if you liked them at 10 you’ll like them at 40.  But for us, growing up in cities and drifting apart, it was a shock, I think. I have spent my life trying to get away from the beginning, trying to grow roots and belong to something, never imagining that glancing backwards might be heartwarming when at the time, as the present it often felt terrifying.

I drank too much wine and ate a burger and chips and the weirdest thing about the whole event was that it felt completely normal. I couldn’t imagine fitting in – I hadn’t seen them for three quarters of my life, I never go to pubs, I’ve never even been to Winchmore Hill. But, as Sabah said; ‘Nobody’s judging.’ And, older, wiser, softer - nobody was.

I sang Consider Yourself all the way home. ‘We’ve taken to you, so strong. It’s clear, we’re going to get along…’