Friends and bullies

 When you are little it is so much easier to make friends (well more or less everything is easier when you are a small child), you just meet someone randomly and say, "Do you want to come and play at my house?" and then you become firm friends very easily and quickly.  Or you don't see each other for a while and you drift apart but don't feel desperately sad about it. 

A picture I did for Trish from a 
photo of us sharing a towel on
Dalebrook beach in Cape Town

My first friend was Trish, and we met when we were both one-year olds.  Our mothers became friends even though there was a nine-year age-gap between them, and I just loved my friend's entire chaotic family of, eventually, six children!  Her mum became my second mother, just as so many of us become mothering figures to our childrens' friends.  We two were beloved best friends, even though we were quite different, in looks and in our natures.  We used to tell everyone we were twins although it was patently obvious that we weren't even related!  

My friend Maureen, a small woman still filled with
the huge life and vivacity seen in this image from
years ago. She is now 80 (!) and lives in Fremantle.

I have had several such deep and profound friendships through my life, some which have lasted most of my life.  It is a great sadness to me that each of my very dear friends now lives far away, in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, in Australia, in America.  

When we moved to America we left our entire history, from birth to mid-forties, such a jolt to the psyche!  

It took ages to make friends and most of them turned out to be South African, no doubt due to that shared history, that humour, that consciousness, those perceptions distributed only amongst your own countrymen and women.  

Now we have uprooted ourselves once more, and so we lose our American history of 21 years. As even older people it is that much harder to make new friends.  Neither Tim nor I are much good at small talk and we're both a little eccentric and different.  We are both the third child in our families, and we're putting it down to that!  Also, I am even more passionate about those things which outrage me than I was as a younger environmentalist/feminist/pacifist etcist.  This tends to put people off.   

Last year on our travels we stayed for a weekend with an old church friend of Tim's from long ago, who came to Portugal and married an advocate here.  They were astonished that I don't eat meat, as most people in Portugal are astonished.  (You can buy whole entire rabbits at the meat counter here!) Eventually, after several meals, and my refusal to eat even octopus, they asked me why.  So I explained, to the best of my ability, about the cruelty of factory farms and abattoirs and how animals are all sentient beings, with emotions and social structures and whatnot.  That scientists are discovering that the question to ask is not, "Which animals have emotions?" but "Do any creatures not have emotions?" 

And I told them about the book I read about a Giant Pacific Octopus in the New England Aquarium, The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, a beautiful study.  She speaks of a friendship between the author and an octopus named Athena, but the book also includes scientific knowledge of what is being learned about octopuses, and it makes us wonder about these magical creatures.  As humans we always look at everything from our own perspectives, our own intelligences, but it seems that even octopuses have their rich intelligence and abstract thought and even a sense of humour, and other strange and extraordinary powers, like the ability to pour their entire bodies into a bottle.  They are truly admirable, beautiful aliens.  

And not for eating.  

And then I spoiled it all by weeping. 

Wonderfully, and in spite of my sentiments for animals, these two have become very good friends of ours, and we love them.  They are kind and lovely people, we just feel differently about meat.     

And, the opposite of friends, 

are BULLIES.

Bullies are on my mind now because of two of my grandchildren starting high school.  Smartphones and social media have made bullying so much worse, as children can exclude others from whatsapp groups, badmouth them online with no reprisals, and a multitude of other sins.  The last few years of my teaching, several of my students were on anti-depressants already, at the tender ages of 15 and 16, and largely, I believe, due to all this kind of stuff, plus the enormous weight of information which bears down on us every day.  

The reader, having a birthday.

So many of us are bullied, and the bullying stays with us our entire lives.  I remember well my own first experience of it, when I was 6.  My best friend and I went to "Big" school the same day and we were happily ensconced together in our little wooden desks, when suddenly, on the second or third day of school, I was whisked away to demonstrate my reading abilities to a group of other teachers, and then to the very intimidating headmistress,  One of the teachers asked me when I learned to read and I replied, "I was born like that." at which they all unexpectedly roared with laughter.  To me it felt like I had always read, as my dad had taught me when I was very little.  And a solitary child with a chronic illness finds great solace in reading for hours and hours, so that she can forget her lungs' labouring breaths and travel far far away with her mind.    

Then just as suddenly I was pushed into another classroom a year above, where I had to read aloud, a lot.  I read to the class while the teacher marked books and prepared lessons, standing on a little stool so that everyone could see me, as I was very small.  Apparently they were amazed that I read so expressively and that I did all the voices. (Maybe that's why I became a teacher.)

When break-time came, we all went outside to eat our packed sandwiches sitting on the grass under the trees, and I went eagerly to find my friend, who was sitting in a circle of little girls all sitting cross-legged, who, when they saw me, the little freak who could already read and was moved up a class, all hurriedly scrunched up until their knees were touching so that there would be no space for me to fit in.  I walked slowly around the entire circle of about 7 or 8 children, and no one moved up to let me in,  So I just walked away.  I was utterly shocked and my heart hurt. 

And still does, to this day.  I was treated as a misfit and so eventually that is what I became.  But while I was becoming myself, I became strong, grew a (slightly) thicker skin, learned that ignoring someone mostly works, found my own different friends.  I wore strange clothes I made myself, went down my own path of poetry and art and stories and the green world of nature.  I was always happy in my own company.

I have heard other people's stories of being bullied, horrendous stories, where mine pale in comparison.  Boys getting stripped down and made to stand while everyone laughs at their genitals, an entire class voting against a child for some made-up issue, horrible physical and mental abuse.  

Margaret Atwood wrote about her childhood trauma in her brilliant book Cat's Eye, where a 'mean girl' bully nearly caused her death.   

The girl who was bullied just tried to deal with it all on her own, only told her mother when the near-death occurred.  It is interesting that, although I am 15 years younger than Margaret Atwood and grew up on a different continent entirely, my generation also just dealt with awful experiences.  Bad things happened to us and we just stoically carried on, we didn't tell our parents or complain to anyone, we just learned how to cope with the trauma.   

You can become quite cynical about human beings, can't you?  

The beautiful seascape

But yesterday we went to an art exhibition in Portimão, and there was beauty and colour and passion and creativity, and a lot of people looking at pictures, and an old artist told us his entire life story, just about, all in Spanish, as he was from Toledo, and had traveled down slowly to Portimão, over many days, in his van.  He is a passionate painter of Nature, and we walked away from his stall with a beautiful little seascape which will now become part of our Sea wall.  

Our Sea wall.

Self-portrait with shadows

And a watercolour self-portrait this week, with leaf-shadows added in Procreate on the Ipad.  I read a lovely description of self-portraits today, which I quote here from a critic writing about the winner of the second biennial Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize in 2013.  "Newbolt demonstrates how self-portraiture offers an opportunity for the artist to present their image as they know themselves - a platform for the individual to explore the potent, confusing, relationship between psyche and body."