Who knew that this correspondence would lead to so much more?
BY EIRIN THOMPSON
Set in the 1980s
PERHAPS it was because I grew up in an isolated spot in the country, and couldn’t pop round easily to anyone’s house, that I never had a best friend.
At school, I lived on the edge of a group of girls.
I showed the others my homework answers and let them copy them if they wanted.
I swapped Mum’s homemade tray-bakes for a handful of crisps at breaktime.
They urged me to join their youth club, where there was music, a tuck shop and an opportunity to meet boys.
But I couldn’t ask Dad to drive me all the way there on a Friday night and come back for me later.
He worked long, hard hours on the farm and needed to rest when it got dark.
Carol Ann, a kind girl with lots of friends, tried to include me where she could.
She invited me to her birthday party at her home and arranged for me to come there after school, stay for the party and then be taken home the next day by her and her dad.
It was Carol Ann who organised the international pen-pals project, too.
She got us all to fill in forms and send off our details, waiting for a match.
“I got a letter!” Adele shrieked one morning, bursting into the locker area, brandishing an envelope.
All the girls crowded round to take a peek.
The letter was from France, but was written in English, and in a strange, pointy handwriting on squared paper.
In the address, the ones looked like sevens, while the sevens had a horizontal line through them.
“What’s her name?” someone asked.
“Marie-Claude,” Adele informed us.
“And what age is she?”
“Fifteen, like us.”
“What does she say?”
“She lives with her parents in an apartment overlooking a park. She has a cat called Etienne.”
“What else? What else?” everyone clamoured.
“She wants to be a fashion designer. Her favourite subject is Art.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Yes. His name is Alain and he is the captain of the school rugby team.”
“Will you write back in French or English?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“I’ll try to start in French,” Adele replied. “If I get stuck, would you help me, Julia?”
“I’ll do my best,” I replied.
None of the rest of us heard anything about our pen-pal applications for weeks, but we all pored over Marie-Claude’s letter until the paper was ragged from being passed around.
Then
