I sent this tale to the New York Times Magazine's Lives Lived column, but they rejected me. The beauty of a blog is that you can post all your rejected submissions on your own!
In 1969, when I was seven years old, my family moved from Canada to England for a year. My father, a college professor, had a year’s sabbatical, and enrolled in a Master’s of Linguistics program at the University of Essex. We took a ship across the ocean (because my mother doesn’t fly), and settled down in southeast England, on a small and somewhat obscure island near the town of Colchester, called Mersea.
Mersea Island was a child’s paradise. Miles of beaches, lined with small huts, were deserted in the off-season. The house we rented was huge, and came with a dog and a cat, left behind by the owner, who had business in Libya that year. The house was located on a street with only a few other homes, and the roadway was unpaved. Our backyard was filled with flower beds and apple trees. All around our property were grassy fields, quiet lanes, small woods, and riding paths – a pastoral wonderland for a child accustomed to the decidedly urban landscape we inhabited in Canada.
My mother, British by birth, plunged her only daughter into the full English experience. School uniform, sweets at the sweet shop, Enid Blyton and C.S. Lewis, piano lessons (given by the local corsetiere, who clearly needed to supplement a lagging career), and, best of all, weekly riding lessons at Miss Catchpole’s Riding Academy. Miss Catchpole’s was a mish-mash of tin-roofed stables that housed ponies and horses of all sizes and temperaments, including “Charlie,” a pony with long curly reddish hair. Charlie delighted in rolling on the Mersea sands, and consequently had to be kept on a lead. As the most inexperienced of all Miss Catchpole’s students, I usually ended up on Charlie.
At the stables, my mother chatted with another parent, and I was soon introduced to a young girl my own age – Louise – who lived not far from us. As it is with young children, we became friends very quickly, our mutual love of all things horsey bonding us. We drew horses together, we rode imaginary horses through the lanes and woods of Mersea, we entered national newspaper contests to win ponies, and generally lived, breathed, and ate horses and ponies, in the fashion of all horse-mad young girls and women.
The year sped by. As I rode Charlie or galloped my bicycle to Louise’s house for tea once a week, my father completed his master’s degree. In 1970, we returned to Canada. Louise and I exchanged a few letters, and she sent me pictures of her new pony, Silver Sixpence, but we eventually lost touch with each other. My father took me out riding a few times back in Canada, but Western-style riding did not appeal to me, and I lost interest after a few months.
Years later, I returned to Mersea Island for a brief drive through with my husband, to show him this idyllic spot. Mersea had changed, but not as much as I thought, and I easily found our old house and some of my old haunts. Miss Catchpole’s Riding Academy, alas, was gone, as was the sweet shop. I did not try and look up my friend Louise. At the time, I wanted to preserve my memory of two horse-mad little girls.
But as I reached my mid-forties, connecting with old friends became more important. The Internet has opened up a relatively easy tunnel for mining the past. I recently rediscovered several friends through Facebook. But I searched in vain for any signs of my old friend Louise, until one day, I found a Facebook Group for people who had lived on Mersea Island. I joined the group and posted a brief note about my year there, mentioning Louise, Miss Catchpole, and even Charlie, the horse, wondering if anyone out there would respond.
Within two weeks, I had an email from a woman who had seen my post and who had known all three of my long-ago acquaintances. We exchanged a few tentative emails, confirming facts and comparing notes. Convinced of her legitimacy, I asked her to remember me to my old friend, Louise. But her reply was not what I expected. She explained that, not only were Miss Catchpole and Charlie long gone, but my friend Louise had also died.
After several further exchanges, she provided me with details about Louise’s life, and the fact that Louise had succumbed to a brain tumour in her early thirties. The little girl of my memories had grown up and blossomed into a nurse, a wife, and a popular riding companion. She had lived in London and St-Tropez, and owned several horses. Louise had returned to Mersea, where she spent the rest of her short life. Her family and friends had been devastated by her death, the woman explained.
My cherished Mersea memories are now altered forever by the intrusion of facts and reality. I no longer think of that wonderful year without a tinge of sadness, knowing that my old friend is gone. Yet, at the same time, my memories of Louise have become more real to me because I now know what became of her. She is no longer just a dim childhood memory and a few old photos in an album, but a real person who lived her life. That somehow makes my magical year in Mersea even more important to me, although I’m not entirely sure why.
