I asked, ‘And do you think that’s not being very friendly?’
‘No, I think that’s not very nice.’
‘How many friends have you got?’
‘Loads. I’ve got so many friends I can’t count them. I’ve got Sarah, one, Chloe, two, James, three, Hayden, four, Elliot, five, Thomas, six, Kate, seven, Marcus, eight, Sam, nine.’
‘Do you always play with your friends?’
‘Not all the time. Sometimes they get a bit mardy, and they walk off and they say I don’t want to play with you.’
Alice’s brother Miles, at seven, could define a friend and understand that friendship meant reciprocity. He said, ‘A friend is somebody who would be kind to me and wouldn’t desert me if I hurt myself or was in trouble. It’s somebody who likes you. Sometimes you can like somebody but they don’t like you, but that’s not a real friend.’
Miles also understood that reciprocity did not mean that two friends had to have identical interests. He told me how pleased he was that his friend Arthur, who had gone to another school, was coming back to Miles’s school. I asked him why he was pleased. He said, ‘I’m pleased because he was a good friend. Although he wasn’t interested in all the things I was interested in he was still a very good friend.’
‘So when you were doing something he wasn’t interested in, he was still nice about it?’
‘Yes, but it was more the other way around. He likes sports and I wasn’t really interested.’
When I compared the definitions of friends and friendship which Alice and Miles had given me with the definitions which adults gave me it seemed that as we get older our definitions become more complex, and that many people expect much of their friends.
In a workshop on friends and enemies I asked the participants how they defined a friend. Their answers showed that they saw a friend as someone special.
• ‘A friend should be and do. Be: safe, trustworthy, honest, caring, open. Do: share their feelings with me, accept me, believe in me.’
• ‘A friend should share my sense of humour.’
• ‘A friend will have my welfare at heart and is prepared to accept me as I am and what I want from life, even though he/she may not understand why. A friend needs to be honest with me and open about feelings and opinions even though we differ.’
• ‘I need to feel that in dire circumstances that person would be there for me.’
• ‘I want a friend to hear what I say.’
• ‘A friend – I feel comfortable with and talk, talk, talk and do, do, do, and the time passes without thinking.’
• ‘Someone who will be honest with me but care about my feelings at the same time. Importantly, someone I feel comfortable with, easy with, have fun with.’
• ‘A friend is able to accept things you do for them.’
• ‘They need to tell me, show me, they care for me.’
• ‘We share a similar morality.’
I also asked some of my own friends how they defined a friend. Sometimes their answers surprised me.
I had always thought that Elizabeth and Catherine were close friends. They shared considerable work interests and an extensive social life. Yet Elizabeth said of Catherine, ‘I speak of her as a friend, we do the things friends do, but she is not simpatico.’ Elizabeth went on to point out that simpatico is an Italian term with no equivalent word in English. She contrasted her relationship with Catherine with her relationship with someone she has known since college. This is what she calls ‘eternal friendship’, even though she and her friend now see one another rarely.
I have been friends with Judy since 1954, and I regard this as one of my achievements. I love Judy dearly, but in my youth I was always afraid that I would not live up to the high standards Judy set for her friends. Now I am older and wiser I was able to ask her about how she saw friends and enemies. She told me she defined friends as ‘People who like me and are faithful to me. They have to be totally faithful.’
I asked her what was involved in being faithful.
‘They don’t cause trouble amongst other friends. They don’t bitch me up too much. They’re allowed to say a few things about me because I don’t think anybody could go through life not talking about their friends, but they should say positive things about me as well, so that if things come back to me I can say, “That’s fair. I can understand why they said that.”’
Judy’s demand that her friends be totally faithful to her is matched by the love and care she lavishes upon her friends. I have noticed that those people who feel that they have much to offer as a friend and who, like Judy, lavish much time and effort upon their friends are not always greatly surprised when their friends respond in kind, whereas those people whose top priorities include more than friendships can be surprised and entranced by what a friend might do for them.
I first met Irene when we were both in our twenties. Each of us had married the same kind of man – selfish, self-centred, someone who demanded that his wife give him her full attention and not fritter away any of her time with friends. In the 1950s this was a typical male attitude. However, Irene understood the importance of friendship better than I did, and she looked after her friends better than I did then. Now, forty years on, Irene has many friends acquired over many years. When I asked her whether she had a talent for friendship she said, ‘I do spend a lot of time socializing, but I’m also a disciplined sort of person time-wise, and so I’ve got my own programme that I follow, and if somebody says, “What about doing such and such?” I’ll say, “I can’t manage that until later in the day” – because I’m going swimming, or I’ve got calligraphy, or yoga.’
A few months after this conversation Irene had an accident and injured her hand most severely. She emerged from the casualty ward with her whole arm in plaster and strapped across her chest. This quite ruined her plans for the coming weekend, when her friend Amy was due to arrive for a short holiday. Now Irene knew that it would be a most uncomfortable time for Amy, so she rang her and explained the circumstances. She suggested that Amy should postpone her holiday until she, Irene, was capable of carrying out a hostess’s duties. She said, ‘Amy, if you come now you’ll just be my handmaiden for the whole of the time.’
Amy laughed and said, ‘It is better to be a handmaiden in the temple of the Lord than an honoured guest in the tents of the wicked.’ Amy arrived soon after and proved to be a most industrious handmaiden, though her attempt to remove some immovable spilt glue from the kitchen floor by scrubbing it with a nail brush was, Irene felt, one task too far. Amy is, Irene told me, ‘a dear lady and a very dear friend’, but words on paper cannot convey Irene’s astonishment and sense of blessedness.
Irene, like me, did not have a childhood where love and a sense of blessedness came as a birthright. I can see what effect such a childhood had on me. I know that there are people who demand much from their friends. I’ve often had to listen to a torrent of disappointment, anger and sadness from such a person who felt betrayed or let down by a friend. Intellectually I can understand the person’s point of view, but, in my heart, I am surprised that anyone can demand so much of a friend, and I get anxious lest to reproach a friend might drive that friend away. I do not expect anything of friends except that they will be nice to me when I am with them, and that behind my back they will speak about me with kindness. If they do not they are not friends. My expecting little of my friends arises not from some great wisdom but from growing up in a family where I found that to ask for anything was to risk refusal and ridicule. When I was a child many shops displayed a sign which