On love: the ‘life or death’ importance of female friendship

It was always the three of us as far back as I can remember. We set up as a unit in 1970 without knowing what we were in for. Two were blonde, one was brunette. She took a lot of abuse about the hair also being curly. One of the other ones was jealous, she got a perm. It made her look like she was wearing a woolly hat. How we laughed! The sensible one left her perfectly good straight hair alone. She kept it long and parted on the left through the next five decades. We took to begging her to do something with it. Anything. She never broke, just waved us away with another waft of her cigarette smoke. Oh, and that smile.

One took a lovely tan, the other two of us blistered even in the weak Irish sun. None of us suited the terrible canary yellow blouses that formed part of the convent school uniform. We could all be shy. More often we were giddy in that sniggering, annoying, trying-to-be-invisible but not-really-wanting-to-be way of the teenage girl. We mourned the fact that the A-line school skirt could only be improved by hiking it above the knee with three folds of the elasticated waist band. This fashion statement went hand in hand with rolled down socks. We were strict about important life or death stuff like that.

I liked going to one of their houses. She had a set of unusually young parents. They weren’t so bogged down in the tough rules and regulations of being ‘good’. There wasn’t a Sacred Heart in sight. We were allowed to drink orange Fanta and eat cheap biscuits and to commit both sins in the privacy of her bedroom. We could hardly believe that no one but Duran Duran was watching us from a Smash Hits poster as we ran through lists of boys. Who would we kiss and when would we kiss, but never how would we kiss because we’d not the first clue. One of us stated outright that it was never going to happen. Turns out, she was right – not boys, at least.

The three of us told each other lies and told each other truths. Sometimes we went behind each other’s backs and spilled secrets with pleas of not telling the other one what was done or said or promised. Mostly, we pulled off being loyal. One of them never had the grace to fancy me though I’ve asked her a hundred times why not. What’s wrong with me, I’d demand when enough vodka had been poured to make me sulky. She’s been known to have good taste in patches, it just didn’t stretch to brunettes.

When we got older, we covered each other to sneak away to dances in The Republic where nobody knew us or our families so we could try our luck at getting lucky. We thumbed lifts to get there, always sticking together, to be safe. Often, we walked miles in high heels to get home along lonely country roads. We filled the cold night air with chat about who we were going to be. We all nodded along to the amazing things we’d do when we escaped the small town where we were born.

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Image: Ryan MacEachern / Penguin