Rosemary came from a family who took little or no interest in religion, and she had stomped out of Sunday School at the age of ten, claiming she ‘didn’t need to be indoctrinated any more’. ‘I’m getting interested in Catholicism,’ she said. Then, out of the blue, as we met one Saturday as usual, she asked: ‘Would you like to come with me to the Catholic Church?’ We, on the other hand, were carefree, with nothing more pressing to worry about than what to wear on our Saturday outings into town.īy the time she was 17, Rosemary looked like a young film star, highly groomed and poised, and certainly turned heads in St Neots. You were trapped for ever in a too-early marriage and stuck living next to your mum and dad for the rest of your life. This, to us, was a horrible example of what happened if you let a boy from St Neots get too close. ‘You know Winifred King?’ asked Rosemary one day, mentioning a girl who lived nearby. We both had casual boyfriends, but were too ambitious to want to be trapped with a local boy. Anything, that is, except settling down with a St Neots boy and getting married, a fate we viewed as worse than death.
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How we were going to achieve our exotic dreams - Rosemary’s of the stage, mine of literary fame - we didn’t know, but at that moment anything was possible. Like me, she would go on to take A-levels, with the aim of going to university and escaping St Neots - something we couldn’t wait to do, or so I presumed. Her father was by now running the local Conservative Club, a job that came with spacious accommodation, and Rosemary had taken her O-levels at the Technical College and achieved the most brilliant results the town had ever known - far eclipsing mine.īright young thing: A photo of Liz taken near Newcastle in 1966 However, by her mid-teens things were back on track - both in Rosemary’s life and our friendship. There was another setback when I went to the grammar school and Rosemary, in the cruel lottery that was the 11-plus, wasn’t offered a place. We moved into a detached house in Avenue Road, where all the prosperous St Neots shopkeepers and businesspeople lived, and I inevitably saw a little less of Rosemary. His family were mortified, and their reduced circumstances were highlighted by the fact my mother’s floristry business was starting to take off. Our families’ fortunes first diverged when Rosemary’s father Albert, a skilled cabinetmaker and carpenter, developed severe asthma, couldn’t work and had to go on the dole.
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The locals tut-tutted, especially when we started smoking as well, but what did we care? We would show ‘em! We’d parade down the High Street, fancying ourselves in our tiny mini-skirts, make-up and high heels. Rosemary and I wore the same clothes, sat next to each other in school, went on holiday together and were easily the most fashionable teenagers in our small, stifling home town.
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Their family lived in a flat above a tailor’s shop, opposite my mother’s flower shop on the High Street of St Neots in Cambridgeshire. My mother had known Rosemary’s mother since childhood. Rosemary Trolley and I met as babies in our prams and were pretty much inseparable from then on. Now both in our 70s, I was intrigued to see the outcome of the diametrically opposed ways in which we had chosen to live our lives. Her decision - as mad as it seemed to me at the time - was not just a passing fancy, but a lifelong commitment and she has just marked 50 years as a nun.Īs such, she invited me, her very oldest friend - whom she hadn’t seen for more than 40 years - to help her celebrate her silver jubilee at her monastery in the U.S.
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Rosemary had decided on a career in the theatre, maybe producing or directing, and I was going to be a famous writer.Īs we sat chatting so confidently, neither of us could possibly have known how dramatically our lives would diverge.įor while I went on to lead a rackety old life full of incident and adventure, at the age of 20, in 1964, Rosemary shocked everyone who knew her by taking the veil as a Carmelite nun, the strictest and most enclosed female monastic order of all. My best friend Rosemary and I were hiding behind the bike sheds, drinking and smoking and discussing our hopes and plans for the future.ĭressed in the latest Sixties garb with towering beehives and thick black eyeliner, we may have been only teenagers, but we had it all worked out. They were wild 60s teens - until Liz's best friend became a nun.īack then she pitied her.