Monkeys and Parrots 4

I'm posting excerpts -- and they are excerpts, just tasters -- from my unpublished account of the years when I in my teens and early twenties, at a time when the world was a different place. This one is called --

A small reunion.
In 2007 a handful – maybe a dozen – elderly people gathered at a pleasant Yorkshire hotel on a beautiful Summer day. I’d helped to bring them together, and they are all my friends, although we meet but rarely. What we have in common is that we were all in the same form at school. In those days, secondary schools like ours – a local authority grammar school – didn’t have the kind of flexible timetables that allow different kinds of grouping through the day. You stayed with your form all day, for almost everything. As a result you became a very close knit band. Just how close is best shown by the fact that in about 1990 we had a proper reunion which was attended by all but two of the original class of thirty.
There weren’t that many of us there in 2007 – maybe a dozen, and about the same number the following year when we met again at the house of one of our number. Both gatherings were sparked off by the knowledge that during 2006 two of our number had died, the beginning, we accepted, of a steady attrition that will gradually accelerate now towards its natural end.
The 2007 reunion, full of memories of the ones who had died, was quite beautiful, really, like a scene from a tranquil, life-affirming English film. It was so wonderful to see these old friends, very much in their prime, smiling, relaxed, entirely comfortable with each other. It was, I should have explained, a mixed school that we went to, and so we were a mixed group of elderly folk. Now, though, we were free of the adolescent hormonal tides and tensions that flowed through us in those far-off school days. Well, almost at any rate. I, for one, and I guess this applied to everyone, was conscious all the time that many of us knew toe-curlingly embarrassing things about each other, all not so much suppressed as deliberately dismissed as irrelevant. Only occasionally, perhaps, did someone wonder why the person across the table smiled in a certain way, or suddenly went mentally into another place.
And do you know, the other thing about being free of the hormone thing is that we saw each other so much more clearly. We were free of adolescent self-obsessed posturing and inhibitions, and frankly I think we’ve mostly turned out to be nicer people than we were in those far off days. Nothing to prove now, I suppose.
Something else struck me, too. It was that some people were instantly recognizable, little changed in over fifty years. Others were the exact opposite – you could stare for ever and not see any sign of the younger version. What does that signify? Well, nothing really, except that people are different from each other.
What did we talk about? Why, school of course. What else? Our memories were the usual ones – this or that teacher, what happened to old so-and-so. There were revelations – things you didn’t know about people, including the stories that everybody except you knew at the time. We all had slightly different takes on our teachers, because we weren’t all equally good at everything. So there were those who really liked our Latin teacher, to me a fearsome lady who gave me nightmares.
On the whole, though, the memories were good ones.