Let's Be Friends

I love to write about friendship. It's important to me. When I was young, I remember wondering how my best friend Claire and I had become friends. We had nothing in common, really. I liked reading, she liked skipping. I liked art, she liked football. We even disagreed on the big things; she thought Jesus was always watching us, I was pretty certain only the dinner ladies were watching us.

It came down to the simple fact that we had been put on the same table in Reception. On our very first day at school, we both sat at the red table. That was it. So, she was my friend, for always, because she just was. We stayed best friends right up until I went to college. She's still my friend now, but I only see her and her lovely children on Facebook, as I live too far away.

It got me wondering, can anyone be your friend if the circumstances are right?

I have noticed that when I write, I either write about being friends with your siblings, or making friends with people you don't initially like (which might be true of your siblings too, of course!).

The sibling part is easy enough to understand - I have loads of brothers and sisters and at least two of them are arguing at any given moment. Even though most of them are grown up, with kids of their own, and mortgages, they still fight about who ate the last chocolate digestive. It's how I know I'm home. I used these relationships in How Kirsty Jenkins Stole the Elephant and Operation Eiffel Tower. In these books, brothers and sisters come to rely on each other, just as I do in real life. So writing about siblings being friends is just because of how I live my life.

But in How Ali Ferguson Saved Houdini and The Mystery of Wickworth Manor, I've got back to that old friendship with Claire. The characters in these books are thrown together and just have to get on with it. In The Mystery of Wickworth Manor especially, the two main characters, Paige and Curtis really don't get on when they first meet. Curtis thinks that Paige is a flake. Paige thinks Curtis is stuck-up. Each is the exact opposite of what the other thinks they want in a friend. But circumstances, (in this case the first letter of their surname), throws them together.

I really think that being thrown together and having to put up with other people really does give you time to get to know and like them. Am I being a super optimist? Maybe. But I know that I have made good friends over the years simply because they were house-mates, or work colleagues, or in my sports team.

This idea isn't new in stories and can often have really exciting results. I'm thinking of situations like John Watson being forced to share a flat because he can afford one on his own; he, of course, ends up living with Sherlock Holmes. Or Pippa, from a large family with little money, being thrown together with Hal, an only child with mega-rich parents, in Eva Ibbotson's One Dog and His Boy. So, I like to be optimistic about friendship, because it also makes for good stories.  I'm sure it's something I will return to again when I write, because friends matter to me, even if we don't agree on everything.