I seem to be losing people. In the last few months two childhood friends, both exact contemporaries of mine, have gone. Three years ago, it was my greatest childhood friend. All too early. I don’t wish to be maudlin, simply to notice the fact that loss is a feature of this stage of life; also to acknowledge the impact that these three friends, in their very different ways, had on me.

Our lives took different turns, and I saw much less of them individually in adulthood than I had while growing up. But it’s in the early years that the fabric of one’s life is being woven and they were all three important and enduring threads in mine. In two cases I had seen them within a few months of their deaths and the threads, which might otherwise have dulled a little, glowed again, briefly but brightly. 

When it came to it I had some warning in two cases, the end coming as the result of illness. But the third, the most recent – only a few days ago, was sudden and wholly unexpected. I wept on hearing the news of her death, as much from shock as from grief.

Even as a teenager, Jeanetta embodied style, elegance and sophistication. She seemed to glide through life. Of course, as one matures one comes to know the person behind the appearance, and she had challenges to face, as we all do. But she was a highly creative person – a gifted dressmaker and designer – who was naturally warm and generous, as well as effortlessly stylish. From the age of about twelve I was always a little in love with her.

Jamie (it was a popular name among boys of my generation) was an entertainer, charming and funny, a raconteur and singer of songs whose deep connections with the land and people of the west of Scotland resulted in him later becoming, to the great surprise of many, a politician, much liked in his constituency. We made music together and roamed his local hills and I fell for his sister.

My true compadre, David, was a rascal who sailed perilously close to the wind, yet who became briefly an outstanding soldier, survived a spell in a notorious Indian jail, and ended up as a prominent, even legendary, figure in the world of high-value London real estate. The daredevil I would have liked to have been, he lived close by and in the holidays – we were both at boarding school – we hung out together and broke the rules whenever we thought we could get away with it.

All three projected a certain confidence, however illusory, which, as a teenager, I didn’t entirely share. For that reason I admired them and probably felt a little flattered by, maybe proud of, maybe even not wholly deserving of, their friendship. Later I came to understand that the friendship was indeed mutual and reciprocal, and that I could simply enjoy, even be amused by, the personal charisma with which they were each in their own way possessed. Today their loss rattles my foundations; not enough to bring the house down but, leaving aside the obvious intimation of mortality, enough to make me ask what exactly they meant to me.

I could say much more than I already have about that, about what it was that drew me to each one. But in the end it all comes down, as it so often does, to that most powerful of all connecting forces: love. In those adolescent years I loved them; and that, or the memory of it, never goes away. The great American humanist writer, Thornton Wilder, expressed it better than I ever could in the closing words of his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

‘But soon we shall die and all memory … will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’