Heather

Published on 10 June 2019 in Life, school

It started with a tweet.

To be fair, if Facebook took down everything that was fake, it wouldn’t be politics that would suffer, it’d be women called Heather pretending they were in a happy fulfilling marriage.

@merseytart on Twitter

And that’s what set the brain in motion. See, Heather is not a particularly common name. At least in my experience. I have met only one in my life. At primary school. She was in my class for seven years. And I have never met another.

I lost touch with members of my primary school class very quickly. Most of my class went to one secondary school. I went to another. I was not particularly bothered about this. By the end of primary school I didn’t have any particularly close friends. So choosing to go to a different high school was no big loss. There’s only one of my old class mates I have seen in recent years. She is a lovely person, and I would love to see her more. But she lives in South America so that ain’t going to happen.

I saw one other girl when I was about 18. And that is it.

Indeed I can’t even remember half of their names. Although Heather I do.

Where I grew up there were two primary schools. One was Catholic. The other was considered to be a bit “rough” by my parents (and several other parents), so I went to one different one about a mile or so away. So I didn’t live near most of my class. Well, the boys .

There were a few of the girls from my class living nearby. Including Heather. But as now, the boys at primary school played with the boys. The girls played with the girls. So whilst Heather lived a few streets away, our paths rarely crossed outside school.

She could easily have fallen into the pile of “people from primary school I have forgotten” were it not for one thing that happened.

In my mind it was in the final year of primary school. But maybe it was early years at secondary school. Either way, it is a non school day and I am at home. The doorbell rings. I open the door.

And standing on the door step is Heather.

She asks if I want to do something. I am busy doing nothing of any particular importance so obviously I saw I am busy. Heather goes. The door is closed

Nothing happened. A non event. But it is lodged in my brain. And because it is, I remember Heather. For there is a mystery there. Why did she come over, out of the blue that day?

I doubt I will ever know. Even if I did randomly bump into her one day, what are the chances she actually remembers that day?

And there this blog post may have ended except for the fact that idle curiosity led me to search for Heather’s full name on Google. Just out of interest. Cos you never know. I mean, you’d be amazed at how many people I went to school with who have things mentioned about them on the internet. (Well, okay, one guy I was at sixth form with went on to do quite well on top TV nerdy quiz show, Only Connect. I know!)

I find there is an actress with the same name. This makes it more difficult. But there on the first page is a story on the Manchester Evening News website.

The Heather in the story was said to be 24. Based in the date of the publication given on the web page the Heather I knew would have been 28. Maybe the date on the page was wrong. Or the journalist. Or whatever. It would have been quite a coincidence if there were two Heathers with the same surname in the same town, surely?

Besides, the story told of a wedding at the church near my old primary school. And how the organ had burst into flames during the wedding. Three fire engines were duly dispatched to assist.

Classic local newspaper story really.

A very low resolution picture of the bride sat at the top. Was it her? The picture was too blurry to know for sure. I just filed it under “probably”.

And that is where this story ends. A pointless anecdote. But it fills up some space. And in the unlikely event Heather ever finds this, I have to say, do you remember that day? And what was it all about? And I hope you had a good wedding day. And most of all, I hope you are not the Heather that @merseytart was going on about.