Of course many childhood friendships, especially those between girls and boys, don’t transcend the test of secondary school. We grew apart and found our own cliques. Mine with the library bookworms and his with the footballers and popular girls. Soon he became just another face in the assembly hall. But even so there was always a level of alliance between us, and the day my first boyfriend broke my heart Ben walked home from school with me and told me if he gave me any crap he’d head butt him.

I shivered even though it was springtime and mild, recalling the day we were going to run away together. It was a memory I didn’t even know I still had, yet suddenly it was there at the forefront of my mind. Every detail crisp and in tact, the conversation preserved perfectly as though it only happened yesterday. It was the summer holidays, we were about nine and we’d run out of things to do. We were sat on the riverbank watching the boats pulling into the wharf, our bikes thrown in heaps on the grass. We were both bored and sighing with the kind of impatient tension that grasps you around that age.

‘Why don’t we stow away?’ he’d asked casually, gazing at a large, blue, industrial ship.
‘I can’t. I’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow,’ I’d replied as if this had been the level of complications with the plan.
‘So? We could just jump on one of the boats and hide. We might end up in Australia.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then, I don’t know. We build a house and live together.’
‘We can’t live together! We’re not married!’
‘Fine, we’ll get married then. Here’s a ring.’ And he yanked the ring pull of his can and handed it to me. I blushed at his proposal.
‘Put it on then,’ he insisted ‘it’s an engagement ring, if you put it on it means we’ll definitely get married.’