In loving remembrance of my friend Gail Pearson (1978-2021)
On January 23rd of this year I lost one of my dearest friends. Having been diagnosed with a rare genetic disease some years ago, at the age of 42 her frail body just gave up. I have since been dealing with the loss by putting together some of my (and our) most treasured memories. It will not be of interest to many, but the people who knew her and loved her may enjoy some of what I have written below. Quite fittingly Gail’s last email to me ended with a beautiful poem that uncannily reflected her wild, happy spirit – I have included it at the end.
Her World…
Once having met Gail, you could never forget her. She was undoubtedly the most free-spirited, ditzy, intelligent, charmingly crazy, funny, sweet natured, full-of-life soul that I have ever known. She was, in some ways, the archetypal eccentric English lady of yesteryear. She loved tea and cake, cutesy cafes, picnics, sandwiches, hats, floral frocks (with stripey socks!), Marmite, punting, croquet, letter writing, gardens, folklore, castles, ruins, Carry-on films, scrapbooks, diaries, obscure museums, Victorian clothes, puppets, doll’s houses, vintage cars (she owned a gold MG called Flossie that was forever breaking down!), old toys, purple DMs, cagoules (also purple), theatre, storytelling, guinea pigs, art, music, classic novels and oxtail soup (quite a list!). She read voraciously, loved travelling (to quaint corners of England but also exotic countries far away), and she loved the sea and sun – preferably together. Beside from her wonderful partner Matt, the other great love of her life was Cambridge United, in fact she would dedicate a large part of each year to travelling to their away games – something I could never comprehend! Oh, and she also loved beer, old pubs, blowing bubbles, googly-eyed cards, Frida Kahlo, and Kate Moss! Yes, she loved them!
Her friends were important to her too, as were her family (she had recently become an aunt twice over) and in particular her younger sister Verity who was the light of her life. Wherever Gail went she would take her ‘best friend’ Timmy – a black threadbare puppet-dog – who probably needed a bath more than he’d care for! When we travelled to Libya together in 2009, Timmy came too and in fact on one occasion he was the star of the show – putting on a performance for his travel companions in the grand Greek amphitheatre of Cyrene! I was hysterical, Gail was too, and Timmy loved it!
Throughout her life Gail never erred from a steadfast, genuine kindness toward everyone and everything. She always saw the good in people and met the world with unfailing positivity, childlike curiosity, and joy. Even in the face of adversity she had an uncanny ability to transform unfortunate events into wildly comic tales. She would frequently repeat the story to me of when her boyfriend at uni left her for a ‘one-armed woman’ (!) and the story of when a few Royston ragamuffin boys shouted out to her: “Oi, you! Where ya going? The circus?!” to which she naively replied: “No, the station!” – Yes, our beloved Gail could be charmingly naive to the point of never really noticing snide comments, sniggers, or subtle knockdowns. Her dress sense was nothing short of gypsy-hippy-boho fabulous – gorgeously mis-matched colours, fabrics, styles, and accessories from the Edwardian-elegant to the downright shabby-absurd – and she could pull it off – no, she positively shone!
Our World…
I met Gail on my very first day at Essex University in October 1997. She was standing alone in our shared kitchen (on the eighth floor of Keynes Tower) dressed in something bright and floaty and stirring a frying-pan of mince (as she often did). She turned around, beamed at me, and said: “hello, I’m Gail.” From then on, we were close friends and would often hang out in each other’s rooms in the evenings or gang up against the two American girls in our flat who would call tea towels ‘dish rags’ (Gail thought that was insulting to them!). I would often walk past her room and see her sprawled out studying on the floor barely detectable amongst an over-flowing technicolour mess of clothes, history textbooks, food, and raggedy paraphernalia. She often went to sleep smeared in toothpaste ‘for her spots’, enjoyed licking Marmite off a spoon and took a dose of cod-liver oil before bed. And she was, alas, the only human being, I believe, who could peacefully sleep through a deafening, piercing campus tower fire alarm! We often attended our morning Enlightenment lectures together – both of us still drowsy from sleep (neither of us were morning people) and Gail still wearing her pyjamas with a holey jumper thrown over the top. In winter she’d wear the same but with at least five holey jumpers thrown on! If I was lucky, before ‘clubbing’, she would let me borrow her precious leather jacket which she said only half belonged to her as after finding it in a jumble sale for £1 she had to ask her dad to lend her 50p to buy it (which she never paid back).
Possibly the stand-out story of that first year was the night I tiptoed into her room in the early hours of the morning to ask if I could have some bread at the exact moment when a handsome Greek guy was about to make his move! I believe that she had wanted to get together with this guy for some time but after my crude interruption, alas, it was never to be – and I don’t think she ever quite forgave me!
We lived together in our second year of uni too, in a shared terraced house in Colchester, along with Emma and Jenny – my friends from college. It was a strange, somewhat troubled year domestically. I would often get woken up by Gail screeching with laughter in the street outside in the early hours of the morning and our neighbours would bang on the door complaining about raucous noise, but years later she would cheekily tease us for being ‘boring’ and how she would come home to find the three of us watching daytime TV and rubbing our heads! Gail also insisted on not contributing to the communal TV license and was adamant that I had stolen the microwave! Luckily our friendships all remained intact, albeit with varying configurations and a few bumps along the way.
Our 2009 holiday to Libya was one of the best adventures of my life – hysterical, crazy, fun, and breath-takingly beautiful from beginning to end. It deepened our friendship and created more moments of madness that would expand our unique, shared world. On the flight over we drove a group of business men mad by our incessant chatter and giggling (they were actually very cross), Gail enjoyed listening to me debating theology and feminism with our flirty tour guide, we took hundreds of photos beside old, crumbling, decorative doors (a shared passion!), sipped mint tea and smoothies in Tripoli, danced to techno music in the desert (another shared passion – deserts, not techno!), fell in love with the remote oasis Berber pre-Saharan city of Ghadames, held hands climbing sand dunes at sunset, posed with camels and almost died when the engine on our internal flight to Benghazi caught fire! And Gail always maintained that one of the funniest moments of her life was when I was dressed up in a traditional Libyan wedding dress – it was horrific – layer upon layer of thick, heavy fabric until I literally disappeared and had my head poking out of a diamond shaped opening. Gail got told off for laughing – that was also a common occurrence! And every time I reminded her of that she would tease me by reminding me of when I got told off (quite severely) for posing beside the graves in Highgate Cemetery – she absolutely loved that and mentioned it in her gorgeous creatively ingenious card-book she made for me on my 36th birthday. She called it the ‘A-Z of Binky and Gail’ and it was filled with superb hand drawn pictures, photos, and cut-outs. It goes like this: ‘A’s for asking for bread in a moment of passion, B’s for Binky’s beautiful brown dress that’s always in fashion…M is for Matt and the stolen microwave. N is for New Year – in the bath we did rave!’ (yes, we celebrated the millennium together by standing in a bathtub in someone’s house in Streatham!).
In subsequent years we met up regularly and visited museums and exhibitions, usually in London. We’d often linger too long in the dressing up corner – Gaily looking like she had just stepped out of a Dickens novel complete with bonnets or street urchin clothes. A few times, with Emma, we spent weekends in the Gower Peninsula in Wales – hiking over the beach to the romantic ruins of Pennard Castle, sea-bathing (Gail literally turned blue!) and giggling. On two occasions we went to a ‘Living Literature’ event held at the University of London – one on Proust, the other Frankenstein. Both were sumptuous immersive events designed to capture the full sensory experience of the book and the age it was written in. Gail thoroughly looked the part each time and we enjoyed pretentiously floating from room to room in our sequined gowns, tasting odd concoctions and sipping cocktails inspired by the Belle Epoch!
Every year all of us girls and Richard (one of Gail’s closest friends from uni) would get together for a post-Christmas do (lovingly nicknamed ‘Febmas’, although I think twice it was more like ‘Maymas’) at my house and eat cake while swapping stories, reliving funny times from uni and generally catch-up and offering alternative perspectives on one another’s lives. The last time I saw Gail was Maymas 2019 when she visited me down here in Devon. Then lockdown happened, which was hard on her. She was a social, ‘outside’ person and loved going on train trips (with bags of food!), discovering new bands, being escorted out of CU football matches (!) etc. She spent her time at home writing epically long letters, reading, and recreating scenes of famous paintings using herself and household objects which she did exceptionally well! But lockdown robbed her of her last year and I will always regret that.
Gail was a ‘main event’ in the story of my life. She defined my time at university, and throughout our 23 years of friendship we encouraged each other to live authentically and play by our own rules. In a line by the Chinese poet Li Bai who she recently discovered; he writes: ‘I must make merry before the spring is spent’. Gail definitely made merry, she instinctively lived well, celebrated the ordinariness of life and made every day count. She navigated the world with her own brand of humour, wisdom, grace, and goofy glamour. Now she is gone, I will forever treasure the moments we shared, the fun we had and the irreplaceable friendship that kept us afloat. Her legacy will be the laughter. Her final words in her last email to me define her perfectly:
‘Whenever I sang, the moon swayed with me
Whenever I danced, my shadow went wild
Drinking, we shared our enjoyment together
Drunk, then each went off on his own
But forever agreed on dispassionate revels
We promised to meet in the far milky way’.
Li Bai (701-762)