First year university

The first year undergraduates were housed in a university village just off campus. My window looked out onto the council estate next door and a grassy verge that was covered in daffodils in the spring. I was so shy when I arrived that I didn't make friends with my flatmates. In the beginning I scurried in and out of the kitchen and after a while I gave up using it at all. I ate lunch on campus and kept a toaster in my room. My room was like a ship's cabin. There was a tiny en suite toilet and shower in the corner and the rest was taken up with a fitted bed, wardrobe and desk. The cleaners were scheduled to do the en-suites once a week but I was so shy about having a stranger clean up after me that I rarely let them in. We used to leave our bins outside the door to be emptied but there had been some suicides so the cleaners were ordered to check on us by placing the bin back inside. The carpet and curtains were brown and the furniture was wooden. I made it as bright as possible with posters, colourful rugs and ornaments.

My father urged me to go to the Freshers night in the student union. They were giving away cans of beer and iced tea, and I didn't drink either. I was standing on the swirly patterned carpet feeling out of place when a girl introduced herself. Her name was Mandy and she lived in the flat opposite. I made friends with her flatmates and so for the first year they were my crowd. I'm still friends with one of them now. We lost contact but after her mother died we started speaking more regularly and I ring her nearly every weekend. It was less than a year after my own mother had died and I was finding it difficult. I didn't know how to feel. I'd clamped down on my grief so that I could do my A'Level exams and when I got to university I found it coming up again. I thought I was being self-indulgent for hanging onto these feelings and I didn't understand it at all. I remember once I sat in the department cafe with my coursemates and a mature student told an anecdote about her mother and an iron bath. I felt a pang of anger that she could be so old and still have a mother. Another mature student who had befriended me said it was grief but I didn't understand.

My mature student friend was a 40 year old woman who had gone back to university after several life changes. I was from a standard middle class Daily Mail reading household and she wasn't what I was used to at all. She wore tie dye patchwork trousers and filled her room with incense. She talked about meditation and reincarnation. If I met her now we would be on a more similar wavelength. Back then I needed her because she was old enough to be my mother. She visited me the following year when I was on student exchange in Italy. I was horrible. The week began well but we both got food poisoning and I was irritable with her because her New Age beliefs were so alien to me. We were never friends again after that. When I returned in the third year I felt hurt because she didn't behave like we had ever been friends. She was nice but just another course mate. I'm not surprised really. A few years ago I found her on Friends Reunited and wondered about contacting her but I was too shy and I didn't want to pay the fee. It's one of the things I'll always regret so I think after posting this I'll see if I can find her.