The girl upstairs

Two years ago, I did the flowers for a dear friend's wedding. We met when we finished our GCSEs in the middle of the 1990s. We'd started working at the local Boots which had just started opening on Sundays because of a change in trading laws...that itself feels like a lifetime ago.

(On a tangent - there's a nice paragraph in Nick Hornby's book High Fidelity when he writes about how Sundays are rubbish because everything's closed, even in the city. That felt so pertinent when the book came out, but there must be whole generation who would read it now and wonder what Nick was talking about.)

Helen and I didn't talk to each other until we'd been working there a few weeks and our mutual friend Paul introduced us. Paul and I worked downstairs in the shop, where there were electrical goods, the photography department, a kitchen section, and greeting cards. Helen worked upstairs where there was make up, toiletries, and the pharmacy. I always thought upstairs was where the cool girls worked. Paul and Helen would get a lift home after work most weeks - they had known each other since they were little and their mothers were friends, having their babies in hospital at the same time, and eventually living on the same road. At that time, Helen and I were both so shy and unconfident, I don't think we would have introduced ourselves when we happened to have the same lunch break. So I am utterly grateful to Paul for introducing us one lunchtime. Helen and I were still working at Boots after Paul and some of the other Sunday workers had left. The photo above was taken on our last day there, before we went our separate ways to university. We'd occasionally work together during the holidays after that.

I want to write about our entire friendship, but that would be a novel's worth. Over the next twenty years there were so many lovely moments. She sat next to me the first time I had my hair cut in a salon. I don't think either of us realised how long it would take, and the hair stylist was bemused, but we happily chatted away and I expect we drank tea - we drank a lot of tea. I went to Brighton to see her ballet dance in a fashion show and I was so excited when she stepped out and did her solo, looking so quiet and beautiful. We swapped clothes when we used to be the same size, and we both unknowingly bought the same French Connection dress in different colours. We saw film after film at the Curzon Mayfair and the Bromley Empire, and occasionally at the French Institute. We saw ballets at Sadler's Wells, and it was always nicer to see a ballet with her, because she understood dance so deeply. She gushed over her little nieces, who she loved to pieces. She modelled for me in a lavender field, showing her graceful dance moves and her stunning blue eyes - there are posts here and here. We used to meet most years on Christmas Eve, and I've written about that here. I have other memories, which perhaps don't sound so lovely, but which add to her depth and have strengthened my love for her - taking turns falling out, usually because one of us had a new boyfriend and the other felt left out, crying in cafes because we we were unhappy in love or work or life, ranting and laughing about things that made us angry. She was the first person to contact me when my ex and I cancelled our wedding, and I can remember her kind, thoughtful words. I can hear her randomly breaking out into song when I used to stay over at her first flat, and I can see her beautiful blue eyes and her stillness when she cried.

And then she stopped crying about her love life because she'd met someone at the school where she worked who made her utterly happy.

On 12 April 2015, the last time I cooked her dinner, we were sat in the kitchen and suddenly she said, "Shamini, will you do my wedding flowers?" That's how she told me she was engaged. For the next hour or so, I got out my old wedding magazines and floristry magazines and she could barely contain her excitement while we looked at them. A few weeks later, we met at Vauxhall station and walked over to the old, New Covent Garden Market where I took photos of the flowers she liked - which was almost everything white, yellow, or blue. She was like a kid in a sweet shop. We sat down in the cafe after a while and looked through the photos on my phone, trying to narrow them down, but I don't think we did very well.

The following year, I spent Easter weekend with a friend from my floristry course, preparing Helen and Nick's wedding flowers. Some flowers I couldn't get - forget-me-nots were difficult to get and narcissi and bluebells had shot up in price as it was Easter weekend. I managed to cut a few from the garden, but that was all. But there were ranunculus that mean "You are radiant with charms", huge yellow spray roses called Catalina, white roses and tulips for love, two kinds of myrtle for marriage, ivy for fidelity, delphiniums for lightness, and there were even early cornflowers which Helen had asked for. They symbolise delicacy. There was lemon-scented waxflower and bubblegum-scented muscari, and tiny spires of Thlaspi "Green Bell".

There was loads to do - twenty pew ends, ten tablecentres, a dozen buttonholes or corsages, a cake topper, a long tablecentre, a heart for the church door (which would be moved to the reception venue, along with the pew ends), petals for the flower girls, two bridesmaid bouquets and Helen's bouquet. But we listened to the radio, caught up on the time since we left college, I told him stories about Helen, and we had a really nice time. But I kept getting the bridal bouquet wrong - I must have untied it and started again three times. My friend kindly told me I was overthinking it because I wanted it to be perfect for her. In the end, I wasn't completely happy with it, but Helen came up to me in the wedding reception and told me it was exactly how she imagined.

In the morning of the wedding, I listened to the radio while I wired flowers for the buttonholes, ribboned the bouquets, and made the cake topper. It was just before 4am and there was a call in and people were talking about what time they set their alarms on their mobile phone. Some of the answers were so random - "3.30, 3.40, 3.50, 4.30" - I remember laughing. How long ago that feels now.

I went to the venue and laid out the tablecentres. It was wonderful to get a preview of the work Helen and Nick and their families had put into decorating it. It was beautiful and the tables were themed on their road trip around France.

I didn't cry until the end of the reception, but I felt a bit choked up when I saw the lovingly hand-written place cards.

I dropped the bouquets and buttonholes off at Helen's parents' house. I forgot her photographer friend Dawn would be there, and I hid behind the bridesmaids' bouquets as she tried to snap us. I have that photo now and I treasure it - the doorway I've walked through so many times and Helen laughing and looking so joyful.

I then had to go to the church and tie up the twenty pew ends to the pews and put up the heart on the door.

Then there was the usual florist dash to get ready for the actual event.

I wrote a taster post here with the intention of writing a longer post later. I started and deleted the longer post so many times. I'm furiously kicking myself for not just posting something earlier, however incomplete.

At the end of the night, I got a lift home with Paul's parents - the boy who had introduced us all those years before. It was surreal and incredible, chatting to them in the car. I felt so glad Helen and I had stayed friends for so long and so privileged to be part of Helen and Nick's happy day.

The gorgeous photos below are by Helen's photographer and dancer friend, Dawn. There is another post to follow this, which I really don't want to write, but I'll try to do it after work today. None of us would have guessed that two years after these joyful photos were taken, we would be going to the same church for Helen's funeral. And now I'm crying again.