Brexit Break Up
Wendy Jones Nakanishi
Word Count 967
According to a 2021 survey, the average American has between three and five close friends. Until recently, I would have scoffed at that statistic, priding myself on the large number of individuals I consider bosom buddies, but recent events – beginning with the 2016 Brexit referendum – have shaken that cherished belief. I was living in Japan at the time of that historic vote, employed as a full-time professor at a small private university but happened to be in England in June of that year, attending a conference on crime fiction as an academic discipline.
Talk of this impending event was on all the delegates’ lips. They were, overwhelmingly, ‘Remainers’. Whenever I ventured an opinion contrary to theirs, I was patronized as the little Yankee girl who knew nothing of the matter. In fact, I’d read widely and deeply on the issue and decided – as a lifelong Anglophile – I would welcome Britain regaining its national sovereignty.
When the Leave vote unexpectedly won, I found some fellow delegates – professed Remainers – suddenly hostile to me. Because they were only acquaintances, I wasn’t unduly concerned. More painfully, some of my dearest friends began to question whether our friendship could survive this disagreement. I had thought long years of intimacy and warm relations would preserve my friendships, even if we had different views on topical matters. I was wrong.
Perhaps it is only our mothers who are willing and capable of offering us unconditional love. As a child, however, I counted more on my friends than I did on my own family. My parents’ marriage was nearing collapse when I was born, my arrival on the scene doing nothing to improve the situation, and probably worsening it. Many of my earliest memories are of my parents’ acrimonious arguments, and it was no surprise – coming even as a sort of relief – when Dad left the family home shortly before I turned seven. After he moved away, we scarcely saw him until, two years later, he married a pretty, sweet girl from our town not much older than my elder brother. It was she who ensured Dad spent time with us kids.
Dad had been our tiny town’s bank manager. Miserable at the collapse of her marriage, Mom sank into a deep depression for several years, retreating to her room where she lay on her bed, reading magazines and eating chocolates. My older brother and two older sisters went their separate ways, finding their own means of coping.
I felt alone, and my impulse was to cling to my best friend, ‘Molly,’ a girl with long red hair and a family living in circumstances far more straitened than our own. While we had a big house with a piano and books and paintings, Molly’s father was a tattooed truck driver who, with his wife and six children, inhabited a small tumbledown house near the train tracks, their toilet sited in a shack in the backyard.
I spent so much time at their home I felt like an adopted daughter. They all treated me with great kindness. Because I relied on Molly for the emotional support I couldn’t find at home, you can imagine my anguish when Molly’s older sister got angry with my older sister. I think it was something to do with a game of hopscotch they had been playing. When Molly took her sister’s side, the quarrel resulted in a rupture between Molly and me. Returning to my seat after recess, I began weeping uncontrollably. This happened over sixty years ago, but it feels like yesterday. Just recalling it makes the years fall away, and I find myself, once more, that scared and lonely girl I used to be, gripped by inconsolable sorrow. I was a plain, unpopular girl. I loved reading but I wasn’t particularly good at my studies or sports or anything. I only had Molly, and the thought of being deprived of her seemed unbearable.
After that incident, my friendship with Molly was never quite the same.
This context may help you to understand my dismay when, half a year ago, a British friend living in Holland – who’d come to visit me with his Dutch wife a few months before – admitted that he wasn’t sure if he wanted our friendship to continue. He hated the opinions I had expressed on that occasion, considering them deplorable. It wasn’t only Brexit. I had also questioned the wisdom of allowing nearly unlimited immigration into Europe and the UK.
I wept. I had a few sleepless nights. But, in late August, I arranged to visit him and his wife in Holland for a few days, and we managed to restore our friendship – making a point of skirting any political discussion.
We live in divisive times. The twentieth-century British novelist Iris Murdoch argued that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. She believed that we learn to love through loving, that imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect, and that we must always go forward and never back.
Over a decade ago, I was able to get in touch with my old friend Molly again. We hadn’t met in nearly fifty years. She had married in her teens. I had discovered an interest in and aptitude for the study of English literature, getting an MA in England and a doctorate in Edinburgh before going to Japan to take up a university position. I didn’t marry until I was over thirty, and as my husband is a Japanese orange grower, the first thirty years of our marriage were spent in Japan.
Molly and I hugged and laughed and cried at our reunion. Once more, I had that wonderful feeling of being seen – flaws and all – but loved. The mind has its thoughts, but love trumps reason. True friends are great riches.
Wendy is an American by birth, spent thirty-six years living and working in Japan. She is now dividing her retirement between the UK and Japan. She has published widely on Japanese and English literature and, under the pen name of Lea O’Harra, is the author of the Inspector Inoue mystery series set in rural modern-day Japan: Imperfect Strangers (2015); Progeny (2016); and Lady First (2017), originally published by Endeavour Press and recently reissued by Sharpe Books. She has also just published a standalone murder mystery set in small-town America: Dead Reckoning (2022).