Friendship

Zara Todd: Best Friend Award


Zara was born in 1985 in London. She attended a special school initially, then transferred to mainstream at the age of seven. She continued with mainstream education at secondary and then went on to university.

Here Zara talks about how her school rewarded her friend.

Transcript

A lot of the time I wasn’t unhappy. The worst thing that they ever did to me which did make me very unhappy was when I first started at the school. As I said, I’d never had a problem making friends and that is throughout all my education and I managed to make a very good friend when I started the school. Completely different background to me but it was no problem, we used to go around to each other’s houses and have quite a normal friendship and I, for reasons I can’t remember, happened not to be at the school at the end of the year, but I discovered later that the school had thought it would be appropriate to give my friend an award, purely for being my friend. That in itself was bad enough, but because of the background that she came from, they also gave her money for being my friend, which then basically put a nail in the coffin of that friendship because she them proceeded to see me as a potential (Laughs) money making scheme and obviously I wasn’t going to go along with that. But the school thought that they were being appropriate. With hindsight, most people would say that that was a highly inappropriate gesture. But that’s what they thought they, they thought they were doing it for the right reasons. But that’s the only time I can really think of feeling particularly unhappy.

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