André

I was clearing out some things when I found this photograph of me and my cousin André, taken in summer 1979. We were about 18 here, and had just finished school (he was four months older than me). André spent 12 years in boarding school, seeing his parents just during school holidays (11 weeks a year). All the boys in our family went to boarding school for almost all their schooling. I went to a regular day school.

Hawaiian shirts were a big thing then, and I absolutely loved the dress I was wearing. It belonged to my mother and I wore it until it was in tatters. My bonus mom (my mother had died by then) repaired it for me so I could continue wearing it. Looking back, I wonder if I was emotionally attached to it because I wore it almost all the time. For the first time and last time in my life, I was into wooden jewellery then. I had large wooden beads around my neck and a broad carved wooden bangle on my arm.

André took his own life a year or so later, at the age of 20. I think of him often and miss him. We were both going through emotional turmoil when this photograph was taken, and our way of dealing with it was very different. I wish we knew how to talk to each other or to other people about our mental health, but the whole ethos then was to bottle it up or brush it under the rug. No one talked much about mental struggles.