is name was Robert, we were both aged 10, the place was the playground of the British School, Ludlow, and the first gift of love was a hopscotch stone. And if all this sounds unbearably jejune you should have known that 1920s playground. No adult establishment was so tradition-bound, so insensitively cruel, so hierarchical.
We played the kind of hopscotch where the stone was kicked, not thrown, from square to square. The girls’ playground was patterned with chalk oblongs, each patch the jealously guarded property of one group. We didn’t encroach on each other’s patches. The right to chalk out a new one was the prerogative of the favoured few, while to have access to no patch was to live in outer darkness, a pariah, to be plain, poor, stupid. How early we assimilated life’s basic lesson that to he who has shall be given. One needed an ally to survive.
Robert was gentle, clever, original. I was small but fierce. But the flat white stone resting in the middle of Robert’s brown outstretched palm was, I knew, more than the token of a pact, offensive and defensive. This was love.
I had been at the school since I was five. Robert was a new arrival, from where and why I never learned. He was the only child of a widow, a situation I thought both enviable and romantic. They lived in rooms, not in a house, and were waited on by a black-clad lugubrious landlady, who let me in with silent disapproval whenever I called.
The sitting-room seemed always overcrowded, mysterious, a little intimidating. Robert’s mother had the shared use of a small kitchen, and must have brought to Ludlow some of her own things. How else to explain the transparent, flower-decorated cups, shallow as saucers, from which we drank pale, smoke-tasting tea.
I remember her as a tall, gawky woman, soft-voiced and melancholy, the prototype of widowhood. Strangely, I cannot remember Robert having tea with my family, while tea with him or his mother is so keen a visual memory as to suggest, falsely surely, that I practically lived with them.
We were inseparable out of school and secretive in school, our brave anonymity of friendship helped by the tall wall which separated the girls’ and the boys’ playgrounds, the tradition that our twin desks were strictly a one-sex double harness, and the segregation of boys and girls for morning prayers. Here, too, there were conventions. The younger children, eyes screwed tightly shut, pressed palm to palm under uplifted chins in the approved orisonial style. We were the big girls and, by tradition, could let our arms hang loosely before us, our fingers lightly entwined.
Through half-shut eyes I would watch Robert. He seemed to be whispering a private prayer, half as fast as anyone else. “He talks swanky,” the other children said, missing the high singsong of the Welsh Marches. I was enchanted by the swankiness being, even then, a snob for the different, the unique.
There are few recollections of those mid-1920s which do not include Robert, and I suspect that he later insinuated his presence into memories of scenes and events in which he had played no part. I remember the back of his head in the pew in front, during evensong in Ludford church; the sad nostalgic evening hymns, the tortoise stove which flared dramatically like the Holy Ghost at Whitsun whenever the wind turned; the cave in the rocks round the castle which was our secret lair; Robert walking, arms outstretched, across the weir while the stream bubbled over his bare feet.
But there is one memory of Robert’s presence on a summer afternoon by the Teme which is still so keen and so immediate that the smell of river and dank earth and the sour tang of elder leaves brings it back like a physical pain. The scene was Ludford weir and, unknown to the menagerie of chattering and paddling children, a child had drowned. The children and a few grown-ups with them had been banished by the police while the body was recovered. But Robert and I, hidden among the bushes, on a promontory jutting into the stream, were unobserved.
We crouched there together under the elder leaves, bare-legged and shivering, and listening to the far away adult voices. I thought about death, heaven and hell, subjects on which I had occasionally meditated, but with which I now felt that I ought to come to grips. It had always seemed to me that God had the choice of two systems. He could admit the few impossibly and heroically good to heaven, while the rejects went to hell; or He could consign the spectacularly wicked to hell, when the rest of us would scrape through to heaven. Only under the second system would I stand a chance. The first, so similar to the scholarship examination which we took when 11 and which served a similar judicial function in our lives, seemed so much the more likely. Thinking of the drowned boy, one Cyril whom we knew, I asked:
“Do you think that he’s gone to heaven or to hell?”
And Robert replied from his store of esoteric wisdom, not to mention his knowledge of Cyril: “Neither. I expect he’s gone to the in-between place. It’s called limbo.”
Limbo! Even then, obsessed with words, I found it a lighthearted reassuring one, more suitable for a parlour game than a spiritual habitation. Let’s all have a game of limbo. The word danced between us. The in-between place, eminently suitable for me. If even God found it necessary to compromise I decided – although not, at age 10, precisely in those words – life had suddenly become altogether more possible. Like the Irish priest I might well have prayed in that moment: “Lord, help me to keep to the strait and narrow path between right and wrong.”
In love, I suspect, it is the one most of us tread.
Our friendship, about which we were carefully uncommunicative and nonchalant while at home, aroused no particular opposition from our families. A far more formidable hazard than parental disapproval faced us, the scholarship examination.
Robert was destined for the grammar school, whatever the result. Whether or not I got to the high school depended on the scholarship. It never occurred to me that friendship could cross that immutable barrier. Grammar school boys, I accepted, got high school girls. The girls from the national school presumably got national school boys.
I remember the whole of the examination, except the arithmetic paper, to which subject, then as now, my brain responded by clanging down an iron grille of total incomprehension. The English paper we were set presented us with a black-and-white picture of a sailor careering down a Mid-Eastern street on a donkey, its panniers overflowing with fruit, oranges spilling over the road, turbanned bystanders with their sticks raised, veiled women. Describe the picture or write a story about it.
I glanced momentarily at Robert’s head bent over his paper two rows ahead to remind me what was at stake and plunged at once into the short story which was going to proclaim me high school material. It was melodramatic, over-plotted, weak on characterisation and so exciting that spelling and punctuation were happily jeopardised in my haste to keep up with my hero. The imminence of the final bell left me just time to scribble a conclusion: “Just then the ship’s hooter sounded and Jim had to return to his ship immediately.”
Never again has that final difficult denouement, when the hero has embroiled himself beyond any human aid, including his author’s, been so easily resolved.
But as it happened, the high school was spared the ardours of coping with my juvenile excesses in any form, and Robert and I were parted, not by a couple of miles, but by half England. My father’s job was moved from Ludlow to Cambridge. We accepted the parting with the realism of children, never doubting that, although love might survive death, it couldn’t be expected to survive a less dramatic but equally permanent separation into two totally different worlds. We agreed that, as we would never see each other again, there was no point writing, thus proving ourselves wiser, I suspect, than our elders in a similar situation. Love should always die spectacularly, or at least with dignity, not of a wasting disease.
And so to Cambridge and the girls’ high school. I achieved the emblem of educational respectability, a green and blue band encircling a white panama hat for summer, the ubiquitous blue felt for winter. We wore the crowns jammed down over our ears, the brims turned down all round if one were an intellectual, up all round if a hearty hockey girl, and down in front and up at the back if one aspired to sartorial elegance.
The regulation green gym slips with their square necklines and three box pleats fore and aft, bulging with adolescent swellings, could easily have accommodated an eight-months pregnancy. Not that they were ever required to. No illegitimate babies, no truancy, no drugs. In retrospect, what good little girls we were.
And, despite our theoretical knowledge, how strangely ignorant. Memory recalls a conversation with Rosie, best friend. We were resting on a gate on the Roman road, Cambridge spread beneath us, our cycles flung together in the wayside grasses and almost obliterated by sweet smelling Queen Anne’s lace.
“Once a month! No wonder it’s called the curse. Do boys know about it?”
“Nobody knows except women. It’s a secret.”
“But surely husbands know?”
“Of course not, stupid! They’re men. Wives never tell.”
Although I was far from certain precisely what husbands did or expected to do, I had an uneasy feeling that this was a secret which I, for one, would be unable to keep. My name would become a hissing and byword, a traitor to my sex. One more reason for avoiding the obvious disadvantages of marriage.
“But doctors know?”
“They have to. But they swear a solemn oath never to tell. It’s called the hypocritic oath.”
Against this background the affair with Raymond – although the word is grotesquely inapposite – was disappointing; neither romantic nor particularly exciting, a matter mainly of convenience and prestige. The presence of a dedicated admirer waiting at a discreet distance from the school gate day after day at 3.45 pm precisely was as satisfyingly enviable as a new bicycle and, like the bicycle, not to be lightly discarded until a superior model was actually in hand. It taught me little, except, unconsciously, some of the subterfuges, self-deceptions and brutal emotional economics of love.
Raymond, too, was an only child. His father was a dairy farmer who must, I thought, have fallen in love with Raymond’s mother because she looked so like a beautiful cow, placid, large, gentle, and with huge mild moist eyes. She provided teas of a magnificence previously undreamed of. We would get up from the table bloated with scones, meringues, and chocolate truffle cake, all home made.
I used to wonder whether tea was always like this at the farm, or whether Raymond’s mother was demonstrating approval of me. I was invariably approved of by mothers, although this is less an advantage in love than one might think. After tea, Raymond’s father would drive me home in the back of his van. It smelled enticingly of seeds, cattle food and, just perceptibly, of manure. Raymond and I sat opposite each other, leaning against empty sacks. Inflamed with rum baba he would make spasmodic grabs at me, made ineffective by the jolting van and the intimidating nearness of his father.
In retrospect our activities were a mixture of the boisterously energetic, the sybaritic pleasure of Raymond’s newly acquired motorbike, and the cinema. We queued for a late week-day flick, school cap and hat stuffed into our pockets, since such homework-disorganising divertissements were discouraged during the week. After the preliminary obligatory mass roar which greeted the MGM lion in Cambridge cinemas, we settled down, hand in hand, to watch the antics of topee-ed heroes on far-flung frontiers of empire, or Dorothy Lamour’s immense face gazing down at us with a look of detached lubricious complacency, while Bing Crosby crooned into her left ear and Bob Hope into her right.
My father was addicted to Scouting, a curious sport. He examined local boys for their first-class badge, and Raymond, in the first flush of his pursuit of me, would present himself time after time, each deliberate failure providing an opportunity to call again.
“The boy’s stupid,” my father announced. Like Emma’s Mr Woodhouse, although against love, he never suffered from the apprehension that it could touch his family. Raymond wasn’t stupid; he was probably more intelligent than I gave him credit for. The truth was that I was a terrible intellectual snob. No quality in a man has ever seemed so sexually attractive as intelligence and talent.
He couldn’t possibly have really liked me, beastly as I frequently was to him. For weeks on end the poor boy could do nothing right. He took to attending the morning service at St Edward’s Church, to Rose’s and my disgust. We cast cold, censorious glances across the aisle at him during the Venite and after the service swept past with a brief condescending nod like a couple of Victorian dowagers greeting a lapsed servant.
He was, I suppose, the forerunner of a theological student, an earnest candidate for the nonconformist ministry, who a few years later simultaneously proposed to me and excused himself to God by explaining that one can’t help falling in love with an unsuitable person. I came to the early conclusion, and chiefly because of Raymond, that with prudence and some luck one could and should.
Rose was in love with one of the tenors in King’s College Choir, a hopeless passion since she neither knew him nor had any hope – or indeed any particular wish – of meeting him. This self-denying romanticism, I decided, was one kind of love but not the kind for me. We went to evensong every Sunday afternoon during term time so that she could indulge her passion, an event which in summer necessitated a careful shaving by Rose of her underarms. For what reason, I wondered? She wasn’t intending a vigorous semaphore at him across the chancel. This esoteric rite took place in her bathroom with the surreptitious use of her father’s razor while I perched on the cold edge of the bath and we speculated on love.
“I’m afraid that with you and Raymond it is on a very physical plane,” she said with condescending superiority from the elevated spiritual plane of her own passion. And I agreed with her, except that, from poor Raymond’s point of view it so obviously wasn’t.
Rose, under the influence of forthcoming Confirmation, had developed an uncomfortable, almost Buchmanite passion for absolute honesty which was disconcerting in a best friend.
“You really haven’t anything in common, you with your poetry, he with his motorbike. Are you sure you don’t go out with him just because of the bike?”
It was the forerunner of similar disconcerting self-questioning. Because he got a double first; because of his DFC; because he makes you laugh. And she was, of course, perfectly right. I loved the motorbike, that great glossy pulsating machine, on whose cushioned rear I perched clinging to Raymond’s belt while we roared up the Gog Magog Hills.
In one of my books I wrote of a character on such a bicycle reversing down a lane and was criticised by more particular readers for an inapposite use of the word. It never occurred to the critics that I didn’t know that motorcycles can’t reverse. I grew in time heartily to dislike their smelliness and noise, but I never ceased to believe them mechanically capable of anything.
But the central mystery remained. Love, what exactly was it? This confused combination of sexual attraction, liking, interdependence, prestige, emotional security. Why call it by that one short word?
“I love you.”
“I know, Raymond. But what does that mean?”
“I know what I mean by it.”
No doubt. Everyone seemed to know what they meant by it except me. What was the point of school insisting on precision of expression when the whole world threw those three small words at each other with such abandon? Romeo had said them to Juliet, Mr Knightley to Emma, Abelard to Heloise, Raymond to me, Raymond’s father had presumably said them on at least one occasion to Raymond’s mother. Extraordinary thought. They couldn’t all mean the same thing.
But then the war came and one gave up worrying and asking, since there were so many other preoccupations and anyway, trying to find out for oneself was better than asking. One needed to believe in the existence somewhere of that uniquely different face, the mind mysteriously in tune with one’s own; needed to believe that love, thus discerned and sought, was a reflection of the love which Father Marr of St Edward’s had assured us maintained the universe, and not merely a biological device in poor taste for ensuring that the human race continued, the voracious ego’s search for satisfaction.
Lying in the shelter of the beechwoods on Gog Magog Hills and wondering whether the glow in the sky was London burning; hearing the great bombers grunting their way across the flat East Anglian fields towards the coast.
“Henry, is this love, do you suppose?”
“No. But it’s very pleasant.”
For Henry, incorrigibly honest, was captain of a Lancaster who knew almost to a mission his chance of surviving and had no time for metaphysical speculations.
And so, of course, it was; very pleasant. It was also an exciting, ridiculous and profoundly interesting human preoccupation, a proper study, I thought, for a prospective writer as it was, apparently, for everyone else.
Raymond joined the Marines on the outbreak of war and shortly afterwards married a girl who had been at school with me and who had always said with proper truth that I treated him disgracefully. By then, Raymond and I had long since stopped seeing each other, but with proprietorial prejudice I felt that it was slightly perfidious of him, with all the school to choose from, to marry a girl who disapproved of me.
But it was Robert who was really my first love. With Robert there was no need of questioning, no room for doubt; just the simple loving certainty that here was my person and that I was only at home in the world when we were together. I never saw or heard of him again, but a few years ago, when tearing up a batch of faded old photographs, I found one of us together. It must have been taken when we were visiting my father’s summer Scout camp.
There we stood, two slim but sturdy figures in shorts and shirts, top-heavy with our mops of curly hair, arms similarly folded, facing each other across the smoke of the wood fire like identical twins, a perfect male and female mirror image. Which perhaps tells us something about first love, last love, and all the loves in between.
The Part-Time Job by P D James is published by Faber at £3.50. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
August 01, 2020 at 05:00PM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/pd-james-never-forget-first-love/
PD James: I'll never forget my first love - Telegraph.co.uk
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