Well I guess it would be fair to say he wasn’t very good looking, and at first I didn’t really take much notice of him because I was a novelty…I’d just moved to the school we were 16 and I got lots of attention …from everyone. So it took a while most of the 6th form year slipped by before I managed to develop a friendship with him.

There weren’t many kids at this school it was a country school the sixth form probably only had 15 kids at the most, so everyone knew eve­ryone and it was a tight little community which thrived on gossip and prac­tical jokes and name calling, but which was really close and has remained reasonably close, even as an outsider who only came in at the least I’ve managed to maintained several friends over 30 odd years.

I guess what attracted me to him was the fact that he was like me…even though he was one of them he wasn’t from the area and as such was not one of them, his parents were different… they were part of an arty set who had moved into the area in the late 60’s and who socialised together, they were always viewed with suspicion and most of them even­tually moved away in the 80’s….

He acted like them though don’t get me wrong but when you got to know him better he had a larger worldview that wasn’t dissimilar to mine or that of my parents, socialist I guess, liberal.

I was attracted to the quiet aspects of his personality, the thinking man within…ha ha.

By the time the sixth form was over I knew I was pretty keen on him, but I didn’t make a big thing out of it… we hung out and that was pleasant…mind you we all hung out; a bit like a gang.

When I came back to do the seventh form year he’d decided to leave school which I recall being really devastated about because then I’d only see him at social functions and we’d never get any quiet time togeth­er…when we could talk about music and of course the obligatory poetry.

Because he wasn’t at school and because you couldn’t really talk much on the phone, as it was a party line… god most people in the city wouldn’t know what that was! Our phone was a crank handle big black box and you spoke to someone at the exchange and gave them a 4-digit number and they connected you… but people could listen in. There were four other families on our line and when they wanted to use the phone they’d just pick it up and say “you gonna be long” not conducive to ado­lescent conversation…so I started writing him letters…well I wrote him a letter and he wrote one back and this went on for over a year despite the fact we saw each other about once a fortnight sometimes more? The letters were the quiet time, when we got together it was usually very pub­lic…other people had by now picked up on the fact that I liked him and I think it was assumed he liked me in the same way but it was never more than platonic despite the rumours.

I was young and not very forward so I didn’t know how to go about se­duction and he didn’t seem interested, but it didn’t stop me loving him …I remember asking my mother how you knew when it was really love and not a crush? Her answer always stood me in good stead…she said ‘you think about spending every day of the rest of your life with this person and if you think you could do that then it’s probably love’. And you know I really thought hard about it and I really thought even though it seemed improbable that I could imagine doing that with him… but being sixteen is just the beginning and life’s not often that way… I wanted to go away from the area to do something with my life go to university… he had other plans… we moved apart…it came to nothing but I never stopped thinking of him as the one for me…my true love.

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