Anecdote – First love

First love

I fall in love easy. I am emotional and passionate. When I fall in love it is overwhelming. I’m as obsessive about love as I am about writing, rock music and reading. It takes over my life.

You can’t beat love.

My first love was Glenys. I was ten and a half and extremely green. She was the older woman a whole three months older than me. She was also extremely precocious and quite brazen. She enjoyed telling me how she’d got the boys in her class to show her their willies.

We spent ages in her garage, my garage and my den in the woods playing ‘Dare, Truth and Promise’. I’d played that with the other kids and it would usually involve doing something unpleasant, vulgar or disgusting. With Glenys it was invariably sex. Not that we actually knew anything about sex apart from the rudimentaries (aptly named). It would always wind up with showing each other our bits or touching each other. It was the first time I’d ever experienced those feelings.

We were very serious about each other. I had even forsaken playing cricket with the kids in the road in order to talk to Glenys. And I loved playing cricket. I would hang around outside her window and whistle ‘I’d Like to get you on a Slow Boat to China’, which was current at the time. She’d open her bedroom window and we’d giggle and talk for ages.

Glenys and I would sit on the kerb and discuss the future. She would enquire how many babies I wanted. It was taken for granted that as soon as we were old enough we would set up home and have babies.

The other thing Glenys taught me was ‘Real Lover’s kisses’ like they did in the movies.

I’d kissed girls before. I’d played ‘Kiss Chase’ and managed to be caught many a time. The girls would smother me in kisses. I’d even kissed a girl on the lips. But none of that was anything like the real lovers kisses that we shared. We learnt how to keep our noses out of the way and would kiss for minutes at a time. Those kisses went on for ever and had a profound effect on me. They sent my heart racing and stomach churning. They also were the start of other more visceral stirrings, feelings and urges that were so powerful they swamped me. I didn’t really understand it, but I loved it.

We had twenty seven of those passionate, heady embraces. I know because I was counting.

Then disaster struck. Glenys’s family upped sticks and moved. It was the end of our dreams.

In fact it was only twelve miles away but at ten years old that might as well have been the end of the earth. I still remember that address – 16 Nicholas Gardens. It’s etched in my memory. Glenys would come every Saturday and we’d spend the day together. I’d meet her from the station and she’d tell me about her new place. The boys in her class and the boy and girl she’d found doing things in the toilets. She was excited by it. I was despondent.

The last time I saw her back then was a disaster. We were late and running for the train. We hastily arranged a meeting the next Saturday and I suddenly remembered I was away at scout camp. We did not have time to rearrange another get together. As she got on the train we had one last kiss. I told her I’d write and tell her all about camp she could write back and arrange when to meet.

I wrote a great long letter about our tramp back from the Cheddar gorger with all the bulls in the fields and everything we’d done. She never wrote back.

I was too full of pride to write again. Perhaps my letter had become lost in the post. Most probably Glenys had moved on and become involved with the excitement of her new life in more urbane surroundings.

I shed a lot of tears. I was heartbroken.

That coincided with me failing the eleven plus and going to a new big school. I became quite introvert and unsure of myself.

After three years of being the mouse I can remember giving myself a real talking to. I had to take risks if I ever wanted to do anything. So I tried it. I asked girls out and they usually accepted.

I opened out again.

First love can be so sweet and painful.