13. Jill
I can’t take the Canadian letters. But I must. I must sit and piece this together.
The smell, the stamps, the addresses on the back, the photographs, the washed-out snaps of tiny girls in tartan trousers with long hair, the shame. I led them on. I led them on. Oh, Dale, Jill, Karen and Bev! On the back of Jill’s envelope in bold writing it says, ‘6, Cod Road, Nova Scotia, Canada’. Cod Road? A cold, exotic, fishy place it sounds. Near Halifax. Halifax? I shall have to get an atlas. I have never even checked whether this was west or east Canada. I must have guessed it was near the water. ‘Read this page last.’ The growing confidence still stings. ‘I miss you.’ She didn’t want to send a photo, but I pressed her, and she obliged me.
‘Read this last,’ so I did. ‘Well, you asked for it! Here it is — my passport photo which was taken two years ago — 1970.’ But it isn’t there. I go through the box, but I haven’t hidden it in any other envelope. The other photos all survived with their letters. There’s Bev and Dale and Karen. I must have taken Jill’s and put it somewhere safe. But Bev was writing in April: ‘Remember that I’m thinking of you every day’ So I had hardly settled my attentions on Jill. Or perhaps I had, but I hadn’t told Bev, or Karen, or Dale.
It takes me time to sort the letters out, because the handwriting looks so similar. What did I write to them? To get them going. To encourage them. To lure them in. ‘You sound a slob,’ Dale writes chidingly Did I duplicate? Did I reinvent? What doodles did I send? Why did I write about the ‘gippos’ quite so much? (All of them write back asking to know what I mean.)
Karen was still writing in May. She was still walking the dog and doing badly at her exams. I have got the atlas out, by the way Toronto is hundreds of miles from Halifax. I had lumped them all together, but they had come to the boat from different parts of Canada, as remote from each other as I would be from Germany Whew. They weren’t likely to have met at a party and compared letters, anyway.
And who was Margot from Bowman? My goodness, turning the pile over, I discover another girl altogether. Dale was jolly — full of news and practicality. Karen was wistful. Bev and Jill chatty and direct. Margot got straight to business: acid and speed and a story of the OPD (the Ontario Police Department) raiding her house at six in the morning. Her face ‘was redder than my hair’. She was planning to travel across North America on her ten-speed bike. ‘But most of all I want to see you.’ Oh, Margot. What would have happened if you had bicycled over the Atlantic? There isn’t any photograph of Margot.
Did I churn it up? Did I urge them on? Jill’s first letter is a largely formal one. ‘Which one was she?’ I must have thought, ungallantly.
‘The page is running out unlike my thoughts,’ she writes but she goes on to mention that she is planning to come to England in August — in that very first letter. I must have planned it all. By March she was writing again, having apparently got my postcard — from Florence (spelled like her middle name). ‘After reading your postcard I wished that I was in Rome and about to go to Florence … and most of all to see you.’ Heavens, I don’t suppose we even danced together. Oh, Jill, did you know that I was writing to all the girls?
She had a photograph of that last night on the boat — the last night of a mere thirteen days. In the photograph she has her hand in my pocket, so she tells me. She had gone to work in the movie theatre and in a small boutique for $1.50 an hour. By June she had saved $135 and was ‘almost there’.
This is horrible, reading all these letters — the innocence, the trust. The hard work she went to, based on thirteen days and that hand in my pocket and all those long replies I must have sent. By now she’s telling me to eat properly and wear galoshes in the rain.
Could my mother write to her mother (49) and formally invite Jill to our house?
As I read these letters the sound I can hear is me making groaning noises. What do they mean? Her reaction to a photo that I sent … I can’t repeat it. It’s too intimate and trusting. And the letters have got ten pages long. She writes so cautiously, dropping her little hints and indications, venturing into possibilities of intimacy. Her emotional state seems such a fragile thing.
Suddenly I wonder what would happen if I tried to get in touch today If I wrote to Cod Road, would someone pass it on, would she answer? Unlike all my school friends, these girls couldn’t know anything about me. It could be an anonymous trip. I would just be this guy from the past. I could visit them all. I could see if any parents still live at those addresses, in their eighties now, I suppose. Is it possible? ‘Dale and Brian live near Calgary now and have three children.’
The letters are so potent. All those junior excitements. All that promise of, well, let’s face it, sex.
I finish sorting them out. They lie in front of me in bundles. Margot stopped writing first. Why? She only sent me three in total, but then she was the acid queen, so that’s understandable. Dale’s practical, chatty ones finish in mid-correspondence — mid-endearment, almost — but some time in the summer they all stopped, even, eventually, Jill’s.
There isn’t a letter in the pile, though, that asks, ‘What happened? Why did you stop writing?’ By June I must have settled on poor Jill. Did I simply just stop sending letters to the others? I suppose I did.
I have identified the last letter, I think, from Jill herself. I can hardly bear to read it. It is sent from Hampshire, in England, on her way to stay The one before it is full of excitement. ‘See you Friday,’ she ends.
Now I am in a forties thriller, feeling through the envelopes, double-checking, turning them over, searching in the box. Surely there is more. Where’s the next letter? Where is the one that forgives me? Where is the one that pours hate on me for treating her so badly? Where is the conclusion to this? My only personal memory is the slight icing of recollected shame. I have completely lost the cause, erased it. I cannot remember any real details, how she packed, how we must have taken her back to the airport. Did my mother commiserate with her? Was I even courageous enough to discuss this with her? I doubt it. All that remains is the electrical charge of a residual negative emotion. (Of course it would have been tidier if I had gone there. I like the notion of those frozen places. ‘We have the best climate in the world,’ Dale wrote with all that enviable Canadian pride. I could have gone and visited them all one by one. Instead, I waited for Jill to come to me.)
I came home from that first adventure in Italy by car with the Haydens, our local doctors from Epping. It wasn’t late in the season. It can’t have been, because I had finished the month in Florence and headed north to Val-d’Isère by a sequence of trains that left me confused and cold at a small station high in the Alps. I got down from a powerful express which I’d boarded with an illegal ticket and transferred to a branch line.
I came out of the station and walked through the town to the practice slopes, where I finally spotted my doctor, his family and my sister learning to ski on the crowded hill. It felt like a miracle of personal organization to make these connections.
I had never been skiing. I had no clothes and no money to buy them, so I spent the weekend in flared denim jeans and a reefer jacket, falling over until the wet froze them like cardboard, and my legs became ready for amputation.
So it was after a second tour of duty on the boat that Jill came. I must have taken the Baltic trip and then headed south. Yes, I remember we passed through the Channel on an upper deck in bright early-evening light. One of the assistants danced for joy in his platform-heeled boots, and we all gave an impromptu exhibition of cod Fred Astaire. A junior cadet was sent up from the bridge directly below to scream at us. We had disturbed the captain at a crucial moment as he tried to steer the Uganda through the Straits of Dover. On to La Rochelle and La Coruña, then Lisbon, where we went to the brothel by mistake, then down to North Africa and Carthage, and then home for the rest of the summer, which was when Jill came to stay.
Of all my regular correspondents, Jill was the cleverest and most passi
onate. I had studied her lost photograph closely. Remembering that photograph now and comparing it with my own from 1970, I see she also had the dubious accolade of looking almost exactly like me. Her hair was parted tin the middle, black and wiry. She wore flared jeans and sweaters. She was of average height. It was a unisex thing. We could tell the difference, even if the Daily Telegraph couldn’t. We were very excited by the difference. She seemingly as much as me. She was a sweet, intelligent girl and I treated her abominably.
For a start, when she announced that she was coming to England, I decided that this was quite probably the opportunity to lose my virginity. She was coming a long distance and would be staying with us, in my home, which would furnish the opportunity (though quite where and how might need to be carefully addressed) . She was Canadian. That seemed to augur well. American girls were notoriously loose. Essentially, Canadian girls were American girls in pullovers, weren’t they? ‘Love, love, love, warbled the Beatles. Jill seemed bright enough to understand the ethos of the era and the unworthiness of my intentions.
I hoped I would recognize her. I did. She was, as girls so often are, polite and considerate. I gabbled ceaselessly. My mother’s eyes were shining, as mothers’ eyes do when their male offspring bring girls home. I know from my own experience that dads want to grunt and get on with the previously undisturbed tax returns, but mothers look to the companionship, they like to poke their noses in and they like the hint of nookie. Or at least my mother seemed to.
There is no doubt that I was in love, by my own standards. I knew the beating heart and the state of excitement that led to lingering gazes. I was pleased that she was a better, more considerate person than me, and that everybody else immediately recognized it. This all helps enormously at the beginning of any relationship. It can become something of a problem near the end, though. Other people will grow attached to nice, friendly girls.
Of course, there was no sex in White Lodge. This may have been the tail of the swinging sixties, but my parents were born in the twenties. Jill enjoyed the cooking and was happy to be quizzed exhaustively by my mother and help with the washing-up, but there was a granny lurking about. My mother and father never seemed to go out. I had never noticed before that my family came and went with such noisy regularity; in and out of every room in our house. Then at night Jill went to one end of the upstairs corridor, and I went to the other.
I lost my virginity on the boat. You might imagine that a twenty-nine-foot yacht was a less promising boudoir than a large detached house, but somehow, at the time, it seemed a better opportunity.
I went sailing without my parents. How did that happen? My father must have been ‘on duty’ at the hospital. My brother was certainly aboard, though, and my sister too, I seem to remember.
Jill was given ‘the cabin’, and after lights out I rustled up there to join her. It was my first experience of wearing a condom. We can’t have managed that with the lights out. Perhaps we used a torch. The ‘cabin’ was separated from the rest of the boat by a small, bright-blue curtain. It was a cupboard. If you slept in it, the centreboard casing formed one side, the hull the other, and your legs went into a sort of cubby hole. There was barely enough room for one person to scramble up there. It must have been a challenge to accommodate two. A novice couple engaged in screwing must have been highly audible in the utter blackness of this tiny boat. It was probably made worse by extreme caution. A long zip of a zip-fastening on a sleeping bag being unzipped, followed by a circumspect pause during which only breathing could be heard, followed, after enough time had elapsed to allow the false assumption that the other occupants of the boat were now asleep, by a rustling noise and a squeak.
On the wedding night of a Bejar nomad, the groom leaves the men’s tent in the middle of the night, creeps across the desert and clambers under the tent flap to find his betrothed. Then, in the women’s tent, surrounded by her mother, aunties and sisters, he ravishes his bride. This was similar, though at least I knew where to find her and didn’t have to stumble around in the dark and inquire where she was. I obviously thought that siblings didn’t count. I would have done the same for them. They had to pretend, for form’s sake, that they were asleep. If they woke up and tried to eavesdrop, that was their look-out. But I wasn’t really concerned about them. The extended courtship by letter and now an attempt to take each stage as slowly and quietly as possible must have stoked up the ardour. The condom smelt rubbery, but it was real sex, and Jill was a bona fide visitor from the more straightforward Americas. I had joined the sixties sexual revolution at last, and only two years late.
After that we worked hard at it. I did a lot of babysitting. We would stand at the door, see the parents off and get at it amongst the toy cars. Thank God for dinner parties. I meet grown-up people today who could have choked to death in their cots for all I knew. We loved the sex, but, alas, I gradually realized I didn’t love Jill.
‘I thought she was staying for good at one point, my mother told me. I should have realized that no trip around Europe was really planned. Jill didn’t suddenly reach for her backpack and wave a cheery farewell. I took her to see the Tower of London, but the sites of major European cities weren’t the reason for her visit. I was. I had made the poor girl cross the Atlantic, and as the summer faded so did my passion. In September I would go to university anyway.
Jill was far too grown up not to guess that there wasn’t any real future, even if I was too immature to be able to broach it. I took her with me to Cambridge a few weeks before I was due to go up. I hadn’t had the guts to talk to her, but by now I was walking separately from her. I can feel the dipping, draining slide of the stomach and the heat on the back of the neck. It’s called ‘shame’. I simply grew cold towards her. We had talked a lot, now I didn’t talk at all. We had walked hand in hand, now I took my hand away. We had been friends, now I acted like a stranger. And she was thousands of miles from home.
She finally got the message and flew off, and I was relieved. Everybody was sorry that she was going except me. They were just more polite than me. They could say sensible words and talk to her. I just let things drift and behaved obtusely until she told me that she thought she had better go home. I hope her parents hugged her. I hope she got married. I hope she’s happy.
I hope she doesn’t read this.
14. The Whiff of Nepotism
In the autumn of 2003 I went back to Cambridge. I was taking George, my son, there to start his university career. I should have been many things at that moment. I should have been proud and a little in awe of his youth and attainments and I should have been happy for him. I should have been supportive and easy-going and helpful. I should have been at the very least a little decent. But I suppose I have never really been very good at being the things that I ought to be.’
The year before, he had quietly come to me to ask me my advice about colleges. ‘My advice?’ Once I had accommodated the mild shock, I had given my advice freely enough. I was an expert, after all. It was one of my favourite subjects. ‘I can only recommend two things.’ I was exploring a tone that I gradually recognized as being magisterially paternal. ‘Go for a college by the river. You will be spending time in university activities, not college ones …’ (how speedily one becomes an utter arse under these trying and exceptional circumstances) ‘… and the river colleges are much prettier. But, hey, it doesn’t really matter, just whatever you do, don’t apply for my old college, Emmanuel. They hate any whiff of nepotism. And anyway,’ I added, ‘it’s become some sort of academic top-runner, apparently, first on some ladder list or other, and there’s no point in making things difficult for yourself, is there?’
George ignored my advice, applied to Emmanuel and got a place easily enough. The director of studies was apparently utterly unaware that his father had been at the college at all. And when the time came, I offered to deliver his bass amplifier. It was the least I could do. Had my own father come with me at that point? Probably not, but I wanted to be at least a li
ttle parasitic. We drove out through east London, actually passing within sight of Epping on the way.
‘This is actually what I’d like to do,’ I said by way of conversation half-way up the M11.
‘What?’
‘Oh, I don’t know Spend a few years studying architecture at undergraduate level.’ University was wasted on young people. ‘They only want to shag each other and explore the shops. Ha ha. We should go to university at sixty. Then we’d be fascinated by the lectures. God, I’d attend all the lectures these days.’
My wife Jo shifted in her seat and laughed gently. ‘Are you trying to compete with him?’
I laughed myself, loudly. I was trying to make conversation with an eighteen-year-old, wasn’t I? OK. I was dumping my neuroses on him as I did so, but then he was old enough to understand that, wasn’t he? By the way. had he actually read any of the set books on that list they sent him? Had he?
By the time we arrived, I had the grace to feel moderately ashamed of myself, and he was a nervous wreck.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s always you!’
But it was me. This was the unacknowledged elephant sitting in the back seat of the family Zafira.
We arrived at the back of the college, my college. They had built a cream-painted wall where there had once been internal windows looking down into the Junior Common Room, but otherwise the building was utterly unchanged. To an undergraduate returning from the 1940s, Cambridge in the 1970s would have been a different planet, but as we heaved the trunk through the same heavy sprung door up the same spiral staircase and stood in the same corridor I felt I had entered some sort of cruel time warp. George wasn’t actually in my room. He was in Andrew’s, next door.
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