breathless with longing, incandescent with passion. ‘
My darling darling darling,’
they read, followed by pages of news about her friend Andrea, and about the savage teachers who attacked and oppressed them at school. Froggy wrote, ‘I
love you, my darling, I love you
’, and she concluded her letters with ‘All
my everlasting love
’, or ‘All
my tons and tons of all my special love ever faithful’
.
Their epistolary passion had endured for a year and yet they had never held hands, kissed, or said anything other than ‘hello’. On the day before his mother’s request to go and pick daffodils, however, a day of the spring holidays, he had contrived to break the impasse, by slipping a note into Froggy’s plastic adolescent handbag. He did it on two false assumptions, the first being that girls go through their handbags every day, and the second, that upon finding the note she would come to the assignation. He did not know that women are not what you think; they have hesitations and peculiar fears, a sense of right-timing and self-preservation that is obscure to men. Neither did he know that a handbag, even that of a twelve-year-old, contains more than a woman’s essential supplies. His note vanished into a congeries of brush, purse , broken biscuits, tissues, coagulated make-up, old bus tickets and chocolate wrappers, much of it being of extraordinary antiquity. The note read:
‘Come and meet me at the Maclachlan bench at two thirty tomorrow. Today is Tuesday
.’ It had not been easy to find a moment when he could put the note in her bag, but somehow he had done so when she had left it momentarily abandoned in the hall while she was upstairs, giggling with his sister.
Peter did not know precisely what he and she would do up on the common at the Maclachlan bench. Perhaps they would kiss, hold hands, declare their love outright. Perhaps she would take him in her arms and he would feel the length of her sweet and burgeoning body against his. Peter did not imagine that they would have sex. If he had known that it was imaginable, he certainly would have imagined it. He was in love, and he thought he knew the cod wisdom, frequently passed on from his mother while his father sat in resentful silence, that sex and love were different and not really connected.
Peter did not sleep at all that night, and was forced to sit up and read a book. He read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, which his parents had hidden on the shelf in a brown wrapper, making it the most obviously tempting book in the house. His parents might just as well have written on its spine ‘Attention all children! Read this book! It’s got sex!’ All the children did read it, and none of them understood it much. In any case, the book wasn’t as explicit as they might have hoped. Peter read it that night without taking it in. He was too much consumed with anxiety and speculation.
Spending the morning lying in the orchard, shooting down daffodils and thereby picking them in the manliest possible fashion, seemed the only way to pass the time without going mad. He was quite a good shot, but his Webley Junior was only a small-bore 177, and sometimes when he hit a stalk, the flower still didn’t topple. He decided that any hit counted as a plucked flower, otherwise he would never get enough of them in time for lunch. Sometimes he would aim at one flower, and another immediately behind it would topple over instead. The dog kept sabotaging his efforts by pouncing on him, snuffling in his face and wandering about in the line of fire. One of the cats, who enjoyed every spring sitting motionless and upright among the flowers, watched them both as if they were mad. ‘He thinks he’s a daffodil,’ Joan used to say. Next door, Miss Agatha Feakes, wearing her brown peaked cap and one of her vast home-knitted cardigans, threw seed to her chickens and milked the goats. A white-headed blackbird came down nearby. She’d known it for nearly ten years. She listened to
My darling darling darling,’
they read, followed by pages of news about her friend Andrea, and about the savage teachers who attacked and oppressed them at school. Froggy wrote, ‘I
love you, my darling, I love you
’, and she concluded her letters with ‘All
my everlasting love
’, or ‘All
my tons and tons of all my special love ever faithful’
.
Their epistolary passion had endured for a year and yet they had never held hands, kissed, or said anything other than ‘hello’. On the day before his mother’s request to go and pick daffodils, however, a day of the spring holidays, he had contrived to break the impasse, by slipping a note into Froggy’s plastic adolescent handbag. He did it on two false assumptions, the first being that girls go through their handbags every day, and the second, that upon finding the note she would come to the assignation. He did not know that women are not what you think; they have hesitations and peculiar fears, a sense of right-timing and self-preservation that is obscure to men. Neither did he know that a handbag, even that of a twelve-year-old, contains more than a woman’s essential supplies. His note vanished into a congeries of brush, purse , broken biscuits, tissues, coagulated make-up, old bus tickets and chocolate wrappers, much of it being of extraordinary antiquity. The note read:
‘Come and meet me at the Maclachlan bench at two thirty tomorrow. Today is Tuesday
.’ It had not been easy to find a moment when he could put the note in her bag, but somehow he had done so when she had left it momentarily abandoned in the hall while she was upstairs, giggling with his sister.
Peter did not know precisely what he and she would do up on the common at the Maclachlan bench. Perhaps they would kiss, hold hands, declare their love outright. Perhaps she would take him in her arms and he would feel the length of her sweet and burgeoning body against his. Peter did not imagine that they would have sex. If he had known that it was imaginable, he certainly would have imagined it. He was in love, and he thought he knew the cod wisdom, frequently passed on from his mother while his father sat in resentful silence, that sex and love were different and not really connected.
Peter did not sleep at all that night, and was forced to sit up and read a book. He read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, which his parents had hidden on the shelf in a brown wrapper, making it the most obviously tempting book in the house. His parents might just as well have written on its spine ‘Attention all children! Read this book! It’s got sex!’ All the children did read it, and none of them understood it much. In any case, the book wasn’t as explicit as they might have hoped. Peter read it that night without taking it in. He was too much consumed with anxiety and speculation.
Spending the morning lying in the orchard, shooting down daffodils and thereby picking them in the manliest possible fashion, seemed the only way to pass the time without going mad. He was quite a good shot, but his Webley Junior was only a small-bore 177, and sometimes when he hit a stalk, the flower still didn’t topple. He decided that any hit counted as a plucked flower, otherwise he would never get enough of them in time for lunch. Sometimes he would aim at one flower, and another immediately behind it would topple over instead. The dog kept sabotaging his efforts by pouncing on him, snuffling in his face and wandering about in the line of fire. One of the cats, who enjoyed every spring sitting motionless and upright among the flowers, watched them both as if they were mad. ‘He thinks he’s a daffodil,’ Joan used to say. Next door, Miss Agatha Feakes, wearing her brown peaked cap and one of her vast home-knitted cardigans, threw seed to her chickens and milked the goats. A white-headed blackbird came down nearby. She’d known it for nearly ten years. She listened to
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