My education

4 November 2009

At The Gate in Notting Hill watching An Education based on Lyn Barber’s memoirs with a dawning, dismaying sense of recognition as the story unfolds.  The main character, Jenny, was a clever sixteen year old being stifled by her hothouse education and her middle class semi-detached suburban life in Twickenham.  I was a drifting sixteen year old at a tough comprehensive in a working class mining village where university was seen as less desirable than the local Chunkie Chicks or Levi’s factory.

Her David was dazzling and Jewish and drove a Bristol.  My David was nineteen and came on the bus on an hour long serpentine, sick-making journey through country lanes and desolate villages from a town twenty-five miles away.

She met her David in the rain, holding a cello.  I thought a cello was a big fiddle and I would have spelt it with a ch.  I met my David at a dance and at the end of the evening I gave him my address.  Three days later a letter arrived. I was beside myself with excitement.  It seemed so romantic that he would take the trouble to keep my hastily scribbled note (which was probably on the back of a cigarette packet) and actually bother to get in touch again.  With me.  That, in my life, was dazzling.  And I’ve always been a sucker for a man who writes letters.

He was my first lover, my first proper boyfriend and though, unlike Jenny, there were no Ravel concerts, and no trips to Paris in our courtship, there were films and restaurants in Edinburgh and trips in his friend’s modest car to the seaside and drinks in hotel bars that I wasn’t legally allowed to be in.  Even in the depressed backwater of a Scottish mining village, nineteen seemed so much more glamorous and sophisticated than sixteen.  It was practically adult.  He was working.  He had money to throw around.  I was still at school saving my lunch money for cigarettes.

I had never had a proper boyfriend before.  I was plain, tall, skinny and didn’t have the stamp of popularity.  But David loved me.  It was real.  This was grown up.  It was also, finally, was official when my parents invited him to stay for the weekend.

I was getting his bedroom ready.  The phone rang.  It was in the draughty hall at the back of the house, next to the spare room where I was struggling with the eiderdown. I heard my mother assume her Thora Hird with a Scottish accent telephone voice.  Yes, I see, she said formally. It sounded serious.  Her words were clipped.  Angry.  My ears strained to hear what she was talking about but the walls were thick and I could only sense that whatever was going on, it wasn’t good.  She hung up and came into the bedroom.  I looked up at her.  Never warmer than a wet weekend at Saltcoats, my mother’s face was now thunderous.  What’s the matter, I asked, fearfully.  You know fine what the matter is, she told me, spitting the words out. I must have looked blank, because I really didn’t have a clue, but she poked me in the chest with her ash-tapping finger and told me I’d better sit down.  Dutifully I did as I was told, ruffling the surface of the newly made bed that I’d just spent many minutes perfecting.

That was your boyfriend’s mother, she said, pronouncing the word boyfriend with a contempt that swelled to include me.  It seems he has a wife and child at home that he’s leaving to come here this weekend.  She thought I should know that my daughter was a home-wrecker.

I gaped.  I couldn’t really understand what she was saying. A wife?  A child.  At nineteen?  Though it shouldn’t have been so difficult to grasp. Pregnancy was the pastime of choice where I grew up.  There was nothing else to do until you were eighteen and could get into the pubs, except have sex, and teenage mothers and shotgun weddings were so common as to be normal.  In fact, if you were a Catholic wanting to marry a Protestant, they were obligatory.

Are you sure you didn’t know? she poked me roughly again, but this time her ash-tapping finger had an Embassy Regal slotted in behind it.  I dodged the tip.

She made me feel like a slut, and in two seconds – poof - my love affair disappeared in a tawdry puff of smoke and went from being something precious and romantic to a stain that defiled me.  I was despatched to  meet him from the bus and tell him to turn around and go home, back to the wife that he had, I later discovered, actually left weeks before he met me.  I was ordered never to see him again.

I didn’t even look him in the eye when I told him.  I just remember the cheap suitcase that got out of the bus before he did.  And then I walked away.  Feeling just as cheap.

At home, we never spoke of it again. But for weeks my parents looked at me as though I was untouchable.

I couldn’t stand it.  I told them that I wanted to leave the job that I had just recently started in a nearby town that they were both delighted with – a 'job for life' they told me, that felt like I was training to be dead.  I said I had decided to go and live with my aunt in England and, reluctantly, they agreed.

I was seventeen when they took me and my grandfather’s steamer trunk to Waverly Station in Edinburgh and waved me off on the platform.

In the film Jenny, and presumably Lyn Barbour on whom the story was based, was seventeen when she discovered the older man to whom she was engaged was already married with a child and lived a few streets away from her in Twickenham.  After the big reveal she sat her A levels and went to Oxford.

I got there a year earlier.  And David with me. I found him waiting for me on the train, as we had arranged. After the phone call, he didn’t go back to his family, but stayed on with his mother.  We began to meet each other secretly about a month after my parents told me I couldn’t ever see him again. And then we ran...

It was not my finest hour.

I moved in with my aunt and found a dreary job fastening papers together with pins in a mail room.  He got a room in a boarding house and found work.  It was a couple of weeks before I plucked up the courage to confess that David had come with me and neither the news nor the deceit was well received.  She too was disgusted with my sordid life and my married boyfriend so that when he told me he missed his little boy, I encouraged him to go back home.  I was tired of feeling dirty.  I was relieved to see him go.

And then the letters started. One every three days. Each time another landed on the mat my aunt would fume and snap that I should get rid of him and tell him to leave me alone, but I couldn’t.  I was torn. I did, however stop writing.  Still the letters arrived.  Eventually, feeling pressured by my family and the sense of shame that hung over me like poisonous gas, I stopped opening them and gathered them together, cut each one in two and sent them all back in a jiffy bag.

Unsurprisingly, I never heard from him again.

And even though I felt a horrible curl of guilt at what I had done, it was nothing to the guilt I felt at being with him.

And so I didn’t even flinch when Jenny found the letters addressed to Mr and Mrs Goldman in her lover’s glovebox. It seems so un-shocking now as to be almost banal.  So what?  Where’s the dilemma? Where are the footballers and the drug taking and the topless pictures?  I was more shocked by the fact that Jenny’s parents thought marriage was a career option than that he had a wife. 1964 seems like a quaint period piece, as does 1973 in my story.  Did people really watch those boxy little televisions?  Were there really only three channels?  Did people really only have one telephone?  And write letters, actual letters?  And was it really such a big deal that you might be seduced while still at school by someone who would turn out to be a married man with a baby and a home?

But, yes it was.

At the time.

Posted by Writer in Residence at 12:08 AM