The Heartbreaker
I had my first crush at the tender age of four. Laura Barton was the privileged one. She didn’t know. And who would have expected that anyway? Girls just didn’t fancy girls at the time, apparently. We used to walk home from school together. Well, from the playground to the school gates together, because once we got to the school gates we were inevitably absorbed into the melee of mothers waiting to collect their little darlings. I don’t really know if my feelings were reciprocated - subsequent history suggests this highly unlikely - but I seem to remember that we held hands along the way. I didn’t carry her bag for her, though; that would have just been weird. But then, I could only just manage to carry mine, so maybe the thought didn’t enter either of our heads. It didn’t enter mine, and maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong since.
I don’t know how long this crush lasted, but it can’t have been that long because by the age of five I had discovered football and by the age of seven was getting distraught at the fact that Stacey Ashton was moving to Nottingham. All the boys loved Stacey Ashton, it must be pointed out, and my distress was never going to be noticed. But her leaving left a hole in my life that could only be replaced by thinking about somebody else.
I used to think about somebody else on a regular basis; not ever having a definite somebody else made it easier. I discovered my mum and dad’s record collection at an early age, and quickly learned the words to all the Beatles’ songs. We didn’t have a car, and with the railway station five minutes walk away we made ample use of the train. We travelled to stay with my cousins in various parts of the country taking full advantage of British Rail’s remaining network, and I spent a fair proportion of these journeys stood by the doors singing Beatles songs, engrossed in my own little daydream and waking out of it only to allow puzzled-looking grown ups to get into the toilet. My mum had made the mistake of telling me that the Beatles had sung a song on a train in the film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Given that by now I was the fifth Beatle, I had to act out the role I would have assumed in the film had I been around at the time. I spent the whole trip to Leamington Spa singing similarly. And all the time I was singing, it was for the benefit of that somebody else.
Now somewhere along the family history line I missed out on the ‘talking to people you fancy is easy’ gene. Maybe it is this missing gene in science-minded people that has prompted research into genetic engineering. In artistic people I suppose it has just given rise to thousands of songs about unrequited love. The lack of the gene in my own peculiar genetic makeup was evident before I had reached the age of ten. It should have been easy, on the face of it, because what would be suspicious about two girls having a conversation. Nobody would bat an eyelid or cast an aspersion. But heaven help me if the truth got out; the horror, the public shaming, the stigma; I couldn’t risk it. So I didn’t.
Unfortunately Daisy Elphick did not comprehend the rather obvious implications of my tying her ponytail to the back of her chair. Neither did the teacher. It was the oldest trick in the book, and she should have known that the act represented not a desire to hurt or injure, but an indication that I was completely smitten. I didn’t see the funny side when I spent the next playtime stuck in the classroom. And neither did Sarah Lyons realise the exact intentions behind my gift of five rubber pencil-tops; the bendy character things you stick on the top of your pencil to stop you chewing the wood. Such a gift was supposed to be the pinnacle of romance (well, it was the best I could come up with at the time). Still, lucky for me she didn’t tell her boyfriend, who was the most influential boy in the school and I was hoping he might take me to watch Villa play one day. [Incidentally, being a coward has its advantages: the ability to run very quickly helped my cross-country running career at big school a short time later].
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though: to suggest that would be misleading. I plucked up enough courage at Sunday School to ask Simone if I could kiss her hand and she duly obliged. And I remember a quite lengthy game of kiss-chase with Paula who lived across the road when the house next-door-but-one was still a building site. And, as clear as the day is long, the crestfallen face of Shirley Wilson when I told her I didn’t want to go to the pictures with her remains firmly lodged in my childhood recollections. She and Kathleen Shaw were standing by the sinks in the cloakroom, washing out the paint pots and brushes we’d been using. I was drying my hands having just rinsed out the glue pots. Maybe it was the vapours from the glue that did it, but out of the blue came Shirley’s rather clumsy and vague suggestion that I may want to go out somewhere with her. We were only eight or nine so I can see now how brave a move this must have been. However her socks were a greyish white instead of proper white, so the snobby reply (“No.”) was delivered with the sensitivity you could expect from an eight year old not used to being propositioned. This wasn’t to be the last proposition I would receive, either.
Many years later, after a number of awkward advances towards the apples of my eye had been thwarted with implications of bargepoles thrown in for good measure, it happened again. This time I was older and wiser, if not a little merry with festive spirits purchased at the pub down the road. ‘Twas a Christmas holiday evening, the air crisp and chilly, and two
mid-teenage girls sat on the wall at the corner of our street awaiting the last bus home. It being a leap year, one of the pair leapt down from the wall, kissed me on the cheek and asked me to marry her. Instantly thrown by such an intimate advance, I lied, said sorry but I had a girlfriend already and made my way home. Being in my late teens, such assertiveness from women was what I was banking on: why should I have to take all the risks? But I suppose it was inevitable that the familiar yellow streak in me should reappear, and the next evening when I walked past at exactly the same time there were no women in sight.
The first proper girlfriend I had was Jennifer Oldham. We got together after several ‘chance’ meetings, conjured up by one or the other of us without the other ever guessing the intent behind the coincidences. In the end it was down to a mutual friend to grasp the nettle and tell it like it was. Eventually we met under agreed circumstances. From the start I wasn’t convinced our mutual friend had got the right lass, but I went with the flow regardless. I was sixteen at the time. We walked round the school grounds. We walked into town. We walked through the park. On Valentine’s Day I had a family ‘do’ and she was working, so we went out the next night: I booked us tickets for the theatre (Shakespeare’s ‘A Comedy of Errors’). Whilst I waited for her outside the market hall I was groped by one of a drunken group of men who then slapped me hard across the cheek, bloodying my nose in the process.
When Jennifer arrived she thanked me for the card I had sent. I then gave her the card I had bought her, which I hadn’t sent because I didn’t know her address. One of my closer friends confessed a week later. One week and a day later Jennifer asked if we could just be friends, and … well, you can guess what happened next. I concluded that our mutual friend must indeed have got the wrong lass, because Jennifer and Fiona lasted months rather than the two and a half weeks that we had lasted. I didn’t even hold her hand, you know: I didn’t have the confidence to try. Pathetic, really, but such is life.
I was single for quite a long time after that. Ten years, to be precise. I learned to shrug off the nudging neighbours and the gossip-hungry aunts of the family who were all desperate for me to find someone to settle down with. I thought this might be Serena. We met at a conference for social workers and she admired my Housemartins pin badge. Serena wasn’t a social worker. She was in a much better job, with much better prospects, was well-educated and seemed to come from a good family. Appearances aren’t everything though. After we’d been going out for six months she got kicked out of her flat. She had been defaulting on the rent, it transpired - God knows where the money went, but it certainly wasn’t on me. Obviously there was more to it than just that, though I never properly worked out what. We lived together for a month while I helped her find a place of her own. I had flatmates and exams to think about, and she needed independence and to keep her job.
Eventually Serena found a room in a shared house down by the river, an old townhouse that had three floors, an attic and a converted basement. She quickly developed new friendships, but also developed a drinking problem that took us as far as the local casualty unit. Serena found new pleasure in the attentions of men old enough to be her dad, in the joys of red wine, and in having nothing much to do during the day other than drink, be merry, think dark thoughts, and sleep.
After one binge Serena locked herself in the bathroom with a bunch of razor blades, a bottle of Paul Masson and a couple of packets of Paracetamol, screaming for her long lost mother. She screamed for five hours until four in the morning when I eventually realised that no matter what I said no difference was being made, that she might now have swallowed her stash, and I called the ambulance. When we got to Casualty she got out of the ambulance, threw up on the paramedic, punched a nurse, said she thought I was on her side, and then swore at me as I followed her all the way home. When she eventually woke up in the late morning, I suggested things may not be working out. Not the best of timing, but I didn’t want to go the same way. Serena swore at me, again and started throwing every single bit of furniture in her room at me. I beat my retreat, with further missiles raining down from the third storey window out of which she was leaning. It went quiet for a day or two. Then the malicious and threatening phone calls. The blokes she was hanging out with knew people (apparently) and she knew where I lived (definitely). Fearing GBH I phoned in sick, posted my resignation to the council, and left town for good.
Six weeks later I bumped into one of the men she had befriended. I had to do a double-take - why would he be in the village after all? - and thought I might have been able to duck out of sight. I crossed the road but it was too late; he’d seen me. We talked, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. He even gave me a fiver to pay for the carafe of wine Serena had downed that night. It came in useful; not for wine, because I haven’t had a drink since that evening, but there was a new record out that I wanted to buy. He told me that Serena was pregnant, which came as something of a surprise, the sort of surprise that feels like a ten-ton-truck hitting you (I would imagine). He also told me that he thought the only reason Serena had ended up pregnant was because I had broken her heart. I’d had to do it for my own sanity of course, but for this, Serena, I am sorry.
Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025
