Maeve and I lived opposite each other, on top of one of the Brighton hills. One day she invited me to have dinner with her in a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Croydon. It seemed a bit strange to travel all the way to Croydon for our dinner when two steps away in Brighton we had an embarrassment of choice in the restaurant line, but Maeve raved about the place, and I was happy to have company and an outing that summer. So I strode gaily across the Level and up Trafalgar Street to the station where I met Maeve and we jumped on the London train. The short walk from East Croydon station to the restaurant gave us a glimpse of what you might call the arse end of the town, though I’m still not sure there is a better end. But once we got there we found ourselves ensconced in a haven of scented candles and delicate sprigs of flowers, and the food was light and exquisite. At the end of the meal we shared an ice-cream sundae, and perhaps emboldened by the intimacy of the collision of spoons and the sugar induced ecstasy, Maeve declared her love. She apologised for her bad timing – she knew I was still recovering from the end of the American dream. In fact my sorrows were the last thing on my mind. The whole Croydon thing had become a bit of an adventure. We were very giggly on the train on the way home, like two schoolgirls sharing a secret joke. Maeve came back to my place. I swigged some brandy, lit a candle, and we went to bed.

Maeve and I quickly became an item. She moved into a basement flat round the corner from my place, and filled its back yard with colourful flowers. We spent many happy hours there drinking cups of tea or glasses of wine. We liked to go walking on the Downs, and I decided to get myself a pair of proper walking boots. After some trials and tribulations with leather and Gortex, I finally found a pair that did not give me blisters. We would set out clad in our boots, waterproof jackets and comfortable trousers, with oatcakes and cheese and apples in our rucksacks. Maeve’s brother Bill, who lived in New York and worked ‘in fashion’ often sent her the free gifts that had turned up in his office – designer scarves, pallets of eye shadow in unlikely shades, blusher, lipstick. Maeve passed all of this on to me, and I tried it all. I would set off on the Downland walks in the boots and the trousers with several large pockets, and a face plastered in clashing shades of powder. One day Maeve looked at me as I was applying Bill’s latest gift to my slightly wan visage, and asked why I needed so much slap on to go out on a country walk. I wasn’t sure at all how to answer this. But the same day, despite the excess of slap, Maeve took a picture of me lying on the picnic rug and smiling happily at her and later pinned it on her noticeboard.

Shortly after this I was introduced to Maeve’s parents who came over from Belfast for the weekend. Maeve’s mother Joan raved about Maeve’s floriferous back yard which compared favourably, to the ‘broown floowers’ that Maeve’s Dad insisted on planting in their own garden – ‘you can’t tell the difference between them and the soil!’. Joan seemed to approve of me almost as much as Maeve’s trailing lobelia. ‘It’s all girls in Brighton and all boys in New York’ she commented on her two queer children. After a cup of tea Joan got the Ajax out and attacked the kitchen, which despite Maeve’s best efforts still bore the greasy traces of the previous occupant – the ‘glar’ as Joan called it. This activity did not disturb a single hair of Joan’s finely coiffured head, onto which her hair was piled high in blond coils adding at least six inches to her otherwise diminutive height. More inches were added by the high heeled, laced ankle boots that Joan wore, even to clean the kitchen. She tottered about in them and I could not help admiring her commitment to glamour, even if being with Maeve had taught me the joy of striding out into the world with the love of a good woman in my heart and sturdy boots on my feet.

 

Save

Summer 1987. I could not wait till the end of term when I would be joining History Man in America. Virginia would be hot and humid, so I went to Debenhams and bought four pairs of shorts – blue, pink, orange and yellow – and matching vests.

I packed joyously, trying not to think about a previous meeting in New York that had been clouded by his confession of a terrible betrayal, perhaps the worst of them all, (with one of my feminist friends). His affairs were part of an annual cycle, always in spring, always with someone as close to me as possible. I would break it off, he would repent, and some time in mid summer we would get together again, closer than ever in our efforts to suppress the waves of jealousy, anger and guilt.

I bought a lot of food for the flight in Brighton’s first vegetarian restaurant Food for Friends. I was travelling on one of those budget airlines where nothing is provided. Unfortunately the quiche and salads did not travel well, reducing to a kind of mush, which I ate, nonetheless. In the immigration queue in New York I felt tired but happy, eager to get on to my connecting flight to Virginia. When they asked me how much money I had on me, I was so taken aback by the question that I replied without thinking “about 50 dollars”. They looked alarmed, unimpressed by my story that I was meeting my boyfriend and had transferred money into his account. Perhaps my bleached spiky hair and parrot earrings didn’t help either. But being white and English I was not used to this treatment and it came as a shock to me that I could be classed as a potential threat to American society. They took me into a side room, and made me telephone History Man’s American friends – fortunately he had given me their number – and even more fortunately they vouched for me, and the Immigration officials let me go on my way, anxiously running for my next flight.

He was there to meet me and we travelled by taxi to the flat he had borrowed for the summer in a historic small town. It quickly became home. We relied on friends to take us shopping, as in our town you could buy a mob cap or a quill pen, but not groceries. At first we survived on drugstore sandwiches and I delighted in the very American experience of ordering them and choosing from the mesmerising varieties of bread and toppings. But it was an expensive way to eat, and as soon as I could I stocked up on pasta and tomatoes and olive oil. Someone lent us a membership card to a club with a beautiful spring water pool, the perfect antidote to the Virginia summer heat. I had to forge a signature to get in, but my categorisation as a potential criminal as I entered the US somehow made this easier for me. I went there every day, while he worked, wearing my shorts ensembles on top of my costume. In the mornings I would wash out the shorts and hang them to dry in the back yard, relishing this summer of being a housewife, even if I did sometimes go to the library with him to prepare next term’s classes.

One weekend friends took us to the beach in North Carolina. We stayed in a motel apartment, right on the beach, and cooked seafood together in the evenings, and in the day bathed in the warm but turbulent ocean. The friends had a tiny baby. I had my picture taken on the beach, holding him. When we got back to our apartment, we decided we wanted to have a child together, and because of my age there was no time to be wasted.

Then an American friend of mine invited me to visit her in Ithaca. We agreed I would go, even if the visit coincided with the best time of the month to conceive. He joined me in Boston en route, and we did our best to make up for this bad timing. I travelled on a series of ever smaller aeroplanes, lost in a happy dream that I was already pregnant. My friend welcomed me enthusiastically, and took me to swim in waterfalls and eat in the famous ‘Moosewood’ vegetarian hippie restaurant. In the bookshop in Ithaca I read the chapters on pregnancy and birth in Our Bodies Ourselves, imagining that these miracles were taking place in my own body. He and I were reunited in Washington, staying with some friends of his. We retired a touch too early to be polite, such was our eagerness to resume our efforts to conceive.

Back in Virginia it was soon time to pack up and go back to England. Somehow most of the work of cleaning the flat and packing fell to me, while he seized the last hours with the manuscripts. I became bad-tempered. Pre-menstrual tension was the explanation, we agreed. When my period came I was relieved, as all the old feelings of distrust and anger had come back, and I was not sure I wanted to take the risk of having a child with this man, after all. The summer dream was over. I packed the shorts.

When we landed in England I was delighted to be home, while his gloom deepened. We got back to my house and I made phone calls and finally went round to the corner shop to buy eggs and bread for breakfast. When I got back he was furious because of the time I had spent on the phone, and my obvious pleasure in being home, even in having a corner shop to go to. For him America was the dream, and my enthusiasm for the old country anathema. And my relief at not being pregnant with his child had wounded him. He grabbed his leather jacket and threatened to leave. I imagined how I would feel in this situation pregnant, or with a baby.

What we were actually gestating was the end of our relationship. In April the following year he had another affair, with a student, this time. Then he met me in town for coffee and explained how he missed me, how she was really too young, not quite right for him. One evening a few weeks later he came round to invite me to the cinema to see ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, but I had seen it the night before and knew exactly where watching those erotic scenes with him would lead. I closed the door, in tears, and wrote to him the next day asking him never to contact me again. After this climax of agony, it was over, by my volition. The end of History. I burnt his letters, but could not bring myself to waste perfectly good garments, so that summer, in the midst of my grief for him, for the lost child, I kept on wearing my American shorts on Brighton beach.

 

During my spiky bleached hair à la Annie Lennox phase I invested in a rather startling summer outfit: lime-green and orange cotton trousers, orange t-shirt and long lime-green cardigan. This startling, almost fluorescent combo became my summer teaching uniform. My clothes expressed all my aspirations to what was then called trendiness, a necessary qualification for living in Brighton in the 1980s. One of my male colleagues, Dave the Maths teacher, looked at me disapprovingly one day as I stood in the school dinner queue – ‘You just look so trendy!’. That was exactly the effect I was hoping to achieve. Another colleague, a woman this time, told me that students with problems would always talk to her, not me, because I was ‘too trendy’. She may have been right – but I was not sure I wanted to hear about their problems anyway. I preferred guiding them through ever more difficult French newspaper and magazine articles – they groaned as I handed out the endless photocopies – or great works of French Lit. I had one group who were actually interested in the latter, and with them I was able to put on a production of Sartre’s Les Mains Sales in French, a didactic piece about revolutionary politics. The students loved the existential dilemmas, and the opportunity to swagger about on the stage with pretend guns.

At Christmas there was a staff review, so I got the chance to swagger on the stage myself, playing a French housewife, Froufrou, in a sketch written in franglais. It brought the house down because it involved a liaison between me and the French assistant, André, and of course sex between teachers is both a complete taboo and the dominant fantasy of students. My class, who had clearly developed a whole narrative about me and André, shouted ‘c’est la preuve’ among the general screams of delight of the audience, as André and I kissed melodramatically, only to be interrupted by my ‘husband’, Dave of the dinner queue.

The following year I had an existential dilemma myself – a sketch was chosen in which I was to play Rapunzel using my best Wolverhampton accent. There were a lot of arguments about the script between me and Dave, who kept inserting ‘phallic humour’ into what I considered to be a feminist sketch. Then History Man got me a surprise present – tickets to see ‘The Eurythmics’ but oh no the concert was on the same night as the end of term review. I was torn between the chance of speaking my native tongue in public and wearing a long blonde wig, and seeing Annie L. herself in the flesh. I chose the latter and was only a tiny bit disappointed not to be on stage myself.

The staff review was not the only Christmas celebration in the college – the last day of the term was fancy dress day. One year a group of us decided we would dress up as Goths. On the train journey the art teacher Holly did her best to improve our look with assorted jewellery and scarves, almost black lipstick, dark purple eyeshadow and pale foundation. I didn’t really need the foundation as I was pretty pale anyway most days on the 8.12, and I had already daubed my lips cherry red. The students quite liked our efforts but were very clear about whose outfit looked right (Holly’s) and whose didn’t (mine). The blonde spikes just could not be made to look goth. And I think they suspected that underneath my black floaty dress and Tuesday market coat there was a lime-green cardy trying to get out.

 

Spiky-haired ‘Goth’ on Network South-East, circa 1986