journal of a writing man

Saturday June 23, 2007 

I live in a world of warmth and sunshine now and am comfortable with it. So much so that when I sit in the quiet house with no distractions, thinking of places I’ve been, people I’ve enjoyed, I don’t mind the long shadows which increasingly fall over my memory of early days and gather together to form a darkness, masking the once-familiar paths of my youth. It doesn’t really matter.

I’m content to have things as they are, and to have lived things the way I did. Most of it was good. Some of it was bad. Mostly, though, it was good. Or so I remember it.

There was a lengthy period in my late teens, running through to when I was twenty and was summoned back to England to perform my compulsory military service, when I would disappear for long and short periods, knapsack on my back and a cheap cross-channel ticket in my pocket, to see what I might find on the Continent.

What was I looking for? Well, scenery, and history, of course, and romance and… Let’s not be overly coy about it… sex. It wasn’t easy being gay in England back then. Not impossible, but sometimes the brighter, more forgiving lights of the big European cities held a greater appeal, were more inviting and comfortable than the grey and gritty streets of London. I doubt the ability of my libido to take me to  the end of our street  now but it was a powerful thing when I was a young man, and led me into some strange situations.

Oh, I scurried back home now and then of course, and picked up the threads of my very ordinary British life. Until a book or a play or a movie triggered the adventurer in me and off I’d go once more.

The call to report for military duty came as rather a bombshell. I was happily established in a comfortable middle-class apartment in Paris, not far from the Bois de Bolougne, with an older guy who regarded me as his English plaything, and treated me so. I had only to ask for a bit of pocket money, or some item of clothing, and it appeared as if by magic. And, by a more powerful magic, sometimes I didn’t have to ask.

During the day, when he was at work, I walked the wide avenues, camera in hand, and learned a lot about what it meant to be Parisien in the late 1950s. I took my lunch in one of the porter’s bistros just by Les Halles, and learned what onion soup was really about.

On the weekday evenings we’d dine out as often as not, sometimes grandly, mostly in small restaurants where the food was good and there was little chance of him accidentally meeting one of his colleagues or family.

At the weekend he’d go off to spend Saturday evening through to Sunday afternoon with his parents, leaving me and the maid to sip white wine and munch fried potato and fish in the kitchen, shrieking with laughter as we swapped stories of the men we had known.

It was a great life. Like a grasshopper I had no real thought for the future, happy to live what was a greatly extended vacation and to take each day as it came.

And then, one day, the letter arrived, forwarded from London. “You will report to RAF…”

I was devastated. I rushed out to find a friend of my own age, and showed it to him, translating best I could.

“You will not go, of course,” he said.

“I must. It’s not something I can refuse.”

“Call me when you are ready to leave. I will drive you down to Calais.”

And that is how it was, in the late spring, I dropped my knapsack into the back of his MG sportscar, sat in the passenger seat, and was driven off into the soft Parisien night. I made no connection at the time of course but years and years and many life experiences later Marianne Faithful sang the Ballad of Lucy Jordan. It woke my forgotten memory, still does, and when I hear it I am transported back there and then, with the warm wind in my hair.

Not something I indulge too often, though. I don’t truly trust the clarity and accuracy of these old, old memories, lovely as most of them are. The long shadows have fallen over my vision of early days and, mostly, I like it that way.