Love Bites - Blotting My Copy Book

 

I had done what my dad would refer to as ‘Blotted my copy book’. I’d been there before but this time I’d excelled myself in the ‘What has she done now?’ misdemeanours and no amount of wide-eyed fictional protesting could talk me out of this situation or lessen the impact.

Returning home after two weeks away in Europe with school friends, I was exhausted after a lengthy over-land journey but still on a high and buzzing with enthusiasm to share thoughts on where I’d been. I thought they, my family, would be pleased to see me. I was naïve. Worse, I’d been stupid. Caught up in a moment fuelled by Slivovitz and the sultry, open air discotheque and, yes, of course it was my own fault.

“I hope you weren’t getting up to what I was doing when I got love bites!”  There was a hint of a snigger from the barmaid. I’d just dragged my suitcase through the pub door and she could see me from the bar. She was only a year older than me, married to my dad’s cellar man and had a baby daughter. She was lovely. She’ll never know how much.

My story was more innocent than her story implied. Mine was no more than a dare in Opatija. Who can get the biggest, reddest love bite out of the four of us up for it. We had become friendly – and it was just friendly – with some lads from a posh boarding school. Everything  above board and respectable, apart from the awful love bites.

Following the passing of my mother and re-marriage of my father, our family dynamics had changed considerably and everything familiar and comfortable to me had gone. It is hard enough to be a teenage girl without complications of where you fit in, where you belong.

It wasn’t many minutes into my arrival before the proverbial hit the fan. My dad was speechless. Even he couldn’t stand my corner on this one. His wife, with a ‘How dare you do this to us’ headless chicken routine, throwing in to my dad, ‘I knew she’d do something, I told you.’

I don’t suppose it helped when I reassured them that the love bites will have gone long before I go back to school and meanwhile, I’ll dab them with Witch Hazel and hide them with makeup, better than I have done.

I didn’t fit in and I didn’t belong, but for the time being I had a good friend in the barmaid who was always there for me and wanted me to do well for myself, not be tied down like she thought she was. Life goes on and we’ve both done ok.

By the way, love bites are disgusting and I promise I haven't had any since!

I’ve chosen poems that are not love-bite related, but take me back to that summer and remind me of my fascination with the poets concerned.

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine? –

See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822


She Walks In Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron 1788 - 1824


Thanks for reading, Pam x

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What the Butler Saw - A 'Y' Shaped Coffin

When I was a child I remember my father having a novelty pen. From behind clear plastic, a picture of a young, attractive lady smiled. She was fully clothed, but a twist of the pen and she was just in a bathing suit. The pen would have been quite a popular thing at the time. Blackpool promenade gift shops would have been full of them – perhaps they still are, I wouldn’t know, but I hope not. At the time, early to mid ‘60s, they were harmless fun and not intended to degrade women any more than ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines in the amusement arcades or live striptease shows. Dad always told me that she, the model in the pen, wasn’t a patch on my beautiful mother. And of course, she wasn’t. Nobody was.

I laughed at something being hilariously funny before I was old enough to understand what it was really about and got seriously told off by my mother who was horrified at my amusement. I ended up in tears. I hated being trouble and I didn’t know why she was so cross with me. It was to do with a woman being born with her legs apart and would need a ‘Y’ shaped coffin when she died. I know now that what I probably overheard was likely to be something to do with Joe Orton’s play ‘What the Butler Saw’ which was new and considered risqué, though I didn’t know anything about that at the time. I was thirteen and a naïve thirteen by modern day standards. My mirth was completely innocent. Had I known then what I know now, I certainly wouldn’t have shared it with my mother. This was the lady who wouldn’t let me watch ‘A Taste of Honey’ on television, around the same time, I think. I’d just got into it when she shooed me off to bed. She went downstairs to help in our pub and I crept back to our lounge, watching the film from the doorway but listening for her coming back. At the time, things in ‘A Taste of Honey’ went way over my head, probably the things my mother wanted to shield me from. During the last fifty-odd years, I’ve seen the film many times, I have the DVD and I’ve read the play. Shelagh Delaney, pure perfection.

The ‘Y’ shaped coffin comes from a famous quote from Joe Orton’s ‘What the Butler Saw’. When I was old enough to understand why my mother must have been so mad at me, she was no longer there, I couldn’t explain. She passed away later that year and I had to grow up without her and learn to steer myself through the abyss of life. I hope she wouldn’t be too dismayed at what I’ve read, studied, written and achieved.

At the age of thirteen, the names Shelagh Delaney and Joe Orton wouldn’t have meant anything to me but their written work was there, waiting for an older me and I have devoured every word, over again.

Joe Orton was before his time, lived his own life, took chances and packed a great deal into his thirty-four years before his partner murdered him and committed suicide.

Read at Joe Orton’s funeral:

Hilarium Memoriam J. O.

Some met together when he died
Not in the name of any God
But in his name
Whom they lost to the coffin,
The box which caused him endless mirth.
His lesson – which he would not read again.
Hilarity in death.
And now his censored spirit
In oblivion – free.
Perhaps it’s hard to see that
He’d have thought it funny – mad.
They will not weep for him.
They know that if they did
He’d think they’d missed the joke.
The joke that some would say
Was ‘in bad taste’,
And others who are calmer
‘Just a waste.’

                                         Josephine Crombie

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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