Marrying My Muse

One popular myth about writers is that they are tortured souls whose work derives from unrequited love, financial hardship and general misery. They scratch away at their manuscripts by the light of a guttering candle in some solitary garret.

Not me. I dispensed with my misery in my childhood. Thirty four years ago this month I got married and my success as a writer, such as it is, I attribute to the emotional stability I have enjoyed for a third of a century. I work best when I’m happy. I run all my writing past Rosie, my wife, and if she says something needs to be cut or changed, I cut it or change it.

However, back in 1972 the announcement of my intention to get married was not well received. The seventies followed hard on the heels of the intoxicated sixties like the onset of a colossal hangover. Social norms had been toppled and were lying all about us in disarray. The job of clearing up after the party had not yet begun. Perhaps that explains the general negativity of my friends at university. One flatmate summed it up by responding to the great news with the question, ‘Why?’

‘Because we love each other and we want to spend the rest of our lives together,’ I told him. He looked unimpressed. ‘You don’t need a piece of paper to do that.’

My parents were even less enthusiastic. ‘Don’t tell your father!’ was my mother’s reflex response. ‘I think he might notice, Mum,’ I pointed out. ‘At least wait until the end of the summer,’ she begged.

Wearily I agreed, eighteen years of living with my father having conditioned me to a process of walking on eggshells. When the end of the summer came I decided I would wait no longer and broke the news. His reaction was entirely predictable. He objected and said he would not be coming to the wedding. I told him he wasn’t invited. That was the end of communication between us for a very long time.

In the end he did come to the wedding. He was prevailed upon by his sister, a nun in Philadelphia, who came over from the US with the specific intention of making him do the right thing. She was my father’s younger sister but the only person on earth he seemed to fear. A ferociously patriotic, hard line Republican, she was not standing for any nonsense. He was going to the wedding whether he or I wanted him to and that was the end of the matter.

Earlier that summer I had come to the end of my time at university and was working on a building site while applying for work as a secondary school teacher. The news of my impending marriage had leaked out onto the site where it was greeted with ironic amusement. One of my fellow labourers, a hard-drinking man, gave voice to the considered wisdom of the site in a fine example of metonymy: ‘It’ll be all sweetness and light until she gets you to the altar. Then you’ll see a change. You’ll come home at night to the cold dinner and the hot tongue.’

I’m pleased to say that his prediction proved wide of the mark.

A Secret Place

Do you remember the first time you kissed someone and really meant it? If you want to write for young people I think you need to remember such things. I was sixteen with long curly hair like Marc Bolan when it happened. I had ‘snogged’ girls before of course, but only as a points-scoring exercise. This was a different thing altogether.

I saw Diana for the first time at the house of a friend of a friend. There were about seven or eight people in the room that night, listening to music, drinking cheap wine; some were passing joints around. I didn’t care about any of that. I couldn’t stop looking at the girl in the corner of the room with the almond eyes. I thought she was incredibly beautiful. That was the word that filled my head. Not pretty, or sexy, or attractive. Beautiful

Weeks later, when we were ‘going out’ together, I told her what I thought that night. To my surprise she punched my arm, really hard. ‘Don’t say stuff like that!’ she told me angrily. It was no good me insisting that I meant every word. She wasn’t prepared to listen. She wanted only honesty, she told me firmly. But all that was in the future.

I left my friend-of-a-friend’s house that first night with my head full of her, though we’d hardly spoken. How I envied other people’s social lives that seemed so full of exciting opportunities, unlike my own narrow little world. I felt quite certain I would never see her again.

But only a week later on a Sunday evening at the Round House in Chalk Farm where I regularly went to see rock groups, I walked right into her. To my surprise she seemed just as pleased to see me as I was to see her.

We spent the whole evening together. I have no idea what we talked about. I expect I babbled, but she agreed to meet me in the same place the following week. I don’t know how many evenings I spent at the Roundhouse with her before I plucked up the courage to kiss her. Three, perhaps. Four. How could I have been so slow? Because I didn’t want to spoil things; I was terrified I might drive her away.

It was right at the end of the evening. I remember that I was wearing a heavy blue ex-RAF greatcoat. Much too big for me but very trendy at the time. We were standing near the exit and she was about to go home. I put my hand up to her cheek and gently tilted her head towards me. She smiled, slid her arms inside the coat and wrapped them around me. Then I closed my eyes and put my whole soul into that kiss.

That relationship lasted until I went to university two years later but it seemed to me that it had been going downhill for at least twelve months. She so often seemed dissatisfied with me, critical of the things I said.

In the end, I took the coward’s way out and wrote her a letter. But she wasn’t prepared to be dismissed like that. She insisted on meeting me face to face. It was the honest thing to do.

So we met up for one last time. She mustered all her dignity. I felt ashamed of myself. ‘I was looking in my diary,’ she told me. ‘I read the entry for the first time you kissed me. I wrote that I loved you.’

I was speechless. All I could think of was, why had she never said that before? It was no good telling me now when it was too late. I had always been obliged to guess at what she thought of me. And I had tended to assume the worst. Gradually, the relationship had degraded into a series of misunderstandings and now it was too late to put it back together again. But I didn’t say any of this because I was too young to understand it myself. I just stood there like a fool.

It would never have worked between me and Diana. Even if we’d met later on in life, I’m sure she would have found me just as annoying and I would have always been left guessing at what went through her head. But I will always remember the night the whole world melted away as she slid her arms beneath my coat and kissed me back. That night I discovered a secret place, one that I had never known existed but where I had always wanted to be. I walked back to the tube station with my blood singing in my veins.