... & HOW I LOVED YOU

A carousel of the past, a gift of reminiscence

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“As long as you’re all right & bear in mind if you can, how much I love you & miss you & long for your comfort.”

I remembered Sally’s two daughters as children. One of them, Leila, I looked after as a child, taking her to school. I was even at her birth, doing the music. The second child, Rosa, I hadn’t met as an adult, and it was shocking to be confronted with these two handsome young women, who reminded me so much of their mother, both in their beauty and sweetness.

As friends of Sally’s from the seventies appeared, I struggled to make out who they were. But memories began swimming back to me in this low-ceilinged room by the river at Hammersmith, a neighbourhood where Sally and I spent much time in the late seventies and early eighties. It was a carousel of the past, a gift of reminiscence, both moving and disturbing. So long ago, but now disconcertingly present – and what was there to say?

I met Sally Whitman in 1976 in the bar of King’s College London on the Strand. I was with my new, adored brother, The Leather, who knew all the girls. Sally was pretty and, more importantly, looked as kind and curious as she was. A country girl from Norfolk, her conservative, farming parents were not well-read or cultured, but she yearned for a wider life. There was nothing dark or pained about her; her face was open and sincere.

I slept with Sally for the first time on the night of my twenty-first birthday in her flat at 215 North End Road, just up the road from the famous punk pub, The Three Kings. The next morning, I rang my mum to tell her what time I would be back for lunch. She told me my father had been taken to hospital, having had another heart attack. Was there, I wondered, a connection between my sexuality and the possible death of my father? This, of course, would be a question that my analyst and I would worry over for the next thirty years.