FIRST LOVE

I was nowhere, except in the wind and the rain, with this fabulous view, and a girl I hardly knew, reading a novel we couldn’t understand.

Dear Readers,

We are almost finished with Shattered, a book composed of my hospital blogs, writing that was originally published here. Thank you everyone for all your support.

To mark the occasion, I’m holding a flash sale;

This week, yearly subscriptions will be priced at just £25.00.

That’s less than three pounds a month for all my writing.

Your contributions go towards my care, which include physio, massages, hydrotherapy and equipment, all of which is essential for my physical maintenance.

Love to you all,

Hanif

(Photograph by Markéta Luskačová.)

The best day of my life so far was the day I left that awful school, where I felt oppressed and lonely, to say the least. I cycled home whooping with joy, something I’d never done before. I was ecstatic; I was free, the future had opened.  

A few months before, I was suspended from school after getting into a dispute with my Gauloises-smoking French teacher, who had insisted on referring to me as Pakistani Pete. In return, I would call him by his nickname, Jock, causing the class to crack up.

I was sent to the headmaster, Mr French, for punishment. He told me to bend over to be caned. I refused. Mr French suspended me and wrote a letter to my parents. I withheld the letter, and during the week of the suspension walked around Bromley High Street, feeling desolate and alone, sitting in the Wimpy Bar.

One afternoon, I wandered into Ravensbourne College of Art, which was a place I knew well since I delivered their newspapers every morning on my paper round.  Walking in at seven o’clock, I would find joint butts and condoms on the ground, and thought, ‘this is the place for me,’ since as well as being an art college, you could also study A-levels.

I talked with one of the lecturers, and he gave me a place in September. It turned out later that I had done badly in my O-Levels and, in fact, had acquired only four, one of which was Art, and that had been done by my mother, who had been a proper artist.

Despite my appalling results, I got a place. It was 1973 and the college was hippyish. The common room stank of dope and patchouli, most people had long hair, wore Afghan coats, bell-bottoms and the rest of it.

I was in my second year, I think, the first time I met Jane. She was in my English class, where I sat at the back, too nervous to communicate with the other students. My previous school had been single-sex, and this new class appeared to be mostly composed of beautiful, fey bohemian girls, one of whom was pregnant, apparently.

The talk was tough, of abortions, adoptions and the relationship that at least two of the girls were having with the English teacher. Jane and her friend teased me about my paper-round, which I still did; and the other girls giggled as well, asking me what time I got up, falling about laughing. They would never be out at that time of the morning.

I didn’t have a girlfriend, although the year before I had an on-and-off fling with another girl from the college. I recall cycling up to her house in a posher part of Bromley, looking through the fence of the back garden, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, because her father, according to a friend, had banned me from going into his house because he wouldn’t allow his daughter to go with a Paki.

During my second year at college, I applied to university. My criterion was that it should be as far away from South London as possible. I didn’t think about the inconvenience, the hours on a coach.

The University of Lancaster was a place I knew nothing about, I could barely point to it on a map. But I had been reading a lot of Kerouac, becoming a big fan of his adventures into the unknown. My plan was to drop a lot of LSD, take off on a trip across Britain and see what turned up.

I ran into Jane in Bromley High Street that summer before I went to Lancaster. She invited me over to her house, just off Hayes Lane, for dinner. Her father had died not long ago, and she was living with her mother. Her brother was away at university. 

She lived in a big house; certainly larger than our cramped two-up-two-down. But it seemed empty and neglected. We ate upstairs in her bedroom, lying on beanbags. She had a record player, and we drank cider and wine while we ate chilli con carne.

At one point she played me a record, and watched me as I listened. It was a sound I had never heard before, and I liked to think I knew a lot about contemporary music, mostly pop and rock, but also more adventurous stuff like Soft Machine.

It was In a Silent Way by Miles Davis, and we played it all night. That muted, haunting, metaphysical trumpet can barely be described, though it has been imitated often enough. She also gave me a book called Bird Lives about Charlie Parker, of whom I had never heard.

We got drunk, and what with the music, the booze, and the girl, it all got too much and I threw up. I must have passed out on her mattress on the floor, and woke up in the night, disturbed by a bitter weeping close by. Jane told me her mother cried most nights since her husband’s death.

I was young and naïve, and I was just getting acquainted with the adult world, which amazed and freaked me out. I was starting to change in relation to it. This was also the time when I became interested in women who were older and more sophisticated, women who could take me somewhere else.

I went up to Lancaster in the September of 1973. Jane had become a nanny, looking after the kids of the editor of the Daily Express in West London.

Lancaster was a modern, all brick prison-like place, dumped in the middle of nowhere, alienating and weird, and where the normal rules of sociability had been suspended, as I would learn. I had a room on the outskirts of campus and it was a wild student environment. The other kids were up all night, drinking and carousing wildly. My floor was entirely smashed up, of which I approved, though I made no friends and spoke to no one. I didn’t want to fit in and get used to being there.

I was working on a novel and didn’t go to any lectures.  Jane and I wrote to each other every day and then she came up to stay with me. We spent a couple of nights together in my single bed. Jane was stern, wilful and argumentative. I guess she had been a feminist for some time; she wore big clothes to cover her body, never wearing a bra. It was the first time a woman had touched me properly, it seemed traumatic, the amount of pleasure people could give one another.

I told her I was going to move out next term into a house not far from the sea in Morecombe. I hadn’t actually seen the place, but I knew the guy who owned it; he had been at Ravensbourne College. Jane wanted to leave London, so she and I agreed that we would live together in this house, though we barely knew each other and really had no idea what we were doing or where we were going.

After getting to know her a bit, though she was enigmatic about her past, I got the idea that she had been involved in drugs, taking heroin for a while. I think she may have also spent time in a psychiatric institution. She was intense and had a strong desire to learn. Why she liked me I had no idea. I thought of myself then as a shy, reserved kid, not exotic or old enough for her.

It took a day to get there, dragging my suitcase and typewriter all the way from South London to Heysham Head, Morecombe, close to the nuclear power station.

We had a large room on the ground floor, with a desk, double mattress and a record player. We shared a kitchen with Rick and his girlfriend, who lived upstairs, where there was a box-room with my typewriter in it; I would write every day, a practise I believed would get me out of the directionless spin I was in.

This was the seventies and the north of England. It was cold all the time; you could never get warm. Once a week we would have a bath. The tub was filthy and I would get in and out within five minutes for fear of emerging dirtier than before.

Jane and I had a began a sexual relationship with some kissing, touching and masturbation but we hadn’t got to know each other’s bodies yet, or the other’s sexual preferences. At that age, I didn’t even know what a sexual preference would be like.

Where we lived was miles away from the university. The buses were rare and infrequent. The journey, as far as I can remember, took an hour and a half. Jane and I went into the university a couple of times, I may even have attended a lecture and met my tutor but that was pretty much the extent of my university experience.

Certainly I didn’t do any studying, but Jane and settled into a routine. In the morning I would go up to my study and work on my novel, while downstairs Jane began to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, in the Scott Moncrieff translation.  When I came down at eleven o’clock for a break she would masturbate me, then herself, before telling me what had been going on in Proust’s novel.  I loved hearing what the characters were up to. You wouldn’t believe that it was one of the most complex and tedious novels from the way she talked about Swann, Odette and Baron de Charlus. After she finished each volume – and there were twelve – I would read it myself.

In the afternoons we would walk down the hill to Morecombe Bay which is an extraordinary sight, both beautiful and threatening. The bay is perilous. You could easily be sucked into the sand, which was soft, or cut off by the tide, which was quick. We liked to walk on the edge of it. In 2004 it became infamous for the cockle picking disaster, where twenty-one undocumented Chinese migrants were drowned by an incoming tide.

I liked the feeling of disconnection and alienation. I had been brought up in a street where everyone was familiar. Now, I was nowhere, except in the wind and the rain, with this fabulous view, and a girl I hardly knew, reading a novel we couldn’t understand.

On a couple of occasions we hitchhiked out to the Lake District. Another time we went to the movies to the see The Sting, but mostly we stayed in our room. Jane would cook huge meals composed of six courses, and we would eat over long periods until we were completely stuffed. On a good evening, if all went well, we would lie back on the bed and listen to Rick and his girlfriend having sex, discussing the positions they might be in, or which particular act they were attempting, according to the presenting noises. 

When Rick and his girlfriend were out, we would sneak into their room and borrow their Bob Dylan records which we would listen to over and over, Highway 61and Blonde on Blonde, in particular. Jane had brought some of her favourite records with her: Chopin and Mahler, and Verdi’s Requiem Mass of which even now, years later, I know every note. I knew nothing about this side of music but I wanted to learn, I didn’t want to be left out.

Fiercely intelligent, Jane was ahead of me, pulling me along behind her, expanding my mind. I think she was in mourning or recovering from something, her father’s death and other crises. One time, we went back to Bromley to see our families and I remember her mother, who was a terrifyingly stern Scottish woman, a schoolteacher, taking me aside and saying, ‘Are you taking care of my daughter?’ I just stared at her, backing away; I had no idea what she meant. Her daughter was taking care of me in all sorts of ways but I had no idea what it was to take care of another human being. I’d never done it before; I didn’t know what it entailed.

At the end of the college year, we moved back to our respective houses in Bromley, and took summer jobs at Cosmos, a travel agent.

It was grim to go back, nothing had changed. My father always opened my mail – ‘we have no secrets in this family’ – and this time he got a shock. Lying in bed, he started yelling, “What is ‘F’? What is this bloody ‘F’?” I rushed into the room to see Dad holding my university exam results. “Does it mean you got a first?”

“No dad. I’m afraid it means I failed.”

“In every subject?”

“Yes dad, in every subject.”

I informed him that I hadn’t turned up to any classes or exams. I just hadn’t fancied it. He was pretty annoyed with me. I was glad he cared so much, but I was still in my Kerouac period where experience, free will and moving from interest to interest was all that mattered. Not long after this, dad had another heart attack, and returned to hospital.

While Jane and I were living in Lancaster, we didn’t have any drugs or the desire to take them. Back in Bromley, depressed about my academic failure, and with no idea what I would do next, I wanted to take more LSD, but it didn’t interest her. I would go round her house in Hayes, tripping off my head, and not tell her, something I’ve done with several of my girlfriends, disappearing into some private stoned space and creating a distance.

When we were bored, she would pretend I was her puppet, dressing me in some of her clothes; scarfs, big shirts, and other feminine attire, putting makeup on me. With Jane, I felt overpowered, she had taken control, I was losing my agency. The conflicts essential to a relationship – those that signify difference – were disappearing. It was time to escape.  

Jane and I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew I wasn’t ready to work for a living, at least not in the conventional way. We went to see Lindsay Anderson’s production of The Seagull with Helen Mirren. Jane had been so disturbed by an argument we’d had on the train there that she insisted we walk out during the first act. It really pissed me off; and that was that for me and Jane, from my point of view, though we carried on until the autumn.    

The next academic year I got into Kings College London by somehow convincing Professor Winch, head of the philosophy department, that I would be a suitable student, despite the fact that I was an academic disaster. The 70s was a great period like that; you could talk others into things, the system wasn’t so structured, it wasn’t all about exams. If someone liked you, and you could persuade them that you were interesting, you could get a gig, they would give you a chance.

I went to King’s College London and Jane went to the LSE to read politics. During the previous few months she had been working in Brixton as a road sweeper, I had seen her a couple of times and she had become what looked like a butch lesbian with spikey hair, donkey jacket and Doc Martin boots. She told me that there were a lot of lesbians doing council work in Brixton and the separatist feminist scene there was fascinating.

The following year I met Sally Whitman, and she and I began living together in West Kensington. She was like Jane insofar as she was intelligent, a feminist, original and combative, but she was also milder, and we could be more tender with one another.

The next time I saw Jane, and this was the last time, was when I invited her to my new pad in Barons Court. It was March, 1989, just after the fatwa against Rushdie. Jane had been in Africa teaching Muslim girls English and to my surprise, in her perverse way, she supported the fatwa. She told me I was the only person she had met so far who was on Rushdie’s side.

Not long ago, her brother contacted me on Facebook saying he wanted to apologise for his behaviour during my relationship with his sister. I remember him being an upper-middle-class, rugby-playing posh boy, staring at me with contempt across the dinner table. But I realise now that in my teens I was used to being in scenes where I didn’t fit in, and where there was hostility.  You expected it as a hippy, and there was a lot of envy about.  Since I was on acid, I hardly noticed.