My First Love Was a Lady in Red (Juniors in general)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	Juniors in general
Date:	08/03/03 (133 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The sweetest feeling

Disadvantages: It had to end, It's a bloody awful song!

The opening lines of Nancy A. Collins' short story "Thin Walls" read thus..."There are some personal milestones that have a way of cementing themselves to your gray matter. One of these is your very first apartment."

What she doesn't say is what the others are. First love must be among them. The first time you do things always seems to have that additional, mystical quality about it, that often makes it stand out in the memory as something more special than it was. The event seems to end up being placed on a pedestal, only recalled occasionally, but always with great fondness.

The same is also true of the negative. "The first cut is the deepest", sang Cat Stevens, but subsequent cuts often bleed more and hurt for longer. With love, as well as with heartbreak, those original experiences seem all the more important, as it's a part of growing up, and because there is nothing to compare them to.

But, enough! You want to hear the sordid tales of my first love, right? Trawling back through my memory unearths various candidates, but they're not the one I'm seeking. My first true love was not the little blonde girl my mother has a photo of me kissing on a sun drenched beach in Torremelinos in the Summer of 1977. Even then I was dating older women - I wasn't yet 3 years old while she, as I?ve been told, was. It must have been a typical holiday romance, as I can't even remember her name. For those of you with an interest in that sort of thing, 1977 marks the last time I snogged a blonde, to the best of my recollection.

It's not Helen, who I had a thing for at my first infant school back in Kent. My parents broke my heart that time, by moving us out of town, and meaning I was unable to continue our budding romance into the heady heights of Riverview Junior School. It's not Karen, who I met at the Junior School I ended up at. She, now I think about it, was prob
ably my first platonic female friend. It's not even Emma, a tall and beautiful blonde who was the desire of every nine year old that Summer we first discovered kiss chase on the field at Meopham Junior School and who punched me the one and only time I caught her, and ran away before I ever claimed that long awaited kiss.

No, when I think of my first love, it's my class' other Emma that springs to mind. She was in a different class to me for the first couple of years and only really appeared on my horizons when we were in the final year, and being taught by the then Deputy Head. Although neither of us knew it then, she would be the start of what now almost seems to be a tradition - I've nearly always gone out with women whose initial was in the first half of the alphabet. And no, I'm not listing them to prove it! There was a rogue Sarah in there, but everyone makes one mistake, right? And her surname started with a letter in the first half of the alphabet anyway!

But, back to Emma. This is what you came for. In the fickle way of the eleven year old, and of many older men, to be fair, she didn't come to my attention at first, even though she was quickly good friends with Karen, my not quite first love. Believe it or not, I was quite a studious kid back then, working towards making my parents happy by passing my 11 plus and going to Grammar School (I did, by the way) and desperately trying to gain some ground back on Joseph from the other final year class, who was the only person in the school ahead of me in both Maths and Reading. I never caught him in the end, although we were the only two boys to pass the eleven plus with flying colours.

That done, time to relax and think towards our leavers disco. Having a girlfriend, and someone to share the slow dances with at that disco had never occurred to me before. And this year my mother wasn't going to be helping out at the door, instantly removing one vita
l barrier for my attractiveness to women. Of course, I was still ugly, but it was likely to be fairly dark in there anyway.

Emma, of course, started to appeal in the normal way. My best friend fancied her something rotten. He even went so far as to give her a card and an Easter egg just before that particular holiday. He got ribbed by the rest of us about that, but he was actually way ahead of the rest of us, who had progressed from kiss chase...but only about as far as football in most cases.

And so began the only time I have ever actively campaigned to steal a girlfriend from another man. Making sure I was nice to her. Walking her home from school, which was on my route anyway, but there you go. I guess it was fairly obvious what I was doing, but back then, she fell for it, and when I casually asked if she would like to go to the disco with me, she said yes.

The excitement in our house that night was palpable. It wasn't a proper date, really, as we were going to arrive and leave separately, but it was my first! And so I pulled out what I imagined to be my best clothes, and got ready in a fever pitch while my brother, four years younger than me and still in receipt of the worldly knowledge that only Infant School can provide muttered "Girls! Ugh". That he was still saying more or less the same thing when he was eighteen is irrelevant to this story. He'd changed his tune by twenty one, I can tell you, but anyway...

The disco started in much the way of any normal school disco. The girls were on one side of the room, the boys on the other. There were some glances across the floor, but eye contact was broken as soon as it was made, and no words were spoken. Eventually, as is often the way, the consumption of strong drink, in this case Coke and Lemonade, loosened our inhibitions. It was the Summer of Madonna and Billy Ocean, although the song I remember being played most often was Sister Sledge's
"Frankie", which had been number one the year before. The chasm between the sexes closed. And, finally, I made my move. Would she dance with me to Boris Gardiner's "I Want to Wake up With You"? No, she wouldn't! Heartbroken, I retreated to the opposite wall, slightly emboldened when she also turned down Mark, the guy I'd "stolen" her from.

Late in the evening, there had to be one last try. As Chris de Burgh's "Lady in Red" played, I asked her to dance again, and was accepted. We danced in the awkward way of the young, hands clasped tight to each others...elbows. I couldn't dance, and still can't, but at that range at least I couldn't step on her toes. We moved closer, and ended the song dancing cheek to cheek and, miracle of miracles, I still managed not to tread on her. The evening ended, parents pushed into service as taxis arrived, and we departed. Into the future of Senior School, her to Gravesend, me to Dartford. And we never danced again.

I did see her several years later, when we both had Saturday jobs in town. Me in the MacDonald's, and her in Mason Hall, a shop I frequented fairly regularly as it had a sizeable book section, and I'd become a Stephen King fan by then. She even sold me my first copy of "The Stand". I tried to rekindle our brief romance, but she told me bluntly she wasn't interested.

And so the story ends. But, to this day, I think of her every time I hear "Lady in Red". Sickening, isn't it?

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