Mists and mellow

Early September, the fruiting time, with plum juice and warmth and wasps in the air, when you know the summer is fading and the cold is coming. You can smell it in the air in the evening, in the morning now too. And think of times colder. Cold is different wherever you go. I remember the white cold of Norway that March I went there, rivers still hidden under feet of snow that lay on the ice., all the contours of the earth smooth and flowing. The other cold I found there too, when I went out without a hat and got caught in the rain, so cold it made me think I might die.

And the cold of the West Country, those mornings when I was young and we had no heat in the house until the fire was lit, apart from the choking paraffin heater at the bottom of the stairs that sent fumes into my room while I was asleep; a sort throat from November to March. Ice ferns on the windows inside, astonishing skies orange and yellow and pale blue with no clouds, as if all of Wiltshire was flying through space, so high above the earth in my council house bedroom, the concrete tiled rooftops, the sodium streetlights. My crystal radio with its wire loop of aerial strung around the front door porch. I haven’t felt that cold since then, since I left the place where I came from.

A different kind of cold out here in the East. A sadder one as the year spins into its last part, towards the long night. And one where now the summer is over the people have gone back to their real lives, leaving this pretend holiday place still bathing in the cooling waters of the retirees mantra: ‘it’s always been like this,’ as if a place was ever built where six out of ten houses are lived in only now and then.

I dreamed a mouse was trapped in the bin where I keep the chicken’s corn. In my dream I tip the bin slowly so the little mouse can escape. Yellow and orange mist as I leave the house this morning. Figs from the tree I planted half a decade ago this sweet Autumn. There are much worse times than these.

Ecoutez et repetez

Learning how to teach English as a foreign language is making me think about how I learned it. I can’t remember. Everyone around me did. It’s a problem. It’s made me realise something I first had an inkling of when I was supposed to be learning French at school; sometimes I don’t listen. I don’t always know when I’m doing it, or rather not doing it. I just know afterwards.

We had to write a list of names of things. I put le in front of every one of them. To this day I don’t remember hearing anything about masculine and feminine nouns before that, although everyone else in the class obviously had. Presumably, someone told them. I still have to look up the meaning of things like gerunds. I was never taught anything about them, including their existence. I don’t remember it, anyway.

The embarrassing thing, apart from everyone else knowing this stuff except me (yes, but I know stuff that other people don’t know, like the man who wrote Biggles came from Hertford) was that these were really ordinary words like chair and car and cat and for reasons that were never made clear, minkey. I think every French textbook family has had to have a singe in the house ever since Peter Sellers first essayed Clouseau back in about 1964. Which was even before I had to learn French. We learned by the example of la famille Bertillon.

Mr Bertillon was a douanier, which sounded to me onomatopaeically like a lorry driver but was in fact a customs inspector instead, a pretty exotic occupation in rural Wiltshire. His wife looked pretty exotic too, with a tightness of knee-length skirt that would have had lips firmly pressed together and arms folded across disapproving bosoms on the estate where I lived. They had two children, a dog, a cat and a minkey. Even more weird, they lived in a flat and went to the baker for bread instead of Gateway supermarket, one of several butchers depending what kind of meat they were looking for (ditto) and ultra-wierdly, made a big deal of going out to eat on Mr Bertillon’s birthday. I still remember him remembering one birthday dinner, each course as well as the Nuit St George, which I got the idea was a synonym for nights in white satin, or maybe Mme Bertillon.

Back then going out for a meal really was a big deal, but possibly rather less of a big deal in Trowbridge than Paris. We did birthday dinners too. You could go to the Woolpack or a pub out at Freshford that famously did food. The pub had a musician playing Harpers Bizarre covers and a stuffed monkey on a hi-hat stand that went up and down in time to the music. I do not know why. All of this was the reason it was such a strange and wonderful thing for Ben to go to Geales in Not Your Heart Away. The only fish and chip shop he would have known was the one you went to on the way back from school discos. They didn’t have seats, let alone a bar upstairs.

The Woolpack meant you wouldn’t have to drive as far. Drinking and driving didn’t come into it, or rather it did, but only on a practical level. Predictably for the times the Woolpack was a Berni Inn. That meant three things. Steak. Black Forest Gateau. A Mateus Rose by any other name.

I wonder now if there were English textbooks in France and what they put in them.

Mrs English: Is oven chips all right tonight? I got some of them faggots from Bowyers you like.

Mr English: But of course my darling. Ah, I remember that meal on my birthday! The keg Double Diamond! The crisps! The bag of chips on the way home. They don’t give you much in there.

Mrs English: Too right they don’t and no mistake. Mind, you don’t want to get done like you nearly did last time, when you went up on the kerb in front of that copper.

Somehow Mr Bertillon’s life seemed more, ‘ow you say. Like a life, really. I’ll tell you all about Bowyers faggots some other time.

Drinking at lunchtime

Back in the day, when that woman from the Darling Buds of May was still er, budding with Pop Larkin and hadn’t even met Michael Douglas who was still on the set of Wall Street, one of his lines was famously ‘Lunch is for wimps.’

Trickle-down Theory

He was playing Gordon Gecko, the character who also came out with the 1980s mantra, Greed is good and please let’s move swiftly on before all of us who were there have to admit how much we took that to heart. Gecko was the embodiment of the people who we now subsidise, the ones whose wealth mysteriously didn’t ‘trickle down,’ in theory or otherwise. Gecko did deals on a mobile phone the size of a housebrick, in his dressing gown, on the beach. Yeah, we all thought. That could be me one day.

Except for the lunch thing. Greed is good. Lunch is better.

The anti-lunchers tried to spin it as decadence (And your problem is, exactly?) and a loss of control. And that could happen. I remember going to lunch and being asked to order some drinks. Wine? Sure, you have whatever you like? She waited until the bottle was brought to the table and open before she said: ‘I don’t drink at lunchtime.’

It was presented as if I had a problem drinking when clearly I had no problem drinking at all, unlike the person who was going to lose control after two glasses of wine. Or said she would, anyway. Losing control of the amount she ate didn’t seem to be any kind of problem, but that was obviously a different story.

I never believed it. I’ve always thought if you can’t sit and share some food with someone, or at least a drink, there’s something deeply wrong with them. Life gets better when you sit and talk to people. Food makes a neutral, natural setting for that to happen.

And if I hadn’t been sitting having lunch with a friend this week I wouldn’t have bumped into someone I knew who also believed in the business efficacy of the working pub lunch, who’s just offered me some script-writing work and wants me to do a voice-over test.

Trust

Lunch is for wimps, is it? Missing lunch is for people who can’t be trusted.

And if you ever wondered where the darling buds of May thing came from it wasn’t just HE Bates. He nicked it from Shakespeare, who lived in Stratford on Avon, where I was born, where Ben and Claire and Peter and Liz in Not Your Heart Away went one evening a thousand years ago. It’s sonnet XVIII, since you ask.

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

As we say down the Plough & Sail. Sometimes. It depends on the company.

Rurality

Not Your Heart Away

“What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain. The happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”

Housman, The Shropshire Lad

You’ve seen it from a train window, like Ben on his way back from another desultory university interview in Not Your Heart Away. Or looking out through a car windscreen, once, twice, a thousand times and you’re still not really sure what that place is called. Even the time you sat down and looked at a map or Google Earth and worked out the place it probably is, you still know nothing about it. What it’s like. Who lives there. What they care about. Who they loved. You know now that you probably never will.

The spires are the churches that hardly anyone goes to because they forgot what they were for. When they were built they served not just as a place to worship but a place to meet, to talk, to tell stories, a village hall as well as a church. It was probably the one place in the village the squire’s word was only the second most important thing in your life, and the squire didn’t openly cross the parson if he had any sense. Not with all of Rome behind him. That changed, eerily like today. Something of one state was taken by a law decreed by another state. The friends of one kept quiet if they wanted an easy life and the friends of the second got rich. Nothing really changes much.

Change Happens

The farms did though. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting to know an old-fashioned farm a few miles from me. They need a business plan to change from being a hobby to a business, so I said I’d help. Because it’s been years since I was anywhere near a farm I’ve gone over and helped round up cows and do the non-milking parts of milking, to see what it is they actually do apart from worship Solihull LandRovers, like all British farmers and unlike all French farmers, who find a two-wheel drive van perfectly adequate for almost anything they ever have to do that doesn’t need a tractor. So I’ve been feeding. Cleaning. Fly-swatting. Walking. Moving straw. Hanging-up the salt lick. It isn’t what anyone would call a skilled job but it doesn’t do itself. And you can do an awful lot of harm by accident if you don’t keep thinking about what you’re doing. It gives you time to do something important though, watching the animals, seeing which one is feeding which calf. Which one that if you notice there’s something going slightly wrong in its life today needn’t cost you a fortune to sort-out next week.

It’s a tiny farming operation, just eight cows and four of them with calves. They only eat grass, no grain and because the soil is so thin down here on this edge of England and it hasn’t really rained for months the cows are being fed hay already, only just past half-way through the year, from big round bales that have to get up to the top field, the same as the salt lick does. Did you remember to bring a knife to cut the plastic off? Did you remember to put the plastic in your pocket? Because the cows are going to eat that if you don’t, and then they’re going to get the plastic stuck in one of their stomachs and that’s going to cost hundreds to fix, or a dead cow. So wake up. It’s not just about chewing straws.

Pushing back

The electric fences are old and sometimes there’s current in ones you were sure were off and no current in ones you needed to be on. You can’t lead a cow unless it’s got a ring through its nose. It’ll go where it wants to, so you need to think about what’s going to make it go where it wants to go. You can push it out of the way if you’ve got something to lever against like a cowshed wall and when you’re stuck between the breezeblocks and the cow you find a certain strength if you’ve any sense, before you promise yourself not to get stuck there again.

The milking machine only does one cow at a time, for the tourists who gather to see how it was done. The little ones are fascinated at the idea of a real cow just feet away from them, and they’d be more fascinated if they were left in the stall with the black and white rescue cow who came from a commercial dairy where by the way she acts the way to get cows moving where you want them was to kick them and flail them with sticks. Still, supermarket milk at 21p a litre to the farmer doesn’t get itself, does it? The old tourists remember, or say they do, but so often when the milk is warm in the churn and everyone is offered a taste the reaction isn’t ‘how delicious,’ which it is, but ‘yuk, it’s not cold.’ Tell me about the thriving food culture in the UK, the one you read about in every Sunday paper, even the tabloids. No, seriously. I’ll listen. I’ve got all day.

It feels like a land of lost content now, with the sun shining. It’ll be a different story of a March morning when the raw rain is sweeping in from the sea and the Spring won’t start. But it comes back to me again and again. One day maybe it won’t burn. One day.

One of those Facebook days

You know how it is

As the cliché goes, it’s complicated. We met about six months ago and argued about almost everything and about two months ago we came to an understanding. It’s very special. Quiet. Grown-up. A lot of the time we don’t say anything. Not very me-words at all. On Sunday we’d both had too much to drink and something was said I took badly. It was my ego that did it. What was said could have been true, just in the context it was said. I took it to mean in every context and I was hurt and upset. I did the stupidest thing I could chose out of my massive long list of utterly stupid things I keep handy, lightly oiled and ready for instant deployment for situations like this. I wrote on Facebook. I deleted it before I could send it. I wrote another, more restrained, much more bitter and pretentiously self-pitying version. I deleted that too.

Then I did a hugely uncharacteristic thing and thought about why it bothered me. The answers were pretty simple. Because I had drunk too much. Because I can see how it could have been true. Because of how I took it. Because of the stuff in my head. Because I was thinking like an idiot, projecting my own doubts and insecurities onto the words someone else had said and saying ‘you said that!’

That’s the trouble with words. Once they’re out you can’t decide what anyone else is going to think about them. You can say ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ but it doesn’t matter. Once it’s out you’d better hope the other person thinks the same way you do because there’s nothing else you can do but hope. You can’t decide how someone else is going to interpret your words. You can’t decide how they’re going to feel.

Brand New Degree

Once upon a time someone worked for me who as a brand new graduate said one of the most stupid, 100% gold-plated guaranteed just plain wrong things I have ever heard and trust me, I’ve heard a few: “I say what I like. People have to take me as I am.”

I don’t know what they teach in universities these days, but they don’t. People don’t have to do anything you think they have to do or say they have to do, unless they have a gun at their heads. Even then it’s still their choice, not yours. People don’t have to take you as they are. You don’t have control over what’s in their heads. But you need to be aware of what’s in yours.

So I didn’t send it. Nothing at all. Not even, ‘we need to talk.’ Because we really didn’t, not then. In the morning I checked to make sure I didn’t send the silly, petty, hurting, pathetic thing I’d thought, something more suited to coming out of the mouth of a fourteen year-old than the person I hope is me now. I hadn’t sent it.

Dead dogs in a skip

But it was still a shock when the same person sent me a picture of what looked like dead dogs in a skip on my phone. I thought maybe somehow my message had been sent after all. I thought it was a metaphor, or maybe just an indication of where I should end up along with the dogs for being such an arse. It wasn’t quite the Mafia-style horse’s head on my pillow, but it felt not far off. It was only when I went onto Facebook on a laptop that I could see the whole thing. The dogs weren’t dead although they were in a skip, tied up for transit in a way I can’t see the Royal Veterinary College recommending. The words that weren’t displayed on my phone were on a bigger screen explained what was going on, asking me to make it public.

I did more than that. I tracked down the phone numbers of the people who definitely know what was going on with these dogs and posted it, so they should be getting one or two calls around about now.

I think things are ok with my friend. I hugely hope they are. I really do try not to be a total arse these days. Mostly I think I avoid it. And I’m truly sorry when I don’t. I think I’m finally growing up. A bit, anyway.

Read all about it

I’m not from round ‘ere. Eerily like Ben in Not Your Heart Away, I grew up in a country town. Also like him, I don’t think I knew anything much about the countryside that I hadn’t got second-hand and decades out of date from Thomas Hardy or Housman. The process was helped by my school, the local C of E (it was just the school, not a lifestyle choice. People didn’t have lifestyles in those days) village Primary in Wiltshire, where we learned to read on Dick and Dora. Well, not me, my parents made sure I could read before I went to school. That said, Gibbon’s Decline And Fall was still a bit of a struggle. Dick and Dora wasn’t about co-eds in Minnesota at all, but a reading primer that I later found-out had been replaced everywhere else in 1949.

Well, not at Southwick Primary it hadn’t. It’s fair to say it totally warped my world view. Obviously every decent family had an Aga. Daddy went out to work every day, wearing a suit and tie (brown or dark grey in summer, of course. Why do you ask? Everyone knows that), slipping casually into a pair of flannels and a cardigan when he got home, invariably on time, by steam train. Daddy had a car with running boards and an income sufficient to keep Mummy at home in some style, long before our fetishisation of Agas and vintage cars felt stylish to anyone at all. Dick and Dora the children, (no, one doesn’t talk about contraception. Mummy and Daddy may well be and obviously are quite progressive in that respect, but one simply doesn’t) in their own turn looked after Fluff the cat (also eerily named after my cat, I think) and a dog. I can’t remember what kind of dog it was. Probably an Airedale or something similar, one of those sturdy dogs you used to see on wheels, pushed around as children’s toys. Well, I used to, anyway. It almost certainly wasn’t a Rottweiler or a trendy Iberian waterdog or a pit-bull, muzzled or not.

Chaps’s hats were expected to blow off in Spring gales as March roared in like a lion and went out like a lamb and somehow that was something to do with the lamb of god. Houses had fences around them, gardens provided eggs and vegetables as well as flowers and umbrellas (remember them?) blew inside out, usually in November, unless you were lucky enough to get one through to March, when the lamb/lion combination would mean another visit to the umbrella shop.

It marked me. In almost every garden I’ve ever had it hasn’t felt right unless there was rhubarb and mint growing and let’s face it, that isn’t the hardest stuff to grow on any rubbishy old soil. (Gardening tip: plant it. Leave it alone until it’s ready to eat. Eat it. You will have more rhubarb and mint than you know what to do with). One of the most pathetic things I ever saw was coupled with hearing one of them. The pub chef was walking down to the shop while someone told me what a great chef he was. When he came back he’d bought a jar of ready-mixed mint sauce. Obviously the pub had run out of vinegar, sugar and the bushels of the stuff growing practically everywhere. Maybe he’d read the new Janet and John books instead. I never have. Spiritually as well as at Southwick Primary, they were after my time. Childhood leaves its mark, good or bad. But adulthood is its own responsibility.

That Sort Of Girl

It definitely is my age. I’ve been thinking about sex more than recently. Well, my age and other stuff, anyway.

Back in the impossibly long-ago days when Ben scored his hat-trick, having sex with (always called “sleeping with” when everyone knew sleep was not involved) three separate girls in a month and only one of them his official girlfriend, sex was supposed to be part of the revolution. In Ben’s parents’ world of doodlebugs and rationing, sex was something people did in wartime because they thought they might die the next day. After the war, when people regularly died from a host of things that would make headlines today such as tuberculosis or measles or smog in London, decent people didn’t until they were married, all through the 1950s. As the poet Larkin (not to be confused with Lorca, quite a different thing altogether) noted, sex began with the Beatles in about 1963, which was quite late for him.

Poppy’s happy, enthusiastically guilt-free bisexuality was illegal until she was ten years old in 1969. Or rather if she’d been born a boy it would have been. The story goes that nobody could think of a way to tell Queen Victoria that girls left on their own when their men-folk went out for a spot of peasant-shooting sometimes found novel ways to keep themselves amused so when male homosexuality was made illegal (man, how straight is that?) there was no mention of female hom0sexuality on the statute because it officially didn’t exist. Like most stories it’s probably at least half wrong. In certain circles an Albert is a male piercing with attaches the penis to the scrotum with a small chain. Its name comes from that of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about how restrained the late Queen’s sex life actually was from that fact alone.

Of course, there were dangers. The biggest one was unpleasantness when a girlfriend found out their boyfriend was nobbing someone else, a devastating event which ended sometimes in tears and occasionally even outright public sarcasm. At least in Ben and Claire’s circles, the idea of attacking anybody because two people had got temporarily mixed-up about where one ended and the other began never crossed anyone’s mind. The other not-very-huge risk was clap, the joke non-specific word for what usually turned out to be Non-Specific Urethritis, a bit of an itch, a genital irritation which a ten-day course of antibiotics cleared up with no further ill-effects provided the patient remembered not to drink alcohol and took all the tablets. Unbelievably now, that really was about as bad as it got. There must, somewhere, have still been people with real, really mess-you-up sexually-transmitted diseases, but back then a lot of people thought the worst one you could get was marriage.

Sex was revolution. Sex was not being your parents. Not-death, a loose, wild, necessarily messy stain-on-the-HP sofa Richard Brautigan un-death, the totally naked rejection of the suffocating not-in-front-of-the-children, please-and-thank-you mind-your-manners Terry and June suburbia of the soul that no-body could be bothered to realise was the only sane reaction of a 1940s generation for whom heaven really was a place where nothing ever happened, because so much else already had. To their children, the Bens and Claires, Theresas and Petes, the Lizs and Poppies, each in their different ways unchained if not unhinged by free prescriptions of oral contraceptives, sex was kicking out the jambs, which had nothing at all to do with the Women’s Institute. Suddenly, nice girls did, enthusiastically, shamelessly, happily, almost entirely because they almost certainly wouldn’t get pregnant by accident. It was stepping over the traces, changing everything for freedom, if not for god, Harry and St George and in those days at least, freedom wasn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. Someone of Ben’s generation still believed at least one party had to say they loved the other one before they got their kit off; at least one of them was genuinely shocked when after they announced they were quite keen on a boy they’d met but didn’t know what to do about it another girl simply said ‘why don’t you just fuck him?’ It wasn’t Poppy, although it sounds very much like her. In fifteen years, half a generation, from the introduction of oral contraceptives the world changed from one where officially no-one did to everybody did. As Wordsworth said before Thatcher invented AIDS and condoms and girls who went to Art School, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. And in that respect at least, to be young was very heaven.

Off the rails

I think it’s my age. I’ve been thinking about delinquency. Just a phase I’m going through, probably.

Reading Not Your Heart Away poses some problems for God-fearing folk who saw England as a land where laws were supposed to be upheld, where decent girls didn’t, where the consequences of pre-marital sex were not just pregnancy and disease but much more importantly to some, shame and ruin. Alongside the “moral” issues (who decides on morality? Oh anyone, don’t worry about that, so long as they can say with a straight face that that’s what God meant) there is also a measure of straightforward criminality.

Under-age drinking. Landlords tolerating (or pretending not to know about ) it. Drug-taking. Being drunk in a public place. Having sex ditto. Possession of a controlled substance. Possibly (pending the outcome of luckily fictional) blood tests, drunk driving.

The victims of crime were variously unhappy. Theresa was in tears realising not only that Ben was never going to put a ring on her finger but also fancied someone else a lot more than her. Ben himself, who tended to blame Claire for messing his life up for ever when really, he did it to himself. Liz, but only in the sense that she was just pissed-off with Ben being an idiot, poncing around with rich girls. Poor Claire seems the most damaged, her whole life in free-fall after her parents decided provincial pettiness about who puts what where belonged with steam trains, the Home Service and rationing, all of which they remembered.

Some characters’s lives changed hugely for the better in the same atmosphere. Poppy, for example, who might once have faced a cloistered life, bursting exuberantly out of the closet with no apparent harm to herself or anyone else. Liz herself, who was mostly just irritated with Ben and waiting for the revolution she thought would topple the likes of Claire and her kind forever. Bad luck Liz. There was going to be a revolution but you didn’t know it would do exactly the opposite of what you hoped.

Talking About A Revolution

Another revolution is going on now. One where part-time policemen can decide whether you should be allowed to say things they object to in public not just then and there (Ben’s generation were just told to shut up and piss off home) but for up to three years. If you don’t like it you can go to prison. Think I’m making this up? Sadly, I’m not. It’s all over the news, or it would be if the BBC didn’t feel the Royal Baby (capitals to match its divinity please) was more newsworthy. Maybe it’s the same revolution that was starting back then.

It certainly isn’t the one Ben and his friends had any idea was going to happen. Back in the days when Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero, (‘a bit political,’ as Ben Elton used to say) Adam Ant (Thatcherite motto: your money or your life, although in the Falklands in 1982 she wanted both) and Haysi Fantayzee (John Wayne – bad. Anal sex – sorry, the jury’s still out on that one) were political voices in the land, in retrospect John Otway much more than Billy Bragg captured the true spirit of the 1980s revolution when he sang about the ongoing oppression of the rural poor by the bourgeoisie. (“Louisa said: Get me a saddle boy, and go and mount my horse. You and me together are going for a ride”). Gleefully, a whole generation grabbed its Ray-Bans and jumped into its Volkswagen Golf.

And what a ride it was. In a very few short years Ben’s generation dumped the leftover trappings of an alternative society founded on strawberry cigarette papers and patchouli, love, peace, unrestrained sex and gentle law-breaking. They swapped all of that for mortgages within a few years of graduation, silly spectacles, red braces and AIDS. A lot of them became seriously better-off in the process. A lot of them still mourn the freedoms that were lost.

The backstory

The screenplay of Not Your Heart Away went off to a proper, professional script-editor a few weeks ago. For flattering but still unknown reasons despite doing this all of a very long day for a living she wanted to have a look at my attempt at a screenplay to see if Ben’s longing for Claire’s jeans and their contents might be visualised in a format conducive to people paying £10 to eat popcorn in the dark.

Several people have said the beginning of the book is confusing. So did the script-doctor. Not because it was, in a Donnie Darko sense. (Come on, that whole film was confusing). But because unlike the book, you don’t get any time to explain things. You can’t say what a character thinks, unless he says it or sees it, so you can hear it or see it too. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but only if you know what you’re looking at. So the backstory needs filling in.

Where are we now?

Why is Claire where she is? I think that’s explained as the film unwinds, but why is Ben the way he is? And Liz? And Pete? And Poppy? Again, Poppy, being essentially anyone (yes, as in anyone would do, and if they’re funny and into Ben then so much the better, but let’s not kid ourselves about him. He might be the romantic lead but he’s not a romantic hero. He’s 19, for heaven’s sake. What were you expecting, Lord Byron in Levis?) she doesn’t need so much explanation, but the three main characters, they certainly do if we’re ever going to find out why they act like that.

Only one person reviewing the book has commented on Liz’s love for Ben, which I certainly intended to show when I wrote it but no-one has picked up on at all, save one of the most forthright reviewers. So even there, in book form, the backstory isn’t complete.

I’m finding the same with a new screenplay I’m trying to write, (School Lane) about a German boy who I met in a pub when he was an old man. Every time I start writing it I get the first scene down and then think: ‘that’s not the first scene. We need a first scene before the first scene, to see how they got there.’ That’s four times, so far and I don’t think it’s any nearer being the first scene yet.

Maybe that’s the secret. Start at the end and work backwards. Then at least I’ll know how it turns out.

Liz speaks

This is the review from the person whose voice I stole for Liz’s character:

Now that I have worked out the title of Not Your Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle Heart Away is taken from the wonderous A E Housman, I like this even more, except for the first bit which didn’t float my boat any more than it did Mr Bennett’s. And the end bit, which could do with tweaking. But the rest of it is really rather far out (as I am sure that Ben and Liz would have said in late 1970s, although probably not the posher Claire).

In so far as the writing is concerned, the style is journalistic and leaning towards being impressively taut; there’s a sort of “dashed off” Fitzgerald / Capote / Hemingway thing going on which makes you want to keep on reading notwithstanding your aggravation with one or two of the characters and the rather mesmeric plotlessness; all so resonant of late teenage years. As other reviewers have said, reading this book took you back to 1978, when so many 18 year olds lived lives dramatically different from their parents; when sixth formers had dreams and vagueish plans rather than A*s, focus and resumes, when you were allowed to drink illegally in pubs on the basis that the landlord kicked you out if you couldn’t at least pretend to be grownup.

Mesmeric Plotlessness

And what an insight into the mind of a boy / man – able to care about the rather uninspiring girlfriend who provided sex and wanted an engagement ring, whilst lusting after various others just because they were there and all the time being romantically obsessed with the vacuous posh totty. Which brings me to another Fitzgerald similarity – the way in which Claire drifts around carelessly in the manner of Daisy in Great Gatsby, oblivious to harm she causes; not least to the narrator by taking his heart away.

Loved the Salisbury Plain bits – anyone who was brought up in Wiltshire will confirm the night driving and Cradle Hill watching are truly evocative. And Peter was a beautifully drawn cameo role. Liz was absolutely fabulous and what a shame Ben didn’t listen to her sound advice – but what boys ever do listen to their good girl friends when dreamy posh girls are drifting by?
This book has a definite filmic quality – get the script written, Mr Bennett! And for the next book follow Ben on his adventures wherein a 1970s teenage boy becomes a man ………………..I just hope he keeps his fancies free from entanglements with vague, dim posh girlies, although somehow I rather suspect not.