One of the problems of bounding spontaneously through life, I have long since discovered, is that people do tend to react to me quite strongly. I’d like to say that my life is therefore littered with heavily breathing Valentinos bowled over by my outgoing temperament. My radiance even. (I’d love to be able to say that.) But, alas, the strong feelings I seem to arouse rarely work out in my favour.
If I were asked for a quick, off-the-cuff description of my personality I. suppose that I’d have to say that I see myself as your fairly average Mrs Miniver – with a strong dash of Auntie Mame. Which definitely doesn’t suit all tastes.
‘Tell me,’ hisses a suspicious lady to my husband, well within my earshot, ‘Why does she wave her arms about like that?’
‘You don’t really mean that you’d rather dance to those Rolling Stones than to Englebert! You are just joking aren’t you?’ murmurs a worried, ever-so-matronly contemporary during a current coffee break.
‘Did you wear those black tights on purpose, dear?’ whispers my mother. ‘Or couldn’t you find any normal-looking ones?’ All of which might lead one to suppose that I soon see the error of my ways and go sedately swirling through the rest of my days, pale-legged and with hands clamped carefully to sides. The heck with that. Somewhere in this world, I tell myself firmly, there must be whole shoals of people eagerly searching for tall, arm-waving, black-legged girls who really move it to the beat.
And the trouble is that there are. But not, alas, equally outgoing, non-processed souls with whom one can laugh and leap and push back a frontier or two. No, it seems that great swoopy types like me stir a whole cross-section of folk we didn’t have in mind at all …
Take Ernie, our landlord from way back. He was definitely stirred. Pale, skeletal, hairless Ernie whose departed wife’s fur coat was left hanging in our closet during our year’s tenancy.
‘She’s gone now. It would really suit you,’ yearned Ernie, catching me many a time alone as he sidled in with his master key to ‘check things over’.
‘I just wonder where she’s gone,’ I complained to David, who didn’t seem to notice any sinister undertones. Until that day when I finally plucked up the courage to ask where the locked door at the end of our hallway led to.
‘I‘ll show you,’ rasped our Ern, drawing out a whole bunch of master keys. Bounding bravely forward I found, to my horror, that not only was I leaning out of a doorway that led absolutely nowhere except to a sickening drop of several floors to an overgrown garden plot below, but that Ernie, while explaining that he ‘meant to put a fire escape in eventually’, was thoroughly goosing me from behind with a relentless, bony hand.
‘Well, good grief David, I wasn’t going to move forward and I couldn’t move backward. I had to hold still!’ I cried later, as we started packing and looking for new digs.
Then there was the truly awful old chap in the pink socks I worked with for a while, who gripped my knee and chortled: ‘By crikey, as soon as I saw the kind of girl you are I knew I’d clicked!’
(Really! Where?’ I murmured, but he didn’t seem to notice.) Oh yes, the world is full of folk just waiting, it seems, for outgoing BB types to bound into their lives. And not just chaps either.
There was the not very happily married couple I knew slightly, felt a bit sorry for and invited to a party along with heaps of assorted friends, acquaintances and downright strangers. It turned out to be quite a good party. Everybody meshed. By that magical stroke of luck all hostesses pray for, it had lift-off. Swept up in the general euphoria our couple stopped bickering just long enough to decide to make us their Instant Best Friends.
‘See you around,’ we said blithely, as they left. And we did. All the time. Morning, noon and night. When it seemed that our Christmases, our New Years, our birthdays and our anniversaries were all rapidly becoming a part of their own Master Marriage Therapy Plan we began to make excuses.
‘What’s the matter?’ they said, turning up anyway and scowling. ‘What have we done to offend you?’
On the credit side there is the elegant lady who came up to me at the big social event, patted my hand and said: ‘You don’t know me but I’ve been watching you and I just want to say – don’t ever lose that vivacity!’
Which was very nice and very flattering. How was she to know that, at the very same gathering, the old BB pzaz attracted: (1) a man with red eyes who seemed confident I was – in his words – ‘available for sex’, (2) a budding psychiatrist who whipped out a notebook and started questioning me closely on my attitude to hot baths, thunderstorms and water in general and (3) an implacable soul who said I was just the sort of person she was looking for to make pot holders for her bazaar. Bounding through life isn’t all fizz and frolic. But it certainly is eventful.