I knew that Joan Taylor fancied me when she switched from the L8 to the L3. She lived in Bootle, a mile or so away, which had a wider choice of buses to take her to Seafield Convent, the school down the road from ours, so when she began to appear on the upper deck with a mate or two in tow, I dared hardly hope that the reason was me. She was lovely. She was a dream. Many of the older boys, those Brylcreem-tongued lotharios of the lower sixth, thought they were in with a chance, but when she crumpled up her bus ticket and threw it at me (if the numbers added up to twenty-one it meant ‘I love you’) I could have eaten my satchel.
We were fifteen-year-olds, and as our parents knew each other and wouldn’t have approved (‘There’ll be plenty of time for that nonsense when you’ve passed your exams!’) we had to keep our passionate affair clandestine. My sister still recalls to my eternal shame and embarrassment how I would use her as a decoy on Saturday evenings: ‘Mum, I’m just going to the pictures with our Brenda.’
‘You’re taking your little sister? Well, that’s very good of you.’
Joan would be waiting outside the Stella or the Regal, and she and I would head for the back row, leaving Brenda to sit on her own down in the front stalls. Sometimes I would give her a threepenny bit to buy one of those waxy cardboard tubs of ice cream with a flat wooden spoon, part-payment, part-bribe, and to her credit she never grassed. It was all unbridled innocence, in fact, and one particular night remains etched into my memory, like … like a memorable etching. It was shortly after Christmas and I had bought her a present with the money I’d been saving up for weeks. A tiny bottle of ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume by ‘Bonsoir’, which came in a little midnight-blue box with stars and the Eiffel Tower picked out in silver relief.
Cut to a park bench in Bootle: Joan is wearing the perfume and I am sitting with my arm around her. The sky is the colour of the perfume box and the stars stand out in silver relief. We kiss. Five power-lines cross the parchment moon to compose a stave and I half expect nine pigeons to land, C D E, F G F E D C prompting me, on the count of three, to sing: ‘By the light, of the silvery moon …’ We linger over the pause before the next kiss. I become the Eiffel Tower.
Evening in Bootle. Bliss.
Catching the L3 bus meant that Joan and I would walk together through Coronation Park. Past the putting and the bowling greens, the meteorite, fallen and homesick, sited in a bed of flowers, around the boating pond and up the steps into Everest Road. As we were part of a stream of schoolkids there was no holding hands, no kissing, although a good deal of teasing and pushing I shouldn’t wonder. As we neared St Mary’s school gates I would either walk on ahead or fall back, letting her cross the road to rejoin her friends and carry on to the convent school. One Wednesday morning just as Joan had said goodbye and run on ahead, a hint of Evening in Paris fluttering in her wake, Brother Gibbons leaped out from behind a tree and grabbed me by the ear. Brother Gibbons was the new Headmaster and I wondered if he had been up in the tree all night. Like his primate namesake, swinging from branch to branch through the trees in the park, his long arms extending out from the sleeves of his cassock.
‘You’re a disgrace, boy, a disgrace.’
‘Sir?’
‘Horseplay! Wait until I tell your parents about your horseplay … with a girl!’
‘Sir?’
‘Go now straight to Assembly and stand at the front. We’ll make an example of you and no mistake.’
So off I slunk to join that small but select band of criminals lined up in the hall. The usual suspects, the late-comers, the no-cappers, the no-hopers, the guttersnipes, and the awful truth was the feeling that I deserved to be among them. Obviously I was puzzled as to what I had done wrong, but it must have been sinful, for wasn’t Brother Gibbons the Headmaster and the fount of all wisdom? My parents would surely be outraged at my behaviour, whatever it was. At the end of Assembly Brother Gibbons, having made no mention of horseplay in the park, swept back to his office and the school filed out. Mr McDonald (‘Old Jimmy’) was in charge of dealing with the day’s delinquents. A PE instructor of the old school (‘Skip jumping begin’), ex-Army, lean and trim with a toothbrush moustache (blue plastic) he was a decent old fella whose strapping was meant not to hurt. One by one we lined up and mumbled our offence: ‘Late, sir.’
‘That’s the second time this week, Downey.’
‘Yes, sir.’
(Whack! Whack!)
‘Forgot my cap, sir.’
‘McNamara, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.’
‘I know, sir.’
(Whack!) And so on until, last in line, it was my turn.
‘Well, McGough?’
‘Erhm …’
‘Late?’
‘No, sir. Brother Gibbons told me.’
‘Told you what?’
‘Told me off, sir.’
‘What for?’
‘Erhm, walking through Coronation Park, sir.’
‘Oh. Well, walk properly next time.’
(Whack!)
And that was that. Not another word said, neither to me nor to my parents. But it got to me nevertheless. Horseplay one day, rape and pillage the next. I told Joan that maybe we shouldn’t walk through the park together again. At least, not until we were married. So what was the point, asked Joan, of her catching the L3 every morning? So she went back to catching the L8 and we stopped seeing each other. Bus journeys were never quite the same after that.