Peter’s mum brought me a basket of fruit when I’d been off school for seven weeks with whooping cough. Peter hated school when I wasn’t there apparently. 6 year old me didn’t really like him wanting to sit next to me all the time, but, of course, I still let him.
Mum came in wielding a basket of fruit. Who's Peter she demanded. A boy in my class; I said, avoiding her eyes but gazing instead at the huge bananas. You're too young for boyfriends she admonished. It's ok I don't like him, he's silly, I replied, idly eating a grape.
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Above are two little vignettes wot I wrote for a hashtag prompt on Twitter to write something on unrequited love.
My first thought was about an incident in my junior school days when I was off school with whooping cough, and, in the spirit of Allen Ginsberg, I went with that. As I was struggling to remember what it was, I wrote the second tale, in retrospect, a rather lame attempt at humour and to convey how one can sometimes be disinterested in matters of the heart, which feels childish, or perhaps childlike, to me.
The first attempt was me trying to make sense of it, trying, as an adult, to understand and justify the only things which remain of the incident; feelings and atmosphere. As a child, and as an adult too sometimes, I often feel quite remote from the effect I may have on others. Even as I try hard to imagine what it might be, it takes effort, and time, for it to percolate through sometimes.
The actual or factual memory I have is very hazy and probably mostly inaccurate as I think they mostly are ; sitting at my desk - a copy of an old school desk with a lift up lid, an ink well and bent metal legs - outside in the yard each day and every day for most of the day if it was fine, I think because my mum thought the fresh air would help me, in a similar way to the way TB patients had been helped by the fresh air cure, taking my own class register - I'd made up all the names on it, goodness knows where they came from, they often used to pop into my head even until just recently, - and enjoying planning and marking lessons for my imaginary class. I seem to remember they were all rather bad at maths, like me.
I don't remember being too bothered by the illness itself, though I do remember the whoop, most vividly when I have a winter cough, when mum frog marching me to the tap to stick my head firmly under running cold water which seemed to pull me out of it comes rushing back to me on some occasions and my cough becomes a little asthmatic.
I know my mum felt guilty about not having me vaccinated against this horrible disease and the reasons were similar to those which prevent some parents taking their children for the MMR vaccines. I don't remember my brother being around during that time and I think perhaps he was sent away to stay with someone so as not to catch it too.
So it was that my poor mum was no doubt very fraught during the ten or so weeks it took me to recover, hence my depicting her response to what was rather a touching gesture from a little boy in my class, as somewhat testy and ungracious.
In truth, I can't imagine she would have been bothered, or surprised, by anyone enjoying my company. My dear mum thought the sun shone from me when I was small. Or so I felt. However, I can imagine and vaguely remember her being bothered by the rather, I think she thought, extravagant, gift of a basket of fruit, brought to the doorstep.
So I think that for my mum, what was particularly troubling about this incident was not that someone was pining for me particularly, thinking back, it could have been partly because fruit was an expensive luxury to most ordinary people at that time, or certainly, to our family. I went to the shops with mum at least twice a week when I was on holiday and she had a very strict budget. If fruit was bought, it was to be eaten. I could rarely finish a whole apple as a small girl, and so was reticent to embark on one for fear of retribution. I can imagine having a whole basket of fresh fruit to be eaten before it went off would have been quite an annoyance for my mum, and come to think of it, possibly slightly intimidating for me as a child.
Thinking about Peter, although I can remember his name, and his second name too, but I can't remember him in actuality. Our tables were arranged in sets at school and I was, on the ' top table ' with five other girls, all destined for grammar school, though we didn't know it at the time. It's a sad fact that the boys in my class did not register my attention unless they were a) very naughty ( I was sometimes asked to mind the class when our teacher left the room for some reason so I got to know the naughty ones ) or b) I was tasked with showing them how to do something, like tell the time. I don't know quite why I was considered adept at telling the time from an early age. Something else for me to ponder on another occasion perhaps.
I do remember where Peter lived and that's because my mum went to call on his mum at some point. I remember her saying it was to ask that they stop sending me gifts. Since I can only remember the fruit, I presume the other gifts were either refused or returned. Mum told me where their house was; quite close to school, alongside a busy duel carriageway she said and she was at pains to point out that it wasn't such a nice house as ours, and that Peter's dad might not be at home very often, which I related to because my dad was often at work and since he worked shifts, I sometimes didn't see him until the weekend.
In reality, I hadn't been aware of Peter much in my day to day life at school before I contracted whooping cough and had to stay at home and nor do I remember him featuring any more on my return after about ten weeks. To me, he's someone I feel I should have noticed and I'll never know what I truly was to him because of the fact that I didn't.
Well I have a funny theory, that we meet everyone at least twice. Recently I started wondering if I'd met Peter again since I left the town we grew up in and whether he recognised me and whether I had a feeling of recognition when I met him and what he had become.
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