The Ned Wood Archive

You’ll never be any good at this game, you bruise too easily

Were we a couple?  Meaning did anyone think ‘Ned and Mary’ in the same sentence.  I still saw Sonia a lot round the Union, but I mainly saw Mary only on my visits to her place.  Whenever I saw her at the campus, it was just in passing.  At her place it was just the two of us.  So probably no-one else thought of us as anything other than casual acquaintances.  What about Mary?  What did she think about Us?  As in ‘Us’ with a capital letter.  Why was she so interested in teaching me the whole history of Socialism, the Labour Party, and the Plight of the Working Classes?  I mean there must have been easier nuts to crack or less bigoted folk to convert.  It can’t have been that she looked on me as a younger brother.  Of course it was too soon for her to try to turn me into a New Man – I don’t think they’d been invented then.  She wasn’t helping me come out of my shell emotionally or sexually or artistically or helping me mature in any other way.  She was just steadily chipping away at the mountain of my conservative inertia.

Whatever, there must have been something there because she kept inviting me back.

And what did I think of her?  I worshipped her.  All of those physical characteristics that got me hooked in the first place, had stuck like the chorus on a Bowie single.  Her hair shone more blackly, her cheeks dimpled more impudently, her voice ribbed more sarcastically, her curses caressed more gently, her presence warmed more thoroughly.  When I looked into my soul, I could see her eyes.  And as well as this I’d discovered that she was a woman as well as a girl.  She had a house.  She could cook.  She took care of me.  She made me feel I’d got a home. All those girls I’d had crushes on before were just that.  Teenage girls to have teenage crushes on.  And now the crush I had on this girl had developed as I awoke to the totality of her charms.  Last term, I’d fallen for the face. This term, I fell in love with the person. Well, I’d never been in love and I thought this was it.  I was growing out of that schoolboy stuff.  I was leaving home at last.

Maybe I knew this from the moment I first went round to her place at the beginning of term.  Maybe it took time to sink in.  For most of the time I’d been content to enjoy listening to her, to enjoy her taking care of me, to enjoy the anticipation.  But as the term drew to a close, as the winter turned to spring,  as 1977 grew from boy to man, I felt that I wouldn’t be complete until I’d cemented this relationship.  I had to prove that she was mine.  I had to know exactly where I stood.  She had to say yes.

And by the time the last week of term arrived I’d made my decision.  This time she wouldn’t hesitate.  This time it would be perfect.  This time I’d knock her off her feet.

She’d invited me round on the Thursday.  It was going to be a special End of Term meal.  OK so it would probably be spaghetti out of a packet with a sauce, but it’d be a good sauce.  And today we’d have wine.  I’d buy a bottle along Portswood Road on my way there.  I spent hours each day during that last week planning what I’d do to prepare for the evening.  I’d get some flowers.  I couldn’t buy them that evening, so it’d be better to get them in the afternoon and keep them at the Hall.  Did I care if someone saw me?  What the hell, probably not.

And what was I going to wear?  I was becoming aware that my wardrobe wasn’t everything I cracked it up to be.  Too many baggy trousers.  I’d started to see youths with drainpipes – on TV or in bands like Ultravox.  At first they looked really square, but now they looked cool, and my baggies looked so stupid.  The straightest I’d got was a pair of Levi’s which were only slightly flared.  They’d have to do, even though they were new and too bright to be cool.  I wished I’d got some more faded stuff.  I figured my white tennis sweater was the coolest thing around, plus it was ‘our’ sweater in that Mary was there when I’d got it.  Jeans and a sweater.  I was becoming a real student.  Though of course, my sweater was cleaner than most.  See, even as a student, I still had style.

I felt so good, catching the bus from Chamberlain, with the five quids worth of flowers in my hand.  They were dripping, cos I’d kept them in a water jug I’d borrowed from the kitchen.  On the bus my after shave started to itch.  I used to wear it in those days, I guess I thought it was cool.  It was the Yves Saint Laurent Anna Mulcahy had bought me one Christmas a couple of years before.  I didn’t wear it that often.  Just when I wanted to impress.  Because whatever else I may say about her, Anna had good taste.  Trouble was, itching after shave warms you up.  So I had to try breathing exercises and stuff to keep calm.  Even though it was March and not yet warm enough, I took my jacket off.  I needed to be calm, so that I’d make a good impression in the Offy.  My biggest fear getting off the bus in Portswood was that the guy in the Off Licence would laugh at me.  Or even guess what I was up to.

Anyway, I walked in with the flowers in my hand and my blue jacket over my arm.  And tried to find the wine.  Which meant three or four circuits of the shelves before I spotted a few bottles at knee high.  Which names did I recognise.  Blue Nun.  That was what the old dears had.  Sometimes.  I stared but I couldn’t see anything else I’d even heard of.  How was I to know what was any good.  I never drank the stuff.  I didn’t ask myself whether Mary drank it either, which was probably a good job, because it was taking me long enough to make my first decision.  Eventually the pressure of my needing to make a move restricted any thinking I thought I should continue with and I grabbed the Blue Nun and presented it to the guy at the counter.  

“Who’s the lucky girl?”  he asked.

“Oh, just a friend,” I answered as I left, trying to be nonchalant.

The wind was blowing a bit now, which I hated, on account of my hair being unruly at the best of times.  In common with just about 80% of male students at Southampton that year, my hair was long enough to cover my ears and no more.  That fabulous no man’s length of early seventies England.  One in a hundred guys were bald.  About one in five had the imagination to grow their hair as long as their elder, hippie, brothers.  And the rest of us had the post Donny Osmond mop.  Except my hair wouldn’t stay in place, but had to be combed over and over again.  So, as I walked the half mile from the Offy to Mary’s, I carried the flowers and the Blue Nun in my left hand and tried to comb my hair with my right hand whilst gazing at my reflection in each successive shop window or car door.

At last I reached her road and my heart started to race.  I quickly forgot the trials and tribulations of the journey and focused on the task ahead.  Of course, I’d rehearsed seven or eight neat ways to phrase the question.  But would I get a chance to use any of them?

When she opened the door, she must have guessed.  I wonder how.  A shocked look crossed her face.  It made me catch myself for a moment and we both stumbled over our greeting.  I missed my first planned opening, which was to whisk her off her feet immediately and swear that I’d loved her for ever.  Instead I held out the gifts, unable to speak.  Grateful for something to do, she took them into the kitchen, telling me I “shouldn’t have”.

How much easier it would have been, if I’d had the courage to ask her there and then.  I could sense that it wasn’t going to plan, but yet I wasn’t confident enough of this sixth sense to believe entirely in my judgement.  Nor was I confident enough in myself to overcome the doubts it was raising.  I was silent.  I was aware of my silence.  I tried to think of a way to end it.  Mary got there first.

“Where did you get these from?” she asked, talking about the flowers.  “They’re beautiful”.  She’d recovered much more quickly than me.

“Oh, I just got them up the road this afternoon.  I kept them in my room.  Do you like them?”  Of course she did.  At least, she’d just said that she did.  She got an empty milk bottle from the sink and arranged them in it before putting them on the table.

“You know, a couple of candles would really look nice.”  I wished I’d thought of that.  I could have brought them.  Did she have any?

“I don’t think we’ve got any,”  she said.  There was a gentleness in her voice.  Usually she would have made a joke at my expense.  Or my family’s.  Or my class’s.  Not today.  These words were the cushions she was preparing for my fall.

I started to fidget.  I got up to peer at the sauce she was cooking on the stove.  Bacon, tomato and some other stuff I didn’t recognise.  I walked over to the draining board to see if I could dry something.  All that needed doing was to put away a knife and a tea spoon.

“Where do these go?”  I asked.

“Oh sit down, you’re like a caged tiger,”  she railed.  At last some of the old spark.  I sat down, just like I’d been told.  Mary managed to steer the conversation towards the holidays.  All I could tell her about was the Easter field trip – two weeks in Devon and Cornwall.  We managed to talk about Geology and what I did for longer than we’d ever done before.  She wanted to know what I was going to do when I graduated.  I think I would have been interested to find out myself at the time.  Or maybe not.  I did it cos I enjoyed it.  I hadn’t a clue what would come next.  My horizons were the field trip, the summer exams, and if I allowed myself to glimpse the far, far distant future, the six weeks’ mapping I would have to do that summer.  We’d done two days’ mapping the previous year, but I didn’t quite comprehend what it all meant.  All I knew was that after spending two weeks walking round Cornwall with a rock hammer this Easter, I’d have to spend six weeks walking round some other place in the summer.  Counting rocks.  Wonder what field trips they come up with for mathematicians.  Anyway, work was a distant second to the other things that were going on.  Football.  Music.  And Mary.

Except maybe Mary wasn’t going on much longer.  It seemed as if I was determined to prolong the agony by waiting and waiting.  Was it agony for her too?  Would she have said ‘Look Ned, I know what you are thinking – the answer’s No’ to cut short my suffering?  In the end the conversation dried and we finished the spaghetti in quiet.  After we’d both had a couple of glasses, I knew I had to do it.  She knew too, and let me.

I looked into her wonderful eyes.  The dimples in her cheeks shone like gemstones.  Her hair, deep and blue, framed that lovely face.

“Mary,” I started, “I’ve really enjoyed the past few weeks, coming here.  In fact, I’ve really enjoyed the last two terms, since I got to know you”.  She let me take it at my own pace.  I think she knew any form of interruption from her would have ruined my speech, such as it was.  

“You’ve taught me a lot.  And you’ve helped me get to know myself better.  I don’t think you know how mush I enjoy just being with you”.  I was repeating myself.  Maybe I should have told her how beautiful her hair was, how much I  treasured the memory of her face.  

“You are the most wonderful person I’ve met”.  At least that much was true.

“Will you go out with me?”  I just didn’t know of any other way to phrase the question.  That is how I thought about it at the time.  ‘Going Out’  Maybe some other phrase would have been cooler.  “Will you date me’  ‘Will you marry me?’  ‘Do you love me?’  I guess it really doesn’t matter.  She gave me the short answer.

Goodbye Mary.  Take care.