Therapy

Hancock? We were in fits.” She used mauve stationery from Woolworths that was scented with lavender. That whiff from Dudley’s phial brought it all back — not just her handwriting, but Maureen in all her specificity. Maureen. My first love. My first breast.
     
    There was a letter from Samantha in the mailbox when I got in, with her idea for writing Debbie’s part out of The People Next Door : in the last episode Priscilla is knocked off her bike by a lorry and killed instantly, but returns as a ghost, which only Edward can see, and urges him to find another partner. Not exactly original, but it has possibilities. You have to admit, the girl is smart. In another mood, I might have tinkered with it. But all I can think about at the moment is Maureen. I feel an irresistible urge coming over me to write about her.
     

* * MAURENN * *
    A MEMOIR
     
    I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Maureen Kavanagh’s existence when I was fifteen, though nearly a year passed before I managed to speak to her and discover her name. I used to see her every weekday morning, as I waited for the tram which took me on the first stage of my tedious three-leg journey to school. That was Lambeth Merchants’, a direct-grant grammar school to which, pushed by a well-intentioned junior-school head, I unluckily gained admission at the Eleven-Plus. I say unluckily because I believe now that I would have been happier, and therefore have learned more, at some less prestigious and pretentious establishment. I had the innate intelligence, but not the social and cultural back-up, to benefit from the education on offer at Lambeth Merchants’. It was an ancient foundation that took obsessive pride in its history and tradition. It accepted fee-paying pupils as well as the cream of the II-Plus, and modelled itself on the classic English public school, with “Houses” (though there were no boarders), a chapel, a school song with words in Latin, and numerous arcane rituals and privileges. The buildings were sooty neo-gothic redbrick, turreted and crenellated, with stained-glass windows in the chapel and the main assembly hall. The teachers wore gowns. I never fitted in and never did well academically, languishing at the bottom of my class for most of my school career. My Mum and Dad were unable to help me with my homework, and indulged my tendency to skimp it. I spent most evenings listening to comedy shows on the radio (my classics are ITMA, Much Binding in the Marsh, Take It From Here, and The Goon Show, not the Aeneid and David Copperfield) or playing football and cricket in the street with my mates from the local secondary modern. Sport was encouraged at Lambeth Merchants’ — they even gave “caps” for representing the school — but the winter game was rugby, which I loathed, and school cricket was played with a pomp and circumstance that I found tedious. The only success I enjoyed at school was as a comic actor in the annual play. Otherwise I was made to feel stupid and uncouth. I became the class clown, and perennial butt of the masters’ sarcasm. I was caned frequently. I looked forward to leaving school as soon as I had taken the O-Level examinations I did not expect to pass.
    Maureen went to the Sacred Heart convent school in Greenwich, also courtesy of the Eleven-Plus. She had an equally awkward journey from Hatchford where we both lived, but in the opposite direction. Hatchford was, I suppose, a desirable outer suburb of London when it was first built at the end of the nineteenth century, just where the Thames plain meets the first Surrey hills, but was almost part of the decaying inner city by the time we were born. Maureen lived at the top of one of the hills, in the lower half of a huge Victorian villa that had been divided into flats. Her family inhabited the basement and ground floor. We lived in a little terraced house in Albert Street, one of the streets off the main road at the bottom of the hill, where the trams ran. My dad was a tram-driver.
    It was a hard job. He had to stand for eight hours or more at the controls, on a platform open to the elements on one side, and a certain amount of brute force was needed to apply the brakes. In the winter he came home from work chilled and haggard, and crouched over the coal fire in the living-room, hardly able to speak till he had thawed out. There was a more modern type of tram, streamlined and fully enclosed, which I saw occasionally in other parts of London, but my Dad always worked on