Therapy

the old clapped-out pre-war trams, open at each end, that screeched and rattled and groaned as they lurched from stop to stop. Those red, double-decker trams, with a single headlamp that glowed in the fog like a bleary eye, with their clanging bells, their brass fittings and wooden seats polished by the friction of innumerable hands and bums, their top decks reeking of cigarette-smoke and sick, their muffled grey-faced drivers and chirpy, mittened clippies, are inseparably linked with my memories of childhood and adolescence.
    Every weekday I caught my first tram at Hatchford Five Ways on my way to school. I used to wait not at the stop itself but on the corner just before it, outside a flower shop, from which I could sight my tram as soon as it appeared around a distant curve in the main road, swaying on the rails like a galleon at sea. By moving my angle of vision about thirty degrees I could also look up the long straight incline of Beecher’s Road. Maureen always appeared at the top at the same time, at five minutes to eight, and took three minutes to reach the bottom. She passed me, crossed the road, and walked a few yards to wait for a tram going in the opposite direction to mine. I watched her boldly when she was distant, covertly as she approached me, while ostensibly looking out for my tram. After she had passed, I would saunter to my stop, and watch her as she waited, with her back turned to me, on the other side of the road. Sometimes, just as she came up to the corner, I would risk turning my head in feigned boredom or impatience at the non-appearance of the tram, and glance at her as if by accident. Usually she had her eyes lowered, but on one occasion she was looking straight at me and our eyes met. She blushed crimson and looked quickly down at the pavement as she passed. I don’t think I breathed for five minutes afterwards.
    This went on for months. Perhaps a year. I didn’t know who she was, or anything about her, except that I was in love with her. She was beautiful. I suppose a less impressionable, or more blasé, observer might have described her as “pretty” or “nice-looking” rather than beautiful, judging her to be a little too short in the neck, or a little too thick in the waist, to qualify for the highest accolade, but to me she was beautiful. Even in her school uniform — a pudding-bowl hat, a gaberdine raincoat and pleated pinafore dress, all in a dead, depressing shade of navy blue — she was beautiful. She wore the hat at a jaunty angle, or perhaps it was the natural springiness of her auburn hair that pushed it to the back of her head, the rim framing her heart-shaped, heart-stopping face: big, dark brown eyes, a small, neat nose, generous mouth, dimpled chin. How can you describe beauty in words? It’s hopeless, like shuffling bits of an Identikit picture around. Her hair was long and wavy, drawn over her ears and gathered by a clasp at the back of her neck into a kind of loose mane that fell halfway down her back. She wore her raincoat unbuttoned, flapping open at the front, with the sleeves turned back to expose the cuffs of her white blouse, and the belt knotted behind. I discovered later that she and her schoolfriends spent endless hours contriving such tiny modifications of the uniform, trying to outwit the nuns’ repressive regulations. She carried her books in a kind of shopping-bag, which gave her a womanly, grown-up look, and made my big leather satchel seem childish in comparison.
    I thought of her last thing at night, before I fell asleep, and when I woke in the morning. If, as very rarely happened, she was late appearing at the top of Beecher’s Road, I would let my tram go by without boarding it, and take the consequences of being late for school (two strokes of the cane) rather than forfeit my daily sight of her. It was the purest, most selfless romantic devotion. It was Dante and Beatrice in a suburban key. Nobody knew my secret, and torture wouldn’t have dragged it from me. I was going through the usual hormonal storm of adolescence at the time, swamped and buffeted by bodily changes and sensations I could neither control nor put a name to — erections and nocturnal emissions and sprouting body hair and the rest of it. There was no sex education at Lambeth Merchants’, and my Mum and Dad, with the deep repressive puritanism of the respectable working class, never discussed the subject. Of course the usual smutty jokes and boasts circulated in the