Therapy

school playground and were illustrated on the walls of the school bogs, but it was difficult to elicit basic information from those who appeared to know without betraying a humiliating ignorance. One day a boy I trusted told me the facts of life as we walked back from an illicit lunchtime visit to the local chip-shop — “when your dick gets stiff you poke it in the girl’s slit and come off in her” — but this act, though inflaming to contemplate, seemed ugly and unclean, not something I wanted to associate with the angel who descended daily from the top of Beecher’s Road to receive my dumb adoration.
    Of course I longed to speak to her, and thought continually about possible ways of getting into conversation with her. The simplest method, I told myself, would be to smile and say hallo one morning, as she passed. After all, we were not total strangers — it was a quite normal thing to do to somebody you met regularly in the street, even if you didn’t know their name. The worst that could happen was that she would ignore me, and walk straight past without responding to my greeting. Ah, but that worst was chilling to contemplate. What would I do the next morning? And every morning after that? As long as I didn’t accost her, she couldn’t rebuff me, and my love was safe even if unrequited. I spent many hours fantasizing about more dramatic and irresistible ways of making her acquaintance — for example, pulling her back from certain death as she was about to step under the wheels of a tram, or defending her from attack by some ruffian bent on robbery or rape. But she always showed admirable caution and common sense when crossing the road, and the pavements of Hatchford at eight o’clock in the morning were rather short of ruffians (this, after all, was 1951, when the word “mugging” was unknown, and even at night unaccompanied women felt safe in well-lit London streets).
    The event that finally brought us together was less heroic than these imaginary scenarios, but it seemed almost miraculous to me at the time, as if some sympathetic deity, aware of my tongue-tied longing to make the girl’s acquaintance, had finally lost patience, plucked her into the air and flung her to the ground at my feet. She was late appearing at the top of Beecher’s Road that day, and I could see that she was hurrying down the hill. Every now and then she would break into a run — that rather endearing kind of running that girls do, moving their legs mainly from the knees, throwing out their heels at an angle behind them — and then, encumbered by her heavy bag of books, she would slow to a brisk walking pace for an interval. In this flustered and flurried state she seemed more than usually beautiful. Her hat was off her head, retained by the narrow elastic strap round her throat, her long mane swung to and fro, and the energy of her stride made her bosom move about thrillingly beneath her white blouse and pinafore dress. I kept her in my direct line of vision longer than usual, as long as I dared; but eventually, to avoid giving the impression of staring rudely, I had to avert my eyes and go through the pretence of looking along the main road for my tram — which was in fact, by this time, quite near.
    I heard a cry and suddenly there she was, sprawled at my feet, her books scattered all over the pavement. Breaking into a run again, she had caught the toe of her shoe on the edge of an uneven paving-stone, tripped, and fallen, dropping her bag as she broke her fall. She was up on her feet in an instant, before I could lend her a supporting hand, but I was able to help her pick up her books, and to speak to her. “Are you alright?’ “Mmm,” she mumbled, sucking a grazed knuckle. “Stupid.” This last epithet was clearly addressed to herself, or possibly to the paving-stone, not to me. She was blushing furiously. My tram passed, its wheels grating and squealing in the grooved tracks as it took the corner. “That’s your tram,” she said. “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, filled with rapture at the implication of this remark — that she had been observing my movements as closely as I had been observing hers over the past months. I carefully gathered up a number of foolscap sheets that had fallen out of a folder, covered with large round handwriting, the is topped with little circles instead of dots, and handed them to her. “Thanks,” she muttered, stuffing them into her bag, and hurried away, limping