Therapy

dropped out of the football team. I missed the exercise, and it was probably from that time that my waistline began to expand, especially as I was acquiring a taste for beer. I became friendly with a young man called Nigel who worked in the box-office of the theatre over which our office was located, and he introduced me to a number of Soho pubs. We spent a lot of time together, and it was months before I realised that he was homosexually inclined. The girls in the office assumed that I must be too, so I made little headway with them. I didn’t lose my virginity, in fact, until I was in the Army, doing National Service, and that was a quick and sordid business with a tipsy WRAC, up against the wall of a lorry park.
    I saw Maureen occasionally in the months that followed the production of the Nativity play, in the street, or getting on and off a bus, but I didn’t speak to her. If she saw me, she didn’t show it. She looked increasingly girlish and unsophisticated to my eyes, in her eternal navy-blue raincoat and her unchanging hairstyle. Once, just after I received my National Service papers, we came face to face in a chemist’s shop — I was going in as she was going out. We exchanged a few awkward words. I asked her about school. She said she was thinking of going in for nursing. She asked me about work. I told her I had just been called up, and that I hoped to be sent abroad and to see a bit of life.
    In the event I was trained as a clerk and posted to a part of North Germany where beetroot fields stretched to the horizon and it was so cold in winter that I cried once on guard duty and the tears froze on my cheeks. The only escape I found from terminal boredom was through acting in and writing scripts for revues, pantomimes, drag shows and other home-made entertainments on the base. When I got back to civvy street I was determined to make my career in some branch of show business. I got a place in one of the less prestigious London drama schools, with a small scholarship which I supplemented by working in a pub at nights. I didn’t see Maureen around Hatchford when I went back to visit Mum and Dad. I ran into Peter Marello once and he told me that she had left home to train as a nurse. That was about thirty-five years ago. I haven’t seen or heard of her since.
     

Sunday 6th June. It took me a whole week to write that, doing practically nothing else. I printed off the last few pages at ten o’clock last night, and went out to stretch my legs and buy the Sunday papers. Men were unloading them from a van onto the pavement outside Leicester Square tube station, like fishermen selling their catch on the quayside, ripping open the bales of different sections — news, sport, business, arts — and hastily assembling the papers on the spot as the punters thrust out their money. It always gives me a kick to buy tomorrow’s papers today, the illusion of getting a peep at the future. In fact, what I’ve been doing is catching up on the news of the past week. Nothing much has changed in the big wide world. Eleven people were killed when the Bosnian Serbs lobbed mortar shells into a football stadium in Sarajevo. Twenty-five UN soldiers were killed in an ambush by General Aidid’s troops in Somalia. John Major has the lowest popularity rating of any British Prime Minister since polling began. I’m beginning to feel almost sorry for him. I wonder whether it isn’t a cunning Tory plot to capture the low self-esteem vote.
    I didn’t buy any papers last week because I didn’t want to be distracted from the task in hand. I hardly listened to the radio or watched television, either. I made an exception of the England — Norway match last Wednesday, and regretted it. What humiliation. Beaten 2-0 by a bunch of part-timers, and probably knocked out of the World Cup in consequence. They should declare a day of national mourning and send Graham Taylor to the salt mines. (He’d probably organize his chain-gang into a 3-5-2 formation, and have them all banging into each other like the England team.) It spoiled my concentration on the memoir for at least half a day, that result.
    I don’t think I’ve ever done anything quite like it before. Perhaps I’m turning into a book writer. There’s no “you” in it, I notice. Instead of telling the story as I might to a friend or somebody in a pub, my usual way, I was trying to recover the truth of the original experience for myself, struggling to find the words that would