First love.

I got home to a very surprising, very welcome, contact with the boy I was strongly attached to for three years from the Lower Sixth, through A levels, through a year working in the County Library (he in a bank) and into our first year at separate Teacher's Training Colleges. 50 years have passed since the last phone conversation and exchange of letters, but when I picked up the phone on Tuesday I immediately recognised his voice.

The contact has helped me throw away a script I wrote for myself many years back which had him relieved to be free of me. Not so. He even looked for me in various ways, including talking to my father (who didn't pass the conversation on) and to some girls hitch-hiking from college into Cambridge (as we did frequently!) They didn't pass it on either. I wonder who they were. Possibly I had already left and was married.

It's quite difficult to say how much this has meant to me. He is still happily married to the girl who was hovering in the background the last time I visited him at his college in Sheffield; I am happily unmarried with a varied life behind me. We both have children and grandchildren. We've both had ups, and both had serious downs. All the difference it actually makes is in my mind, and, it seems, in his. My life story has changed. 

I looked out photographs, could find none of him except on the long curly school photo, and he found none either, but maybe  the memory is enough. I've always liked smartly dressed men - he looked wonderfully lean and handsome  in his school blazer, as did most of the Sixth Form boys. I also remember his kindness, tenderness, and good humour. I'm happy to be sentimental about my first love.