Rough Cider

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When I was nine; I fell in love with a girl of twenty named Barbara, who killed herself. True.

It’s an extraordinary story. I’ve been telling myself for years that I must put it in writing. I can’t expect the memories to stay vivid forever. I’m past fifty now.

I have any number of excuses for delaying so long. Where should I start, for instance? Not in 1943, for sure.

To tell it right, I must take you into a self-service restaurant in Reading in 1964, where you meet me at the self-assured age of twenty-nine, eating sausages and chips and rashly trying to read Machiavelli’s The Prince at the same time. A Friday lunch. I know it was Friday because at the end of the week I was in the habit of escaping from the university for a quiet couple of hours on my own. My luckless duty as the most underemployed member of staff in the history department was to offer a course on Europe in the twentieth century to all-comers in the first year. Like many other fiascos, my course was the brainchild of a committee, this one dedicated to promoting a concept known as supportive studies. It was optional and would not be examined. The “all-comers” consisted of a phalanx of political agitators who filled the two front rows, plus sundry casual callers who came in to sleep because all seats were taken in the library. After it I was in no mood for luncheon and pretentious conversation in the senior refectory.

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