Weekend love special / The one that got away / Rachel Hirons

Rachel Hirons at Kingston University in 2006: 'I saw a girl – the sort of girl so incredibly attractive that it makes you genuinely question how and when we evolved far enough for someone to look like that.' Photograph: Courtesy of Rachel Hirons

Weekend love special

The one that got away: Rachel Hirons

'I came to realise the extent of her innocence, and decided against being the one to corrupt it'

Rachel Hirons
Saturday 23 August 2014

I

nitially, I believed that notion of "the one that got away" didn't really apply to me, as once I've "got them", their reasons for "getting away" are often perfectly valid. After six break-ups, I can pretty much sing-a-long to the inevitable speech of "you're impossible… completely self absorbed", or, as my most recent ex put it, "genuinely insane and in need of professional help". So this isn't a tale of someone "getting away", rather a confession about someone whom I didn't "get" in the first place.

On my first day of university, I stood in a queue to collect my student ID card, which would enable me to open various establishment doors – a card I would lose two days later, resulting in me spending three years waiting next to said doors. But I didn't know that then, so I was queuing. Three people ahead, I saw a girl – the sort of girl so incredibly attractive that it makes you genuinely question how and when we evolved far enough for someone to look like that. In little time, I had introduced myself, made her laugh and complimented her. I was pretty certain I had her wooed. I found out her name – Harriet – and, before the week was out, I'd found out a lot more: she was 18, fairly quiet (as English was her second language) and, due to the fact that she had never had a romantic relationship, a job or seemingly gone to bed beyond 10pm, entirely unworldly.

As the weeks went by, I came to realise the extent of her innocence, and decided against being the one to corrupt it. Instead, we became the best of friends, and four months later, the day-to-days of university life meant that she had successfully managed to corrupt herself anyway. Having concluded long ago that anything beyond friendship was off-limits, I entertained her with my "hilarious anecdote" of how and why we came to meet in the first place.

She laughed, and thought me "hysterical" – which was all well and good until two weeks later, when she revealed, "So I've thought about what you said and... I wanna sleep with you, too."

Well, this was unexpected. But just as I was about to whisk her back to my mouse-infested squalor of student accommodation for a night of passion overheard by the eight people I lived with, I decided to play the "good Samaritan" card, giving her a little speech about how I wanted her to be sure. We were good friends now and I didn't want her to feel awkward because of some "drunken, experimental whim". I smugly told her that she wasn't a lesbian and, while she was free to experiment, it would be careless to do it with me.

She had her experiment all right. In fact, she went on to "experiment" for the next seven years with a multitude of different women, informing me – in detail – of every aspect of her relationships. Now engaged to her current girlfriend, the pair have set a date for early next year. As her best friend, my role is that of maid of honour. I once told Harriet how she will never know for sure whether it's actually me she should marry. She said she did know – because I'm too self-absorbed and clearly in need of professional help.

THE GUARDIAN

Weekend love special / The one that got away / Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher in 1998: 'What was it about Ricardo? The growl in his voice? The shimmy in his walk, always about to transform itself into a podium flail and strut?' Photograph: Jacques Lange

Weekend love special

The one that got away: Philip Hensher

'It could only be for a single, crazy summer. You could only lick him. You couldn't marry him'

Philip Hensher
Saturday 23 August 2014

I

saw him first across a seminar room in Cambridge. I was 35, and about to give a talk to an international conference about my own work – a setting of the utmost respectability, as Taiwanese, Egyptian, Ghanaian academics thrust offprints of their scholarly articles about the novels of Julian Barnes into each others' hands. But there, in the third row, was Ricardo. You couldn't fail to notice him. I gave my talk; he asked a saucy question, his eyebrow raised; and in the evening I sat next to him at dinner, after manipulating the place settings. He was a Venezuelan professor with a guttural noise in his voice and a face full of outrageous possibilities. I couldn't keep my hands off him.

Ricardo stayed in London for the next four months, to his university's astonishment and resentment. The summer of 2000 was the most insane of my life. I just couldn't understand it. Neither could he. Most of my friends found him charming, but impossible; most of his London friends, highly respectable South American disco dollies who liked to confine their festivities to formally licensed hours, openly disapproved of me. We had a terrible influence on each other. Sometimes, we would catch each other's eye in a public place and, before we knew it, were groping each other, tongues down each other's throats, in the British Museum or in Debenhams. God knows how we avoided being beaten up or arrested. It was like being 16 again. But I was never like that when I was 16.

We made each other laugh constantly, and that summer everything else disappeared from my sense of priorities. One day I turned up an hour and a quarter late to a long-arranged lunch with the editor of a national newspaper. We'd been lying in bed, eating toast off each other's tummies, all morning. The editor was outraged, and never used me again. I just didn't care.

What was it about Ricardo? The growl in his voice? The shimmy in his walk, always about to transform itself into a podium flail and strut (my God, that one could dance)? The wonderful animal odour he had in the mornings? I stood so many people up, those four months. For the only time in my entire adult life, I didn't write a single word all summer. I had to make it up to dozens of outraged friends when October came round.

When he went, it was all over. It could only be for a single, crazy summer. You could only lick him. You couldn't marry him. The mind honestly quails at the idea. He just swept in and out again – I felt liberated, transformed, joyous. A year later, I met the man I would marry, and felt grateful to Ricardo for that, too.

He died. Anyway. I hadn't heard from him for a while, and sent him a message on Facebook. A girl wrote back – a name I didn't know – saying that he'd died a year before. She was a mystic, euphemistic type in the way she explained stuff, and it took some time to sort out the facts. I'd have liked to have said goodbye. Those four months in London were like a first experience of a continent, the break of rain after months of dry heat, like going to bed with a man for the first time and finding out that laughter was also a possibility. He was quite something.

THE GUARDIAN

Weekend love special / The one that got away / Margaret Drabble

 Pauline Boty made a big an impression on Margaret Drabble in Rome in the late 50s: 'Like a golden meteor she had flashed through life and escaped and soared onwards into space.' Photograph: Tony Evans/Getty Images

Weekend love special

The one that got away: Margaret Drabble

'Friendly, glowing, bronzed, curious, eager, impulsive: the world was all before her, and she knew it'

Margaret Drabble
Saturday 23 August 2014

I

t was August, in the late 1950s, and we had reached Rome. We were students on vacation, on the road, hitchhiking, exploring, sleeping in hostels and convents, eating plates of pasta, drinking cheap red wine. This was the Rome of Fellini and Antonioni, it was the dawn of La Dolce Vita, it was L'Avventura, and Italy spread itself out like a sunlit dream. We were players in a romantic movie, we were footsore, dirty and dishevelled, but we thought we were glamorous.

The most glamorous of all was Pauline Boty. She embodied the coming age. We met her in a youth hostel. She wasn't one of our group, but she was our age, and she was blonde and strikingly beautiful. She introduced herself to me in the primitive shower room by admiring my nightwear, which consisted of a man's shirt: "I know I'll like a person who wears a shirt like that!" And I knew I would like her. How could one not? Friendly, glowing, bronzed, curious, eager, impulsive: the world was all before her, and she knew it. I can't recall in detail the adventures we had in Rome – they have merged into dim memories of ancient ruins and trattoria and bars – but they involved pasta and wine and wild talk about the future. She was studying at the Royal College of Art: most of us were hoping to go into the theatre. We were all full of expectation and desire.

I've no idea how much time we spent together: probably not more than a day or two. I moved on, to the mosquito-coast of the Adriatic, and she went I know not where. But once seen, never forgotten. I had thought we would have plenty of time to pursue a friendship, but this was not to be. In 1960, I graduated, married, had three children and started publishing novels, all in quick succession. She, I knew, had become a pop artist and an actor. I noted her name whenever it surfaced, but made no effort to contact her. I was busy, and there would, I thought, be time hereafter.

We moved in circles that were adjacent but not overlapping, and I waited, not at all anxiously, to bump into her again one day. Then, to my grief and horror, I read that she had died at the age of 28, in 1966, of cancer, not long after giving birth to a daughter. I remember the sense of shock that somebody so young and so charged with life could have vanished so suddenly and completely.

She vanished for years. Her work was almost forgotten, her reputation eclipsed by the lasting successes of her male friends and contemporaries – David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones. Like a golden meteor she had flashed through life and escaped and soared onwards into space. The sorrow she left behind, to those who knew her well, must have been unendurable. To me, who met her so briefly, her death seemed portentous and terrible.

Decades later, in 2004, deep in the Hades of the London underground, I saw a huge poster of one of her paintings, then being exhibited at Tate Britain, in a show called Art & The 60s: This Was Tomorrow. So she hadn't been a dream. There was her well-remembered name. I stood and stared.

I never went to the exhibition. It was far, far too late.

THE GUARDIAN

Weekend love special / The one that got away / Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Weekend love special

The one that got away: Jeanette Winterson

'I used to have a lot of affairs until I realised it was like growing cress on a flannel – instant results, no roots'

Jeanette Winterson
Saturday 23 August 2014


N

ostalgia for lost love is cowardice disguised as poetry. It is easy to imagine that if life had moved a degree in a different direction, then the one that got away would be by our side, and we would both be living happily ever after. Memories of holiday romances or stray nights with strangers are part of the pleasure of the past. And I believe that anyone we have loved is someone we should be able to think about, talk about and recognise as a real piece of our emotional history. To me, one of the best aspects of gay culture is that we work hard to stay friends with our exes – perhaps a survival mechanism from the bad old days of the ghetto, but a civilised arrangement, nonetheless. (It will be interesting to see if the normalising effect of marriage changes this.) But recognising the past as our past, and being able to groan, giggle, blush, sigh and play with those memories, is not the same as a corrosive secret infatuation with the idea of that special someone we managed to mislay. Sighing over a fantasy drains energy from reality. What happens in our heads isn't private; it is unspoken, that's all. We all know what it's like to live in the stifling atmosphere of what is unsaid.

Love is hard work. We don't hear enough about that. Falling in love is the easy part – it's why affairs are so exciting and attractive – none of the toil, all of the fun. I used to have a lot of affairs until I realised it was like growing cress on a flannel – instant results, no roots. Adam Phillips has written eloquently, in Missing Out, on the strange discontent that prompts us to believe that the life we are not living would be better for us than the life that is ours. If only we had that job/house/girlfriend/husband/sex life, etc. In truth, the life that is ours is the one we make, and that includes our partners. If we really have been criminally careless with the love of our life, and driven him away, or let her go – well, then – we deserve to be unhappy, at least until that unhappiness prompts such a change in us that the miracle of a second chance (with someone else) is not thrown away.

I realised a few years ago that the script I was running through all my relationships was a narrative of loss. Either I chose, or let myself be chosen by, people who weren't free (those were the exciting ones), or I had bouts of duty where I tried to settle down in a way guaranteed to find me secret-sighing over someone else. Changing that story changed my relationship with myself – which is, after all, the relationship all other relationships must negotiate.

I have regrets about a couple of past partners, but no fleeting feelings of nostalgia for what might have been with "someone". "Someone" is a fantasy. The person I love is real.

THE GUARDIAN