11. THE KINDS OF LOVE

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Wallace is growing ever closer to maturity

It didn’t take Wallace long to realise he had lived a sheltered sort of life. Maybe it was his mother who had protected him from most of what she looked on as the seedier things in life. Like girls. Her late husband Jack had despised anything to do with the flesh and it was a miracle she had conceived Wallace, but relations had happened. Once, and once only, and that had been enough. And something of his attitude had remained with her and been passed on by some kind of assimilation to her son.

Mickelthwaite Secondary school had a mixture of boys and girls in each class in much the same was as his infant and Junior school had, but as the weeks and months rolled along it became quite obvious to Wallace that there was something almost fascinating about some of the girls.

Way back when he’d been what he looked on as a kid one of the lessons he’d had to do and truly dreaded had been country dancing. Why they had to do that was a mystery to him, but the teacher, who had all the appropriate gramophone records in her collection, forced it on her class. The whole half hour (and he thanked the Heavens it had only been half an hour) at the end of each Friday was a nightmare, from the initial order for the children to stand in twos by the door of the classroom, boys on the right and girls on the left. Then the dreaded holding of hands as they walked in sedate agony to the school hall, to the boys having to actually approach a girl and ask her to dance with him, to the hope that there wasn’t one boy left over when all the girls had been chosen, and the nightmare if that happened and that boy was him, and he’d have to partner the teacher…

The whole half hour had been a nightmare not in any way alleviated by the light hearted dance instructions by the prettiest teacher in the school, and that was a fact that went unnoticed by Wallace and, he thought, all the other boys.

And now the weeks and months had rolled along in his secondary school and it was a girl who chose to sit next to him in English lessons. And it was in English lessons that he first made a discovery about his changed attitude to the dreaded line of girls, one of which he’d had to actually hold by the hand.

Here was a girl he wanted to hold by the hand. Penny Ashton was a dream. She had to be, because she cropped up at night when he was in bed asleep alone.

To start with he knew she was nice and clean by the aroma of expensive soaps that wafted from her to him and the way he never spotted a single blemish on her skin or on her clothing, and he did find himself secretly looking when he was sure she wouldn't notice. But no: Penny Ashton was as pristine and perfect as any human being could be.

Her most perfect feature was her hair. His own hair was always clean because he washed it every week: come rain or sunshine, that head of hair of his had to be washed. Mum saw to that. But after it had been dried he was sure it didn’t have the delicate scent of some kind of sweet flowers that he was sure wafted out of Penny’s gorgeous tresses. And her hair was long, so long that he sometimes thought that she might be actually sitting on the ends of it when she was perched in her school chair and contemplating verbs and nouns and all the difficult things that he personally was struggling to get his head round.

How he longed to hold her by the hand! And how he dreaded the idea!

The current lesson was about poetry and he found himself drifting off to a world of his own when,

“Hands up,” said Miss Hawkesbury suddenly and out of the blue from where she stood by the blackboard, “if you can tell me something about love.”

Miss Hawkesbury had never seemed to be the kind of person who would consider love to be at all important. From her short grey hair, past her thick-lensed and allegedly all-seeing spectacles, down her starched grey blouse to her severe and very prim skirt, she was the very image so far as Wallace was concerned of a genderless, loveless academic whose entire life revolved around books and pens and had nothing to do with anything as esoteric as passion.

“You mean boys and girls?” asked a fellow pupil after he had been selected from the forest of raised hands.

“Or men and God,” replied Miss Hawkesbury, “a lot of people love God, you know, and it is said by many that God actually is love.”

This put Wallace on safer ground, which was just as well because his hand was selected next, a rarity because his contribution to English lessons had never been as comprehensive as that of some of his fellow pupils.

“My dad was a vicar before he died,” he said, “and he often said the most important thing we should love is God.”

Miss Hawkesbury smiled at him and clapped her hands a single time. “Good, Pratchett,” she said in a voice that sounded as if it needed oiling, “but tell me, what about human love? What about a boy looking at a girl like I notice you sometimes look at Miss Ashton in the seat next to you? Does a boy feel love for a girl? And does a girl feel love for a boy?”

She’d noticed!

He hadn’t been able to help it, secretly looking at the girl sitting next to him as though she were a drug that he was a helpless addict incapable of independence without absorbing something from her.

“He might, Miss,” he replied weakly.

“Take the playwright Oscar Wilde,” she said, still looking him straight in the face, “he, it is reported, found his love in the worship of other men… Is that love or is it criminal obsession that needs the harshest punishment? And if a man should be punished for professing love for another man, should not a woman be punished for professing a love for another woman?”

He didn’t know what to say. He’d raised his hand to mention the love of God by his father, not what he knew was not allowed, the apparent love of people of the same sex for each other. It sent men to prison, for goodness sake! It was in the papers all the time, some famous man being incarcerated for doing disgusting things with another man It must be wrong. And, what’s more, it had nothing to do with him.

“I ask,” continued Miss Hawkesbury, “because I noticed something at the back of the class. I noticed two boys secretly and disgustingly touching each other under the desk, where such things are most certainly not allowed, didn’t I, Smith and Pratt?”

There was a sudden and most alarming and tangible silence followed by a feeble “I’m sorry, Miss,” followed by a further outbreak of silence.

“You will, Smith and Pratt, be grateful that it was me who spotted your misdemeanour and not any one of the other teachers,” grated Miss Hawkesbury, “because if it had been there would be a really frightening caning after assembly tomorrow morning and in front of the whole school. But as it’s me and I can’t absolutely swear with one hundred percent certainty that I saw what I thought I saw, there won’t be, but you must both write out one hundred times I must not do disgusting things to my friend in class… Will you do that, Smith and Pratt?”