1 Peter’s Early years

My hero's childhood and his friendship. He might share my name but this is in not way autobiographic!!!

Peter and Jane had been friends for as long as they could remember even though at their age (nine) as long as they could remember wasn’t very long. But the time had to come when their friendship was put under a disastrous strain when Jane’s family moved across the world to another continent, and lived there.

Peter was distraught. His friendship with Jane was as important as anything to him, in fact it was probably more important than that with his parents. For as long as they could remember the two children had been inseparable. And what was more important the break was sudden.

One day Jane’s father announced that he’d been offered a job in that other continent and was going to take it, and within a matter of days a FOR SALE sign appeared on their house and its contents disappeared in boxes and bags and crates until suddenly Jane wasn’t going to school in the morning because she’d actually left and the teacher told the class how sad she was that little Jane was moving far, far away and they wouldn’t see her again.

Peter tried to keep himself together. He didn't want a rumour to go around that he was a wuss or a cissy even though everyone was quite sure that Jane had been his best friend. But there’s one thing about a determination to keep oneself together, and another doing it, and Peter cried.

He hated himself for doing it. But he cried anyway.

David came to his rescue. David lived round the corner on the next street and he was in Peter’s class at school and he was a decent enough boy who’s had an upset himself.

“So she’s gone, Pete,” he said sympathetically. “I had a friend as went away and I never saw him again. It ain’t fair.”

“It’s nothing,” Peter replied, lying through his teeth but careful to preserve his boyish stolid reputation, not that he had one, what with his best friend having been a girl and he generally out of any male loop going.

But Jane hadn’t been any old girl. She’d been a tomboy who enjoyed climbing trees more than wearing frocks, which made her all right to have as a friend. So Peter hadn’t suffered any of the scorn he might have received had his best friend been Rosemary, who was pretty as a picture with long scented hair and freckles.

Peter might have spurned Rosemary and gone around with David for ages, but his teens came around alonf with a spectacular entrance of testosterone into his life and he started hovering ever closer to the hair and freckles that were how he pictured Rosemary when he lay in bed at night. And one day she asked him out.

“Peter,” she said prettily, “there’s a fair on the park, with dodgems and a darts game. Fancy coming?”

He was fourteen by then, and he said “sure thing, Jane.”

And she replied, “I’m not Jane, silly, I’m Rosemary.”

And he blushed and explained how he’d once known a girl called Jane and she must have crossed his mind accidentally and he was sorry and he knew she was called Rosemary.

“Jane was that girl who went to live in Australia, wasn’t she?” asked Rosemary, and Peter replied “somewhere like that, I reckon, but I forget.”

He hadn’t forgotten, though. He’d even written to her once or twice and got one reply through the post, which had excited him beyond all reason even though it had skilfully said very little indeed and was, at best, disappointing. And anyway, what was a wallaby?

So he and Rosemary went to the fair together and while they were sitting side-by-side in a dodgem car she took one of his hands in hers and squeezed his fingers so gently it felt like he was being touched by a fairy. Not that be believed in fairies, of course. He, after all, was a boy.

Then, when daylight was fading and they were walking home from the park, she kissed him.

His mother had kissed him many times, but not like that. Mum kissing him was an ambarrassing but momentary affair, very different from the way Rosemary kissed him. He squirmed for ages afterwards when he remembered the way the tip of her tongue had touched the tip of his and the already interesting mound of her bosom pushed against his chest.

“Cor,” he thought to himself almost excitedly, “that must mean she likes me.”

What he didn’t fully appreciate was that she liked anyone in trousers. It was like an instinct in her, to attach herself romantically to a boy, and his heart was broken when the very next day he saw her kissing Stephen.

And the next time she asked him if he’d go with her, this time to Waites’s coffee bar, he asked if Stephen would be going too, and she asked him “who’s Stephen?” and he replied, “oh just a lad.” But he didn’t want to go to the coffee bar with her but made up an excuse about putting flowers on a grave in the cemetery.

She, he thought, wouldn’t want anything to do with such morbid things as graveyards, but he was wrong.

“That’s a lovely thought,” she whispered, her gorgeous eyes almost watering as she gazed into his, “can I come with you?”

And he wished he hadn’t lied about the graveyard because he couldn’t think of an answer, so “it’s a bit ghoulish,” he told her.

At those words her eyes lit up, those beautiful, teasing eyes, and she said “I’ll come!” just like that.

“Then I’ll call for you at six,” he said.

By six o’clock he had worked out a plan. He’d even popped into the cemetery and spent what seemed like ages looking at dozens of gravestones until he found one he thought might be appropriate.

It was old, almost crumbling, but he could just about make out part of the ornate script on it: Died on the 18^th February 1789. He might not have been alive in the eighteenth century, but his birthday was 18^th February.

So when he met Rosemary at six o’clock that evening he told her that he always liked to think of people in what he called the olden times who shared his birthday. And he laid a small bunch of wild flowers against the stone and stood in silence for a minute or two before grinning at the girl and telling her that was that, they could go home.

“Via Waites’s coffee bar,” she grinned, and those eyes were so glorious that they started to awake something inside him that was a great deal deeper than childhood friendship. So he smiled and said “okay, and I’m buying”, even though he barely had enough money to cover two coffees.

Four years later Rosemary married Stephen, and she made the most beautiful of brides though her choice of a white gown was a tad dishonest, while he, Peter, was the best man and Janie was chief bridesmaid. Peter instantly fell for Janie because Janie was a name very much like Jane and although Jane had been an age ago she had never been forgotten and he still hankered after the times they’d spent together. And he particularly loved the idea of Janie when she told him her full name.

She was Janie Cobweb.

© Peter Rogerson 04.05.22

*Here’s the resurrection of another of my characters. It was before Dorothy and I married, I was sitting in her front room and trying to think of a name for a precocious character I was developing and ended up with Janie Cobweb. She’s gone through several stages since then, but I’m returning her in this tale to her roots as a precocious young woman.

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