Bringing the Girlfriend Home.

I watched an episode of The Royle Family tonight. It was the one in which the son of the house, Anthony, brings his first girlfriend home to meet the family. And such nostalgia it did evoke.

Anthony was eighteen, but I was only fourteen when I first took a girlfriend home. (She wasn’t my first girlfriend, just the first one I took home.) That was Sandra, the one I’ve mentioned before on this blog. She was only thirteen, and she was the one who gave me a scented handkerchief to keep under my pillow while she was on holiday with her parents. Every night I used to sniff it before going to sleep, and what light through yonder window did break (figuratively speaking, of course, it being 11 o’clock at night.) See what a nice boy I was?

I was seventeen before I took another girlfriend home. That was Mary, who I’ve also mentioned on this blog. My mother didn’t like Mary. She didn’t tell me she didn’t like Mary, she told the next door neighbour. Now, it just happens that the next door neighbour was the one with whom I subsequently had an affair, and it was she who told me that my mother hadn’t liked Mary. There goes the good old universe weaving convoluted patterns again.

Next up was Pauline. My mother liked Pauline. I suspect my mother read things in people’s eyes, and she read – with unerring accuracy – that Mary was a bit of a minx. Pauline, on the other hand, was wholesome as a fresh-baked loaf. She was also exceedingly pretty and had an Irish bricklayer for a father. She came from what some people would deem a lower social class than me, but my mother was never that kind of a snob (and neither was I.) Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the impeccable credential of having an Irish bricklayer for a father, Pauline threw me over six weeks later for a lad a year older than me. I gather it was because he wasn’t as nice. The universe’s convolutions can be a little difficult to fathom sometimes, but the upshot was that Pauline never came to my house again.

The point about all this, however, is that I never took a girlfriend home for the purpose of introducing her to my parents. I might have been a nice boy, but I was never a dutiful son. I took them home simply because I lived there. My home was where my bedroom was, and my bedroom was where my music was, and my bedroom was where my girlfriend and I spent most of our time when she visited. That fact is particularly true of Mary, and I always kept my bedroom door shut when Mary was in it (for reasons which you may feel free to infer.) And all these years on, it’s just occurred to me that maybe my mother was standing outside listening.