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Love Story By Douglas Leighton Email: douglasleighton at waitrose dot com (above email address formatted to reduce spam) March 06, 2008 When I was thirteen years old I was a message boy with the Copey. I had a bike with the big frame on the front for holding the boxes of groceries. On this, I delivered the messages, for the ladies of the district who didn't fancy humping the weekly provisions back home. I even delivered a funeral wreath on it once, to the family of a young girl I knew, who, love struck and rejected, was the first person to kill herself by jumping off the Forth Road Bridge, quite promptly, after the Queen opened it. The apprentice grocer in the shop was a lad called Love, Mike Love, who at sixteen years was to me a fount of much knowledge that was then not easily gained. Love, for all its weighty meaning, is a common enough name in Fife. And for all its weight too, a common enough sort of game. For amusement, he and the shop girls would flirt and caper and there was all the banter of Love you would expect of young people trapped in a dark, holey sort of place. One of Mike's tricks was to catch any of the girls who ventured into his domain; the high shelves of the backshop, and give them a love bite in a prominent position on their neck. Some of the girls even went willingly because they liked this Loving attention. His idea was that the girls would have to explain to the boyfriend or mother or father where the mark on the neck had come from, it being assumed that such a mark could only have been imparted in the high passion of the passing of a then treasured maidenhood and this, in those days, required some explanation. It was, in a funny way, a tentative statement that the person carrying the mark had passed through a threshold, to the adult world of love. But not really, of course, for a young girl of just sixteen or seventeen summers and not yet married could not bear such stigmata lightly. (People of course, nearly always knew a real one from a pretend one; such are the fantastic powers of discrimination in these matters). Well, at the age of thirteen I was very impressed and decided I would make my mark in this game. What loon does not dream of love? It was the girl from the bread and cake counter that I really thought was the best looking, my target for this bogus passion. She had a pretty face, beehive hair and shapely legs below a fetching white flour-dusty apron. She was Marjory McQueen, a name surely prescient for someone whose destiny was to be intimate with both Pan and Plain. I waited for my chance and one afternoon when I was filling the 7lb tattie bags, my task when not abroad on the bike, I saw her pass behind me on her way to the shelves. I hopped over the tattie hoppers into the aisle (was this a nuptial dance?) on an interception route. We met at the corner of Condiments, across from Tinned Fruits. I placed my arms around her and she knew the game, or thought she did and resisted only gently, in a not unbecoming way, coyly offering up her neck for the novelty of a young lads lips. She had a shock however as she got, not my lips but my teeth, not so hard it drew blood, just hard enough to leave an impression. Well, truth to tell, it really did leave an impression and she, screaming, jumped from my arms with the words "help, he's biting me". You can forgive her that. I can't say it was overstatement. The thing is, how was I, at thirteen, to know that a bite is not a bite and that Love was not love. Any way you look at it, bite or suck, blow or kiss, love hurts. And I still can't quite resolve the harshness and the softness of love, the teeth and the lips, the rose and the thorn. About the author: I am fantastic. At 57 I look like Robert Redford at 32. My athletic prowess is legendary. I play the saxophone like John Coltrane and can dance like Fred Astaire. I live in Scotland, not British columbia. I am visiting the USA in march/april and looked up this site as part of my research, recommended by a friend. I teach science to Secondary School children in an inner city school in Aberdeen. Some explanation of the story as there may be slight cultural lack of understanding: The "copey" was a once ubiquitous chain of communally owned shops just before "supermarkets" took over. They were descended from the "cooperative" movement of the 19th century. Still around, but more like a Supermarket company now. Pan and plain( loaves) were universal(in scotland) types of bread. Hence the expression " He/she (speaks)is pan-loaf . " meaning a false air of superior opinion of self-as if more refined but actually made of the same stuff. The Forth Road Bridge is a bridge very similar to the Golden Gate Bridge which crosses the forth Estuary and was opened about 1963. I have tried to capture the naive intimacy of young people in the small community I used to live in as a child but also hint at the unspoken or unacknowledged threat or violence of the future for young people and their relationships in those days. | | | |
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