Authors: Dawn French
There is something else I just want to mention now because I’ve been thinking about it. Other than the mega luv we will have for each other which I take for granted already, we will have to learn about each other’s cultures and this might take some time,
so
we must be patient and tolerable about it. As of this moment, there is so much I don’t know about your fair land, the United States of America, but believe me, I am an oh-so-hungry learner and am oh-so-keen to digest it all! Before long, I will be jivin’ on the Sunset Strip, eating crabfish on the byoo and getting down all over the place! And perhaps, in time, you will come to love our crazy fish ’n’ chips in newspaper and our coins with the head of the Queen on one side as a mark of respect. What a fascinating time we have ahead as a future. So, unlike most other couples who simply come from the same place and already know all this stuff, we will have so much more exciting exploration to do. I can’t wait!
So, anyway, this is enough for you to take in all in one go so I will wait for your reply before I arrange anything. Please can you make sure it’s you who writes or calls me rather than a servant/secretary? That would be better. Until we finally meet and instantly know how in luv we are and always will be forever and a day to the moon and back, I leave you with one last thought to abide. ‘Could it be forever?’ Oh yes, my love, it could, is my answer. My heart in yours, have courage,
Lotsaluv
,
Moo French age 14
(This is a family nickname which comes from when we lived in Cyprus and has nothing to do with me looking like a cow! – as you will see from enclosed photo, which you are free to keep. I have another copy.)
I LOVED LINCOLN
, I thought it was the poshest city we had ever lived near. There was something grand about it. There’s that big ancient bow arch you can walk under, and an elegant river that runs right through the middle, reminding you what an important place you’re in. Plus of course a cathedral you can’t miss. I haven’t visited Lincoln since we left when I was 14 years old so maybe it isn’t as impressive as my memory insists, but I clearly remember shopping there and being in awe.
RAF Faldingworth was also impressive to me, but in a different way. The quarters and the NAAFI were quite compact and cheery but the actual base where you worked seemed sprawling and, as I recall, a large part of it was empty and virtually derelict. There were plenty of big old buildings that must once have been – what? Billets or meeting rooms or training areas or messes or something? It was like being in a spooky episode of
The Avengers
or
The Prisoner
where someone nearly always ends up in a deserted military base doing plenty of fast running and hiding and dodging. The perfect location for a teenager to get up to eight kinds of no good. And sorry to say, Dad, we did. We had secret parties where I was introduced to the mixed blessing that is sweet cider. We had romantic liaisons behind the doors of storage cupboards. (Most of these were innocent fumblings resulting in flushed frustration, nothing more.) We had terrifying seances where we tried to summon up the spirits of dead relatives. I once
attempted
to connect with Grandad McCarthy and was utterly petrified when the glass on our home-made Ouija board hurtled around accurately spelling out various clues about our family which no other soul there could have known. I was shaken to the core by this creepy, seriously weird experience, but I didn’t feel I could share it with you and Mum because it was
so
supremely bad to have done such a thing. Had I opened up a sinister portal through which my dead grandfather had been reluctantly sucked into our earthly plane? Was he going to haunt me from now on? Was he attached to me like some kind of astral teasel stuck on my jumper? I was freaked out for a while but lots of reassurance in the form of heavy petting with David Eccles alleviated my spiritual burden somehow. Ain’t it always the case?! I have never fully understood what happened but I have learned enough to keep a respectful distance from any inexplicable phenomena since (except for watching
Most Haunted
of course, of which I am a devotee). This explains why I have never tried to communicate with you through any of these odd channels which I find too eerie and strange to understand. I do hope you haven’t been sitting on the other side of that spiritual portal for these past 30 years, staring at the backside of a closed door waiting for someone to buzz you in. That
would
be awful. If that’s the case, Dad, just lock up, turn off the lights and go to bed cos no one’s comin’! Maybe we’ll see you in the morning … Who knows.
Do you remember taking me to look around Caistor Grammar, my first experience of senior school? I only spent a year there but I had a good time except for the hideous weekly cross-country torture. Why do schools insist on hurting children with ugly running kits and near-death experiences of exercise
which
is too demanding? Has anyone ever died of PE? I think I did, several times. At the least, I learned to reject any suchlike activity in adult life. Thanks, school. Otherwise Caistor was just fine. It
was
, however, the venue for my first criminal activity. There was a sweet shop just outside the school gates and, yes, I can hear you, I
know
how little the return is on sweets, especially when kids are nicking the profits. As the granddaughter of a newsagent I knew all this and I knew it was wrong because you had impressed that on me at a
very
early age,
but
what you didn’t know is that it was mandatory. Like a Herculean task, it was expected of you as a measly first-former to steal sweets for the older girls. You were a cretin and a smell if you didn’t and you would also be forced to suffer the humiliation of being actually killed, which I didn’t relish. So, you see, Dad, I stole in order to live. That’s entirely different to stealing because you’re just a greedy immoral grubby little twat, isn’t it? That’s my defence for my initial sticky-fingeredness. I have no such justification for what happened next.
There was an officer’s daughter called Heather (not her real name. Her real name is Hannah Black). She was big and bold and brave. She
loved
stealing. It was her passion and she was extremely talented at it. Like many illicit skills, her excellent pilfering credits won her a lot of attention and much admiration. She was cool, she was a bobby-dazzler, she was a hep cat. She was
it
. I was swept along with this frothy tide of admirers, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that stealing was actually OK, that it was only our parents’ archaic morals that had fooled us into eschewing such exciting, rewarding delights. What did they know? They were ancient and ill-informed and, like,
so
establishment
. I wanted to be like Heather. I wanted to be a proper thief, yay. We would go into town at lunchtimes and I would watch and learn from the Grand Mistress. She had no fear, she was cunning and stealthy and extremely smooth. My first attempt was in Smith’s. She advised me to start small, with something inexpensive so I could feign ignorance if caught – after all, what is the
point
of stealing a packet of pencils, sir, it’s hardly rich pickings, look, here, I have enough money in my purse if I really wanted them. Good ruse. OK, here I go – a packet of six pencils. The execution of the ‘grab’ was awkward and the packet edges grazed my flesh as I shoved it up my sleeve. I went a bit sweaty and telltale red in the face, but I did it – I nicked the pencils and propelled myself out of the shop as if bitten on the bum by a beaver. My tutor was delighted with her protégée and promised a bigger, brighter, lucrative future if I stuck with her.
I went home that night and looked at my swag. Six lovely red pencils, sharp and perfect. My booty. Mine, all mine, and I hadn’t parted with a sou of my precious pocket money. How great was this? Yes, it was. It was great. Wasn’t it? So why wasn’t I feeling great? Was it simply that I was back in the home environment and thus back under the old, outdated regime of morality? Surely I
should
be feeling great? Like Fagin-type of great? I didn’t feel great – I felt awful. Full-of-guilt-and-self-loathing awful. Fagin-at-the-end-of-the-film-type awful. In the end, I tossed ’n’ turned in bed, feeling steadily worse as the night wore on. I was plagued with guilt. It was a massive dragon breathing hot fire down my neck until eventually I could bear it no longer and I came to speak to Mum and confessed all. It gushed out of me like spew, my litany of felonious misdeeds –
well
, the one dastardly pencil one and some sketchy info about the lesser but still vile prior sweet-shop crimes. She was very understanding but said that you, Dad, needed to be brought into the loop to make the big decisions about how we should proceed now that she was fully informed of how hopelessly miscreant I was. So, you sat on my bed and what followed was the most serious and sobering conversation I had ever had. Thanks for holding my hand, by the way, but it didn’t comfort me much during your frank assessment of the dire situation. You explained that in light of the extent of my villainous underhand dealings, there were only two options open to us. A, to call the police and inform them how bent I was, or B, to try and replace the contraband without anyone knowing. I had never known you be so solemn. You then commended me for my honesty and said it might take time to come to terms with the shame and the potential dishonour brought upon the House of French. Then you promised to make a decision the next morning and we went to bed.
Well, we were outside the door of Smith’s at opening time. Putting those pencils back was SO difficult! People around me were noticing my shifty behaviour and looking at me with accusatory and disgusted glares, but, somehow, I replaced them. I left that shop and my former crooked life behind that day. I was no longer a low curr; I had cleaned up and was back on the straight and narrow, all thanks to your wise counsel. You surely saved me from a life of pure base wickedness. So that’s good then.
Heather was disgusted and said she’d let me know when she’d found a spine donor for me. She went on to some truly awesome thieving, including large hi-fi equipment and TV sets. Eventually
her
dad found it all in a cupboard and she got a hiding from hell. Wonder what she’s up to now? Probably something in government, I s’pect.
It was at that camp you set up the big youth club, wasn’t it? I know you had done stuff like that before but this was the time I really noticed it because I was the age to appreciate it personally. I think you must have noticed how vulnerable bored teenagers are. Maybe you could see that shagging and stealing weren’t going to lead us anywhere good, that we needed distractions. All of my mates loved you for it – you reclaimed a building from dereliction and we all decorated it till it was a perfect teen meeting place with a coffee bar, tuck shop, ping-pong, games and a dance floor with disco lights. I loved those dances except for one thing – you were
always there
keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings, so it was double difficult for Gary or me to get a snog or a puff. The kids there knew you well, and thought you were dead groovy and told us how lucky we were to have parents like you. This was only a small part of what you did for young people everywhere we went, and only now do I see what a phenomenally selfless thing it was to do. It took up a lot of your energy and often tested your patience, but Dad, you did a wonderful thing – you gave your time up to improve the lives of so many young men and women. I hope you knew how proud we were when you received the BEM in the honours list for this work, because we really were.
OH HECK, EVEN
writing your name there has given me a little flutter of flushed embarrassment. It is only momentary though, because if I scrunch my brain up hard enough to remember … yes, there it is – I can still smell your sweet breath and taste your divine lips. Your lovely, lovely mouth. How bloody fabulous it was to kiss you.
You weren’t the absolute first. Sorry, I may have lied and told you that. Before you, there was a boy called Michael Le Pellier. I was about four I think, and the lip activity was very brief and not as entertaining as I might have hoped. We merely stood opposite each other and let our lips touch. That’s all. Just touching. Eyes open. No movement. Like statues that have fallen towards each other and come to rest at the lips. It usually lasted for about two minutes and was supremely uneventful, although I was flattered that he had chosen me for the experiment. We did it at various intervals during the day at infant school while class carried on around us, and we joined in with all the normal activities either side of the kissing interludes. Eventually we agreed that it wasn’t the best use of our time. We both preferred the sandbox play to the kissing so we cooled it off and only engaged in the face-docking as a courtesy at the start and end of each day.
That was pretty much it till you came along when my Dad was posted to RAF Faldingworth in Market Rasen. As I recall, you were Gary’s best friend on that camp, just before he went away to
start
boarding school in Plymouth, and even after, when he came home on holiday. I can’t quite remember how we started with the kissing, I don’t think we actually dated as such, did we? I was in hyperdrive with the ol’ puberty hormones at the time and was raring to get out of the traps, so I doubt you had a chance of escaping. I loved how tall and funny you were (are?!) and I was doubly impressed with your Swiss army knife expertise, and the whole camouflage flak jacket and bobble hat thing you had going on. You looked liked you might go all Rambo at any moment and disappear into the forest to live on grubs and bark, start your own campfires from brushwood kindling and stab any evil-doers who crossed you. I liked that. Any teenage fugitive who could survive against the elements and, frankly, against a whole world which was against him was my kinda teenager. Of course, I didn’t actually
see
any Swiss army knife action except perhaps a bit of whittling and some bottle-opening, but I was still impressed, just by the potential.