Summers Gone

The way it was: those memorable summer moments recalled

Summer and nostalgia are entirely intertwined; deeply, irresistibly co-dependent, and perhaps this year more than any other. Here, Ciara O’Connor recalls a bittersweet summer of love, while overleaf, some LIFE favourites remember their own outstanding summers

We five girls had been planning the holiday for a long time, that summer after school ended, before real life or college began: it was legend. This was not a holiday but a rite of passage, the promised land, a solemn ritual of leaving childish things behind: Ios.

This Greek Island was full of promise, of what it meant to be young (but old enough, finally): drink, sluttier-than-you’d-wear-at-home outfits, sunshine and snogging. Sophie’s older brother had been there the year before, and we earnestly noted down the names of bars, and what to order where, and who to ask for. It was our first holiday and we’d be (very) young, free and single. We couldn’t wait.

During the revision period before exams, I had wandered into a kind of casual romance with a boy whom I mostly knew from 6pm mass and bored eye-flirting during communion. After a while of mostly revising and occasionally playing footsie under the table (I have enough self-knowledge now to recognise that I appear to require an emotional-support man during periods of hard work), he asked whether we’d be boyfriend and girlfriend.

I was surprised. We didn’t have much in common (such are school couplings) and I didn’t think he liked me very much. I carefully explained that there would be exams soon; and then the summer holidays and Ios with the girls; and then immediately after that, Kerry with family; and then we were both going straight to college, in a different cities, so...

“I understand,” he smiled I was relieved — he understood.

At school on Monday morning, a friend nudged me and gleefully hissed,”You never told me you made it official!” He had shared the news at six o’clock mass the night before — I’d missed it.

Panic rose. By the end of the day it was common knowledge. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, I appeared to have a boyfriend.

I was 17 and my aversion to conflict had not yet been flagged as a problem. It would be too awkward to bring up. I couldn’t willingly expose myself to the mortification a conversation would surely entail. I supposed I’d just have a boyfriend now, until I died, or he died. It could be worse, I rationalised: he was nice.

Exams finished, and then I was in Ios where (to my fresh bafflement) I was neither free nor single.

Every day was the same: we woke, ate bags of those crunchy little toasts you get in foreign supermarkets; and then the diligent plan for pre-drinking was drawn up, to make sure we hit the magic ratio of drink, to food, to time, to sustain the bacchanalia until the sun came up and sent us, cheerfully shameful after a masterful snog, home.

In retrospect, what we felt to be debauched and adult was all very innocent: the thrill, you see, was the snog itself. Snogs were not a means to an end — one-night stands with strangers abroad seemed very serious and slightly dark, it was definitely unnecessarily complicated and far too time-consuming for a girls’ trip. We wanted fun.

I was dramatically, demonstrably, miserable. My ‘I have a boyfriend’ sounded unconvincing because I was unconvinced, so explaining the fact to sexy drunk man-babies only served to suggest that I was looking to be persuaded — and, honestly, sexy man-babies had never tried to persuade me of anything before. It was intoxicating.

A boy we met in the street got my name henna-tattooed up his calf, thinking that this was the hard-to-get dance I had started. I’m not proud to admit that 13 years later the thought of that freshly shaved, humiliated, frustrated leg still makes me proud.

I would nobly turn from the best-looking boys I’d ever seen, having illegally danced with them for a whirlwind hour and breathlessly say, “we can’t.” I would walk away, the very embodiment, I felt, of alluring melancholy, imagining their devastated regret. My legs were incredible. It was amazing.

And so then to Kerry, which had roughly similar numbers of drunk Irish teenagers as the streets of Ios, and an infuriating, heartbreaking summer with a friend I had long been (in a low-key way) desperately in love with. I knew that he’d wanted to snog me too, that summer, because he got nasty. I stayed home after he stood me up on my 18th birthday, and after that I realised I needed to make more friends. And so that’s what I did. They’re still my friends.

When I got back home at the end of August, I gave Accidental Boyfriend a call. He didn’t pick up. My eye began to twitch. After a significant pause, he rang: “Look,” he said, “obviously this isn’t easy.”

“Are you kidding me?” I spluttered. I knew what was coming. He misunderstood.

“It’s not you, it’s me... It’s just we didn’t see each other this summer,” he said.

“But I told you we wouldn’t, it was...”

He cut me off. :It’s just that you had Ios with the girls, and then you were in Kerry, and now we’re both going to different universities...”

“Right.” In wordless rage at the mansplaining of my own gentle let down of months earlier, I hung up. I don’t know if I was more furious about my absurd snog-less summer, or embarrassed that he clearly thought my reaction was to losing him, personally. For teenage girls, anger and embarrassment are always inextricably lined. At least, I consoled my pride and hormones, there’s Freshers’ Week.

Some years later I got a Facebook message out of the blue from an older guy who had been staying by us in Ios. We had chatted amiably most days — mostly about our mutual experience of being there and not single. He had made much of my young age and felt benign and unthreatening in his lack of charisma and advanced years (he was 24, which felt ridiculous to me).

The message read: ‘I should have fucked you when I had the chance.’

It felt physical, strangely violent and violating, to now recalibrate and see myself again at 17 through his eyes: a thing to be ‘fucked’. And I know now that he won’t have been the only one. I wanted to go back in time and scoop up little stupid gorgeous teenage-me that summer and tell her she’s not missing out: the world cannot be trusted with 17-year-old girls.

That’s when I forgave sweet old Accidental Boyfriend, and the summer of love he stole from me: I’m glad it was a summer of angry, exquisite sexual tension, disappointment, and friendship. It spared me; it taught me (sooner rather than later) that sometimes the thrill is in doing nothing at all.