Oh the agony and the ecstasy of our first loves
Top writers share their ‘Normal People’ romances
WHAT is it about hit BBC drama Normal People that has struck such a chord? The beautiful Ireland scenery? The smooth-skinned beauty of its two characters, Connell and Marianne? No, it has to be the nostalgia that it conjures up in anyone who has ever been young and in love; the sheer awkwardness and ineptitude that sees us blunder about in a constant state of anxiety as we desperately try to get things right, simultaneously getting everything so wrong. Here, eight writers recount their tales of teenage angst, love and frustration.
MY HEART BEAT SO FAST Emily Sheffield
I’d Kissed a couple of boys before, both washing-machine experiences where you came up gasping for air, inwardly laughing at the ridiculous pantomime of it and the inexperienced slobbering on both sides.
But apart from the relief you’d finally properly French kissed, emotionally, I’d been left cold.
They sent love letters. I was ruthlessly seeking adolescent experience.
This boy was different. I was nearly 15, he was two years older, charismatic, tall, dark and gifted with an ease and teasing wit that ensured women were never far away.
This illicit first love took me totally by surprise, like being hit by a high wave, your breath and balance gone in a second. We hung out in the same friends’ circle and I had watched him slyly, never assuming he might feel the same.
Until one moment when left alone in a room on a sofa together, his usual flirtatious banter changed temperature, and he slowly lent in and kissed me for so long and so deeply, pinning me beneath him; I can still feel how fast my heart beat. This time mouths didn’t bump or feel uncomfortable. everything fitted.
His compliments didn’t ring untrue. I didn’t want him to stop telling me how beautiful I was, or sexy, except when he dropped his head to kiss me again. More secret assignations followed, including a week on holiday, where he toyed with my affections, always dancing one step away, and then later that night kissing me under a dense black summer sky. It was my first taste of the cruelty of romance.
It would be a decade before someone had that hold on me again. For two more years, and through other boyfriends, he was the one I pined for, as he dated one sinuous beauty after another.
Watching Connell kiss Marianne that first time, and her laughing, innocent delight and the shockwave of first passion, reminded me of that afternoon on the sofa, unaware in the pure pleasure of that moment that lips that lock perfectly don’t always lead to love on both sides or true love for ever.
GIRLS WERE ALIEN Brian Viner
AWKWARD teenage fumblings would have been nice; for most of my teen years I didn’t even get that far. I do remember practising French kissing on my childhood teddy, named Panda, but when it came to the real thing — more experimental than lust driven, with rebecca, a girl I’d known since I was two — it was traumatic.
I had a drowning sensation and felt a powerful urge to gasp for air. I was 13. Panda had let me down.
About a year later, I had my first date, with elyssa.
We went to see The Man Who Would Be king at the Odeon, but sean Connery had died before I even plucked up the courage to feign a yawn and put my arm round her shoulders.
By the time we had a tentative snog, the credits were rolling.
I had no sisters and went to a boys’ grammar school, so part of the problem was that girls were an alien species.
But when I was 17, my school became a sixth-form college and there was an intake of girls. I was dazzled, bewitched. I fancied suzanne rotten, and hoped that my broken leg (a rugby injury) might impress her.
We went on a sixth-form trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and on the roller coaster I had to sit on my own in the front car because my leg was in plaster and I needed room to prop it up (it was 1979; Health and safety didn’t exist).
That was bad enough. Then on the coach home, suzanne sat next to one of my best mates, and they flirted all the way.
When I got off at the end of my road, I hurled both my crutches away in terrible existential despair that I thought would never lift.
Two years later, a miracle happened. I shed my boyhood blubber and most of my spots, just in time to squeeze some actual sexual encounters (awkward and fumbling, naturally) into my teens. On a French train during
an Interrailing adventure, I met a Californian girl, Robyn (pictured far left).
She was two years older than me and a lot more experienced.
I wouldn’t say I never looked back, but at least I was able to look forward with a little more optimism.
SILENT BUT SO COOL Cristina Odone
HE WAS blond and lean, the coolest of the cool gang. Aged 17, Michael had already mastered the air of inscrutable aloofness that gives every self-respecting woman a goal: I’ve got to melt him.’
This was Washington DC, 1978: Jimmy Carter was in the White House and Bruce Springsteen was in the air. But Michael sloped around the school looking like a melancholic romantic hero.
I was a chubby, cheeky extrovert, who found silences in any conversation truly awkward.
We were in the same English literature class and were paired to see A Streetcar Named Desire at the local theatre, and then do a presentation for our classmates.
Heart pounding, palms sweaty, I don’t think I could breathe during the two hours I sat beside him.
I didn’t draw breath on the bus ride home, prattling on next to the silent, enigmatic Michael.
Suddenly, he took my hand in his and kissed it. ‘What a chatterbox,’ he whispered. It was love, I was sure of it. Every day over the next fortnight, we prepared our presentation after school and I convinced myself that Michael and I were forging an incredible, unique relationship.
I chatted for two as he sat beside me, blue eyes half-shut and a halfsmile playing on his lips.
I talked about anything and everything in order to spur my taciturn love object into a few words.
I still squirm at the memory of me, casting words into a silent well. The most I got was: ‘Do you want a Coke?’
His kisses, though, melted all reservations.
It took me months to realise that Michael was a sphinx without a riddle and that I was trying to shoehorn deep emotions and loving words into someone incapable of either.
By graduation, he had replaced me with a bubbly cheerleader.
MEETING IN SECRET Emma Cowing
WE met at an under-18s disco in Glasgow. Christmas time and frosty, the floor of the club sticky with illicit alcohol. I was 16, a girls’ school pupil who rarely had the chance to meet real-life boys.
He was tall, blonde and shy, a swimmer who competed for his exclusive private school yet turned out, miraculously, to live a couple of train stops away from my parents’ village on the Clyde coast.
Afterwards we went to a latenight Chinese noodle bar on Sauchiehall Street and gazed at each other under the garish strip lighting, swapped numbers (house phones back then) as our friends giggled behind their menus.
That Christmas we spoke endlessly on the phone, conversations about nothing at all which I would dissect at length with my friends. We arranged that he would sneak over to mine one day before New Year while my mum and dad were out. I took him up to my room and we kissed. Soft, warm kisses that seemed to last for days – before my parents made an unexpected return.
Now I know what love is, I thought. Two weeks later we arranged to meet in Glasgow. I sat on the steps of the RSAMD building and waited. Finally, I walked to a phone box and dialled the number I’d learned by heart.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly down the phone. ‘I can’t do this.’
That night I sat in my bedroom in the dark, full of tears and teenage angst. It was my dad who found me. I poured it all out.
He gave me a hug, told me that yes, it really was true, there were plenty more of fish in the sea. Then he told me there was chilli con carne for dinner, and a small glass of wine if I’d like it.
It was my first lesson in heartbreak, and healing.
CIDER WITH SNOGS Flic Everett
LIKE Marianne in the show, I was clever but, unlike her, I was hopelessly inarticulate about my emotions and too crippled with self-consciousness and fear of rejection ever to admit to a boy that I might like him.
No wonder it went wrong when, aged 17, I developed a huge crush on Paul, a friend of a friend.
Ironically, the previous year, he’d half-asked me out — in that teenage way when you’re not sure if it’s a genuine proposition or they’re just making casual conversation.
I said No because at the time I thought I didn’t want a boyfriend. A year later, I very much did but he was no longer interested — until after one night of excess cheap cider we had a snog in his parents’ garden, subsequently not mentioned by either of us.
A few weeks later, we were at the same house party, and I was quivering with hope that our drunken collision might lead to some kind of declaration of passion.
I was giggling with my girlfriends, drinking Bacardi and Coke, when his best mate approached me.
‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said. ‘Paul says he wants to go out with you, and you should go and chat to him outside.’
Off I staggered, heart pounding, to find Paul happily snogging a friend of mine, entirely unaware that his mate was weaving humiliating fantasies on his behalf.
It later transpired that the mate fancied me himself, and hoped that his lie would put me off Paul for good when I realised the truth.
He was not a student of teen psychology.
I pined after Paul for a further year, when we all dispersed to university, and I never saw him again.
A KISS — I PANICKED Paul Connolly
THERE was a girl, Sally, who lived on my street. I’d been in awe of her since I was around 14. To all my other friends, I was the joker and bright boy.
But Sally’s beauty intimidated me and if she was around I would clam up. Then one night, when I was around 16, one of my mates nicked a bottle of cider from his parents’ house. We were all hanging out in his back yard, swigging from the bottle, and suddenly we were playing postman’s knock.
On around the third go, I was paired up with Sally for a kiss.
I had no idea how to kiss. I was a late bloomer, more interested in football than sex.
But I’d seen old 1940s and 1950s films where the lovers pressed lips firmly. So that’s how I thought you did it.
When I saw her leaning in with her eyes shut and her mouth opening, I panicked.
Eyes bulging in horror, I bumped my dry, bolted-shut lips with her tongue. Then I quickly sprang away and, looking for an excuse for being a terrible kisser, for some reason said, ‘Bleaugh, your perfume tastes terrible.’
The look she gave me was pure scorn. I didn’t talk to her for more than three years. Then, one day, I was in a pub with my friends, holding court. Sally who, unknown to me, had been sitting in a little booth and had heard me being funny, sidled up to me and told me to buy her a drink.
We then went out for 18 happy months until I told her during an argument, ‘You’ll never leave me.’ It turned out I was wrong.
HE WAS A ‘PERVERT’ Mary Killen
I GREW up in Larne, a somewhat dank provincial town in Northern Ireland. Culturally, we were about ten years behind the 1970s mainland.
I preferred more effeminate boys with long hair and velvet bellbottoms as seen on Top Of The Pops. Instead, we had short-haired boys with dandruff, weatherbeaten complexions and shiny, grey, polyester trousers.
One day, aged 15, I was sitting in the town’s one coffee bar when the boy of my dreams walked in.
Tall and devastatingly handsome with long, black hair, he was the epitome of romantic sophistication. We made eye contact and were soon engrossed in conversation while my schoolfriends stared on in stunned silence.
Aged 18, he had just moved with his parents from England. His name was Rudolph.
After an hour, during which we established we were soul mates, he took my phone number and headed off. I swooned back in my banquette. I had clearly met the love of my life.
About ten minutes later, we streamed into the chemist’s which Rudolph happened to be just leaving. ‘Mary,’ said the pharmacist, who knew our family. ‘Do you know that fellow?’ ‘I’ve just met him,’ I replied. He shuddered in disgust. ‘Well you keep well away. He’s a sex pervert. He’s just been in here trying to buy naked photographs of women!’
I knew it was too good to be true. A sex pervert! Moreover, a stupid sex pervert. Why would he think the chemist would sell nude photos?
A few years later, I met Rudolph at an event in Belfast and was emboldened to explain why I had not taken his calls.
He was stunned. ‘Was that what it was? I went into that chemist because they had a cardboard cutout of the kodak girl outside the shop and I asked if I could buy it. She wasn’t even nude. She was in shorts and a bikini top!’
And so a potentially great romance was stymied by a provincial Irish chemist.