In 1975, I was fourteen years old, the middle child of a family of seven. That summer, a new family moved in next door. The two houses were semi-detached with a narrow passageway running along the side of each, leading to the back gardens.
Mum said the Dad next door was a diplomat. I didn’t know what that meant but I nodded as if I did. There was a boy. He was fifteen. His name was Laurence. He was the same age as my brother. After a while, we all hung out together in the woods behind our houses.
One day, it was just Laurence and me, out climbing trees as usual. I was about to challenge him to a tree race when he stopped and put his hand on my arm. I turned, scuffing the piles of autumn leaves around our feet.
Then, tilting his head, he asked “May I kiss you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that.”
“I think you would be allowed,” he said, with a shy smile.
I was unsure of what to do or say so I smiled back at him. He leaned towards me – he was a little taller than me. He couldn’t have been aware of the significance of this place, right here, right now where I could feel the soft nub of tree bark nudging into my back.
He bent his head and put his lips on mine. They felt like cold paper. I had never felt cold paper on my lips before. It wasn’t unpleasant. His skin felt smooth and cool against my face. The light touch of his fingers on my shoulders felt good. This was different from anything I had ever experienced before. I still wasn’t sure what to do. My arms were by my side. He drew back from me and tilted his head again, with a quizzical look.
“Was that ok?” he asked.
“Yes, that was ok,” I said, in a most matter-of-fact voice.
“Can I do it again?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “You can do it again tomorrow.”
“Oh, ok then, great, tomorrow.” He blushed. “Will you come here at the same time?”
“Yes” I said, “but I have to bring my sister home first. Then I will come. If I am late it’s because Mama has asked me to do some jobs for her. I’ll have to do them.”
“I’ll wait for you, right here,” he said. He smiled again. I liked his smile. His hair was straight and fell from the middle of the top of his head, to his eyebrows. My two brothers had dark wiry hair that stuck out all over their heads, so this fine light-brown hair intrigued me. I wanted to put my hand up and touch it where it covered his forehead but something inside me told me not to, so I kept my hands by my side.
We turned to make our way along the uneven track that many walkers before us had trampled out through the trees. We were alone in the woods behind our houses. We could get back home quickly by scaling the garden wall which ran along the back of his house and mine. His hand bumped into mine as we walked. He left it there. Was he holding my hand? I wasn’t sure. Only my family had held my hand before, but this was different.
I felt safe here with him. I knew every inch of the woods, better than he did. His house was a rental and the occupants seemed to change every two years or so. My two brothers, four sisters and I were all born into our house with the woods behind it. We had climbed almost every tree, except the impossible ones with sky-high barks and no branches for twenty feet.
We had played hide and seek there every day of every summer since I could remember, with favourite hiding places and special trees – mine was a small gnarly beech. It looked insignificant against the huge horse chestnuts and oaks that surrounded it, but it was my tree and to me, the best one.
When I was four years old, I asked to be lifted onto the lowest branch and I crawled across it until I could reach up and pull myself to the next one. My favourite branch was the fourth one up because while sitting there I could see over the garden wall to my bedroom window, and the back of my teddy bear leaning into the corner of the windowsill. There was a small hole in the fourth branch with a fossilised acorn embedded into it. Year after year, that acorn pressed into my knee as I crawled along the skinny but strong arm of my tree.
I remember being scared when I first made it to Branch 4 and my sister had to come and help me climb down. Now it looked so low and so easy. If I wanted to, I could now clamber to the top without much effort. Twelve branches in all. My initials were carved into the top branch. From there, I could see over our house, to the road at the other side, through the gap in the clay chimney pots. On many a winter’s day after school, the sitting room fire’s smoke would billow out and up into the evening sky as I sat and watched, seeing animal shapes and faces form and disappear in the moving white fog.
But today I didn’t want to climb my tree. I was walking away from it, along the track, with him.
When he kissed me, my back was pressed against my tree. He changed the feeling of the woods for me, probably forever. He added a new memory to my special tree. In the woods behind our house, I was kissed by a boy for the first time. His name was Laurence.
Two days later, I borrowed my brother’s scout pocket-knife, telling him I wanted to dig the fossilised acorn from the tree. This meant nothing to him and because I promised to return his knife before he went exploring in the woods that evening, he was happy to give it to me.
Tucking the knife into the waistband of my shorts, I climbed my tree to the fourth branch. With painstaking care, I carved a crooked ‘L’ into the bark. It took me so long I thought I might have to limit myself to ‘L’ instead of completing my plan to create an artistic heart between his initial and mine. At least ‘L’ was a simple letter to carve. Would I get an ‘A’ carved before I had to abandon the operation and be back to the house for tea? I couldn’t rush because knew I’d be in serious trouble if I cut myself with my brother’s knife.
A misshapen ‘A’ was all I could manage – I had to go. No heart today. Another day perhaps. I didn’t tell Laurence. It was my secret, carved into my special tree. He had kissed me again. My first love – the boy next door. We never told anyone we had kissed. I liked that we had something special.
The next year, his family relocated to Italy. I missed him in that innocent first love, early teenage way but I must have shaken it off and we lost touch once he moved away.
On a rainy Monday morning in 1995, I was sitting at our breakfast table scanning the newspaper before taking my son to school. ‘Tragedy strikes German diplomat,’ the headline flashed. I almost didn’t read on but the Bauer name stopped my scanning eyes.
‘Laurence Bauer, the 35-year-old son of renowned German diplomat Ulrich Bauer, was killed today in a motorcycle accident in a suburb of Berlin.’ The article was accompanied by a photo of a handsome young man with his arm around a beautiful blonde woman, a small toddler sandwiched between them – a boy, the image of his father. That smile I loved some twenty years earlier jumped off the page. The fine light brown hair still covered his forehead to his eyebrows. I felt a strange tightness in my chest. My tummy flipped. An uncontrollable tear brimmed over my eyelash and down my cheek, splashing into my tea.
As my son played at my feet, my mind galloped back to the woods behind my childhood home. A crooked ‘L’ and a rushed ‘A’ carved into the fourth branch of my gnarly beech. A kiss that felt like cold paper. An unfinished love heart for an unfinished love. I was fourteen. He was fifteen. His name was Laurence.
The heart holds memories in a secret box. The morning Laurence died, a memory seeped out and a tiny sliver of my heart melted, forever.
Published by The People’s Friend Magazine – August 2017
