The beautiful Miss Boston

Before you fall in love, you have to get some practice in and your sub-brain seems to do this by fooling you into seeing someone as perfect, it usually chooses someone unobtainable who you can’t win. Well for pubescent boys anyway.

For the first time in my school life I looked forward to English lessons with relish. Miss Boston was the teacher and she was beautiful. The Thursday English lesson was in progress and I was sat at an old fashioned penknife distressed desk that still had an inkwell hole and chalk grove when we all possessed modern fountain pens. I sat writing lines about a very young poet who impressed his English teacher with his depth and passion by composing wonderful rhyming couplets that I later realised were limericks. She, the object of my very existence, was walking the classroom slowly moving from desk to desk and coming closer to me. This woman was perfection, about five foot four. Hourglass figure, red lipstick, red nails, perfume, long blond hair, short sleeved white blouse and a black pencil skirt. She was the double of Jayne Mansfield but real and in my life.

I could hear Miss Boston’s voice now advising the girl sat behind me, she was very near and then she stood at my back. I could smell her perfume, It was inappropriately old for her, Tweed I think, but nice enough, her warm breath was near my right ear as she leaned forward to read my thoughts, thankfully only the ones that I had put on paper. She leaned and pointed at my couplets and In my right eye I could see the little pearl pendant she wore on a neck-chain swinging backwards and forwards. It swung In view and out of view like a metaphor for coitus that a 1960s film director might have employed. These metaphors have gone now, the trains and tunnels and crashing waves, the glug-gluging knocked over bottle of white wine. Today it would be perfect couples copulating in perfect harmony. The metaphors were better; you didn’t feel inadequate with the metaphors, you could dream the full dream. Miss Boston’s svelte arm with painted fingernails pointed out my errors and she said something like ‘have another look at that’. I did, at her delicate skin with tiny little hairs shining in the light and her perfect red nails, around her wrist was a broad silver bracelet made up of platelets that resembled miniature razor blades and I noticed a loop of amber cotton snagged in the clasp, I was convinced that I knew the garment it came from, this in spite of it exactly matching the amber blackboard cloth. I was convinced now that she was almost imperceptibly caressing my back and the thought of only two thin cotton cloths separating our skins was delicious. I wanted time to stand still, for this all enveloping pleasure to last for ever. She asked me something in a sweet low voice that sounded conspiratorial but I had no answer, could not speak. Someone above must have loved her too because they then threw me out of heaven and took her away and gave her to the boy opposite. The devastation heaped on me was crushing, distraught is not enough to describe the unrequited longing washing over me like waves of dragging tangles.

A few days ground by then by a week later the realisation that she meant nothing special to me any more. She was just another pretty woman like you see with their kids in supermarkets every day.

The intensity of our time together was far too deeply cut into me to ever forget her though.