Sometimes a story lands in your lap. You don’t look for it. It looks for you.
My first ‘difficult’ story was a case in point. I delayed the search for this tale but I knew that I needed it. I was, and am, keen to paint the visceral (that word again) truth, and that includes the agony as well as the joy, the fear as well as the fun, the doubt as well as the certainty. Because we all begin the same – as virgins, on an equal footing, but life deals us all a very different hand.
The story came without warning, in Liverpool, almost a year ago. I was there to stay with Debbie, an old school friend and one of a number of people who have helped me garner some great stories. I call Debbie a school 'friend’; the truth is that we barely spoke in the five years we spent together at the local comprehensive. We couldn’t have been more different. She was the school loudmouth, and a Pringle jumper wearing ‘casual’ to boot. I was the spiky haired, Kensington market shoe clad layabout who breezed around in the background. We met, improbably, years later at a party at the original Cobden Working Men’s club, got talking, and pretty much haven’t stopped since. When I told her about this project, her response was immediate and insistent. ‘Get yourself up to Liverpool’, she said, I’ve got loads of people you could interview here. She wasn’t wrong. I got five great stories that weekend. But only four were scheduled.
The fifth came on Saturday morning as we drove to Sandra’s house, a Welsh lady and the owner of the story in my last post. It was the first time I had ever met her and I was struck, as I often am, at the peculiarity of my life. I go to people’s houses, usually following a single telephone conversation. They make me tea, they sit me down, and then they tell me the intimate details of their sexual lives.
Today was one of those days and as we did the introductions, Sandra’s partner, John, a slight and gentle looking man, asked if I minded him staying in the room while I interviewed her.
‘If it’s OK with Sandra?’ I said.
‘Its fine by me, I’ve got nothing to hide’, she replied. ‘You can stay too if you like Debbie’.
Gulp. I felt selfishly self-conscious. I was under the microscope as well. I got over myself quickly, mostly because I knew I wouldn’t get a good story if I didn’t. I am no expert in these matters but a nervous interviewer does not a good interview make. I needed to put my interviewee at her ease.
Later, as we finished and I flipped off the record button, we sat awhile in Sandra’s front room talking, her partner, John, asking me the odd question.
‘So how long have you been doing this for?’ he said, and, ‘what sort of stories have you heard?’ And then, ‘Have you heard any bad stories, you know, difficult ones?’
‘No’, I said, ‘but I need to hear those stories. I want to paint a balanced picture of this experience. I want to tell this story from all angles.’
I got up and went to the loo, picking my way through the study at the back of the house and closing the door, pondering on what John had just said. As I finished and came out, Debbie accosted me from behind the door.
‘I think John wants to tell you his story. He’s talking to Sandra now. I think it’s a scary one’.
I paused and went back into the room and to John who now looked at me and confirmed what Debbie had just said.
‘I’ll tell you my story if you like, but I don’t think you’ll like it. Its not a nice story’.
There it was. And I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have a spare tape. I talked to John and arranged to go back early the next morning, giving me an evening to ponder on what he might tell me. And, amongst other ludicrous thoughts, what on earth should my face look like as I listen to this story?
I know. It sounds stupid. But I was stepping onto fresh territory. I knew my instinct would be to attempt to placate, to try to make better. But I am not this person’s friend and neither am I a therapist. My role was undetermined, at least in my perception.
I also thought of one of my best friends, Sophie. One of the kindest people I know. A person who, for no good reason, often laughs at the most inappropriate moments. I once told her about finding my cat on the lawn, entangled in the long grass, close to death, reaper-esque bluebottles hovering above. She laughed. At our friend’s dad’s funeral, people crying during the service, she laughed. Its not because she's a terrible person. She gets nervous. She can’t help it. That’s her response. What if I did that too?
As it happens, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t do that and in the event, I am pleased to say that I managed to contain myself. I went with the flow and used the best piece of advice I could find to give myself; I used my ears and listened. Besides, whatever I was thinking, I knew it was nothing compared to what John might be experiencing.
This time we sat downstairs in the kitchen, the sunlight from the garden windows splayed over our feet, the rest of the room shrouded in shadows, the small window at the other end of the room providing just a tiny light. Sandra sat opposite her partner and I next to him. Close enough to watch as tiny beads of sweat sprung from his temples and ran down the taut skin of his cheekbones and to the tiled floor below. John unwound a story that took in five decades, a peripatetic childhood with a single mother and later, a sadistic stepbrother. John climbed uphill, and with great trepidation, for many years towards the loss of his virginity. When he arrived, a broken marriage and an unsatisfying sex life ensued.
Redemption, and a guiding hand, arrived, in the shape of Susan, a woman that stepped in following the end of that marriage.
‘Susan was a really gentle, simple soul but she was absolutely fantastic with people, she was brilliant with social relationships. I was with her for four year, and she literally took me by the hand and guided me very gently. That was the first time in my life that I understood anything about sex, about what women required, and about what they appreciate. I learned what a woman was looking for and what it all meant. It was all completely new to me at the time and it felt like waking up.’
As we sat in the half-light, Sandra whispered across to us, ‘I love Susan’.
‘Did you ever meet her?’ I asked.
‘No’, she said. ‘But I still love her’.
*********
This morning, a year later, I sat in bed and read a bit of the book that my transcriber lent me last week. It’s a big, thick ex-library book entitled ‘A Secret World of Sex’. It charts the British experience of pre-sixties sex and it’s a top read. In the introduction, the author, Steve Humphries, writes, ‘Though the interviews were deeply moving, I sometimes felt, as American oral historian Studs Terkel once put it, ‘like a thief in the night’. You go in, you search for the most private and intimate story of a person’s life, then you rush off, leaving them high and dry, to catch the next train to the next town’.
Yes, you do. But I also left Liverpool with the impression that by listening to this man’s tale, that I had inadvertently helped to begin to release the story’s secrets from holding its owner hostage.
It’s amazing what you can achieve, simply by using the two odd shaped round things that are stuck to either side of your head.
