It was the glorious summer of 1960. I had just left school and the world was mine. I went to a seaside resort, Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. I knew nothing about women, girls I should say: I disregarded any over the age of 21.
I got a job washing dishes at a hotel, accommodation provided in a hut behind the kitchens. The first evening I went out and walked the streets. Girls galore. The scent of ice-cream and hot-dogs and cheap perfume. The chatter of sparrows and girls. A radio blared “Weep no more my baby” by Brenda Lee, a singing star not yet turned 16. I’d never yet met any girls for I’d been at boarding-school. I was sure I looked ugly and I had no idea how to approach them. What I had learned from male banter didn’t help me work out what went on in a girl’s mind, or teach me anything practical.
My room-mate was a gnarled vagrant labourer, fond of the simple pleasures like betting and drink. He put a deck of cards my way. Each had the photo of a woman in provocative pose. I’d heard of these cards, but now I had the opportunity to lounge on my bunk in the hot evenings, studying each carefully and deciding which I liked best. The innocent-looking ones or the other kind? I imagined that photographer and model would succumb to mutual lust as soon as the photo-shoots were over. The cards were mild by today’s standards but put me in a fever of excitement.
Till those cards, the girls of my imagination were noble and virtuous, goddesses who bestowed their favours only on young knights bound by the rules of chivalry. What precise rules I didn’t know, but feelings within me held sway, beyond the mere physical. The girls who’d consented to be displayed on cards looked defiant and slutty. I was aroused but not in a nice way.
One of my colleagues at the hotel became my role-model: Lionel, student at a college of technology. He wore a bow tie and slicked-back hair. He played classical clarinet in the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra. He used to charm hotel guests of both sexes and all ages in his role as evening barman. Each day he’d recount how his charm had scored with a lady after the bar closed at midnight. One week it was 3 girls: each from Leicester, each aged 25, looking as if “left on the shelf”; and each named Shirley. Their parents had been caught up in Shirley Temple mania, when the child-star was 6 years old.
As Miranda, one of my favourite heroines, exclaimed in The Tempest:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Then I went to university. There were plenty of girls but the ones I met soon became like sisters. At a lecture on Shakespeare in a hall with tiered seats, I could see through the white blouses of girls in front to the bra-straps which bit repulsively into their plump shoulders. Real women were a let-down compared to my fantasies of Goddess and Tart. Sometimes I would rendezvous with a girl for a date, and then fail to turn up. Three times actually. Not the same girl, needless to say.
Real girls were fascinating to behold and I felt safer just looking. The ones who interested me were not the ordinary, not the obviously pretty ones; they might be flat-chested or prominent-buttocked, or as Alexander McCall Smith describes in his Ladies Detective stories from Botswana, “traditionally built”. However it was girls whose faces set them apart from the crowd who fascinated me most. Sometimes my sense of pity added to the erotic mix, when a girl had for example an aquiline nose or a hare-lip. I thought women who looked as extraordinary as I felt would be more approachable. It was disappointing to discover how ordinary they were to speak to, after I had shyly stalked them for days.
But then, as Philip Larkin says in his poem Annus Mirabilis:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
There must have been something in the air. Girls wanted to lose their virginity, not for pleasure, not for romance, not to have babies, but as a rite of passage. I was a man, and willing. But it wasn’t what I wanted. It took forty more years, four children and three grandchildren before I discovered true love.
For more on this theme, see “The Nothing Girl”
5 thoughts on “The Deck of Cards”
ghetufool
brilliant! i can identify with it because i was same in my 21. very shy and very unsure.
Charles Bergeman
My innocence was shattered when I found a girly magazine left out by my Dad when I was around 13.
A year or 2 later I found a 16mm stag film in his home office. A lady who could not pay the TV repairman found another means of erasing the charge.
The high school girls didn’t interest me much, I was more interested in older women. Of course, they were unavailable to me at such a young age.
In college, girls were more mature looking and available at the same time. But, in spite of this success, I was poorly prepared to engage in sex.
I was not able to have mutually satisfying sex till much later in life.
If I only knew then what I know now.
Jim
I have to ask, perhaps you can say, Vincent, is it age that makes the difference, or, was it possible in our youth?
Great writing Vincent, you give memory value.
Vincent
Thanks for comments, guys. I seem to have “touched a nerve” if you will permit the expression.
Jim, I would say that there are those whose wisdom is fully-formed in their youth. Others, like me, seem to sleepwalk through life learning little until their late-flowering adolescence!
Just a toy
you write well. very enjoyable.
a wayfarer’s notes 