“I really don’t want to go, it’ll be awful!”
“Come on mate, the music of the sixties is great – and it’s only one evening.”
Thinking back to those days of the early 2000s I was wondering once again why I had never married or settled into a steady relationship. Oh well, I’ve lost hope now, especially now that I’m in my forties, destined to stay an old git of a bachelor, still on the shelf, one of those misfits who never found a wife.
All kinds of reasons why I’m alone spring to mind: I suppose when I was the right age I wasn’t settled in my job, was a bit on the selfish side, had commitment issues. But if I’m brutally honest, the real reason was that I knew that I had met the love of my life just after the run of the century, 23 years ago. Nothing came of it, and nothing significant has ever happened in my love-life since.
Sad really.
Yet I can remember that night when I fell in love as if it was yesterday. My friend Colin had been going on about how he wanted me to go with him to a sixties themed dance night in a distant town.
“For goodness sake,” I’d told him. “A sixties night? It’s the twenty-first blimmin’ century now. It’ll be sad old gits with bald heads and wispy white ponytails wearing winklepicker shoes and harking back to their youth. I go to dances to try and meet girls of my own age – not little old ladies, with neat pink hair and bingo-wing arms, bopping to Freddie and the Dreamers. They might even have one of those dreadful tribute acts.”
“But the music was good in those days,” he argued. “Some of it was brilliant. Besides I like old people, and if they’re old people who like good music, what’s wrong with that? You like your grandma and grandad don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. But they’re my family.”
“Just come for my sake.” Then he became serious for once, “You know, Simon, don’t ask me why, but for some reason I really really want us to go to this gig.”
“Okay,” I agreed reluctantly. “Do we have to dress in flared trousers, or have Beatles’ moptop wigs?”
“Definitely! Shave off that beard and leave some wedgie sideburns, and try and find the kind of frilly blouse Rod Stewart used to wear. No seriously, mate, we’ll just go as we are. If the others want to enter the spirit of things, let them. Think of it as a history lesson.”
We arrived in good time, and found the venue to be a big old pub in a town I’d never been to before.
Oddly enough, there weren’t any signs advertising a Sixties music and dance night, but Colin assured me we’d come to the right place. I noticed a sign on the way in saying that there was going to be a Swinging Blue Jeans band tribute act, “
And, funnily enough when we went through the door, we found that practically all the crowd were people of around our own age, in their twenties and thirties, which seemed very odd indeed, but I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it’s something like that trend for wearing clothes of another era, I thought? I’d heard of these clubs where people want to pretend they’ve gone back in time, and become passionate about the music, food and fashions of one particular bygone era.
I always remember the wonderful song that the tribute act were playing: an old American ballad, Tell Laura I love her, all about a man who entered a motor race to win money so he could marry the girl he loved, but got killed, and had only been able to speak to her mum before the race, to say Tell Laura I love her. Even today, that song can bring a tear to my eyes.
And then, would you believe it, I actually met a girl called Laura.
They talk about falling in love at first sight, but until then I had no idea it could happen, and happen in such an amazing way.
Laura was small and blonde, and when she turned round and saw me her face lit up in an incredible way. And when I looked into her eyes, everyone else in the room faded way, I couldn’t hear the music, I couldn’t see anything but her wonderful face and the beauty of her soul in the way she was smiling. In that moment, I knew I had met my soulmate. And if I had died in her arms, I would have died happy.
I didn’t even have to ask her to dance, she just kind of fell into my embrace and we spent the whole night together, dancing for a bit talking about this and that, it really was as if I’d known her all my life.
Colin saw how smitten I was, and kept clear of me, realising that I wanted nothing to interrupt my evening with Laura.
When the evening ended, and the live band were packing up and everyone was leaving, I knew that I never wanted to let her go.
“Can I have your mobile number?” I asked her.
“My what?”
“Your mobile.”
“Mobile what?”
“Phone number.”
“Why didn’t you say so, silly? Course you can have my phone number.”
“Because I really want to see you again.”
“Don’t you lose it now.” She wrote down her number on a piece of paper.
“Ring me tomorrow,” she told me. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
“I know they always tell you you shouldn’t make your feeling plain, that it can scare a boy off.” For the next bit she put her arms around my neck pulled me close and whispered in my ear, and I’ll never forget her words: “Simon I don’t understand what’s happening to me, but the moment I saw you, I longed to get to know you. Call it ridiculous, but, God, I think I’ve fallen in love. I never never want to let you go.”
“You’re feeling it too?”
I kissed her again.
“Phone me tomorrow?”
“I can’t wait.”
“I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Yes, she actually said it.
Colin drove us home, and he was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “There you are, Simon, what did I tell you? You’re on to a winner there, mate, believe me, I reckon that girl was made for you. I’m delighted for you, I really am. I won’t moan about being jealous, just as long as I can be your best man at the wedding!”
Good old Colin, He was always the kind of guy who had a knack of saying the things that pick you up when you’re feeling down and make you feel even better when life is on the up. He completely understood how I was feeling.
But then my world came crashing down,
I phoned her next day. The number wasn’t recognised. I checked and checked again, and it was a dud number.
And that was it. Dead end. Worst of all, there was absolutely nothing on earth I could do about it. I didn’t even know her surname. The following weekend we went back to the same town to the pub again, and I asked a few people if anyone had been to the dance the week before, but no one had. I even asked the landlord if he knew of a girl called Laura, but he just shook his head.
And that was my first heartbreak. The end of falling in love for me.
I never ever got to the bottom of it. If she hadn’t wanted to see me again, why had she seemed so keen, and why had she offered her phone number? And why had she lied about not owning a mobile – after all, everyone’s got a mobile haven’t they, even back in 2003? She had straight out told me that she loved me, yet she’d deliberately given me a dud phone number.
And from that day to this I’ve never fallen in love like that again. Sure, there have been superficial relationships, but nothing like my instant ‘soulmate’ feelings for Laura.
A lot of things happened in my life after that. Sadly, dear old Colin was killed in a car crash two years later. Other horrible things happened too, and I realised I was feeling cheesed off with life, had never felt fulfilled in my sales career, and was just going through the motions without any real purpose.
One day I had the urge to go into a church, and I had this incredible thrilling feeling that I was on the brink of something important. I went to church regularly after that, made friends with our local vicar, and realised that I myself had a calling, Trevor, my vicar friend, encouraged me to consider entering the church as a vocation, and as luck would have it, my A-levels and Trevor’s reference were enough to get me accepted as a mature student on a theology course, and after years of hard study I did indeed become a man of God. Some of my friends on the course seemed to be studying theology for various spurious reasons – one man seemed intent on the Church as a career path, a posh guy who told everyone he was going to be a bishop, and there was another very brainy bloke who seemed to enjoy studying theology for the sheer joy of learning. But most of them were like me, ordinary people who felt a genuine calling to do God’s work on earth, to do our very best to try and help others, and hopefully leave the world a better place when we leave it.
Now all these years later I’m a pretty experienced priest. One of my duties is to officiate at funerals, and, I admit, I usually hate doing it. The most I can hope to do it try to offer comfort to the bereaved, and increasingly nowadays, so few of them truly believe in God’s mercy and a life after death, so for those people, sadly, my words of comfort can only ever be words.
And then an astonishing thing happened. On Tuesday of last week I was asked to take the funeral of an old lady of 80, and I was called to the home of her daughter to discuss the service.
After my long chat with her family, I had already got the notes for my eulogy. As I was leaving, they gave me the funeral card which was the usual type of thing, with a really nice picture of an old lady on the front. However when I looked closely at it, my heart skipped a beat. There was something familiar about her. Then I remembered that one of her chosen songs for the service was going to be Tell Laura I love her. When I turned over the card and saw the photo of her as a young woman in 1968.
I burst into tears,
It was her! It was my Laura!
I don’t know what the daughters thought of me, and I couldn’t explain how I felt, just muttered some excuse about having had a hard week, and apologising. The other daughter Debbie, who hadn’t talked much before, spoke to me quietly, as a way to cover up their embarrassment at the man who was supposed to offer them comfort and support, losing control and making a fool of himself.
“It’s a funny thing, vicar, but Mum once told me about the man she’d fallen in love with before she married Dad, she always got this faraway look in her eyes describing him as the love of my life who let me down. She met him at a dance in a town quite a way away from here, and the song that they were playing that night was Tell Laura I love her, and that’s the song the two of them were listening to when she fell in love. He promised to phone her the next day, but he never did. She never forgot him.”
“Did she ever forgive him?” I asked, unable to breathe.
“Oh yes, she forgave him all right. She said that she knew without any doubt that he loved her just as she loved him. She always said that there had to be a reason beyond his control as to why he never contacted her again. She thought maybe he’d been killed.”
“Umm. Maybe that’s what happened.”
“Do you know something, vicar? Maybe if she’d married him it would have been a wonderful marriage, but who knows? Reality often spoils a dream doesn’t it? It’s that eternal tragedy of not knowing. What might have been are the saddest words in the world, don’t you think?”
I’m dreading taking the funeral next week. What if I lose control again and make a fool of myself?
Spare a thought for me then, please. . .
Here’s the song
Image by Nicholas Panek from Pixabay