You’re probably enjoying long, hot summer days less than you used to. Apart from the roads and the rails melting and the sleepless nights, there’s that nagging feeling that we’re all going to hell in a handcart. Assuming, of course, that the handcart hasn’t packed up in the heat.
Until I was 17, I loved long summer days. I would be out for hours with my mates playing football, cricket and whatnot, or darting around woods and fields, secretly pretending I was one of the Famous Five. But then came a particular long, hot summer day, the scars of which for me have rather ballsed up all subsequent long, hot summer days.
It was 1984 and I was breaking new ground. I had my first girlfriend, and I’d just passed my driving test. Neither of which, of course, meant I was any good at romancing or driving. It turned out I was a lot better at one than the other. She was in the year above me at school, which only made me feel more out of my depth. Having finished her A-levels, she went off cycling with a friend to the south coast of England. I pined away back at home, dividing my time between waiting in for a call from a payphone, and driving around in an old white Mini Metro listening to sad songs on the cassette player.
Eventually it was arranged that, as their odyssey was complete and her friend had pedalled off elsewhere, I would drive down to meet her. So off I went, on the dawn of a long, hot summer’s day, on my first long solo drive to see my first girlfriend. What could possibly go wrong? Spoiler: it wasn’t the drive.
I’d read a lot of Thomas Hardy. Well, two novels anyway, which felt like a lot at the time. The Mayor of Casterbridge for O-level, and now Tess of the D’Urbervilles for A-level. And here I was heading deep into Hardy country in the cause of romance. As if the still, summer heat wasn’t already heavy enough with emotion for me, I had the hand of Hardy on my shoulder. Unlikely as it was, skirting Blandford Forum in the Mini Metro, I started feeling like one of his characters, triumphant but flawed.
Nevertheless, I embraced the Hardy theme. Anxious to impress upon my girlfriend my literary credentials, and to show her that I could talk about something other than football, West Bromwich Albion etc, I thought it would be a charming idea to take her to visit the Hardy Monument atop Black Down. Up there, alongside her, I was fair swooning with the intense, soft focus of it all, taking in the magnificent views of Wessex, blanketed in a haze of heat. I felt like Michael Henchard – in his glory days, before it all went south for him. Yes, I was a Hardy hero.
And then I spotted that this was a monument to another sodding Thomas Hardy. I’d got the wrong effing Thomas Hardy. This was Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the Hardy from whom a dying Admiral Nelson wanted a kiss. What a cock-up. Farcical, funny but unmistakably a portent of doom. She wasn’t bothered, but as we sloped off down the hill I could almost see Thomas Hardy – my Thomas Hardy – standing there, shaking his head in pity, wondering if even he could possibly do justice in prose to this tragicomic mishap. The magic, even if it had only ever existed in my own mind, was broken.
We camped that night in a field near a village called Lytchett Minster. As this endless day slumped to its stifling end, I could feel she wasn’t feeling it. By dawn I’d been dumped. Being a gentleman, I drove her and her bike back to the West Midlands. When I got home, I sobbed salt tears as I told my parents I’d had the heave-ho. For want of anything else to ask, my dad said: “Where did this happen?”
“What does it matter where it happened? Somewhere near Dorset.”
Pause. “Well, was it in Dorset, or wasn’t it?”
You don’t get dialogue like that in Hardy, I can tell you.
