It was late one afternoon in June 1964 and I was cutting the privet hedge at the front of my parents house near the secondary school. You came along the road, walking quickly towards the bus stop. I heard your footsteps as you approached and, looking up, I watched you coming towards me. I thought you were really beautiful.
I smiled at you and it was the smile you gave me in return that I will never forget! It seemed to light up your whole face, almost as if you had known me for years, as if we were already the best of friends. No girl, or woman, had ever smiled at me that way before, and I was completely bowled over.
My sister Christine was inside the front gate doing something in one of the flower beds and after you passed me and walked on down the road I went in and asked her did she know who ‘that young woman is?’
“ I think she’s a teacher at the secondary school,” she replied, “ But I don’t know her name. Why do you ask?”
“ I just wondered who she is,” I mumbled. “ She’s nice looking and I’ve never seen her before…”
Later on, when I told you how much your smile had affected me, do remember how you somewhat ruined the effect by explaining that, without your glasses, you couldn’t see too well, and were never quite sure who you were looking at.
“ So I always smiled at people that way!”
**************************************
At the time I had abandoned the idea of becoming a priest because I realised that what I really wanted to do was become a teacher. I was about to start a years unqualified teaching before going into Teacher Training College and for that year I was appointed to St. Clare’s, but to the Primary school. Once I started there the following September I saw you more often, and each time I did see you, I thought you were one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
Did God breath a sigh of relief?
Well, if he did, His relief was somewhat premature! We kept meeting of course but, for months, we never actually spoke to each other.
Sometimes, on Friday mornings, I used to see you walking your form back to the secondary school from Mass in the parish church . Your route went past the window of the classroom I had been attached to. One morning the class teacher Bernard Riley noticed me watching you walk past, and told me your name was Alicia Porter. He’d already talked me into joining the drama group he was running in the parish, and he added,
“I’m going to try and talk her into joining the drama group. She’s really talented and I already know the part I want her to play.”
Then again, just before Christmas that year, we were both at the teachers Christmas Party. To promote closer understanding between the two schools, staff were all seated without reference to whether they were teaching in the secondary, or the primary school. You and I were at the same table, though not beside each other. and we certainly didn’t speak to each other.
After the meal the ‘social experiment’ fell apart and for the rest of the evening secondary staff sat resolutely down one side of the room, and the primary staff sat equally determined down the other side.
If only I’d had the nerve to cross the Hall and ask you for a dance, but I didn’t, So, once again, our chance to get to know each other passed by unrealised.
To be honest, at the time, I fancied one of the teachers on the primary staff, and so my attention was probably more on her than it was on you. Just after Christmas she and I even went out on a date together, but it was only one date, and after that the interest, on her part at least, fizzled out.
Then one night a short while later I was at the drama group with my best friend at the time, Tony Martin. We were doing something on the stage in the school hall, ( I can’t remember what,) when you came in with your friend, at the time, Barbara Waters. I already knew Barbara from when we were children but it was you who spoke to me.
“Is this where the drama group is meeting?” you asked.
( Did God, in eternity, exclaim ‘ At last…!’?)
“ No,” I replied, “ They’re all in the staff room along the corridor.”
I indicated the direction I meant and, with a quick ‘thank you,’ you went out.
I remember finishing whatever it was we were doing on the stage quickly so that I could rejoin the group in the staff room. When I walked in you looked up and smiled at me. I remember you were sitting just inside the staff room door, smoking a cigarette and looking by far the best dressed and most elegant person in the room. You were wearing a white trench coat, your blond hair was loose, and I particularly remember thinking what beautiful legs you had!
After that we used to meet at the drama group every week, and after about three weeks Barbara Waters stopped coming with you. You told me later that she stopped when you assured her that she didn’t have to keep you company because ‘Alan Cox will always talk to me!’…. and I always did.
In fact those weekly chats with you standing at the side of the hall while the rest of the group rehearsed quickly became the highlight of my week. ( Neither of us had a part in the current production.)
But it was something Tony said to me on one of those rehearsal nights that then led to the long delay, almost a year, before I dared to ask you out on a date!
*********************************************
The three of us had been talking together, and you went off to help make the tea for the break in rehearsals. Tony suddenly remarked that it was obvious I liked you.
“ Yeah… I do. I think she’s gorgeous!” I told him.
“ Well look I’m your friend and don’t want to see you get your hopes up for nothing Alan,” he explained looking serious, “But take it from me …. you haven’t got a cat in hells chance with Alicia!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well think about it. You’re an unqualified teacher on two thirds the basic salary. In a few months your going to training college, and you’re going to be trying to survive on a student grant. You’re living in a council house with your mum and dad, and she’s a university graduate on a full salary, with a good job, prospects… and her parents are really well off. Her dad’s a doctor, or a solicitor,,, I’m not sure which,, and they own a big house in the best part of Leigh. You’ve no chance!!”
And my problem Alicia… is that I believed him!!!…. I felt awful… but I thought he knew what he was talking about; especially the bit about your family being well off and unlikely to have any truck with an unqualified impecunious nobody like me! But you always seemed so friendly towards me. I couldn’t understand it… and I hadn’t the wit to simply ask you outright for a date. And then, of course, there was Pete Gittins!
Now I know you’re going to laugh at me over this but I really thought he had a chance with you, and he certainly thought so. He had money, and never seemed to have any trouble getting a date with any girl he fancied. One night, after rehearsal, we were standing outside and you went off to catch the bus back to Crumpsall where you were sharing a flat with your sister Mary. Gittens, who I knew lived somewhere near your flat announced he was going to get on the bus with you
“…And by the time Alicia Porter gets off the bus I’ll have got a date with her.. Just see if I don’t!”
That night I went home feeling thoroughly wretched and sick. I had no doubt that he was the sort of bloke who would stand a chance with you!
I did ask him the following week whether he’d got a date with you? He muttered something about not bothering to ask in the end but, for some reason I can’t explain I just knew you’d turned him down… and my week was made. But still I believed what Tony had told me and I still hadn’t the nerve to ask you out myself
Perhaps if you’d told me about the postcard I sent to the group from my trip with the choir to Rome and Assisi during the Whit break things might have been different. Just let on that you’d made a point of putting it into your handbag when nobody was looking, I’d have been encouraged to ask you out sooner…. but you didn’t. So I finished my unqualified year, went to work over the summer in Watneys Brewery, and didn’t see you again until the following September when the drama group reassembled.
You, for your part, went on holiday with Barbara Waters to Newquay, apparently not even giving me a second thought. Only God in eternity, it seems, knew that by the following summer… we would be married!
The play Bernard Riley had wanted to produce was ‘The Love Match’ written by Glenn Melvyn. The main reason he wanted to do it was because it gave him an ideal role for himself but he also claimed it had the best parts for you and me as husband and wife Wally and Emma Binns. I was the stuttering comedy foil to his main part, while your character was a sort of Hilda Ogden type with hairnet and pinny overall. He thought he couldn’t really ask the other young woman in the group, by then Tony’s girl friend Maureen, to play that part, but he knew you would be willing to play anything just to get onto a stage. I remember thinking that anyone who would let me drop a mattress on top of her, as I was required to do in the script, just to get a laugh, ( “ Where’s Emma?“… “ Oh she’s feeling tired and having a lie down!”), couldn’t be all that ‘stuck up’ no matter how much money her family had.
Because you were teaching at the secondary school, and Bernard was teaching at the primary school, ( I had started at college,) we had full houses every night of the plays run and by then I knew that, somehow, I just had to try and get a date with you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and trying to imagine what my life would be like if I never even asked you for a date because I was afraid you would say no, made me feel even more dreadful…. but still I hesitated.
Tony had started going out with Maureen and although I usually spent the Saturday and Sunday afternoons with him helping to build an extension onto his parents house, the weekends were pretty awful for me. Weekdays weren’t too bad because I was at college all day, and I got to see you on a couple week nights at the drama group. I remember especially how low I felt doing my first teaching practice at St. Malachy’s school in Collyhurst. I don’t think I prepared a single lesson properly throughout the whole three weeks! I seemed to be living in an almost continually agitated state.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I decided that ‘come what may’ I had to ask you out on a date. I didn’t want to go through Christmas feeling this rotten.
My cousin Maureen had a telephone and one Saturday at the end of November I decided to take a chance and ring you at home in Leigh. I didn’t have your number of course but I knew the Manchester telephone directory covered the Leigh area so I went down and asked could I use their phone. I remember she said. ‘Yes, of course, but I’m going out for an hour or so,’ which suited me just fine.
If I remember correctly there were about 4 'Porters’ listed as living in Leigh and I rang everyone of them. None of them was either a doctor or a solicitor, and more importantly, none of them had ever heard of an Alicia Porter. In the end I just sat there with my heart sinking into my stomach.
' God,' I thought, ' They must be so important they’re ex-directory. Tony’s right. I really have no chance!'
If I’d run to form at that point of course I would probably have returned home and given up the effort, but thank God I didn’t. I just became even more desperate.
The following Monday I didn’t have a lecture in college until the lunchtime, ( a Divinity lecture for the whole first year in the college theatre.) I decided to wait inside our back door at home until I saw you walking up to school. Then I would idly stroll down the garden path and, as if by chance, meet you at our front gate. I remember how my heart was hammering as I waited for you to appear…. and kept waiting until well after nine oclock when it was obvious that, for whatever reason, you weren’t going to walk up our road to school that morning!
( You told me later that you had an appointment to get an inoculation for a school trip you had agreed to go on to Russia sometime the following year.)
Still, thanks be to God, I still wasn’t put off. I decided to get up to college in time to telephone you at school when I estimated you would be finished class’s for the morning, and would be on your way to lunch.
Whoever answered the phone asked me who was calling and I told her to just tell you it was ‘Alan from the drama’. By the time they’d brought you to the phone, the lecture I was supposed to be attending had already started, but I didn’t care. I’d made my mind up that even if it meant me missing the lecture altogether, I wasn’t coming off the phone until I’d asked you out!
“Hello Alan,” you said and I blurted out the speech I’d already rehearsed in my head a dozen times over the previous few days; that I had a couple of tickets for ‘Oliver’ at the Opera House for the following Wednesday night.
“And I was wondering if you’d like to go with me?”
I stopped and waited. It could only have been for a few seconds but, feeling almost sick with anxiety, I seemed to be waiting for ages. Finally you said,
“I’d love to… that would be really nice…” and I almost screamed with elation.
You told me later that I made some remark about you not needing to sound too enthusiastic, but I’ve no recollection of saying anything other than,
“ I’ll meet you outside the Halfway House, at the corner of Middleton Road and Cheetham Hill at half past six on Wednesday night then!”.
After I put the phone down I went into the theatre for the lecture. I was on such an emotional high that I climbed over all the rows of seats to where my friends were sitting causing the lecturer, Brother Dominic to stop speaking until I found my place. I’ve still no recollection of what the lecture was all about, but I did have a problem.
I didn’t have any tickets for ‘Oliver!’
As soon as the lecture finished I rushed to the bank and withdrew what bit of money I had in there. Then I raced into Manchester to the Opera House. What I would have done if they had told me Wednesday was sold out I don’t know but luckily they had two seats in the front stalls, only three rows from the stage. They were the dearest seats in the house but I didn’t care. I still believed what Tony had told me about you, and I was determined not to short change on our first date.
“ I’ll have them,” I blurted and, feeling on top of the world, I carried them back home on the bus. I remember telling Christine, who had an idea how I felt about you, that you’d agreed to go out with me. We were in the living room at Boothroyden Road and I whispered,
“I’ve got a date on Wednesday night!”
The next two days represent one of the happiest ‘waits’ of my entire life!
************************************
Why on earth did you imagine I wouldn’t be there?
You’d told Mary in the flat on Bennett Road that you would walk around by the Halfway House and if I wasn’t there, you would simply walk back to the flat by a different route, and forget about it.
That Wednesday evening was really cold and foggy and I still wasn’t sure you would come. I wasn’t sure either where Bennett Road was, or the flat. But I decided that if you didn’t arrive by ten to seven I’d try to find the flat, and you… and risk the embarrassment.
Then I saw you coming towards me through the fog, and it was as if an inner sunlight had broken through and dispersed all the darkness.
You were wearing a black overcoat and a black fur bonnet but when you took them off in the theatre you were wearing a tan coloured mohair sweater, a matching skirt, and you had your hair loose and shaped around your ears. To me you looked absolutely beautiful. I felt the luckiest man in the theatre that night, and sitting beside you it was as if we were in a world all of our own surrounded by an impenetrable wall, and everyone else, including the cast on the stage, were simply shadows dancing on that wall. It’s a feeling Alicia that has never left me whenever I think of you!
Do you remember, I’d even brought a box of After Eight mints for us to share? No expense was spared!
In those days people were allowed to smoke in the theatre if they wished. I usually smoked Embassy cigarettes but you offered me one of your Consulate cigarettes to try. The man sitting in the seat beside you was non too pleased when we both lit up, and said something to you I didn’t catch but I do remember how politely you pointed out that we were well within our rights to smoke if we wanted to, but you would stop if it really offended him.
“No need,” I heard him mutter somewhat mollified, “ I don’t mind myself. It’s just that other people might.” You turned back towards me and smiled. We finished our cigarettes but we didn’t light up again until the interval.
You also told me that it wasn’t the first time you had been to ‘Oliver’. In fact you had been to see it the week before, and I remember wondering ‘who with?’, but then you pointed up towards the balcony and gallery behind us,
“But the seats were nowhere near as good as these seats. We were right up in the gods.” You gave my arm a squeeze and whispered, “ These seats are a lot better, and I’m really glad you invited me. It’s such a good show I don’t mind seeing it a second time.”
To be honest the show could have consisted of 2 performing seals honking out ‘Climb every mountain’. for all I cared, I was on a date with you and that was all that mattered.
I can’t recall how we got onto the subject of playing cards, but during the interval, you asked me if I had ever played canasta? I shook my head.
“ Tony and myself used to go down to this friend of ours every Sunday night and play whist,” I explained, “ But I’ve never played canasta. Is it hard?”
“ No not really. I think if you can play whist you should be able to play canasta as well.”
Then you made the remark that really set my heart racing.
“If you like sometime I’ll show you how to play it.”
Did I look as pleased as I felt? I thought, ‘ She doesn’t want this to be our last date.’
I didn’t want it to be our last date either but I wasn’t sure how to go about asking you out again. Should I ask you that night and risk putting you off by appearing too eager, or should I wait and hope to engineer another opportunity later? In the end it was when we were on the bus back to Crumpsall, and I knew you were about to get off that I blurted out,
“Well…..when will you teach me how to play canasta then?”
There was to be a drama meeting the following night, Thursday, and you told me that you needed to sort something out, and would let me know then when we could meet again. For one dreadful moment I wondered who you needed to sort something out with, but then I thought,
‘Even if she is seeing someone else she hasn’t said she wont see me again… and anyway it might not even be someone she is dating!’
I was late getting to the meeting that Thursday night, and when I walked in you were sitting between two other people, so I sat down at the table across from you. Later on you told me that you thought I was ignoring you, perhaps even ‘going off you,’ but that simply wasn’t the case. I wanted to sit next to you, but I couldn’t.
At least from across the table I could keep looking at you without making it obvious, and thinking ‘ She’s definitely the most beautiful woman in the room… and I’m dating her!’
As we left the meeting you hung back as if waiting for me to say something. My recollection is that as we walked down the corridor together I said something like,
“About teaching me canasta then?….” and you replied,
“Do you still want to learn?”
“Of course I do.” I replied.
You explained that you and your sister always went home to Leigh together on a Friday night and only came back to Manchester on the Sunday evening. Because we were having another drama meeting on the Sunday afternoon you’d arranged to come back to Manchester alone for that meeting, and your sister would return to Manchester early on the Monday morning. That, you explained, was what you had needed to ‘sort out.’
“If you like, after the meeting on Sunday you could come back to the flat, I’ll cook us something to eat, and then I can show you how to play canasta…. That’s if you want to of course.”
It was the hesitation in your voice and the uncertainty in your eyes that finally assured me you were not dating anyone else. That I was the only one!
“That will be great,” I said.
**************************************
There are just so many things I remember about that Sunday. I remember meeting you on the way into the meeting in the afternoon, and the way you needed me to repeat that I still wanted to come to the flat for my tea. I remember how easily I picked up the rules for canasta after we had eaten, and even won one of the games we played. But what I remember most of all was that, as I left the flat later that night, you let me kiss you, and agreed to go out with me again the following evening.
I’d missed the last bus, but walked all the way home with my head on cloud nine. I was so happy. I don’t think I even noticed how long the walk took me, or how late I was back into the house… or even whether it was raining or dry. All I kept thinking was that you and I were now an ‘item’, and that Tony’s assessment of my chances with you had been completely wrong!
The following night we went to the old Temple cinema to see ‘ What’s new pussycat?’ We sat in the back row like a courting couple and after the first, slightly unsure, half hour or so I dared to give you a kiss, and could hardly believe the way you kissed me back. I still don’t know how that film ended!
After that we seemed to spend almost every evening with each other, either going to the cinema or in the flat at Bennet Road, playing cards, or just talking. Sometimes Mary would be there, but God bless her very often she would arrange to be out, and then we seemed to spend more time kissing than talking!
There was one evening when you had to go to another joint staff Christmas do with the Primary school and I came to pick you up at the end of the evening. I remember Bernard Riley being at the bar and asking me what I was doing there.
“I’m collecting Alicia,” I announced quite proudly, and his eyebrows lifted.
Then there was the night when you told me you’d decided to tell John Debonnair that you wouldn’t be going to Russia with the school the following year.
“Why ever not?” I asked. “ It’s such a great chance for you!”
“I’d rather be here with you,” was your reply.
There was another night when I didn’t think I would see you at all. It was coming up to Christmas, and Tony and I were due to do our usual stint managing the lights and sound effects for the Primary schools Nativity play. You had a parents evening at the secondary school the same night so I was resigned to not seeing you at all. Suddenly I was aware of somebody climbing into the sound box and there you were.
“ We finished early,” you whispered sitting on a chair behind us, “ And I thought I’d come and find you.”
I remember you were wearing the same jumper and skirt you had worn to the theatre on our first date. By then Tony knew we were going out together and he found some excuse to leave the box. No stage lights needed switching on or off at that point, and in the dimly lit sound box I knew nobody could see us. I looked down at you, and you smiled and turned your face up towards me. I leaned down and gave you a really long French kiss. Tony suddenly reappeared and groaned,
“Oh for heavens sake… will you two love birds cool it!”
Even now, almost 45 years later when I recall what it was like to kiss you, that French kiss is the one I recall!
It was after the play was finished that night, and I was walking you over to the bus stop that I asked you whether you would like to come around to our house on Boothroyden Road. By this time, of course I knew that not only did you not live in a big house in Leigh but your dad was not a barrister or doctor, so I knew you would not feel awkward walking into a corporation house on Boothroyden Road. What I didn’t realise was how embarrassed my dad and mum would be when I walked you through the back door and into the kitchen…. especially as my dad was sitting at the table having his supper, saying his prayers, and wearing nothing but his trousers, and an old vest!
They ushered us quickly into the living room and, from somewhere he pulled on a clean shirt. Mum made us a cup of tea having first whispered to me why I hadn’t given them some warning that I was bringing you home to meet them?
“She doesn’t mind,” I said.
“No… but we do” mum replied.
You stayed about half an hour, and I’m sure it was then that my dad decided ‘At long last the big dope has done something right!”
On the way back to the bus stop, just as we were crossing Victoria Avenue we met Christine coming off a late bus and I was able to introduce you to each other. I’ve always thought that, although it took her a long time to realise what sort of person you really are, she always approved of you as somebody who was right for me.
******************************
It wasn’t just you dropping out of the school trip to Russia that convinced me you really did feel something for me, it was the way you even stopped going home for the weekends so we could be together.
Do you remember the incident with the tape recorder, and my tapes of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem?
I’d brought the recorder and the tapes with me to Bennett Road one Saturday afternoon to play them for you. You really seemed to like them and I left both the recorder and the tapes with you overnight. When I came the following day you met me at the door really upset because you thought you had done some damage to the machine. You hadn’t of course and the relief on your face when I set it going again was really touching.
Then there was the time when you and Mary were shopping in Manchester; I think for presents. You were trying out a pen at the stationery counter and hesitated over what to write. You told me afterwards that Mary laughed and told you to “Go ahead and write it. You know you want to see what it looks like.”
So you wrote ‘ Alicia Cox.’
Because you had spent all your money for that month, and were waiting for your pay day which would be the day you broke up for the Christmas holidays; and I wouldn’t get my grant money until after the vacation at the beginning of January, we didn’t go out much in the last few days before Christmas, just stayed in the flat each evening until it was time for me to catch the last bus home. It was always the last bus home and, once College closed, the earliest bus in the day that let me get to you!
Obviously you were going home to Leigh for the Christmas but you decided to only go on Christmas Eve, and return to Manchester on the day after Boxing Day.
“ I’ll knit you a jumper while we’re apart,” you promised.
It’s that last night before you went to Leigh that I cannot forget.
In a way this whole ‘remembering Alicia’ piece has been leading up to my recollection of that evening and I just hope I can get it all down without dripping tears all over the keyboard!
Mary had already gone home and we were in the flat together as usual playing canasta. By then I had begun to win almost every game we played. We were sitting on the floor with our backs against the couch, and the cards spread out on the floor between us. My recollection is that you were again wearing the mohair jumper you had worn on our first date. Even as I write this I seem able to recall the perfume you were wearing!
I had put down one of my cards and was waiting for you to respond with one of your own. When nothing happened I looked across at you, and you were just sitting there studying me.
The expression in your eyes was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, and now I have a photograph of you with that same look in your eyes. It’s in front of me now reminding me of the impact you had on me that evening in Bennet Road.
At one moment the only thing on my mind was wondering what card you were going to place onto the carpet between us, and the next I felt this rush of emotion stronger than anything I had ever experienced before. I couldn’t help myself.
“ Do you realise I’m in love with you?” I asked.
For a moment you didn’t say anything. You continued to sit there studying me and, having blurted out the words, I hardly dared to breath. But the expression in your eyes warmed, and I remember asking you not to say anything you didn’t mean. But then you quite simply took my breath away, and changed my whole existence forever!
“Yes,” you said, “ And I’m in love with you.”
