York, where I grew up, is picturesque at any time, but at Christmas it’s stupidly charming: a Dickensian vision of twinkling lights strung across narrow paved streets. There’s the soaring gothic minster, pale and intricate as a prize-winning ice sculpture, bells ringing and choristers singing, and there are six homemade mince pies for £1 in the market. What could be nicer than to wander through the bustle, ending up in one of the city’s cosy pubs next to a crackling fire as the winter sun fades and the afternoon blue deepens into inky dusk punctuated with the first stars? It’s magical. Unless your first love is awkwardly, slowly, but surely, dumping you.
With hindsight, there had been warning signs, but I had chosen to ignore them. He was my first proper boyfriend and it had been a breathtaking courtship, heightened by a thrilling frisson of transgression: I was a 17-year-old student and he was in his early 20s, helping out at my school. We stopped short of having sex (just), but even so, as the mother of a 17-year-old myself now, I can see it was grimly inappropriate. At the time, though, it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me.
Admittedly, there wasn’t much competition. Until him, my love life had been limited to intense crushes from a distance and elaborate daydreams about French film stars. Having a real (illicit) boyfriend unlocked an unexpected level in my well-behaved teenage life, and it was better than any of my Nouvelle Vague-fuelled daydreaming. He was no Greek god, but he was older, confident and, more importantly, he liked me. We snuck around and met in secret. He hid snippets of Yeats poems, typed out on an actual typewriter, in my textbooks for me to find. He bought me flowers and talked to me like an actual adult about films I should watch and music I should listen to (yes, mansplaining was also rife in 1992). That summer, he had driven us to country pubs where I sat, drunk with infatuation and the pints he liked me to neck, entwined around him and buzzing with happiness.
Then autumn came, he moved away and contact became … sporadic. In an era of landlines, he was hard to track down and evasive when I suggested visiting. He never replied to my effusive letters and I would call his shared house and get fobbed off by strangers to a background soundtrack of grownup carousing. I pined, but I was also busy with A-levels and Oxford entrance preparation, and doing all the busy, good-girl stuff that was expected of me. But then the Christmas holidays came and I got the call I had been waiting for: he was coming to see me.
I combed the packed shops, trying to find a Christmas present that would convey my ineffable coolness and desirability. I finally found a rare, and extremely expensive, import cassette from the post-punk girl band Shonen Knife that I rather coveted myself. Then one afternoon, in the frenetic fortnight before Christmas, I wove my way through the hordes of shoppers and tourists to meet him in the Kings Arms, a half-timbered and beamed riverfront pub. He didn’t exactly look thrilled to see me, but I threw myself into his arms anyway. I found myself swiftly disentangled and a pint shoved into my hand.
We sat down (on the left-hand side, a table against the wall – yes, I remember it precisely), and he started to talk. I couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying, at first: blah, blah, it wasn’t practical; I was very young. Why was he telling me this? None of that stuff mattered! We were perfect! We both loved Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine! (I preferred Crowded House, but was trying to go with the flow.) It took ages – and several more pints in several other pubs – for the penny to drop. When I did get the message, I refused to accept it. It is to his credit (on this point if in almost no other respect) that he dumped me in person, quite kindly, and did it repeatedly over several hours as I tried to argue, increasingly intoxicated and inarticulate, against my own dumping.
We headed back towards my house, through the merry crowds. By this point the Dickensian York street scenes had degenerated into something closer to Hogarth’s Gin Lane: all pretence of Christmas shopping had been abandoned in favour of heavy drinking, Santa hats were askew and the odd halfhearted punch-up was breaking out. He walked me to my front door, then turned to leave. “But I’ve got you a present!” I whimpered. So he waited while I fetched the Shonen Knife album and handed it over (I regretted this bitterly later). I stared into his shifty, already absent eyes, my own swimming with tears, mascara and the deluded hope that my fantastic gift would make him change his mind. It didn’t.
Christmas was mulled misery, a bleak midwinter that nothing relieved. I had never really imagined it would be possible not to have a reasonably merry one before that, but that one was entirely devoid of sparkle. At some point over the holidays, amid the Christmas cards on the doormat was a letter announcing I had a place at Oxford; I was vaguely pleased in an abstract sort of way, but it couldn’t lift the cloud of gloom.
I blighted the festive season for my family, the mardy ghost at the feast, dejectedly toying with my stepfather’s carefully crafted nut roast en croute and staring bleakly at my gifts. Every attempt to cheer me up was bitterly rebuffed and I took my mother’s breezy assertion that it was probably for the best as tantamount to infanticide. Our usually close relationship was challenged that Christmas: she was understandably sick of my graceless moping; I was heartsick and obnoxiously self-centred. Her patience ran out definitively around the time I drowned out the Nine Lessons and Carols with Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine; there were strong words and slammed doors.
First love sounds so silly in the retelling. We ham it up, highlighting the daft details. I certainly do. But it’s terribly real, and so is first heartbreak. Mine knocked the shine off me. I was an academic high-flyer, with just enough good friends (from whom I had hidden the whole sorry saga) and a complacent confidence that my life was on a charmed and predictable trajectory. This was the first thing I couldn’t talk, study or joke my way out of. I definitely needed that taste of the real world – but, goodness, it made me miserable. I flirted with an eating disorder: he had told me he liked how thin I was – perhaps I could get thinner? It went on to get its claws into me in a properly damaging way in my 20s and lingered into my early 30s. I was lonely because none of my friends knew and I didn’t understand how something so all-consuming could just end like that.
I moved back to York recently after more than 20 years away, and the combination of having my own teenagers and being here at this heartburstingly lovely time of year has brought this episode into keen focus. Christmas is coming, they’re erecting a Viking tipi, putting turkey in the yorkshire pudding wraps and singing the songs of, well, Wham! mainly. Heading to Sainsbury’s for wrapping paper, I pass the lamp-post where we had our first, wonderful, impossible kiss. I peep into several of the pubs we staggered into on our dumping crawl when walking home in the blue-black early evening. I’m not the same person now (I’m fatter, tireder and a lot tougher), but sometimes, walking past the Kings Arms, I remember precisely what it was like to be her, a clever but clueless heartbroken baby.
I got over it, of course. It helped that it was a clean break; that afternoon was the last I ever heard of him (I have occasionally succumbed to a late-night Google, but his name is too common to yield any intel). By the next Christmas, I was finishing up a data entry job on my year out and preparing to head to France to teach English. I was excited by life again. I was also determined to exorcise the ghost of Christmas past, which I did by getting extravagantly drunk and making a show of myself at our office party. It was inexplicably held in a German-themed hut in a North Yorkshire field, where very cheap drinks flowed freely to musical accompaniment from an oompah band in lederhosen. As the evening drew to a messy close, I snogged the face off a perfectly pleasant colleague for whom I felt nothing stronger than a vague bonhomie. A couple of days later, I – finally, strategically, triumphantly – lost my virginity to him. Then never saw him again.
I met the man who would become my husband (20 years later) within a fortnight of arriving in France that new year. And I have not had a pint of beer or listened to Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine since Christmas 1992.
