The letter had been forwarded to me by my Dad who had written a short note letting me know that all the stuff I was sending home was arriving safely; that matters relating to the transfer of my flat in London into my sole name were complete; and he mentioned that the property market appeared to be coming back to life, which was good news. Then he wrote:
"Mail comes for you and most of it is pretty dull and not worth sending on but here is a letter that appears to be personal which did get opened but it remained unread. I do not imagine that you want to see bank statements and things like that"
As you can see from the envelope the letter had already been redirected from London up to North Wales.
I took it back to my hotel room and lay on my bed. This is what I read (click the image to view it large enough to read more easily):
I have thought about whether I should publish Liz's letter like this. I have done a bit of internet searching to see whether I could locate Liz (really quite a lot of searching using every permutation of her name with other key words) without success so I can't ask for her permission to publish it. I'm not sure if I need permission. The letter was sent to me. Anyway, there's nothing embarrassing in the letter. It is very personal but it is positively the nicest letter I have every received.
Ahhhh...Liz! As we are going on a digression you must imagine the scene in front of you going wavy to the circular strumming of a harp. We are going back in time ... back ... back ... back to before the beginning of the events set out in this Blog.
At a gallop: After doing the Final Exams at the Chester College of Law I had settled down to wait for the results. To my mind there was no point in doing anything towards getting Articles of Clerkship (as a Training Contract used to be called) until the results were published. I never thought for a minute that I would pass. The exams were the hardest I had ever done and I was convinced I had done so badly that there would no point in trying to get Articles because I was certain to fail.
My Dad had other ideas. He was not going to let me hang around literally doing nothing. So I was encouraged to write off some applications. I got a couple of interviews. One with a West End firm and one with the Maidstone Borough Council. So I went to the interview at Maidstone which was the first in time. I was not properly prepared for the interview. I had never had a job interview before. I was asked what I would say if I was offered the job. It sounded like a stupid question. I mean, why would anyone go for an interview for a job if they were not going to accept the job if it was offered to him? So I said I would accept. They asked me to wait outside and then I was asked back in and put on the spot. Doh! What could I say? I said I would take the job.
It didn't matter much, I thought, because it didn't alter the fact that I wasn't going to pass the Solicitors Finals anyway. I cancelled the interview with the West End firm. My Dad was off my back and after the results confirmed my failure I would tell Maidstone Borough Council and decide to do something else entirely.
Quite contrary to my expectation I actually passed the exams. I couldn't believe it and neither could the mother of a certain Oxford graduate Murray C. L. McPherson who actually called me up on the day of the publication of the results in The Times to ask me whether I thought there mightn't have been a mix up. There hadn't been, I explained to her, because candidates' names were not put on their papers. We all had numbers. I doubted that Murray's number was as similar to mine as our initials and surnames were.
So, practically by mistake, I ended up in the Garden of England. I couldn't let Maidstone down. They had been let down by a number of candidates before my accepting their offer. I didn't want to try to get another job anyway.
My first "digs" were in East Farliegh with a strange TVS VT editor called Potts who seemed to live on an exclusive diet of the worst convenience foods. How anyone can eat instant mashed potato almost every day is beyond me. Anyway, as soon as I could, I moved out and got a room in a cottage called "Woodlands" in the small settlement of cottages on Pizien Well Lane near Wateringbury, one stop further up the line from Maidstone West to Paddock Wood. This, by the way, is one of the prettiest little railway journeys you can take, at least until you arrive at Maidstone West and one which I had taken before on a "trip" some time the previous year. That is another story altogether but Wateringbury was where we had got off the train when things had started to get out of hand that day so it seemed there was some synchronicity at work.
It was 10-15 minute walk through strawberry fields, apple orchards and hop gardens down to the River Medway and Wateringbury Station. This is was the view as I came home every evening either on foot or on my bike. It was really the most beautiful spot. The white cottage in the front was in fact two cottages called Wheatsheaf Cottage. One was owned by Ken Tobutt a former resident of Woodlands which itself was owned by people who had emigrated to Israel. Ken acted as their agent. Woodlands is the cottage to the rear.
I had the room downstairs to the left of the front door at first. The rooms upstairs were occupied by Tony Swinkels, a Kent County Council surveyor; James Weatherup, a reporter for the Kent Messenger; and another bloke whose name escapes me now (was it Richard?) but who was a student at the Osteopathy College in Maidstone. Later, I got James Weatherup's room (where he had had spent a great deal of time entertaining his tennis coach girlfriend) which was the one on the right at the front with a window carved out of the roof. James had landed a job on one of the red tops.
This image is scanned from a print made of a drawing by an artist called Penny Edwards who had also once lived in Woodlands and with whom Ken Tobutt was in love. Regrettably she was in love and lived with someone else. The original drawing belonged to Ken. I think it was one of his most precious possessions.
One day Tony Swinkels turned up with two girls. Liz was one of them . She was about 19. I was 21. She had beautiful eyes and lovely skin and I loved the way she spoke. She had an infectious laugh. She came from Devon. She was then living in a flat in Larkfield, the other side of East Malling and she was working for Kent County Council. We fell in love and I think we fell into bed almost immediately after that.
We were together for only a few months but they were a great few months. We didn't so much go out together as see each other all the time. When you live in an idyllic rural location like Woodlands why would you need to go out anywhere? Liz came over to see me most nights. We had some very romantic times together. It was a very romantic place. It had a genuine Ingle Nook fireplace and there was a well, possibly the Pizien Well itself, outside the kitchen door.
If you walked up past the house and up into the garden there were woods. Looking back down from there you can see the back of the house and my bike outside the kitchen (possibly trying to get in, see "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien). Bluebells will always remind me of that time with Liz.
The other side of the small wood was Mereworth Castle which is decribed by John Newman in the Second Edition of his "West Kent and The Weald" volume of "The Buildings of England" edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, as one of the major achievements of Palladianism, the architect Colen Campbell's most fulsome act of homage to Palladio, a copy of the Villa Rotunda built on a knoll outside Vicenza. Fancy having something like that at the bottom of your garden?
I really don't know why I ended our relationship. It didn't make sense. I loved her. I think I decided to end it after I had spent the night with Liz at her flat. I think I met some people she knew and somehow I thought we were too different and that I could not fit in. I think it was a mistake. Liz was upset. I was stupid and would not relent.
I did stay in touch with Liz and have a collection of her letters and cards. They aren't love letters but I can't throw them away. I saw Liz twice more after I left Kent to go to work in Sutton and live in Archway. I can't begin to go into more detail but the last time I saw her she was working as a Mental Health Nurse in Bodmin, Cornwall. She was a single mum and struggling. I was overwhelmed with a sense of something I can't describe and offered to try to get a job close to her so that we could be together again. She said she didn't think it would be a good idea, she let me down very gently.
This letter that I had picked up in the Poste Restante in Katmandhu really got to me. I was practically on the roof of the World but my heart was in my boots. I was happy for Liz but felt very sorry for myself. I wrote back to Liz and told her how I had once and always felt about her.
Perhaps having just spent a couple of weeks with Claire and now being back on my own again contributed to my blues. I wallowed in it a bit.
