Miranda’s Diary Of An Illicit Lover – A Farewell And Enlightenment.
It has been a while since we last spoke so I hope you are all having fabulous 2011’s and the miserable weather hasn’t kept you all too bored and caged (and if it has, shame on you for not using the cold outside to get all toasty and intimate inside!). It has unfortunately been a sad start to the year for me, with the death of my beloved grandmother. We knew it was coming, so whilst not a shock, still sad but in a bizarre twist of fate, enlightening.
My grandmother was a trailblazer right from the get go. She cycled everywhere when women of her station were driven, she worked when she didn’t have too and she made sure my mother and siblings had jobs at thirteen despite attending public school. In other words she prized her independence, expected nothing without work and encouraged people to think outside the box. She was dainty, well presented and thoroughly middle class in every way, but one. My grandmother had an affair. Not the interim one nighters and brief sojourns of passion that I and many of you enjoy, but a real, full on, hot-blooded extra marital affair, with a work colleague of my grandfathers.
I found out when clearing out her stuff. She bravely (or riskly depending on your perspective) kept diaries of what she had been up to. As clichéd as it may sound, they also corresponded by letter. Letters from the forties and fifties were so different. Restrained in many ways: no talk of f..ing and c.nts in my grandmother’s days, and yet somehow so much sexier than our modern communications. Lengthy proclamations of passion and desire, talk of need and the merest hint of the pleasures to come – the imagination is the primary organ teased and both sides stop short of discussing the act, while openly declaring their intense longing for the touch of one another.
Her diary talks of warm afternoons in bed with the gas fire burning in the corner, stolen weekends at seaside resorts and walking down the pier, hand in hand in the rain, safe in the knowledge that this weekend was theirs alone, free of the constraints of their responsibilities. The funny thing is, that time doesn’t change that much. She never had any intention of leaving my grandfather, although it would appear she wished she had met her lover earlier on. In those days women were expected and Nana was no different, although I believe a later era would have seen her turn her back on convention and live in sin, rather than duty and without passion.
Their affair, like so many ended in heartbreak when my grandfather returned from Asia, where he had been working and my grandmother called it off, to protect her children from the scandal were her activities to be discovered. The heartbreak she felt at making such a choice was palpable through her words even six decades after the event and even my modern woman’s heart really yearned to know what it means to feel so much passion and such depth of emotion.
There is an intense elegance to the prose and no hiding of the emotions that makes me wonder if the technological age and advent of sexual liberation, rather than granting immeasurable pleasures and anything our hearts, or more like groins desire, has somehow suppressed our imaginations and capacity for true pleasure and depth of emotion. The bittersweet pain of waiting for letters to arrive, visits snatched rarely and nothing but the imagination to tease and taunt during the times when you couldn’t see your lover must have heightened everything to such a fever pitch that it astounds me illicit assignations (as they were called in their day) ever consisted of more than a brief greeting before partners got down to business.
So, this month I am honouring my nana in a different way. With passion not spent in the arms of a temporary partner, but with some time spent reading some of my old favourite bodice rippers and classic tales of love and loss. Sexy escapism of a different sort, with the hope that some of that frustrated desire may invade my own existence one day soon……….
