Member-only story
My First Lesbian
(More significantly, my mother’s best friend…)
When I was a child, I thought as a child — and one thing I thought was that friends were a childhood thing, that you grew out of as you grew up. Certainly my parents didn’t go in for friendship much. I don’t remember my father having any social life at all, those years he lived with us. There were a couple of women from church who visited my mother sometimes, but I was always fairly confident they were really coming round to see us kids. Them apart, we were the original nuclear family, and I thought that was how all families were and ought to be: turned inward, properly focused on themselves, the children, the important child, me.
Except that once every month or so, we’d go out without my father — Dad never came with us, which even then I thought was significant of something — and walk up the hill to Gypsy Lane to visit Mum’s old friend from university. I used to love these trips. Gypsy Lane was a line of pre-war semis, big houses to us, and they overlooked a park, with a little wood at the end of the lane and always that private suspicion that it was called Gypsy Lane for a reason, that someone romantic and sinister and exotic was waiting just around the corner with adventure in their pocket.
What’s odd in retrospect is that what other people would certainly have found romantic and…