It’s not always easy being the offspring of an astrophysicist. Relations between me and my father were always a little awkward when I was living at home. No direct unpleasantness, but there was always some sort of distance between us. It was probably as much my fault as his; we’re too much alike. We have never been really close. The advantage – and at the same time the curse – of living in a learned family was that the house was full of books, plus we had a monthly subscription to ’Scientific American’. We were encouraged to find things out for ourselves. If we came to our father with a question he would indicate one of the many bookcases and say “Go and look it up.”
One day, a new book appeared in the house. It was never mentioned, it just appeared. I know now that it had been strategically left lying around and that sooner or later I would pick it up and read it. I can’t remember what it was called (Your Changing Body or something equally imaginative I should think), but read it I did. From cover to cover. Several times.
And that was that. Sex education done and dusted.
We were a fairly conventional churchgoing family. When I did finally get a girlfriend, visits from her were always with a parent in the background, always in the lounge and never up in my room. The same when I visited her at home. We did a lot of making out in the car, as you can imagine, although with us both being good well brought up kids from good churchgoing families, in a peer group with similar backgrounds, it never developed into more than a kiss and cuddle and a grope under the jumper…in all the five years I was going out with her.
I remember the scandal at the church youth club when one of the girls, who was very well developed for her fifteen years and more forward than most, took one of the lads behind the stage in the church hall and let him take her bra off. I was warned in no uncertain terms by my mother to steer clear of that particular girl because she might get me into trouble. SHE might get ME into trouble???!!!
University changed all that, and for most of that first year Heather and I were sleeping together, despite the fact that we each had a room in hall of residence. The second year was going to be more problematic because we were expected to find digs for ourselves and accommodation in London has always been a problem. The situation was not made easier with the university accommodation officer being a militant Trotskyist whose contribution to bringing about The Revolution consisted of attempting to foment unrest among the student body by failing to find accommodation for any of them. So we were left to traipse around town with outdated lists of possible addresses and much-thumbed copies of the “Ham and High” (we were definitely North London types). Eventually we managed to secure a double bedroom in a family home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. There was only one hurdle left to tackle; how to break it to my parents that we intended to share that bedroom.
I had a summer job in south west London that year and was waiting for a Green Line bus home at Hampton Court one afternoon. By the merest co-incidence my father turned up at the same bus stop. I think he’d been to the flower show or something but in any case, the odds against us meeting there were vanishingly small. Normally at home we could spend a whole evening under the same roof without exchanging so much as a word but here, at this bus stop, we started talking. He asked me how it was going with the search for digs. I answered with a few mumbled platitudes about how difficult it was to find somewhere and his reply struck me like a bolt out of the blue.
”Well, you and Heather are just going to have to find somewhere to share”.
I could have hugged him (almost!). With one sentence had had swept away the problem that had been bugging me for days. Sure, the family had met Heather several times, and liked her. But we had never told them how serious we were about each other. Now I had as good as got a paternal blessing for us to “live in sin.”
On the other hand, my father was himself, at the time, admissions tutor for a major university department. He knew the score. My estimation of him went up from that day onward.
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