First Loves Blogfest

This blogfest is the idea of Alex J Cavanaugh, one of the hosts of the A-Z Challenge. There are 144 bloggers taking part so please visit some of them at http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.co.uk

The Blogfest challenge is to write about our first loves – first movie, first song/band, first book and first person, so here goes:

First Movie

The first movie I ever saw at the cinema was Cinderella, and that was when it was first released (yes, I’m old enough to remember that!). I was six at the time, and my aunt was going to meet me after school and take me to the cinema. I was so excited and when it got to afternoon playtime, I went to collect my coat and was standing waiting for my aunt at the school gate. I didn’t understand why everyone else was still in the playground and not leaving for home, until I eventually realised it wasn’t yet hometime! I had to curb my excitement and impatience and go back into school for the last lesson of the day. Anyway, hometime finally came, my aunt was there waiting for me, and off we went into town. The movie completely lived up to all my expectations, and I loved it. In fact I think I was singing Bibbity-bobbity-boo for weeks afterwards.

First Song

Again we go way back into the past. Although I grew up in the 50’s and ‘saw’ the birth of rock and roll including Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, and of course Elvis with Heartbreak Hotel, it was actually a ballad in 1958 which became my real first love – A Certain Smile by Johnny Mathis. I won’t tell you whose ‘certain smile' it always reminded me of, since that is buried in the past too, but I only had to hear those first soaring sounds of the intro, and my heart would do a double-flip!

First Book

I was a voracious reader from a very young age. We couldn’t afford books then (they were all hardbacks when I was a child), so my Mum took me to the library each week, where I could choose two books. I loved school stories especially those by Enid Blyton, and also Ruby Ferguson’s pony books.

The one book I loved most though was called ‘The Swish of the Curtain’ by a 14-year-old writer, Pamela Brown. It was about seven young people who formed an amateur theatrical group and put on their own shows. I think I was already stage-struck when I read it, and it cemented my on-going love of the theatre. It’s recently been re-released in paperback (and slightly updated, so I understand) but I still have my original copy which I could never bear to throw away!

First Person
Leaving out the obvious first people you love i.e. your parents, I’ll go for my first ‘young love’. We were both 9 and he was called Edward. He lived in the big house just inside the gates to the park near where I lived. His dad was the park keeper or ‘parky’, as we called them then, whose job was to patrol and supervise the park. If you behaved yourself, you had nothing to fear from the parky but his appearance anywhere near the children’s playground made everyone nervous in case he caught us doing something we shouldn’t.
Edward hated being the parky’s son. He and I often walked to school together, and he said he could never play on the swings or slide because the other kids thought he would go running off to tell his dad if anyone did anything they shouldn’t. He was very shy and that was made worse by the taunts of other kids at times. I was teased, too, about Edward being my ‘boyfriend’.

Our school had a Rose Queen Festival every June, and our class of 9 and 10 year olds did the maypole dancing at the Festival. Edward and I were chosen as the lead partners, so we go to know each other really well during all the rehearsals. On the big day we were both very nervous, but we managed to do all our dances correctly and didn’t get the ribbons tangled!

We were friends for over a year, until at 11, we went off to different High Schools and lost contact when his father got a different job and they moved away from the park. I sometimes wonder what happened to him!