KETTERING

Everywhere I go in Northamptonshire is loaded with memories. Perhaps it is because I have lived here for so long. Perhaps it is just because I have lived so long. But Kettering, which I visited this morning, holds more memories for me than anywhere else.

I went to college there between the ages of 16 and 18. Had a whale of a time too, drinking, smoking and vainly pursuing girls while flunking, as the Americans would say, all three of the A Levels I signed up for. "Unhelpful parents," one report on my personal file, which I broke into for an illicit peek, opined. But I didn't fail because of my parents. I failed because of me; and because of the delightful novelty of being surrounded by girls after five years at an all-boys' school.

While I was there I fell in love. Or I fell in love as an incredibly naive, disablingly lonely and sentimental 18-year-old falls in love--that is, I never told her, and went home every night and played heartsick records by my bedroom window, looking out over the rooftops and knowing that nobody had ever experienced a comparable pain. Her name was Helen and I spent many years afterwards unable to shake her memory.

It was only when I started work at the Southbank Hostel (no longer there), that Kettering ceased to be indelibly associated with Helen. And that was fifteen years later. Then I fell for another girl (woman), though I was no longer foolish enough to believe it was love; I knew that what I was experiencing was no more than a powerful crush. But powerful it was. Harness the electricity that generated and you could light up a large village at Christmas time. I still believe that if I'd had the balls to tell her--and that by some miracle she had felt the same way (I know her mother liked me)--we would have embarked on a love affair that might have persisted to this very day. Her name was Caz. Whatever happens to the loves that never were?

The problem was, I didn't have the balls to tell her how I felt. And then I met and fell for someone else. Someone I worked with who was known to everybody else I knew. Someone who was married. And we agreed--though in retrospect I think the agreement served her more favourably than me--to keep our relationship a secret. If we told anybody, so the reasoning went, one of us would have to leave the job.

In the event both of us left the job. But the woman I had fallen for would never leave her husband, either because she didn't love me sufficiently, or because she was lying to herself about her feelings about the situation she allegedly endured at home. Certainly I was not a good prospect as a partner or husband. I don't earn enough, and in my time with my ex I was frequently on the brink of a breakdown. Partly, I stress in my defence, because living apart from the woman I loved, and knowing that she went home most nights to her husband, drove me up the wall.

But the secrecy we shrouded our relationship in at first ruined a great deal that I would have liked to lean back upon when the relationship, as it inevitably would do, fell apart. Our friends and work colleagues weren't idiots; they knew that we were seeing each other. What they couldn't figure out was why we were lying to them. By the time I left the job for pastures new, none of the boys and girls who had been part of my social or work life up to then was talking to me anymore, including, probably, Caz, who I had driven away by avoiding her so that I didn't have to tell her any lies about who I was seeing and what we were up to when we met. I had pretended to have no relationship a couple of times when I went to Caz's for lunch and it stuck in my gizzard like a badly digested chunk of apple.

Now when I go to Kettering I reflect on the damage I did in the pursuit of something I never finally received (her love), and I wonder if it was worth it. The answer has to be a bitter and resounding no, though on those nights when I sat with my ex drinking wine and listening to music, our legs entwined, the fire crackling and the future seeming, at last, to be secure, I suppose I might have answered differently about the friends I wasted and the people I hurt.