Love Lessons

by David Belbin

  Dad kissed Rachel gratefully. “You’re quite right. I needed a new one. Though I don’t have as much to put in it these days.”

  “About Phoebe and Rowan ...” Rachel said.

  Dad immediately looked uncomfortable. “I will arrange for you to see them,” he jumped in. “But there are still problems with access. Clarissa’s been a real ...”

  “I’ve seen Clarissa,” Rachel interrupted. “We’ve made it up. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m babysitting for her once a week. Phoebe and Rowan asked me to give you this.”

  For a moment, as he opened the packet containing his new pair of gloves, Rachel thought that her father would cry. Fiona looked away. She wanted no part of this. She had her own child to think about. Rachel wondered if Fiona had dropped out of university, the way Mum had had to, sixteen and a half years ago.

  Rachel didn’t feel angry about Fiona, the way she used to feel angry about Clarissa. Clarissa was always a threat. Right now, however, it was Fiona who must be feeling threatened by Rachel. One day, perhaps, they would be allies. But Fiona had a few things to learn about men before then.

  “So, how’s college?” Dad asked, a little later. “Got a boyfriend yet?”

  He didn’t know about Mike. Rachel was only just beginning to get over him. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever get over him. She’d been hurt by how little he’d argued when she phoned him that night, how easily he’d let her go.

  “No,” Rachel said. “Well, sort of. I see a lot of Nick - remember him? - he’s doing A-levels there. We go out together sometimes, but he’s more of a friend, really.”

  “A friend," Dad said, the old flirtatious glint in his eyes. “Isn’t that against human nature? Can men and women ever really be friends when they’re also attracted to each other?”

  “Of course they can,” Rachel said.

  “Not in my experience,” Dad told her. “They might say they’re only friends, but at least one of them is always pretending.”

  “If you say so,” Rachel told him.

  She didn’t want to have this discussion here, now. If she said what she really thought, there would be too many uncomfortable truths exposed. She tried to turn the conversation around.

  “What do you think, Fiona?”

  Fiona looked at Rachel’s father, as though waiting for permission to speak. “I don’t know,” she said, finally, feeling the lump in her stomach. “I haven’t really thought about it before.”

  “I have,” Rachel said. “I think Dad’s mixing up sex and love. Friendship’s more important than sex.”

  “Is this the girl who, only six months ago, was starring in the greatest romance of all time?” Dad said, jokily.

  “Romeo and Juliet isn’t a great romance,” Rachel told him. “It isn’t about love. It’s about an adolescent fantasy of what love is. The thing they call love ends up destroying both of them. It never had a chance of working.”

  “Ah, the certainty of youth,” Dad said. “The trouble with Shakespeare is that you can make his plays mean almost anything.” He smiled condescendingly, then added, “You still have a lot to learn.”

  Rachel and Fiona looked at each other, a flicker of contempt crossing both their faces. Eric Webster laughed uncomfortably, as though he’d told a joke. Neither his girlfriend or daughter joined in.

  “I’ve got to go,” Rachel said. “There’s someone waiting for me.”

  Dad showed her out with something resembling relief. They kissed awkwardly at the door, but made no arrangements to meet again.

  Nick was waiting in the street.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” Rachel said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Was it awful?”

  “Could have been worse.”

  Rachel stood in the street for a moment, feeling faint. She thought that she was going to cry, but didn’t. She had learnt to harden her heart.

  “Come on,” Nick said. “I’ll walk you back to college.”

  As they turned on to Mansfield Road, Nick put an arm loosely around Rachel’s shoulders. She hesitated for a moment, then put an arm around Nick’s waist. His grip tightened, and Rachel rested her head on his shoulder for a second before setting off. Then they walked back to where they’d come from: slowly, arm in arm, like young lovers, or old friends.

  Afterword: A Brief History of Love Lessons

  Love Lessons was first published in the late 90s, but the story has its origins much earlier. Aged eighteen, in my first term as a Law student, I pursued a tall, dark beauty a year older than me. We had intense conversations, but she kept being mysterious about her living arrangements. Some of the time she lived with her parents just outside Nottingham. Other times she lived with “a friend”. The “friend” turned out to be her long-haired, former Science teacher, who was at least twice my age. After a few weeks, I and three friends from the Law course were invited to dinner with the couple. She got very stoned very quickly and fell asleep. He played us a guitar record by hippy icon John Fahey and the five of us struggled to make conversation. We left as quickly as we politely could.

  “There are good things about older guys,” she told me shortly afterwards, “but there are good things about younger guys too.” I never explored the second half of that statement.

  That’s the story I always tell about the source of Love Lessons but I didn’t think about her all that much while I was working on the novel. It was my third attempt at a first novel. I’d started writing seriously soon after taking a post-graduate training course in English and Drama. Over the next five years I finished three novels, a radio play and numerous short stories. A literary agent urged me to write something more down to earth. I took him at his word and set about writing the thing aspiring writers are always told to write about: what they know.

  I was by then a schoolteacher in a suburb of Nottingham. In the afterword that accompanied this novel’s eventual first publication, I stressed that Love Lessons was not autobiographical, nor based on events at the school where I spent most of my teaching career. This was accurate as far as it went. But when I started writing the novel I was a young teacher in his twenties. A teacher who has never given a second look to one of his or her students is exceptional. Many young teachers are likely to gather their share of admirers. They then have to work out how to deal with them, especially the ones that she or he finds themselves drawn to.

  A few occasions have stuck in my mind. At my first school I received a valentine from a sixteen year old I had never previously noticed; she handed it to me personally in order to make sure I knew who she was. In one supply teaching post I had my bum pinched on the first day. At the same school I taught a ferociously bright, vivacious sixteen-year-old who, not long afterwards, had an affair with a teacher my age. Many years later she told me that the relationship continued for some time, souring her university years. It was common knowledge at the school, but, like every such affair I’ve been privy to the details of, had no effect on the teacher’s career.

  Teachers who don’t want to compromise themselves soon learn the situations to avoid. Early on, I was followed into a stock cupboard. In an activities week, I led a film making course with volunteer help from a vivacious sixth former who daily wore a very short black skirt. At lunchtimes, in a darkened editing room, she gave me entertaining accounts of how difficult she was finding it to lose her virginity. A few weeks later I began to write the novel that would become Love Lessons. Read into that what you will.

  Had I not been older than the average newly qualified teacher (I took three years out between degree and teacher training, trying to writing novels and dabbling in politics)... Had I not already been living with the woman with whom I still live... Had my teaching career begun in the more sexually “liberated” seventies, when teacher/pupil affairs were at their most common, and least frowned on... I was conscious when writing Love Lessons that I was no saint and might, in different circumstances, have behaved as Mike did. This ambiguity, I hope, helped me create a tru
er novel.

  That said, there is little ambiguity about the morality of a teacher having sexual relations with a pupil. It’s wrong, for many reasons. Yet there are public figures who have boasted about their success with students, not seeming to equate this “success” with child abuse or taking a Thai bride. When I was working on this novel I used to carry around a clipping from Private Eye about the then Chief Inspector of Schools, who’d had a long relationship with a former student. Allegedly, it began when she was a sixth former and they were on a writing retreat at the Arvon Centre in Lumb Bank, the former home of Ted Hughes, where I have myself taught and been a student. This influential individual was quoted as saying that he thought sexual relationships between teachers and pupils could be “educative”. Creepy.

  The first version of Love Lessons had a different title, Don’t Stand So Close To Me, the title nicked from an 80’s hit by The Police, whose lyricist was a former art teacher in a secondary school. It was an adult novel, with plenty of sex and pretty much the same plot as the version that was eventually published.

  I had an agent waiting to see Don’t Stand So Close To Me. But I knew I had a problem. A novel that is set in a school and largely told from the point of view of a fifteen year old is likely to be seen as belonging to the Young Adult (YA) Fiction field rather than the more literary market I was aiming at. So it proved when, eighteen months later, the novel was ready for submission. The formerly encouraging agent wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about it to take me on. I realised that I had aimed the novel at the wrong audience. But there was far too much sex in the story for it ever to be published as a YA novel. Wasn’t there?

  Then things changed. In the space of a fortnight I had my first “literary” short story accepted and I got a commission to write a YA novel, The Foggiest, for the children’s publisher Scholastic. There was no conscious decision on my part but, for the next two decades, my work for adults would be devoted to the short story while my novels would be for teenagers and older children.

  I adapted Don’t Stand So Close to Me into a Young Adult length novel, reducing the adult point of view sections. I knew the book was too strong for Scholastic so I sent it to Penguin.

  A few weeks later, the editor in charge of Young Adult Fiction wrote back to tell me that she and two other editors had read the novel and loved it. However they did not think that fifteen year old girls were as obsessed with sex as the ones I portrayed and were rejecting it. I put the letter aside and set off to work where, daily, I tried to teach English and Media Studies to fifteen year old girls who were obsessed with sex. I had written a novel that the editors loved, that I was pretty sure its target audience would want to read, but one which was completely unpublishable. Oh well.

  If I want to write a story, I keep going back to it. Every idea I’ve had that was any good has made it into print. Eventually. A few years later I was, at last, a full time writer, producing three novels a year, including my Point Crime series The Beat. The editor to whom this book is dedicated took me to lunch. I was making money for the company, she told me, and they wanted to keep me happy. Was there any project, she asked, dear to my heart, that I’d like to work on? She would do her best to push it through.

  I immediately mentioned Don’t Stand So Close to Me. Nobody had yet tackled pupil/teacher relationships. Things had changed since Penguin rejected the novel. My current books had an audience, readers who wanted controversial social issues treated in a responsible but thought provoking way rather than a titillating one. Julia, the editor, said she’d do her best to sell the idea to the publisher. I wrote a proposal, ditching the dated title, replacing it with the blindingly obvious Love Lessons.

  I wrote an entirely new version. The plot changes, however, were minor. Rachel now had a divorced dad who lived in a house similar to one I had briefly rented in Nottingham’s Mapperley Park. I gave Mike my beard, then shaved it off again. The big concert scene, originally meant to take place at a Sheffield Arena show with my favourite band R.E.M. was replaced with an Oasis gig instead. This turned out to my advantage as Oasis remained iconic to younger readers, whereas R.E.M., did not. The opening scene, in which a classic, old school English teacher dies on the job, was also new. I changed the play from Macbeth to Romeo and Juliet, for obvious reasons.

  A year later, I had a finished novel that everyone was happy with. I waited for the book to be published. And waited. Then I waited some more. Word filtered down that Scholastic was trying to work out how to publish such a titillating title “responsibly”. In The Beat I was writing about rape, racism, paedophilia; strong stuff. Nearly all of the characters, including the gay one (the first gay character in Young Adult series fiction) had a sex life. But The Beat was series fiction that tended to escape the censorship radar. In Love Lessons, we were dealing with a very sensitive taboo.

  In those days I did a lot of school visits. I would mention the forthcoming Love Lessons. Every single time, a female teacher would come up to me later with a story about a girl they knew who’d had a relationship with a teacher (I’ve only come across a couple of cases where it was a boy and a female teacher). Now and then the couple married and lived happily every after, but usually it ended badly for the girl.

  Two years after the book should have been published, Scholastic came up with a new imprint, Scholastic Press, to publish “classy” paperbacks aimed at the older teen reader. It was the right place to publish Love Lessons. So would mine be the first title? No, that would be too controversial. It came out second or third.

  The novel was an immediate success, garnering more reviews than all my previous novels put together. School libraries stocked it, though some kept it behind the desk on request for Year Nines (14 year olds) and above only. It was shortlisted for what was then the country’s only Young Adult book prize, judged by teenagers in the North East. The short list included local boy David Almond’s brilliant debut Skellig but the winner was the first Harry Potter novel. A sign of things to come. The Potter phenomenon was soon to have a devastating effect on sales of Young Adult novels to teenagers.

  Love Lessons even allowed me one long held ambition when it appeared on the adult shelves of my local Waterstones (my first “proper” adult novel, The Pretender, was still ten years away). Love Lessons lay in that hinterland between Young Adult and adult fiction. It predated the “crossover” genre, books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

  Is Love Lessons a Young Adult novel? There is an adult viewpoint. There were plenty of those in The Beat too, though nobody argued that they were not YA novels. The gap between YA and adult fiction is a slippery thing, but I think that the key distinction is to do with the historical nature of the point of view. If the narrator or point of view character has an adult consciousness it is an adult novel. If the novel’s only active consciousness is a less mature one, albeit one that is reaching for adulthood, it is a YA novel. Love Lessons can’t be a YA novel, you might argue, because Mike is 23. Yet, a lot of the time, fifteen year old Rachel is more mature than Mike, who is conscious that she can be “a girl one minute, a woman the next”. Adolescence ends at different times for different people, depending on culture, character and circumstance.

  Does the distinction between YA and adult fiction matter? All of my novels are aimed at adult readers, as this afterword is, but the YA novels are aimed at adolescent readers first. My YA fiction seeks to meet the reader on equal terms without recourse to an adult consciousness that can unintentionally preach or condescend.

  Love Lessons sold well but WH Smith, the UK chain which would have ensured the widest audience, did not stock the Scholastic Press edition. The cheaper, smaller edition was delayed, taking three years instead of the usual one. But when it did come out the book was a big seller, all over again, and this time did make it into Smiths.

  I ended the afterword to the first edition of Love Lessons with the phone number of Childline, though the Samaritans may have been a better bet (these days both ca
n easily be found on search engines). Young readers can read against the grain and I wanted to stress that however much the reader might have wanted Mike and Rachel’s relationship to have a happy ending, the affair was always a bad idea. I end this brief memoir with a note that, shortly after Love Lessons was published, UK law changed and it became illegal for a person in a position of care to have sex with a charge who is under eighteen. Just this once I was glad to have written a novel that so quickly went out of date.

  David Belbin

  Nottingham

  Afterword to the 2013 edition

  The first appearance of Love Lessons as an eBook marks the fifteenth anniversary of its publication. I don’t have a great deal to add to the afterword I wrote for its tenth anniversary reissue. But there are a few things that came to mind while I was proofreading this new edition. I have, by the way, made no changes, and resisted the impulse to make a handful of minor grammatical improvements. The 2009 edition was itself identical to the 1998 one, except for an inadvertently omitted line, which I have restored.

  The novel was the first to suggest my fascination with rock music, which was to come to the fore in the later Dying For You, Festival ( aka “The Glastonbury Novel”, recently republished by East Lane Books) and Shouting At The Stars. I went to the Sugar gig at Sheffield’s Foundry that Mike has to give up his ticket for. It was very good, as was the one by Suede, at Leicester De Montfort Hall. So, for that matter, were the ones that Mike and Rachel didn't make it to: Elastica at Rock City and R.E.M. in Huddersfield.

  Love Lessons is very firmly set in a particular time period, the year I wrote the final version, so some details have dated. Cassettes in cars, for instance. The plot would have been rather different had it been set five years later, when mobile phones became commonplace. Few people had them in ’95. The story mentions Ken Barlow, in Coronation Street, who was still a secondary school teacher then. As I type, the actor who plays him is suspended from the series because of allegations that he slept with an underage girl or girls. So that particular reference may have improved with age. The 2009 edition, of course, long predates the Jimmy Savile and associated child abuse scandals. Not long after Love Lessons I wrote a short comic story about a boy being abused by a male relative, titled Jim’ll Fix It. Accidental prescience. It can be downloaded free from my website www.davidbelbin.com