The Fairest Maid of Graemesburgh

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I'm not the author of this story, but the author is an Aspie, and the story relates to the struggles we often have finding partners and the shyness some of us have with the opposite sex.


THE FAIREST MAID OF GRAEMESBURGH

I step out of Graemesburgh Portgate station into the rain drenched streets of the city, and I am disoriented. I ask a woman with umbrella the way to Portgate and she points to the right. I go and there it is exactly as I remember it from my first ever visit. I pause to look at the city's coat-of-arms above the arch that is just wide enough to take a car and then on I go towards the Conference Hall with plenty of time for my engagement.

I had come here with a party of my fellow Glasgow University students but left them when they went into a raucous dive where pop music deafened me. I had on me a Purma camera and there in front of me is one of the old "vennels" between the houses giving on to a courtyard where just as forty years ago I see tubs of carnations jostling beside objects like old cartwheels. Beyond, the Graemeshire moors melt into the low scud brought on this unreasonable gale as I quicken my stride.

The Portgate is cobbles and half way along is a ruined chapel through whose arches I pointed the Purma and took timeless views of this ancient city founded by Admiral Alan de Graeme and running through my head are half remembered lines from the famous ballad of that name:

"Bold Alan de Graeme raise your standard once more!
Send forth your brave men from the Menteithshire shore
Past skerries and airds where waters flow deep
By verdant wide pastures where graze cattle and sheep"

In the coach there was Jenny Atchison bright and fair, brought up in Graemesburgh, that looks over the harbour from whence Alan de Graeme sailed with his flotilla to defeat Edward the Hammer's army at Castle Island in 1297. She regaled with us the history of her city and on the way back we sang that ballad with gusto. Whenever I hear it played in the streets of Wallaceburgh during the Arts Festivals I see Jenny as a little young lass with sparkling eyes and oh the magic of her voice. I wanted to marry her but I could never summon the courage to even ask her to accompany me on a Day for Two train trip to Inversnaid to linger by that burn immortalised by Gerald Manley Hopkins whose bust graces the station platform at Inversnaid.

I was so caught up with the momentum of my studies to ask girls to my lodgings in Byres Road where that dragon of a landlady Mrs Lenski would surely have thrown me out. I spotted Jenny in the refectory chatting to Roderick Beal captain of the Rugby Club and my heart sank. How DID Roderick win a place at university? All beef and not competent at driving his old Fiat Firenze which I knew for sure had brought about a string of drunken-driving convictions. I would bump into her from time to time in the Ronald Laing Building and oh whenever she spoke she mesmerised me!

But always a curtain would crash in my mind as I recalled the nude frolic at Brannockstow in 1953 wit my cousin Laura parading her breasts and something else. That led to such a shock but worse was to come a few weeks after when preoccupied with my disgrace. I forgot to look where I was going on my way to Corchester Grammar School and ended up under a lorry and losing my feet.

Then followed nigh on two years of agony before I attended Netherover Remedial School in the heart of Kent, and all the paradoxes which resulted from meeting Alan Moelwyn-Wright my honorary brother. I think, as I identify all the historic buildings in Portgate which I photographed with that Purma whilst Jenny and my fellow students listened to abominable racket and swigged the local beer.

It is far too wet to use the Pentax, and utterly pointless, too. For any more photographs of Graemesburgh will remind me so painfully of Jenny and what is missing from my life - a loving wife. Even Alan cannot extirpate the pain in my mind that has arisen out of the Brannockstow nude frolic and what happened at Hogganfield Park on the outskirts of Corchester where Provendermill Lane veers right, from the Manchester Road beside the lake and up and over a hillock and so to the Grammar School. I AM TO BLAME shouts the gale in Father's voice as I relive in my dreams the awakening in the hospital with both feet amputated.

When I graduated I moved back to Corchester where I had spent my primary school years before my father became Borough Treasurer of Whiteseaton, but a short cycle ride from where Alan had moved to at Abbotshythe in 1954. There I had a job as a photographic technician with Baddeleys who at one time were the leading specialists in unusual photographic techniques. All because I had presented samples of my work displayed every week in the University Refectory when I ran the camera club - so many indeed taken with that Purma! a British made camera of the 1940s with its pendulum-activated shutter! bought for a princely pound from the Glasgow street market! It was a thoroughly fulfilling career until Baddeleys went bust - when was that? 1974? or the hot summer of Seventy Five?

They allowed me to wear jodhpurs at Baddeleys. I am execrably uncomfortable in ordinary trousers and fearful that my false feet will slip off as they certainly did during a model railway exhibition in Manchester in 1985 and I was arraigned before the Officers of the Manchester Model Railway Club for that calamity. I see myself reflected in a mirror in that furniture shop - the fan twill Gripperbreeks locking the prostheses in place so I feel as normal as can be. Then I recall fleeting liaisons with Corchester girls and having to tell them why I dress as a horseman.

Lovemaking, like everything else has to take place with my breeches on. I will NOT allow anybody but Limb-Fitters or Doctors to see me with my breeches down. So when my brother barged into my bedroom at Lairigealt Cottage to see me with my remnants exposed, there was a terminal row. Now he is serving a prison sentence for assaulting equally handicapped Jonathan Seabright the electronics engineer whose appliances called Seabright Owls detect intruders in many neighbourhoods.

Lovemaking... Longing to hug Jenny Atchison... yet what father did to me - I was a sex-maniac, he insisted, so giving rise to the delusion that I would go mad and indecently assault women. And now I am past sixty how I hunger for a woman's caress - to be a young man again and take a lass as fair as Jenny up a lofty mountain! Still the rain teems down and my hat gets saturated and how far it is to the Conference Hall - up a flight of steps and oh is it the arthritis now affecting my knees...

This Sunday, I am feeling my dignity. But next Sunday if it is bright I shall be utterly along with nobody to say a word to all day long... and my loneliness will get the better of me unless it is so bucketing wet that I shall merely stretch my legs around Baxtermere.

I feel so envious of all men who married well, now with adult children to be proud of. I bump into the graduate offspring of fellow graduates and feel such an enormous pain... Dorothy Coates married Alastair Mackenzie for instance and their son Brian is a tall strapping lad who left the family's opulent home in Castle Stirrat to join Boeing in Seattle and marry an Oregon girl. Then John Brooks married Diane Spelding and both are teachers at Graemesburgh Academy... Peter Groves hit it off well with Ursula de Bruyere and HIS children live in a chateau down in Provence... WHO will buttonhole me in the foyer? HOW FAR NOW as I feel incipient CRAMP in my left thigh?

I was curious as all children are, about the workings of the human body. It was just as fascinating as the discovery of algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics and French in my first year at Corchester Grammar School. Why should my father's reprimand on that fateful morning so scar my soul that whenever I see a nubile girl I feel both the urge to cuddle and kiss and a fear beyond the limits of language - a sub-animal fear of being caged for life in a lunatic asylum? Absurdly, I might get electrocuted if ever I touched a girl - her body like the conductor rails of the line from Carkilty to Graemesburgh Portgate.

Old, weary and lonely with nobody to care for me in Carkilty near my birthplace. No grandchildren to be loyal to, no-one to give all of myself to - and bitterly envious of Alan who was almost as severely scathed as myself, for DEBAGGING ME in the dormitory at Netherover School and I FORGAVE HIM the following morning.

I hear THAT BALLAD being played in the foyer as my glasses mist up.

"Bold Alan de Graeme, raise your standard once more

Reclaim our wide realm by the Menteithshire shore!"

It HURTS, how it does, that melody I first heard when the future seemed bright when I was young. Now there is only the deepening darkening pit of lonely decrepitude and nobody to comfort me, NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO! How I long to have won the hand of bright Jenny Atchison, the fairest maid of Graemesburgh....