The Tall Girl from Somerset 9

ANNE
Oxford 
October 1965

The daies gon, the yeres passe,

The hertes waxen lasse and lasse

Of hem that ben to love untrewe.

John  Gower         Confessio Amantis

‘The days go, the years pass,

The hearts grow less and less

Of those that are to love untrue.’

Old Gower was right, wasn’t he?  The hearts of people who are false in love just shrivel up.  They just shrivel up.

Anne’s second year at university was a strange year.  Going to lectures, going to meals, going to films.  Yes, she did all that. One carries on, you know.  One carries on.  But it all seemed rather humdrum to her now.  She wrote letters to Harvey, of course.  In those days we wrote letters, you know, and the post worked well even out in the country. The postman mattered. The postman could tell you who was ill and who was well, and who had just inherited a fortune from an uncle in Westmoreland that no one knew about.  He could tell you if those clouds meant rain or if they were just passing by, and he could tell you if Somerset would win next weekend's county cricket match against Surrey.  He could even tell you about your aunt Bertha’s holiday in Bognor Regis because he read the postcard she had sent you before you did.  Those were the days before computers and life moved at a different rhythm.  News never broke in those days.  It arrived at its own slow pace.  How long did it take for news of the battle of Trafalgar to reach London?  How many days?  But that is going back a bit, I admit. 

Harvey was in Manchester.  Of course, he was a bad letter writer, just as Anne was a good one.  In fact, he hardly wrote at all.  She wrote very often, especially at first. Although Harvey hardly wrote, he thought of Anne a great deal.  Anne both wrote and thought.  But distance has always been an evil. Does absence really make the heart grow fonder?  Harvey became involved in rugby and the film society.  He didn’t become involved with any girl in particular, but with several in general, but only in a non-committed-on-either-side sort of way, more out of goodness of heart than anything else.