The Girl Who Said Hello the First

Dale Hawling was never one of those boys who went through a phase of detesting the fair sex.
And if ever proof was needed that puppy love can be as agonisingly painful as its adult counterpart it came in the shape of Dale’s adoration, as a fantastically skinny nine year old, of a young blonde girl of about his age with a strong London accent whom he met through no fault of his own in the midst of that most mythologized of decades of recent times.
It was the year of ’65; and he knew this to be an absolute fact thanks to certain songs which, even when played in the early 2010s, took him violently back to the time of his love for little June Cassidy.
And each and every one of these tunes, such as the Fab Four’s “We Can Work it Out” and Pet Clark’s strangely bitter-sweet “My Love”stemmed from that most totemic of years when Pop started mutating piecemeal into Rock; and London was in mid swing with Carnaby Street as its trendy epicentre.
She announced herself to him with a radiant smile one afternoon while they were both attending classes at their local swimming pool soon after asking him whether his name was Dale. After he’d confirmed to her that indeed it was, she confessed her reason for having so unexpectedly entered his world:
“My mum knows your mum”, she chirpily informed him, before explaining that her mother Maryanne had become friendly with Dale’s own mother Jean through their mutual attendance of a sewing class in what would have been a local education centre. She then turned to her friend and, still smiling, more or less reiterated what she’d told Dale:
“My mum knows his mum”.
But if she was overwhelmingly friendly during that initial meeting, she was never so pleasant again, but the more Dale was ignored, the more he adored. And on one occasion, he may have tried to attract her attention by swimming ever so close to where she was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, only to get caught up in the splashing of her feet; but he could have sworn she smiled to her friend at this point, and he clung to the hope that this smile indicated some kind of affection for him.
But such hope was forlorn, for she never spoke to him again, and he was driven to distraction by her indifference, even to the point of looking up her mother’s name in the telephone directory. And oh with what joy he saw it clearly written there, Maryanne Cassidy, and it restored some kind of control to him, so that the intensity of his love was somehow mitigated thereby.
In fact, it consoled him to realise that should he so desire, he could call her, and speak to her, but what would he say? After all, they weren’t friends; in fact, she didn’t even seem to like him, so he let it go, and in time, his love receded.
Yet he carried its memory far into adulthood, despite the fact that were she still alive, she might have grandchildren of the same age she’d been when she’d so enchantingly introduced herself to Dale in that totemic year of ’65:
“My mum knows your mum!”