Cheese and pickle...

Rebecca made the best cheese and pickle sandwiches you have ever tasted. White bread, butter, cheddar and brown pickle, spread not too thinly, not too thick. It didn’t matter if it was lunchtime or later. A sandwich was always on offer.

One sat in the kitchen at a big table with a scrubbed bare-wood top. Her mother might be at the sink; no dishwasher in their home. Her elder brother was often around, too, tall and thin, with a wispy blond beard. Blond was in the family. He had one of the jobs where one sort of knows the name but not what it entails. I think it began with an ‘a’ - auditor, assessor, aggregator perhaps.

When I called, which was often, we were usually on our way off somewhere, but I was always a bit early, partly for the sandwich-to-die-for, and partly because it was so comforting in her kitchen. Neither neat nor messy: homely sums it up perfectly. If she was upstairs getting ready, there was plenty to discuss with mum and/or brother. The fact that Rebecca liked me seemed good enough for both of them.

Not for dad, though. On the very few occasions when he arrived while I was there it was inevitable that he’d open by cursing me because I had left my motorbike just where he wanted to sweep in to their loose-gravel drive.

“Oh! It’s you again. I might have guessed from that excuse for a motorbike in the way.”

He was inevitably coming from somewhere and needing to go out again almost immediately. When he walked in the temperature in the kitchen dropped a full ten degrees and even Mrs Clark tensed. (I learned much later as a father myself that one’s daughter’s suitors are always to be regarded with suspicion. It is in the DNA. That explains some of it, but by no means all.) Rebecca (never Beccy) told me that her fastidious, strict father and her easy-going mum were two people sharing a house but little more. I knew whose side of that divide I was on.

Rebecca and I had been together for a few months but I had known her for much longer. She was now in the sixth form, I’d left a year earlier and was now working - my very first full-time job. We’d been friendly since our early teens, but our relationship blossomed after a particular incident in which a previous boyfriend cheated a group of us.

It was just after her seventeenth birthday and we were all at Fox & Hounds to celebrate. After several earlier rounds, it was Graham's turn to go to the bar with what was left in our communal kitty. He brought back the drinks, and told us there hadn’t been enough. He’d topped it up and we owed him… We all chipped in, but we were left wondering. Apart from Rebecca and Graham, there were seven of us at the table. There were odd glances but nothing was said, but I wasn’t the only one who was nonplussed. After the two of them left we later decided that he’d probably taken something out of kitty for himself; we did the sums. Rebecca didn’t believe us when we told her about a week later. “Graham would never do anything like that.”

I didn’t want anything more to do with him, others felt the same. We heard from others that something similar had happened before. Some time later they split up. Rebecca never said why but I didn’t need to ask.

Within a month she and I became a couple, my first really serious girlfriend. It started properly after I got tickets for a very early Oasis concert. It was a defining moment for both of us. Later Freddie Mercury at Wembley became another real landmark event we shared. We didn’t know anyone else who had managed to make it to that!

Rebecca lived about three miles away from me back then. I was still living at home and commuting. She took the train to school - just a couple of stops. Several times a week I’d use my bike to get to her station, rather than my nearer one. I could just about make on time it if I made a dash at the other end. I was getting something of reputation at work for it. Ray called me ‘last-minute lover boy’ but the boss hadn’t said anything.

So apart from our morning tryst, we spent most of our free our time together. Quite often at weekends there was a party to go to. Friday nights were usually spent at the Fox & Hounds. And then the better weather arrived. We started going to a river, lake or pond in our area… I was surveying aquatic life and collected samples to do with water quality. Mostly I was looking for mayfly, stonefly and caddisfly nymphs. It was not really part of my job, but related to it. River insects spend the majority of their lives in the water as nymphs, making them brilliant indicators of river health. It gave us a reason to explore much of the countryside and enjoy the outdoors. In the week I was often peering through a microscope, but at weekend I saw it ‘au naturel’. It gave our outings a focus for a while but later I sensed that Rebecca grew a little tired of trips to muddy ponds and peering into jam jars of grey green water looking for tiny life forms.

Then, just as her A-levels exams started in earnest, I was asked to go to Zambia for a few months. It was an exciting assignment, and something of a promotion. I accepted it before I discussed it with her. While I was away, we phoned when we could. She told me how her exams were going; I told her about water quality issues – the Kafue River in Zambia was home to significant fish kills due to excessive nitrogen levels.

When I came back, she was just starting at teachers’ training college in Roehampton. Before I went away, we had said we intended to stay together but it wasn’t to be. Her focus had changed, many of our friends in common had dispersed and I was probably becoming a clean-river-water bore!

We stayed in touch – but not romantically. Our shared experiences stayed as a fund of closeness that ensured our friendship endured.

It is now many years later and we are both married, not to each other. We both have children. We’ve met quite a few times, usually at her house in Kent. She’s deputy head of a grammar school – they still have them in Kent. I teach at Cardiff University and focus on microplastics in river and sea water.

Last weekend I was invited to give a paper near Canterbury, where Rebecca and her husband, Clive, live. They invited me for supper on Sunday and she and I reminisced. If I am still a clean water bore, my hosts were too kind to point that out… But what I was put straight about was that the famous sandwiches were bacon with a smear of mustard, not cheese and pickle. Funny that…