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| A. Alvarez, poet, critic and novelist |
Tub Time |
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I kept my tiresome virginity until the beginning of my final year [at Oxford University], then lost it to a married woman, the wife of one of the older undergraduates who had come up late to Oxford after national service. Like most married couples, they lived out of town, in a whitewashed Elizabethan cottage in a village straight out of Arnold's 'The Scholar Gipsy'. The cottage had a thatched roof and oak beams but what I remember most was the cold. The only fire was in the big open hearth downstairs, but downstairs was too public in a small village with prying neighbors and we drew the line at using the marriage bed. So we filled the big iron bath tub with hot water and made love in that, or in the outsized airing cupboard that housed the electric boiler....The woman was as nervous as I was and, married or not, she seemed almost as inexperienced. The husband was a shy, retiring man, so perhaps sex didn't figure much in their relationship.... (Oxford, England, 1950)
from Where Did It All Go Right?: A Memoir, by A. Alvarez (Morrow/HarperCollins, 1999)
© 2001 Nerve.com, Inc.
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