Summer of Love

by Christina Jones

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

It?s the summer of 1969, an exciting time of music and fashion, peace and love. However, the Swinging Sixties appear to have by-passed the village of Ashcote. Seventeen-year-old Clemmie is thinking only of her A-levels, gaining a place at university and the long hot days stretching ahead. But when she meets the gorgeous Lewis Coleman-Beck, Clemmie?s life changes in a split second and she?s plunged, head-over-heels, into her very own Summer of Love.

Release date: September 21, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 86

Sample

2003

It’s as hot and drowsy as a July morning: impossible to believe that it’s already September and we’re closer to Christmas than midsummer. The flowers are still blowsy and vibrant; the air is sleepy, sultry, heavy with pollen and sweetness. Everyone says it’s going to be a glorious autumn this year. A perfect Indian summer. Maybe it’ll be like that other perfect summer so long ago when I was young …

Not that I’m ancient, of course. Well, I’m fifty-one now which is ancient by some standards – where on earth did the time go? – but that summer is still as vivid as if it were yesterday. I remember every detail, especially … but no, I really shouldn’t think about that now. Not today of all days. After all, my present life is perfect: there’s no need to look back to the past, is there?

I’m lounging indolently on the hammock swing in the garden with the Sunday papers, and I’m blissfully happy; totally contented with my life, and I know I’m lucky. But even so, being fifty-one has come as something of a shock. Can I really be fifty-one?

I smile to myself. Reaching fifty last year was fine: everyone said fifty was the new forty, and Lulu and Olivia Newton-John and people like that were publicly proud to be fifty. But ‘being in my fifties’ sounds suspiciously like getting old to me, especially when inside my head I’m seventeen. Always seventeen.

Outwardly? Well, I’ve never been vain, but I do take care of myself. I’m a sucker for every anti-ageing cream on the market, and I dance myself silly by way of exercise, and I still wear my faded jeans and an armful of silver bangles and walk barefoot on the grass. My hair is cut in trendy choppy layers – and if the addition of blonde highlights hide the first grey streaks, then it remains a secret between me and Pauline at Marcelle’s Hair Salon.

Oh yes, if I close my eyes on this glorious morning and let the warmth wash over me, I can easily forget that I’m fifty-one years old. Removed from reality by the soporific silence of a Sunday morning, the people and places from the past seem far more real than those who live in my life now. Strange then, how those images from years ago seem to insist on marching through my head today …

I quickly open my eyes again and squint through the spiralling sun across the garden at my parents having coffee beneath the brightly striped umbrella. They’d be so disappointed if they knew where my thoughts are straying. They smile across at me, pleased that I’m here, looking forward to us all going out to lunch later. They’re in their mid-seventies now, still very happy together, but I wonder if they ever really forgave me.

I know they said they did, and after all, it’s a lifetime ago, but at the time …

Why on earth does my mind insist on going down that route? What is it about today, of all days, that makes me want to recall the past? I really mustn’t dwell on it. But I could so easily give into the temptation and remember.

Maybe it’s not only because of the weather, but also because I’m here in my parents’ neat, orderly semi? The house where I grew up, the house in Ashcote, the sprawling Berkshire village that was my childhood home. The house where I broke their hearts.

I still feel real pangs of guilt at their remembered anger and grief, which is confusing as most of my memories of that time are happy ones. I know I shouldn’t be self-indulgent and allow myself to reminisce, but the seductive scents of the warm earth and the flowers and the sleepy rhythmic murmur of the bees could belong so easily to that other summer more than thirty years ago.

The summer that I really shouldn’t keep going back to. My forbidden summer. The summer that changed my life.

1969 had to be the best time in the whole history of the world to be seventeen, I decided. There were so many amazing changes taking place, all adding vibrant colour and a buzz of excitement to the end of my growing-up decade, and I loved being young and alive and happy.

I was captivated by the hippie peace and freedom movement, and avidly watched the eccentrically dressed teenagers on television as they bravely protested about everything from the Vietnam War to racial equality. And then there was the advent of the mind-blowing psychedelic music with rock bands, groups of gorgeous and glamorous boys, stirring up frenzies of adolescent lust in dance halls across the country.

Not, of course, that any of this had made much impact on Ashcote. Ashcote, still rooted somewhere pre-war, had never been quite ready for the Sixties. The nearest we’d ever got to a rock band was the Ezra Samuels Caribbean Trio playing in the village hall on party nights. With a network of high-banked and tree-shrouded lanes feeding away from either side of the High Street, Ashcote was typical of many large Berkshire villages, having its origins in agriculture and accepting the creeping of commerce with a seemingly sulky reluctance. The High Street, which housed the brand new all-girls’ grammar school at one end and a garage at the other, had various shops, the village hall, a pub – which I’d been forbidden to even think about visiting – in between.

It was midday. Early June. 1969. I’d just had lunch with my mum in the garden, and was heading for school with several classmates, all of us knowing that in less than half an hour we’d have to forget all about hippies and rock bands, the sunshine and the flowers and the summer sounds of Tony Blackburn on Radio One, and listen to those dreaded words: ‘You may turn your papers over now …’

Only four more exams to go. One English paper this afternoon, then two Religious Education and the last History of Art. Then the agonising wait for the results of course, and then in the autumn, with my requisite number of graded passes, off to university.

University was a scarily thrilling prospect. I’d never been away from home alone before. In fact, apart from occasional holidays when my parents could afford them, I’d rarely left the village.

An only child, my parents were inordinately proud of my achievements. No one else on either side of the family had ever been to university or even stayed on at school. Mum and Dad had been ecstatic when I’d passed my 11+, and even more so – if that were possible – when I’d passed all nine O-levels with good grades. They expected me to sail through the As – and told simply everyone who would listen about me going to university.

I’d had my interviews at Durham – an excursion of such mammoth proportions that I felt I might as well have been emigrating to Australia – and they’d offered a provisional place to read English as long as I gained a minimum of an A in English and two Bs. All the way home on the train. Mum had been loudly and embarrassingly confident that I’d manage those grades because I enjoyed the subjects, liked learning, worked hard, loved school, didn’t I? I was a model pupil and they were so proud of me.

Mum and Dad had always taken the time to explain things to me, to answer my questions. They’d always talked to me, we’d always discussed everything, and they’d instilled the joy of learning about new things, and the importance of treasuring the old, in me from an early age.

If I succeeded it was simply because of them, I owed them everything and I knew I’d never let them down.

Anyway, once the A-levels were over there were weeks and weeks of lazy enjoyment to look forward to before the learning started all over again, although I’d probably have to take a holiday job. Mum and Dad were going to find it difficult to get all the things I needed for university even with the grant. But I’d plan for after-the-exams later. Today I had to think about Dickens and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad and Stella Gibbons.

Actually, the English Literature exam held no terrors at all – I was saving my terror for the RE ones looming next week because RE was my weakest subject of the three – I loved reading, was delighted by the English set books, and revising had seemed like pure pleasure rather than hard work.

I drifted along the sun-baked lane between the head-high columbine and dog roses; with the sky stretching cloudless above me and the ground white-hot in the glare of the sun. Dawn and Jenny were on either side of me, and we were singi. . .