Me and Miss Starkey (Xmas 1980)
Dagmar Starkey wasn't the first (or even the only) girl I had a crush on in the sixth form. But she was the one, looking back, I remember with most fondness.
She not only had a non-Essex face (her mother was German), but one that was a bit inhuman - like a sly and rather satanic-looking cat. She also had something of a bad reputation; as a troublemaker and a tease. No one seemed to trust her. And no one seemed to much like her. But I did: I liked her very much - ever after her teratophilia came to light.
Indeed, I think my own xenophilia can be traced back to my adolescent love for Dagmar Starkey: for if today east European girls are working in every local shop, pub, and restaurant, back in the late '70s she and her sister Inge were the nearest thing to foreign bodies found on Harold Hill.
I remember once she got jealous when I expressed an amorous interest in a young teacher called Miss Davies, who, like Toyah Willcox, came from Birmingham, spoke with a lisp, and was sort of sexy in an unconventional manner. "I don't want you to have feelings for that old trout," she said.
Later on, however, I discovered to my chagrin that she'd been having a secret affair with my history and politics teacher; a committed Marxist who helped fuck up my 'A' level result by convincing me to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet Union.
Before entering the teaching profession, Mr Long had briefly worked in a factory where he'd suffered a nasty mishap, badly maiming his hand in a piece of machinery - much to the fascination and horror of his students. When I asked Dagmar about the relationship, she told me she'd only got involved with him because she wanted to know "how it would feel to be fingered by someone with a deformity".
You have to admire such perverse curiosity, such willingness to be touched by monsters. It shows a very special nature; one that doesn't allow conventional feelings of disgust or shame to interfere with a desire for experience. Like the more interesting of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun, I think Dagmar understood love to be an exploratory ordeal in which the body is the site of more than mere pleasure ...
She not only had a non-Essex face (her mother was German), but one that was a bit inhuman - like a sly and rather satanic-looking cat. She also had something of a bad reputation; as a troublemaker and a tease. No one seemed to trust her. And no one seemed to much like her. But I did: I liked her very much - ever after her teratophilia came to light.
Indeed, I think my own xenophilia can be traced back to my adolescent love for Dagmar Starkey: for if today east European girls are working in every local shop, pub, and restaurant, back in the late '70s she and her sister Inge were the nearest thing to foreign bodies found on Harold Hill.
I remember once she got jealous when I expressed an amorous interest in a young teacher called Miss Davies, who, like Toyah Willcox, came from Birmingham, spoke with a lisp, and was sort of sexy in an unconventional manner. "I don't want you to have feelings for that old trout," she said.
Later on, however, I discovered to my chagrin that she'd been having a secret affair with my history and politics teacher; a committed Marxist who helped fuck up my 'A' level result by convincing me to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet Union.
Before entering the teaching profession, Mr Long had briefly worked in a factory where he'd suffered a nasty mishap, badly maiming his hand in a piece of machinery - much to the fascination and horror of his students. When I asked Dagmar about the relationship, she told me she'd only got involved with him because she wanted to know "how it would feel to be fingered by someone with a deformity".
You have to admire such perverse curiosity, such willingness to be touched by monsters. It shows a very special nature; one that doesn't allow conventional feelings of disgust or shame to interfere with a desire for experience. Like the more interesting of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun, I think Dagmar understood love to be an exploratory ordeal in which the body is the site of more than mere pleasure ...
