[John Sadler illustration]

I WAS 19 when I met Robbie. He lived in London and I in the countryside. We sometimes hung out. Usually when he felt like it. He was older, fun, and more sophisticated than the boys in my town. But that was about it.

Then one summer evening, alone in my local, I looked around. All those boys in jeans, denim shirts and Afghan coats, drinking pints and cadging roll-ups. I thought of Robbie. Robbie was tall, with black hair and astonishingly blue eyes. He had a chiselled face. Here, we walked everywhere, but Robbie had a car. A second-hand Saab. My body felt warm just thinking about him. My stomach contracted.

And then suddenly I wondered if this was what it felt like to be in love. My pulse raced. In love? Could it at long last be? How I had yearned to be in love, to suffer the torments I had read about in 19th century literature. English, French or Russian, it was all populated with swooning, suffering women. I ached to experience the wild pangs of separation and desire felt by those tragic heroines. The boys I knew lacked the requisite glamour for such drama.

By the time I had finished my rum and black, I had convinced myself. And it was imperative I told him! I thought of Cathy, roaming the lonely moors, unable to live or die without Heathcliff. Did Robbie even look a bit like Heathcliff? Was I Cathy? Or could I be bold Emma Bovary, risking and losing everything for love? Or tormented Anna Karenina? I jumped up. No longer a Home Counties girl but a woman at the heart of an amour.

Back then, hitching was still a thing. I left the pub, walked up to the main road that led out of town and stuck out my thumb. A car stopped. Was the driver by any chance going to London?

I got to Robbie’s flat at midnight. It was on the ground floor of a Victorian conversion and the windows were dark. He was out. What to do? I sat on the doorstep. As shutters began to close, a car hummed by. A black sky shone with stars. I watched the way they threw silver light onto the folds of my long, lilac skirt.

Hours slipped by. Using ripped-out pages of a notebook in my bag, I wrote poems to Robbie. Lines of desire and devotion pushed through his letterbox. Until slowly, over the rooftops, came the sun.

You don’t have to wait for someone all night to know first love is different to loves that come later. A love without experience or memory. Lost in poetry on the doorstep, I had no concept of real suffering. I had no filters, no need for self-protection, no defences. The pain of romantic love I knew only vicariously through books.

I hitched home. Robbie called me later. Bemused and touched. We were a couple for the next few years. An odd one, though. For, passion aside, we were oddly timid. Lived together, yet never really knew each other. Both of us part-fantasy figure to the other.

Perhaps we were scared of what lay beyond literature and make believe. Perhaps if we ventured there we would lose our magic and dreams.

I was reminded of first love last year when, of all things, I dog sat for someone. I was after space and time away and the deal sounded good: give the dogs a daily walk, but otherwise treat the place as my own and enjoy the countryside.

The two Labradoodles went by the collective name of The Fluffs. On an August morning, I woke with a start. Four eyes at the bedside stared intently into my face. How long had they been there? All night? I blinked. The Fluffs bounded up in delight.

I was meant to walk them for an hour each day, but dappled woods and cornfields quickly became three-hour adventures. The Fluffs loved as only those who have never known pain and rejection can love. They leapt around me. I loved them back with a luminous, carefree joy.

Like all love affairs, it came to an end too quickly. Falling leaves, frosty skies, return to work. The Fluffs faded into the past. But then, on Christmas Eve, my phone pinged. A photo. The Fluffs were side by side, wearing absurd Christmas hats and red and white fur jackets. Four limpid eyes stared. The photo transported me. I was back in the cornfields. Back running through summer’s gold.

A summer not too dissimilar from the light of first love. Lost and unrepeatable.

Through its memory I fell down through the decades to that other time. Back in my long lilac skirt, sitting on the doorstep under a starry London sky, waiting and waiting for Robbie.