My First Date
November 22nd, 1963.
Was it really 50 years ago?
It’s said that everyone of a certain age (that means over 60 now) can remember what they were doing on the day President Kennedy was shot. I certainly can. It was my first date.
I passed my driving test first time out on October 16th, 1963. I was just 17 — you know what I mean — and every possible minute I cruised the Chelsea streets in my father’s red-and-white ’56 Chevy (it never occurred to me to put petrol in it). And a month later I plucked up the courage to ask Caroline Bennett out for a date.
Caroline had a beaky nose, was dark-haired, pale-skinned, slim and pretty. She wore white lipstick, which I thought was the sexiest thing I had ever seen, although I wasn’t really sure what ‘sexy’ meant. She was the same age as me. Three or four years earlier I had asked her to come out and play, and she just stared at me for 30 seconds before bursting into laughter.
She was the younger daughter of General Sir Somebody Bennett, who was the doctor at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, where we both lived at the time. Her elder sister Johanna was even more beautiful, and had married the American film star Aldo Ray (yes, I had to look him up on Wikipedia for this, but we were told he was an American film star and that was good enough for us).
And Caroline agreed to go on a date with me! I can’t remember where we were going to go — probably a film, as I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything else. This of course was some months before the Sloane Squares bought us unimaginable fame, fortune and riches.
Even more exciting than the prospect of a date with Caroline is that my father had agreed to lend me the Chevrolet. General Bennett had an assistant, a newly qualified doctor, who also had eyes for Caroline. But he only had an old blue banger which he kept in the garage next to the Chevy, and we used to roar with laughter every time he managed to start it up and pootle around the block. Caroline used to split her sides. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in that thing,” she spluttered. “Your car [OK, my father’s] is SO much nicer!” So I got the girl. And I hope the young doctor kept sa vieille bagnole bleue. It was a Type 35A Bugatti.
I creamed up outside the house. I rang the doorbell. Lady Bennett answered, her face a mask of horror. “Oh Gwyn,” she said, “President Kennedy’s been shot!” We piled into the drawing room, our date forgotten, and Caroline and I sat on hard chairs next to each other watching the 17″ Alba television. We watched, and watched, and watched, and Lady Bennett made tea, and we watched some more, until it was time for me to go home. We were appalled. He was so vital, so handsome, so virile, so debonair, so much more exciting than the grey, anonymous suits who ran Britain and the USSR. Why would anyone want to shoot him?
A couple of weeks later I took Caroline to a party at Paul Anstey’s house, where she got off with Stephen Gardiner (who played Mosca in the school play, Ben Jonson’s Volpone) snogging endlessly with him on the sofa while I helplessly watched, incapable and paralysed with horror. I got drunk for the first time, maudlin drunk. And I drunkenly drove her home in tears.
We never had another date. We were near neighbours but I can’t recall we ever spoke again. Caroline was horse-mad and went to work in some stables in Sweden. Later I heard she’d killed herself. I never found out why.
All this remains clear. But I can’t remember what I was doing when I heard that John Lennon had been murdered. Lennon meant so much more to me than Kennedy. Lennon meant music and life and fun and passion. In October 1962 Kennedy scared the shit out of me with the Cuban missile crisis. I was convinced we were all going to die.
Whom would you prefer to remember?
