smooching with princess margaret

It's almost sixty years since I was in love with Princess Margaret. At fourteen, in Melbourne, I wrote my first piece of erotic fiction: an account of smooching with the Princess in the back row of a cinema, kissing her, feeling up under her skirt, etc.. very masturbatory - even though I didn't know how to masturbate, and wouldn't for another five years. But that's another story.

My married sister found my bit of teenage porn, and charmingly read it out to her husband and my parents over a Sunday lunch. I fled to my bedroom in redfaced shame. She came some minutes later, brandishing a book called 'My English Garden', by Beverly Nichols. 'This is the kind of thing you should be writing, Donald,' she advised. Well, I never did.

During last weekend's Workshop here, I dreamed very vividly. In one of them, lo and behold, my old cinema-companion re-appeared. She was young, beautiful, dazzling with jewels, elegantly dressed, and with long lustrous curly black hair. I fell for her all over again. We were at some posh ball or banquet. She received some bad news, someone's death or illness, and she came to me and sort of cuddled herself into me, leaning her beautiful head against my shoulder, seeking comfort. Running my hand over her dress, I could feel the bump of a suspender. Ah yes, memories... I thought, she really is a nice woman, whatever people say about her. (I once heard a rumour that she liked my poetry: almost certainly a confusion with Dylan, but I'm disposed to think well of her.) In my dream I sort of accidentally put my hand up her skirt a few inches. She moved away, and I at once apologised; she smiled as if to say 'no harm done', rather sweetly. Nice lady!

It's curious, the way the fantasy of youth and the dream of age intersected. Margaret became, as we know, a raddled old lady. How did she step, young, beautiful and sensitive, into my dream? Perhaps my unconscious felt that I deserved to experience my long-ago fantasy in real life: or as close to it as a dream can be. It was so vivid, my dream, that I had a feeling of disappointment when I woke and found it hadn't happened. But I remember it now as if it really did happen. I remember the feel of her thigh under my hand. How embarrassing. But she dealt with it sensitively, lightly. Unlike my sister. Great gal, Margaret.