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At 17, Joanna Briscoe developed a crush consumption in Robert Redford look-alike, an English teacher and I dreamed that all end in true love. Thirty years later - and now the mother - who is relieved that does not work like that

A. The legend of my youth. The secret of my home lights on school days. He was our English teacher, he looked like Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, was driving an MG, and inspired a frantic frenzy of lust hormone

If I, as a teenager, he could have laid eyes on this page, I wish it turned out to be a novelist, after all those hours in a state of concentration through English classes and devastated - in fact, at the edge of suicide - that my name had not become his. And despite the slight obstacle was married with small children, wearing a wedding ring prominent and, unlike some of his colleagues, do not encourage adulation is not spoken. His combination of charisma, and undeniable reluctance did not look good clean slate on which we could project the hottest fantasies. The spirit of a teenager is a frightening obsession.

My parents had moved in the middle of Dartmoor to get away from it all and provides an education that includes fresh air and horse hair in a sort of bohemian chaos fostered an outdated brand of innocence. In theory, it was a pure, free from material concerns, but at the same time, they were jumping around streams, was also counting the minutes until he escaped to London

In the silence, my mind was full of worldly ambition and an obsession with a married man who was very gothically excessive. If my family or one of the architects Beardy coming out that I had found my journal, I heard the phone conversations at night with confidants, or worse, reading the minds of my fantasies - a whirlwind of scenes animated sex novices, the harassment and deception plans romantic heroine -. I have no doubt it would have been taken by his idealism

started fixing with adolescent narcissism Finally, when Mr. A kept me behind after class one day to say she had reached high English tests. I was in love with him or the idea of ??my own power? Given the self in adolescence, it is not clear, but once the obsession had taken root, little by little I guessed the constant rearrangement of hair going in all English classes, it was not alone. We found Mr. A fan to another, and, ashamed and furtive, secret shared between us. For our close-knit group, was at the center of school life, a fact that we were desperate to never let other people - and again - to discover. No doubt they were much clearer than I did.

Indeed, Mr. A is a trained teacher and engaged, and congestion only enhances the experience of being guided through the texts created by Cambridge graduate, with his white cricket and as a metaphor. In a school that was academically challenging bit frustrating, it was an intellectual giant. When not brooding please God or to get their attention, which show a behavior that bordered on madness, however, seemed routine on the prowl for an average day.

We take pictures of him arriving at school through a telephoto lens out the window of the girls loo, hidden in the car, crouching next to cars to track their movements, re-seen The Great Gatsby in a caucus of inhalation and elbows, sitting in every break in a small room to discuss old file of the unknown and had a round trip of 40 minutes at noon, than spend 20 minutes watching your home. Once back, we come to the phone to talk about it. only took me a little further and, at 17, wrote a novel howlingly bad as I explored its glories. After suffering a crisis in 15 years for the release of two children's books I wrote, I went to "adult" fiction. Like adults, a shelter for 17 years, maybe. The masterpiece, Roxanne, is composed mostly of words "many" and "transparent", the emotions and the effects of light. But beyond the laughter fits schoolgirl, bordered on monomania unbalanced. My parents at that time had found a censored version of my assignment, and simply declare that it's fun. There was no warning, no anxieties or interventions, jokes only after the parent meetings and agreed that Mr A was indeed "a very handsome man." Here is the opposite of helicopter parents today. My brothers and I were individually responsible for not drowning as assaulted by the rivers of polystyrene, and I was driving all of us, with the neighborhood kids to school and back. My gang was up to sixth with a foam of insecurity, snobbery and solipsism, Mr. A was treated at a more adult, even gives us his car and foreign student small groups to the theater, providing a value of feverish weeks of analysis. I thought that if I become his mistress, schoolgirl, I'd handle it with aplomb. I, after all, has prepared for this result because it was the age of Juliet.

I realized after a while that I was not, of course, the queen of an exclusive circle of fans what I had thought, but quite normal in my love for an older model. The town is a teacher so many women - heterosexual, homosexual, or wild square - they have in common. "Oh, I was so in love with Mr. / Ms ...", said the friend, when the discussion, and quite often". In fact, I know someone who had an affair with his teacher "The few women I know who had an affair which, in large part, inevitably, was damaged by the experience, despite several marriages been anecdotal. How I would have died of jealousy like a schoolgirl about it. And now, as a mother, I would like to see a romance with a teacher as a disaster rather than the triumph of ecstasy was convinced that would again.
Last week, I learned that the circle of worship through Mr. A is self-renewal: the race of man as a god was worthy sustainable unattainable love. During a visit to my childhood, I met a woman who had been taught by him a decade after me, and I said, laughing hysteria inspired by her schoolgirl. "Oh yes, what happened in our time," he said. "Me too ..." adds a bit of nostalgia.