A history lesson - How everything has a reason.

Why I have no baby (maybe) and I may take this post down. It scares me a little.

If everything happens for a reason, maybe this will explain.

My birthday, as we know, is in July, so I was just 16 when I went into the 6th form of school and, driven by a strong desire to travel, even live abroad, I chose to study languages.

I chose to take 4 ‘A’ levels (the exams you take to get into University, among other things) – in English, French, German and Art (Spanish followed much later, and really is another story entirely).

It was therefore inevitable that I had quite a bit of contact with D, the “native speaker” German Language Assistant, whose brief was to give German conversation lessons to students of German throughout the school.

He was 21. An intense, highly intelligent, slightly depressive, singing, guitar-playing German with perfect English. We used to walk together in the countryside and talk and talk and talk. In English. To be honest, I didn’t find him wildly attractive – at the time I had boyfriends, rather wild boys with teenage angst and teenage hormones.

It took me a long time to fall in love with D. Nearly a year. And longer still before we slept together for the first time. We spent some of the summer of the year between my lower and upper sixth year together in Germany. He wrote songs for me. He was a poet, a soul mate, my twin. I looked up to him, admired him. I couldn’t bear to be away from him. He adored me. Our love was perfect.

He was only contracted to work at my school for a year, so the following year, as I studied for A levels, he and I wrote letters of ideal, untouchable love. The idealism of John and Yoko’s perfect love mirrored our feelings for each other. That December John was shot dead. D heard it from me as I wailed hysterically down the school corridors while he was on a visit. Ever the drama queen. Still only 17.

The following summer I was visiting D in Germany when my A level results came out. I telephoned my parents from a service station on the Autobahn outside Munich, and had them open the envelope.

Ironically, and to everyone’s surprise but my own, I had almost failed German. My University place was no longer secure.

With no university place, D asked me to stay with him, get a job, a house, get married, have kids.
I had just turned 18.
I was spinning.
He didn’t press me.

My father phoned, again and again, and in my own teenage hormonal angst-ridden state I told him I may stay and marry D. Frantically he made more calls on my behalf to Unis. A few days passed before he phoned to say I had had 2 offers. One of them even allowed me to carry on studying German.

Now what was I to do?

D continued not to press me. It was my decision, and I had to be the one to make it.

(Many years later I asked him why, when he had wanted it so much, had he not pressed me to stay? I told him that I had understood from his actions that he did not mind too much either way. Tragically I was wrong – he had just wanted to be quite sure that I “followed my own way”.

It was a heavy responsibility but I knew I had always wanted to go to university, though in another odd twist, largely because I wanted to study languages and spend a year of my course abroad.

So I went, firm in the belief that D and I would continue. Completely convinced that ours was an ideal, perfect love; nothing could ever taint or destroy it.


I was so naïve, so wrong. I was cruel and thoughtless and hurtful, I really cannot write about the details, but on his 24th birthday that very November, D and I had a heart-breaking scene from which we could never recover. It took me a long time to realise. I really was very naïve.

D returned to Germany and the following Easter I visited him. The tables were turned on me; I finally understood how much I had hurt him.

It was over, but we didn’t leave each other. We still valued how close we had been. No-one else could ever compare.

But, heartbroken that I would never be the mother of his children, the one thing he had dreamed, D made the decision to have a vasectomy. The medical profession tried hard to dissuade him – he was in his early 20’s, how could he make a decision like this – but he went ahead anyway.

How did I cope with that? With the blame?

I thought of it as a mini-suicide, and explained it as his way of destroying a part of himself to keep himself sane. Suicide, it seems, was a part of his make-up. His sister had killed herself when he was just 16. Many years later, suffering from mental health problems, his brother was killed when he jumped out of a train window. A panic reaction when he realised he was on the wrong train and the guards were checking tickets.

So maybe a vasectomy at 25 was not the worst that might have happened to D.
A small death that saved him from going all the way.

I know I sound heartless, and it isn’t meant like that. Not at all. There was a lot of pain to get through. For D, I think I was in some ways just more pain in his life.

Our relationship went through many changes over the years. We remained very, very close for a long time. D had a heart attack, just 5 or 6 years ago and we rowed bitterly over his smoking. He refused to acknowledge it was bad for his heart, or had anything to do with the heart-attack. The smoking row happened over the weekend he got married, and turned things very sour between us.

He got married 3 days after 9/11 to a woman he had lived with for at least 16 years. . Apparently she never wanted children. But I know he did.

And after a long and I have to admit, bitter silence, we have exchanged text messages recently. I wanted to know that he was OK – not dead of another heart attack. He is, apparently, fully recovered and playing badminton regularly.

On a very sad day I texted him the news of my 6 miscarriages, and received from him a very kind text in return:

“Oh Viv, I can only try and figure what you two had and have to go through with that, I am sorry. I wish you strength. I think of you.”

I didn’t expect him to be so kind after all the bitterness. Whatever we did in the past, however in love we once were, it all did happen for a reason – he and I would have destroyed each other. He was simply far too intense, far too prone to misery and depression, even anger. I could not have withstood that.

What I finally found was support and love of a stronger and healthier kind with R. I never feel in danger with R.

But still, a little bit of me really believes that I have no right to have babies, when I could have done with D, and I chose not to . . . and he chose never to have them, if not with me.