Off to Poland in a few days for work and memories of a moonlit night, foxtrotting with a Polish naval officer, came flooding back… a fleeting romance… where is he now I wonder… I still have the letters…
It was the 80’s but seemed more like something out of a film from the 30’s or 40’s… an outrage to the men of our town… the tall ships were in… all the young women of a certain age were sent invites by the mayor to a ball in honour of the sailors flooding the harbour… my boyfriend at the time said, ‘no girlfriend of mine will be going to that.’ I said, ‘Fine. You no longer have a girlfriend.’ Trouble had been brewing for a while in any case… and I was not going to be told what to do. How very dare he! Who did he think he was! Truth be told, I didn’t really want to go and recall being quite grumpy about it all but all my friends were going and it was nice to get dressed up…
So we played the wall flower game, my best friend and I, until a couple of men, naval officers from a Polish ship they were, asked us to dance… what is it about men in uniform?!
I’d taken ballroom dance lessons as a teenager and he too so we, barely out of our teens, walzed and foxtrotted our way round the hall… so charming… he was terribly serious and very sweet… we couldn’t let each other go… in between whirling around the room, we drew pictures on our invitation cards to find out more about each other… without a common language… with lots of laughter…
The next day I gave him a tour of the town… there wasn’t much to see and we were more interested in each other than the tourist spots… it was hot, sunny, and before long we found ourselves in the tall grasses on the hill overlooking the harbour… a hill with a view… a harbour full of tall ships… with a little picnic… with his fingertips gently tracing the curve of my cheek…
The day had a dreamy, romantic quality and yet an emotional intensity to it… taken by surprise… locked in this sudden soaring embrace with a dashing stranger due to be shipped out the next day… it wasn’t love at first sight. it wasn’t love. it wasn’t even really desire, was it? but it was something… magnetic… inevitable… we ended the day at the waterfront… with a sunset tour of his ship… with delicious kisses…
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