A love letter to America. And to Linda, wherever I may find her.

I always knew that I’d fall in love with an American girl.

I knew from the first time I heard Paul Simon yearning for some nameless place and unspoken love on “Homeward Bound,” that America would be my first real love. Growing up, nearly every song I ever loved told me clearly and unequivocally that an American girl would take and break my heart.

I don’t remember when I first fell in love with America, but I was young for sure. Well before my teens, I had a deep sense of something special coming from somewhere far away. Somewhere sunny and hopeful. Everything was bigger and brighter and brasher and louder, and I knew I loved it before I really knew where it was.

It might have been the dust and deserts of Champion the Wonder Horse on a black and white TV on wet seventies Saturday mornings. Maybe it was Tom and Jerry and Walt Disney specials. It could have been my first technicolour crush on Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman.

It was probably a bit of all of those things, but what really stole my heart was the music. You can’t see the amazing landscapes and cities and people in music, but you can definitely hear their aches and their joy. There’s nothing stronger to conjure a sense of a place than the music born of that place.

“The blues is just the sound of a good man feeling bad”

I know that it started with an unofficial Beatles compilation on a cassette that I played so often that the tape wore thin and used to boom and muffle. Their covers of “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Boys,” “Kansas City” and “Long Tall Sally” obviously didn’t come from Liverpool but they fizzed and crackled with a foreign energy that had me hooked from the first four-count.

My dad was a classical musician and had a huge library of Bach and Handel, but the first record I remember choosing to slip out of its sleeve to listen to was from my mum’s small collection. And of course it was American.

“And when I awoke, and felt you warm and near, I kissed your honey hair, with my grateful tear”

The orange and red Columbia label for Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits was a vivid promise. I still know exactly which song leads to the next and how the “Sound of Silence” kicks into “I Am a Rock” and how the echoing crashes of “The Boxer” trips into the whistling whimsy of “59th bridge Street Song (Feeling Groovy).” “Kathy’s Song” made me cry then, and now.

I studied the cover hundreds of times, wondering who lived in the tenements across the river and why Art Garfunkel had such dirty boots for a pop star. Long before nubuck Timberlands ever came close to English shores, I badly wanted a pair of yellow boots like Paul Simon’s.

The music on that album set in me a permanent and rock-solid love of chiming harmonies and listless yearning euphoric melancholy, that I can pinpoint in a thousand favourite songs that have come since. It was my gateway drug to American music.

Simon and Garfunkel led to the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry and The Byrds and Bob Dylan and Crosby Stills and Nash, and then to the blues and BB King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and the white lightning boys like George Thorogood and Johnny Winter. Everyone of them took me further down lost highways, across swampy delta crossroads, deeper into hot summer cities and rolling across wide open prairies.

The country was alive in every song, but it was always about the girls and they were painted oh so vividly.

“The barefoot girl, sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.”

It was all a million miles from Southern England and light years away from the fluff on Top of The Pops, and Lord knows the girls of those songs were all even further away.

For a while, in my early teens, punk barged its way into my affections and for a few years the filth and the fury and the spittle and gob of punk was all that mattered. But even then, my favourite punk album was American.

The Dead Kennedys sounded like the frenetic howl of a straight-jacketed lunatic in a padded cell, ranting against a brutal America that I’d never even heard of. It was a high-speed education that not everyone in the land of the free saw it the same way.

I was too young for the first real flash of punk, and the bands that made it through to the Eighties, like the Clash led me to U2, Simple Minds and The Alarm. They were all from the U.K.’s borderlands and they dressed and sang like their hearts were bleeding American blood too, so I went with them and discovered the music that was fueling their sound.

“I can see you — Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun. You got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby”

That was the time I first fell properly in love. We were sixteen and she was golden haired with a huge smile and beautiful blue eyes. We got together on a school trip to Austria sharing one pair of Walkman headphones between us, and listening to Bryan Adams’ Reckless over and over as a coach hurtled through Germany. Baileys-flavoured kisses and sexually charged snowball fights led to a long summer of blissful distraction.

It was pretty chaste really, but teenage love is raw and ultimate and after we had spent an idyllic August week together in France, under the charge of her sleepy older cousin, we swore all kinds of forevers to each other.

Don Henley’s lament for long lost love was our song and with the cast-iron promise that ‘my love for you will still be strong, after the boys of summer have gone,’ she went to spend an exchange year in France.

I still think of her whenever I see a Deadhead sticker on anything (Cadillacs are rare in my village), but my love of the Summer of ’86 was someone else’s love by ‘87.

“She stood alone on her balcony. She could hear the cars roll by, out on 441, like waves crashin' on the beach”

I think Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers came first, followed closely by John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp and in short order Bruce Springsteen. They brought me a new and more carefully drawn America. The America of farmers’ struggles in the badlands of small town Indiana; the America of defiant pride in a Southern accent and the Spector-charged American yearning to be Born to Run.

I soaked everything up from them and there was nowhere else I was ever going to go.

In the summer of 1988 I went to America for the first time and on my own. Over four months I worked on a Long Island summer camp, rode smelly and smokey Greyhound buses for a thousand miles from New York to Miami and nearly another thousand across to New Orleans.

The return to New York was a frightening and penniless odyssey through the deep south, riding with America’s dispossessed and forgotten. The rear three seats of Greyhounds are not for the faint hearted. I shared cigarettes with hookers and a whisky hidden in a brown paper bag with the blackest man I’d ever met. He was fresh out of jail. I didn’t ask what he’d done, but it had cost him fifteen years.

I never met the magical Springsteen girl I’d heard so much about, but when I came home I knew the Boss’ America. It wasn’t the place my dreams were built on, but I was still deeply in love with her and the love was now real.

In 1990 I went back to my dream and to fall in love again.

“Michigan seems like a dream to me now. It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.”

Late June, 1990.

She was sitting on the steps of the dining hall, feigning disinterest, but watching closely as old friends caught up and us strangers looked to join in with friendly conversations. The summer camp staff was maybe a hundred strong and the laughter and smiles of a large family reunion filled the small glade around the wooden camp buildings.

She was alone in the middle of the melee, obviously a new kid like me, wary and shy. She was wearing black leggings and white Reeboks, and an oversized flowing white cotton top.

She looked like Sloane Peterson — Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend — and I fell for her on sight.

She had long straight brown hair, like dark honey in the warm evening sun, and her big brown eyes were slowly and carefully surveying the scene. She had a hint of an early summer tan on flawless skin, but her defence shields were up. She looked stern.

She might have desperately wanted someone to talk to, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to seek them out.

She caught me looking twice. First time she looked away like our eyes hadn’t met at all. The second time, five minutes later, she smiled for a microsecond and looked away again. But the smile transformed her face. It was a big crack in her armour and it lit her up. The hair on my arms stood up and my stomach flipped.

I lost her in the crowded canteen, but after we’d eaten supper and the camp leadership had welcomed us all, we filed out into the glade again and I found her in the same spot, on the white painted steps.

My feet carried me up the steps on their own and she watched my approach with a wry smile. Her expression said ‘you’ve got some nerve!’ But her eyes said ‘come on then!’

I sat down next to her and she gently shook my offered hand. I am afraid that my first line was 'do you come here often?’

It was deliberately silly but I was twenty, and it worked and she laughed.

'Yeah. I will. Every day!’ she giggled.

The shields were still firmly up but I was past the first line of defence and I hadn’t crashed and burnt yet.

She was bright and sharp with a quick sarcastic wit just like every flawed princess from every John Hughes movie I’d ever seen. She was Ally Sheedy and Demi Moore. She wasn’t Molly Ringwald but she was absolutely Mary Stuart-Masterson.

She was called Linda Williamson, and she was from Motown.

She was from the city of Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and The Supremes and even better, The Stooges and the MC5.

Detroit, Michigan. The Motor City. What an American dream.

Linda was 23, an Aquarius and had just graduated from Western Michigan University, where she been studying ballet.

She’d been to London once, but hadn’t rated the place and it had just confirmed her stereotypes of bad food, bad teeth and rain.

Other than that she’d rarely travelled outside her home state, and here, in this Jewish summer camp deep in the Pocono Hills, she was just as much a fish out of water as me.

We clicked. As her blockade came down the sparks started to crackle.

“ She calls me baby. She calls everybody baby.”

Linda was not like an English girl. Not at all.

She spoke her mind without much restraint and was hilariously rude about the spoilt girls in her charge. She had a vocal contempt for the posturing and posing of some of the privileged college kids on the camp staff.

To begin with I found her self-confidence and sarcasm a bit scary, but there was a soft vulnerability behind the bravado. She’d told me that she’d been bullied by the jocks at school and had always been a bit of an outsider so she’d developed a sassy and prickly demeanour for protection.

She was a self-confessed klutz, fond of slouching and just hanging out, but when she was happy-bored she’d absently-mindedly plié, pirouette and pointe without any self-consciousness and I’d watch, heart stopped, as a prima ballerina in college sweats moved with effortless grace to her own inner music.

She was kind to the awkward children and I remember her surrounded by adoring young girls, all dreaming of being a ballet dancer like Linda.

It took a couple of weeks of aching and flirting before I found myself truly alone with her. We’d escaped to a local bar with a large and noisy crew of camp counsellors and without saying it, we both knew that if we left early we’d have the chance to make something happen. As the beer took hold of the crowd in the roadhouse, I took her hand and led her out of the bar and she drove us into the night.

She stopped in the darkness of the woods a few hundred yards outside the camp grounds, unclipped her seatbelt and lent over slowly until our faces were almost touching. My heart was exploding as she lingered for a wordless eternity, before gently kissing my lips.

It was the slowest and most perfect kiss I’d ever had and I was dumbstruck. We kissed again and I held her neck in my hands as gently as I would a baby bird.

“I have a boyfriend,” she murmured.

“Oh” I replied.

“But he’s in Michigan, and you’re here. In Pennsylvania. In my car.”

And she kissed me again, longer and more passionately as if to confirm that she’d laid out the facts plainly and that was that.

“I want to stand and stare again. It’s in your eyes.”

For most of the day’s activities the camp was segregated between boys and girls, and the thrill of stolen kisses and surreptitious winks across crowded gatherings intensified the desire for our free evenings.

One of the chalets for the catering staff was empty and we found a way to force the lock without breaking it, and spent evenings making out, whispering and suppressing giggles. She led everything and I willingly followed.

One evening, down by the lake, the camp director caught us kissing. We thought we were in trouble, but he was kind and simply said “never in front of the kids guys. But enjoy your summer. It’s yours too.”

He turned and started to head up the path, but stopped and turned back to us.

“This is where I first kissed my wife” he said with a happy grin. “Right here on this step. We were seventeen.”

“Enjoy your summer guys!”

He turned again up the path and we heard him chuckle.

She was on evening duty so we kissed goodnight and I went out to the roadhouse in the nearby hamlet with a jeep-load of Penn State boys. Shirts off, fraternity caps on backwards and with the firm intention of getting loaded.

“Yo English boy!” yelled the quarterback in the front seat. “Check your boys out!” and he slammed on The Who at full volume. We tore up the road with “The Real Me” bawling out around the hills.

“You’re gonna fly away, Glad you’re goin’ my way…”

I remember the day it became serious. A last minute change to my rota meant that we suddenly had a rare Saturday off together. With no time to plan and no money, we simply crossed the road opposite the camp entrance and walked around another lake that neither of us had known existed. We found a small clearing by the shore, hidden from the world by long grass and trees, but it didn’t matter. There was no sign of anyone for miles.

It was the first week of August and it was hot and the air was still. There was no breeze off the lake and we swam naked.

“Let’s smoke a doob” she said.

I’d never heard anyone outside The Breakfast Club call it a doob before, and I’d only ever had the odd toke on a hash spliff so this was new and exotic territory. We shared the joint that a friend had given her ‘for emergencies’ and listened to a Smokey Robinson tape on her tiny white cassette player.

Dragon flies hovered over us and we talked about everything except what would happen when the summer ended. I was warmly stoned but it seemed that we spent a lot of time just staring into each other’s eyes without saying anything. We both got stuck on the song “Crusin’” and decided that we needed to get some space between us and the camp, so we jumped into her burgundy Chrysler and hit the road.

We rolled through endless wooded hills with Motown on the stereo and that night we drove back to the nearest town, ate alone in a nearly deserted Mexican restaurant, and found a room in the cheapest motel in the tri-state area.

It was scary and nasty and Linda’s mood turned. I said something innocuous that upset her deeply and all hopes of a night of passion evaporated. It took me several hours to soothe her out of her funk with the kindest words I knew and eventually she started to cry and let it all come out.

“What happens when camp ends?” she sobbed. “How will I ever see you again?”

She voiced the fears that had been building in me for weeks and I had no answer beyond vague promises, so I told her that I loved her. And as the words came out of my mouth I knew that I meant it.

She sniffed, wiped her tears away with the back of her hands and kissed me with a new and very raw tenderness.

“I love you too. God damn you!” she whispered. “And that’s what scares the shit out of me.”

The next morning would be my twenty-first birthday and although I had slept with a girl before, this may as well have been the first time. The first time is awkward for everyone and you have no idea what you’re doing or why, but this was just as you’d dream the first time should be. It was meaningful and connected and gentle and soft and electric. Linda was my first real lover.

Clichés are clichés because usually they’re very true, but I can think of nothing better to say than with Linda I stopped being a boy and became a man.

The last weeks of camp were and still are a blur. There were events and shows and games and parties and fireworks and with every celebration we came a step closer to separation. I think that knowing in advance that there’s an end point — a definite and inevitable finish line — makes a love affair all the more bittersweet and symbolic. I knew that I loved her, and that she loved me but I had no idea what that meant once summer ended. Would our love still be strong?

“Don’t go too far away. If I can’t see your face, I will remember your smile.”

The day after camp finished she drove me a couple of hours south to another camp where my school friend from England had been working. He’d bought a car and we were going to drive across the States together.

Linda and I looked around the almost deserted camp with a deep sense of melancholy that neither of us had ever experienced before. It was the parallel to our camp, but everything was different and it was empty and finished and when it started to rain the gloomy picture was complete.

Summer was over and we were going very different ways; me to California, her back to Michigan. Both would be long drives. We cried inconsolably and she stole my favourite lumberjack shirt as a keepsake. I watched her tear-streaked face go and I howled.

Before we parted she gave me a tape. I still have it. Track one, side one is Anita Baker, “You Bring Me Joy.”

“I’ll stop the world and melt with you.”

That was the very best of it, but it wasn’t the end. Far from it. I circumnavigated the USA in a battered Buick Electra and ended up at her parent’s house outside Detroit where we spent a hilariously loving few days dodging her erstwhile boyfriend and planning trips. I spent the Christmas holidays in Michigan and she came for Easter in England.

When we were together it was magic and passionate and funny and we never argued — apart from the time when she vocally and publicly disapproved of my choice of a paisley waistcoat for a smart night out (in retrospect it was a poor sartorial choice).

She was perfect, but it petered out. We racked-up huge phone bills but the distance was too great and my visit to her new home in Kalamazoo in the summer a year after camp Echo Lark was our last time together. When she dropped me at the airport we both knew that it was ebbing away. I can still see her sparkling eyes and hear her “see ya later alligator” farewell.

Neither Springsteen, Petty nor Mellencamp could have written Linda for me, but through them I found her country and they brought it to life in me. There’s no such thing as an American girl of course, but I found mine.

Epilogue.

Linda found me again seventeen years later, in 2008, with a lovely letter sent to my parents’ address. We connected and relived the summers of ‘90 & ‘91 through Facebook and a handful of joyful phone calls like no time had passed at all. We’d both been married and divorced and we had both found our own kind of peace of mind in different ways.

Across the miles we sparkled again instantly and powerfully, but it was a brief reunion. She was sick and tired and I knew that she was settling her emotional affairs and lovingly laying her ghosts to rest.

In early 2010 her mum called me and passed the phone to Linda, weak and slow in her hospice bed, and she thanked me for things I never knew had mattered so much. We made each other laugh again.

Over the previous three years cancer had relentlessly taken hold and a few days later it finally took all of her.

Six years gone. Twenty five since I last saw her.

I have no idea why I felt the need to write this story now and it was only in the last few days, when I was reading old emails to check dates, that I realised that tomorrow is her birthday.

Happy Birthday my American Girl. Even the losers get lucky sometimes.