It was 1965 and my brother dropped me off at the local youth club where I had agreed to meet other school friends. We all had a single purpose ... to find a girlfriend. So it was that I finally approached a girl who seemed shy (but then her mother was one of the women checking that everything that happened at the youth club was above board). When it was time to leave an older school friend who had a motorbike offered to take me home ... a rather scary memory etched on my brain forever.
The next month the girl, Pauline, and I chatted more and then we started going out together. There are lots of micro-memories from those days, but I do have something more ... a photo from 1966:
Friends and I used to meet Pauline and her school friends from time to time after school. It was a fun time, usually listening to The Beatles, rather than the Rolling Stones (which would have been my preference).
Of course, there was the angst of being teenagers 'in love' at the time, but this wasn't a real issue for Pauline and myself; we seemed fine together.
... Pause now for a few months ...
I started this thread in July, it's now the end of November. The pause has really been because everyday life (Estate matters and more) have dictated much of my day-to-day life.
Although I had known about my transvestite (as it was called back then) needs, they were deeply closeted. Years later, I concluded that I had taken on what we might consider to be a 'macho loner' persona, starting in my school years, to avoid people getting too close to the 'real' me. Through motorcycling, very fast car driving and way too much alcohol, I could have lost my life, I could have lost Pauline, but I survived and she was always there to provide comfort and tenderness. We even had a very slight dalliance with cross-dressing, but neither of us really understood what it actually meant. We both also had dalliances with others, but always 'came home' to each other.
We moved in together at the end of 1976 in Germany when Pauline, a technical translator, obtained a post with a subsidiary of Siemens. I was just mooching about, not knowing very much about what I wanted to do in life. We decided to stay for a year and then go travelling in South America. As happens, it was after 8 years in Germany that we decided to return to England. Now we were both adrift, but I had 're-skilled' while in Germany and was undertaking voluntary stuff in wildlife conservation. This was Thatcher's Britain, but Pauline found work and eventually so did I. Time passed, my work was increasingly demanding which may have triggered an increase in need for TG expression while Pauline's work peaked and then declined which might have triggered old OCD problems that she had. Sadly, by 2003 the tensions were such that we began to live separately, although we maintained a good relationship (this is another story).
Pauline was diagnosed with Parkinson's in late 2017 and I retired at the beginning of 2018. Having already planned visiting my TG friend Pamela in Ireland in 2018, I was surprised that Pauline said she would like to join me, but she had already spent Christmas with me as Nikki. She was obviously rather trepidatious but Pamela and M were great hosts and I don't think Pauline had experienced me talking for so long with another human being every day for the time we were there. I think it was with meeting Pamela and M that Pauline concluded that being TG wasn't that weird. To that end, and with our squeezing in visits during Covid, at Christmas 2022 we posed for 'marriage photos' with me the blushing bride ... to presage our actual marrying in early 2023.
Enough for now ... but finishing on a couple of photos I love of Pauline:
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Kiel, 1972
