‘Ted’ has grown larger now, the two pregnancies so far apart, the toll of relationships in between have all needed eating through.

I’ve always known her as Ted.

Maybe her absentee father had wanted boys, who knows, excepting that he ‘split’ in that quaint sixties way after two girls had been produced.

Roger (father) was sixties in so many ways, wanting to frolic in the sun with as many screwed up women as he could lay, yet pretending all was love.

I met him a few times, the first time when he gave me the once over and didn’t like the mirror raised and others in later life when he’d discovered Socialism and politics.

Roger was one of those older men who get mistaken as holding gravitas and statesmanship, when their silence is really the extra effort that those who really must work to think, or of course how they can bed your neurotic wife.

Rogers’ relationship always involved women who needed space to think, be and work through ‘things.’

Whether he was happy with this was never up for discussion, I’m sure now that he didn’t dare question these things or else he’d recognise the waste in himself of them and years.

I of course would’ve been only too happy to share in this as all younger men are when facing sharp lessons.

Ted, born second, behind a girlie elder sister christened Alice or fluffy bunnikins or some other pretty in pink, blonde haired, blue eyed way waif must be, was nominated Edwina.

I guess she bore the brunt of soon to be errant daddy’s frustration at lack of heir apparent or maybe, just maybe in some prescient way of her later to be confused sexuality.

Ted grew up loved by a mummy who only wanted the best and those of us who get to view that spectacle can only mime in mute horror as that sociopathy unravels.

Mummy had ideas.

Big ones about how the world should, ought to be, what utensils to use with what, how people who should know better, ought to behave.

The girlie Alice and growing larger Ted (always called Edwina by mummy) absorbed these lessons like those of their middle class naturally absorb state handouts as theirs by divine right. Alice and Ted, sounds like some horror sixties Barbie doll and Teddy bear show where the bear chases the pretty only to retire home a saddened and wiser bear, now knowing their place to not try again.

Mummy also had pretensions of upward mobility, all approaches were open from pedigree puppy farming to later seventies pyramid schemes.

One early strategy had been to involve the girls in happy eating food adverts on t.v. this like the others was dropped because of the inconvenience due to the time-consuming efforts needed to realise any bankable capital.

Mummy was more successful in her strategy of turning Roger’s child support and House investment into successively larger homes.

Which she would ‘do up’ in a continual bate about the shoddy workmanship of artisans she would hold in payment ransom until all her demands were met.

In her later years Mummy would fret in her retirement home that the plumbing needed to be redone or that the wallpaper hadn’t changed bi-yearly.

I first met Ted in her local pub.

She was working there to aid her finances during college: Mummy carefully informing her that Daddy’s meagre child support could not stretch.

She would sit reading between serving flat beer to flatter men on their way to even further emotionally pancaked homes, uncomplaining at their ignoring of her except as servant.

I smiled at her and that was it; she smiled back, a face suddenly open to sunlight and experience.

 Later she was to tell me I represented freedom in that confined space called pub life and a possible escape from the supposed succoured sanity, sanitised way she had always known.

I was to continually let her down over this; she carried her freedom internally then, an amazon amongst puny ants.

I had none of the ways Ted had been raised; my freedom was but defiance and a spirit of good party behaviour, if one strategy failed me I devised yet another.

But to her this was new to her and rather wonderful.

We would meet on her little village green, on full view to those who would report later to mummy and pastel Alice.

I never knew why I was there; feeling only caught in orbit by that smile and what might become.

A bush, now become a tree on a lonely trek path marked the spot where she lost her virginity and I supposedly notched yet another conquest to my coup stick.

I can remember it happened though prurient detail escapes… I do remember the sense of obligation I was supposed to hold to and again failed to deliver on.

Shortly after this Ted as part of her classless upbringing was leaving to become ‘Kibbutzim’ I promised to write and we parted with no promises.

My life as per usual in its turmoil led me to many new avenues in her absence, her letters crossed mine on their journeys, telling of work, other Europeans and so-so confident Americans.

All working hard to justify their Goy ways with subservience to the returning socialist experimenting tribes of the Diaspora.

How letters were read in the glare of headlights from troop carriers patrolling ‘the heights.’

I read these in an English hot summer, trying to earn a living by the skin of my teeth and avoiding those who would fence me in by their demands.

In a nutshell, in a self-absorbed fog of non-understanding that another was in love with me and a not having the broader travel/life experience to comprehend what such letter content meant.

She returned.

We met and began again a going nowhere relationship, I didn’t understand where she had come from and now, she had returned brimful of socialism and other meaningful political thought.

I was scraping by, escaping a hurt youth by evading anyone and thing that would clutch at my threadbare coattails.

We met physically and nowhere else.

Then I moved on to work elsewhere in the country, I didn’t see her for several years.

I returned later after various a beautifully botched relationships: living with a girl almost ten years younger than me and with even less social skills than I.

The sex was great as it always is in shitty relationships, but eventually we had to split, she wanted a life with things in it and I? well I just wanted to lose some of the crap in mine.

Ted and I bumped into each other; she was now living with some guy and appeared to be settling into local politics.

She helped me find a better place to stay and we visited each other, her man too slow to hate me with any great vigour, settled for a meandering campaign of steady disdain.

We became occasional lovers again as his star began to wane.

Not terrific lovers or those who invent wondrous ways to tickle and please but lovers who attempt to be there if not in any spectacular manner.

Ted had moved into ‘women’s politics’ at this time, working with women who had become victims of domestic violence, this I found fascinating in a sad poor way.

Violence had always been part of my life, had it done to me and had done it.

The worst violence in terms of strong physical blows had always come from men, but the continual batterings I’d received had always come from women, in domestic settings.

I was learning that violence was wrong here, that physical blows were unacceptable.

I was happy to learn this; the time where these ways were useful tools to achieve had passed me by.

The difficulty was that these newer ideas were taught by angry women, generally not those who had received spiteful duffings up by drink soused spouses, but nice middle class girls like Ted, angry at men for other reasons and wanting, willing to hit out with words instead of fists.

To say hello,or pass a compliment to these viragos of new moral high ground was to receive fresher buckets of vitriol.

They didn’t need male converts apart from the occasional try from ‘new men’ or those unsure of their homosexuality: they could ‘identify.’

Ted and I would drink together, picking up waifs and strays to later share beds with.

I’d had three in a bed sex before (and in the woods) but these were different, Ted would go for sensuality, long lingering kisses, eyes locked together as their fingers would trace and linger, moving towards breasts and cunts with a grace of motion I’d never felt toward myself. 

To be in bed as an observer was not what I’d wanted, my thin visions of pornography had deserted to leave me only envious of the creation before me, sure they later touched, sucked and ultimately fucked but none filled the hollow drilled by this tableau.

Other women in other times had not created such sensuous mime, they had performed routines suited to film and earlier adolescent needs, this rather than fulfilling had only built further need.

This one though went the way of others, goodbyes and never seen again, but we never again picked up strangers.

Then we began to drift further; her into the arms of women who understandably no longer trusted men and me to women though untrusting of men, needed us to fulfil their dangerous wants.

Ted further into feminist politics, word play and deliberate misunderstandings of offered meanings, I could not reach her here, for women were now more important than men in this jerry-built world that impinged only slightly upon the sphere of mere mortals.

We still spoke occasionally; I even met her occasional girlfriends, though here as with me, she appeared only shakily attached.

Her lovers though attractive held themselves away from me like new lovers do for others who have held that intimate space before them, though whether I held special contempt due to testicles for their neuroses i could only guess.

Then we met again at friends, slept together more for friends than lust and as I left the next morning, another arose to take my place.

They fell in love and irony to the fore found houses side by side with me, this gave her opportunity to criticise his shiftlessness and foibles.

That she was in love seemed good and when she became pregnant even better.

Luckily the child was a girl.

For feminism teaches that female is good, it is a land recently held by communism, socialism, where feelings, intuition and sense are overturned to create a place where life ‘should’ be.

Though these earlier orders have been discredited feminism has re-invented itself not as ideas, theory or dogma but as fact, but as all thought it is only: overweening opinion.

My feelings for her though previously muddy now were clear: happiness at her happiness and sadness at the way in which her partners jealousy only allowed us occasional conversation, though later she would use this against them, she allowed this behaviour during.

Later they split, he to find other love in a facsimile thinner version of Ted and she again into the arms of waif women.

Her world now I found Bizarre, words no longer held common meaning, where once i felt happy to listen and learn of another world, there had been a shift: two ovaries good, two testicles bad.

No matter the crime it seemed women were innocent and men carried guilt.

I tried to hang onto friendship, to support the bridge between us no matter how fierce the force of flow beneath.

But this proved too thin to support any future, women were to win.

Though her male lovers had not enjoyed our friendship, they had at least endured its existence, women it seems cannot tolerate what they disapprove.

Our meetings grew less, further and further apart, she moved into fear, fearful of what men were capable of and sadly the possibilities of what I could be capable of.

No matter I had never or ever wanted to be aggressive with her, her fear inspired by the experiences of other women created divide where I wanted none.

To be damned where no evidence of crime exists is undemocratic, yet women of this thought can damn all men as rapists, violent and oppressors.

Though as all revolutionaries seeking to destroy what created them, they use whatever means we give them to destroy us.

Ted had shifted beliefs from mummy and absent dad’s cosy worldviews but had incorporated the shoulds, oughts and how things must be’s.

If any of this saddens me now, it is only that humanity as a race cling onto these false god givens and cannot hold itself in the face of uncertainty that is the fate of those attempting to grow up and beyond the limiting beliefs others will foster upon us.

I have no doubt that some men have been violent toward women, oppressed them, raped them and denied them their place in the world of grown-ups.

But not all men, always and with equal vehemence to the rage now displayed toward us, that suggests all men are equal in disgrace.

This limits as much as it enrages: helps no one.

It was nice knowing you Ted, but I don’t believe it would be good for any of us to know you now. 

I cannot respect those of any gender who would judge others according to gender, to live in fear and pick lovers out of fearful imaginings.

Neil Benbow

©neilbenbow2026