The March of Romance across My Landscape - by Izzy Garland

The assignment is to write about “Romance”. Time magazine says that romance is dead. The last romantic movie to really make it big was “Titanic” – everything else, since then, has sunken ignominiously. We are, after all, now living in a “war culture”.

When I was twenty years old, so long ago that I have to dust cobwebs off in my brain to remember, I was a silly young girl who adored romance novels; ate them up like they were chocolates. In fact I very often ate them with chocolates! I started innocently enough with Regency Romances, which I aspired to write…

‘Oh, la, Sir! How you do flatter a girl!’ Andromeda batted her long eyelashes coquettishly at Lord Marchfeather.

For his part, Sebastian Marchfeather was utterly bored with girls like Miss Winston-Stanley-Knife-Jones. These young minxes would knock on the door of his large estate, in Kent, at all hours of the night claiming that their carriages had broken down. He would have thought their footmen would have been mortified at the effrontery, but they all seemed to be as shameless as their mistresses.

And then there were the young ladies who contrived to faint at his feet at the tedious balls thrown by their not so terribly cunning mothers. They were “over come by the heat”. Or had seen a dead rodent or a corpse on the path…

There. You see? It’s no good. I do actually think that Regency Romances can be good fun and an excellent medium for humour, but derision has kicked in. Oh Georgette Heyer, where are you when I need you?

I married at twenty-three, and as a young matron felt I could move up a level on the romance scale. I finally knew what it was all about and was free to read and write anything I wanted.

She was out of breath and the dogs were nearly upon her. The flinty walls of Drumhell Castle hardly cut through the pain of her ragged gasping as she collapsed against them in fear. Her auburn hair had come lose from its pins and hung long and twisting down her back. Lord Olliphant would set his huge mastiff, Satan, to grab her by her curls should he catch up with her.

But just as the pack closed in upon her, sturdy arms reached out from the shadows and drew her through a hither-to unseen doorway. Sebastian Marchfeather pulled her into his strong embrace, his black cloak enveloping them both, rendering them invisible to prying eyes.

‘Sebastian…’

‘Hush my Darling; you are safe now; from Olliphant and his dogs, at any rate.’

Her chest heaved a sigh of relief and yet her heart beat harder as the tips of her breasts brushed against Sebastian’s muscular upper body. And then she was crushed to him, his mouth slanting over hers time and time again. A throbbing began in her loins and was matched by the rod of his manhood straining against his leather trousers, wanting to be free.

If only the severed head had not fallen from the shelf as they lunged about the room. As it glanced off her shoulder she tripped over an unattached arm and two disembodied legs…

Oh how can you write a “Bodice Ripper” if you start laughing at the absurdity of it all?

“Nothing in our cultures, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.” says Quentin Crisp.

In my thirties I had my own passions a plenty and no need for books or stories to keep me going. And when I stopped reading them, the Regency Romances limped off to the corner to sulk and Bodice Rippers became the laughing-stock of lonely people with nothing but electricity to satisfy them.

So I just lived my life. I divorced, re-married and time moved on. My very own baby grew up to be a young married woman who dotes upon lurid “Cowboy Romances”, of all things! But then these young things think nothing of wearing low slung trousers that show acres of flesh and the stringy bits of the thongs they call underwear. Times change and I am now a “Wrinkly”. (To be followed by being a “Wobbly”, I'm told.)

I’m aware that I’m not yet dead, however. Occasionally some man will develop an attachment to me and find pretexts to chat me up whilst staring at my bosoms. It amuses me to observe that they are completely oblivious to the fact that I can see that their words are being addressed to the two items that live below my neckline and can not answer. Silly men, I am far too old and too tired for your slap and tickle. I think I’ll just settle for slap and send you on your way. Crime and humour have won the battle for my affections. I’m yours with a curled lip and a sneer, Sirrah.

I look up and see that my husband has put some wild daisies in a white jug on the mantle to my left. He smiles at me and winks. When my tired feet ache at night he rubs them. If my food hasn’t digested properly he makes me a soothing tea, no matter what the time. That, my friend, is romance.


©Izzy Garland - 1st October 2007