I met Simon Goldman in when I was 16 and he was - he said - 27, but was probably in his late 30s. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leant over to the passenger window and said, "Want a lift?
I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham. He had a funny accent - later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh - but I asked if he was foreign.
He said: "Only if you count Jews as foreign. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely: "Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed. He said he had lived in Israel when he was "your age". I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought But then when he said, "Fancy a coffee? So then he drove me to my house, and asked: "Can I take you out for coffee another evening?
My life might have turned out differently if I had just said no. But I was not quite rude enough. Instead, I said I was very busy rehearsing a play which meant that, unfortunately, I had no free evenings. Arriving for the first night a couple of weeks later, I found an enormous bouquet in the dressing room addressed to me. The other actresses, all grown-ups, were mewing with envy and saying, "Those flowers must have cost a fortune.
He said: "Can't we have our coffee now? I wasn't exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father. My father's grillings were notorious among the Hampton Grammar boys.
