I always looked forward to your lessons. I liked how you levelled with us. We felt respected. And your passion for all those novels and plays could be highly infectious. It was because of one of those plays that you took our relationship into a forbidden realm and our lives began to mirror the characters in which we had become so absorbed.

At an after-show party, when everyone else had dispersed to find a room to sleep, we were suddenly left alone. Your touch of my inexperienced, teenage body and my fumbling grasps of yours, both of us finally acting out what we had wanted to do for some time – I had only just turned 16 and it was an exhilarating experience. The illicit nature of our contact only heightened its thrill.

I can’t remember how physically attractive I found you – maybe I did – but that mattered less than knowing how infatuated you had become with me. Although I couldn’t understand it, to have attracted your attention was flattering and intoxicating.

Our brief affair was certainly one of my life’s defining moments, but now, many years later, I can see the deep impact it had on me. I was left isolated at a vulnerable point in my life. I could tell no one about what had happened and I was forced to dodge the rumours that quickly spread. I held your professional future in my hands. You could have lost everything, just on my word, and you made sure I knew it. The pressure was not easy.

Of course I would never have reported you, although I know you feared I would. I didn’t feel abused. I liked you, possibly loved you in some way. I certainly didn’t want to hurt you. But I felt alone, with an overwhelming secret that soon outweighed the pleasure of the original act.

Ultimately, what you did was wrong. And it was you. You had the power and control. You left me entangled in an unfamiliar adult world, in which rights and wrongs are not as clearly defined as we normally pretend to children. The child in me is still annoyed that you hadn’t been wiser to the potential difficulties our actions would put us in, even if the adult in me has come to realise that lust and wisdom are never going to be great bedfellows.

Now, as a teacher with children myself, I know just how much you must have suffered. I can only imagine the anxious, sleepless nights, wondering when things would unravel around you, sweating over the huge mistake you knew you had made. You had placed your professional career in the hands of an adolescent.

I regret not having seen you before you died, just to make sense of what happened between us. My only relief was that our secret was never exposed during your lifetime. I still wonder what your final thoughts about us might have been. Perhaps regret for the anxiety you had caused yourself, or maybe even a small chink of satisfaction that you had got away with it, your good reputation intact.

Whichever, I hope you have been resting in peace. Our secret remains safe.

Anonymous

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