The love letter I wish I'd written as writers finally bare their souls

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Last week extracts were published of a 30,000-word love letter, written by Germaine Greer to her secret lover novelist Martin Amis, in 1976
Here five well-known women reveal the love letters they wish they'd sent
The reasons for not sending them include humiliation and being angry

Published: 19:51 EST, 22 November 2015 | Updated: 20:26 EST, 22 November 2015

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Extracts were published last week from a passionate 30,000-word letter that feminist Germaine Greer composed to her secret lover, novelist Martin Amis, in 1976.

It was a clandestine relationship (Amis was living with fellow author Julie Kavanagh at the time) and so, despite being ‘helpless with desire’ for the writer, Greer never sent it.

Here, five well-known women reveal the love notes they wish they had sent.

Germaine Greer wrote a passionate 30,000 word letter to her secret lover, novelist Martin Amis, in 1976

YOU BROKE MY HEART

Jenni Murray

Dear James,

I met you when I was 26. It was the most passionate relationship I had ever experienced and lasted nearly three years until you suddenly dumped me.

Jenni Murray, above, wished that she'd told her boyfriend James about why she felt they couldn't be together

A year later, you decided you’d made a mistake and tried to begin again. I refused, over and over again, and never really explained why.

I should have told you why I said no, but I couldn’t find the words. Today, I finally can...

I had loved you from the moment I first saw you and know I’ll love you till the day I die. No one else has made my knees weaken at the very mention of their name. No one has ever made me laugh like you did. I longed for your company as for no other.

I will always remember waking beside you in your chaotic bedroom in the cottage while you still slept. The early morning sun blazed through the window and shone on your lovely face. I knew for the first time what it meant to be truly happy - my heart simply soared. And then, after three years of being the life and soul of every party and being seen by everyone as the perfectly matched couple, you ended it suddenly and brutally.

Nothing more than a letter explaining how we wouldn’t be spending the weekend together, you felt it needed to end as it was clear my independence would mean more to me than our relationship and you were afraid you would lose me when it was too late. I wanted to tell you how wrong you were, but you refused to take my calls. My misery knew no bounds. When it became obvious you recognised your mistake, I’d had endless hours to think over what our future together might have meant. The prospects were not promising and I should have told you about the night that kept coming back to me.

I should have told you that love and passion are not enough. Not if the trust has gone

I was working in Bristol, where we’d met, and you in London. It was a Friday and we’d arranged a party for my birthday. You were due to arrive at around 8pm at my flat. All the guests were there, but no you. Not at 9 or 10 or 11. My phone rang. It was the wife of a friend in London, explaining that you and her husband had gone for a drink after work and just returned to her house. Way too sloshed to drive.

She promised to get you on the road the next day. She failed. The two of you launched into a weekend of pub crawls and you finally arrived with me on Sunday evening. After you’d scraped me off the ceiling in my rage - I was unsurprisingly furious - you spoke these fatal words: ‘Jenni, I don’t know why you’re so angry. If I’d turned up late at my sister’s or my mother’s - the other women who say they love me - they’d just have been pleased to see me.’

I let it pass because I was so in love, although I was flabbergasted you couldn’t see how different your relationship with me might be from that of your mother or sister. After the break-up, it preyed on my mind and when faced with reconciliation and a lifetime together I couldn’t let it pass.

I should have told you that love and passion are not enough. Not if the trust has gone.

Love, Jenni

YOU TAUGHT ME HOW TO LOVE

Hannah Betts

Dear H,

Knowing me as you do, you’ll remember I despise love letters - so pompous and posturing - emotional blackmail invariably the aim. However, I feel I owe one to you, the love of my 30s, thanking you for the years we spent together; a letter from one no longer in love, who can now love all the stronger because of you.

Hannah Betts says that this relationship taught her how to love as an adult, and how she still values his opinion

Our relationship taught me how to love as an adult, and you remain the only man I have ever set up house with. People declared us opposites: introvert and extrovert, sportsman and hedonist, music lover and word obsessive.

We saw beyond the superficial. You are one of the few people on earth who has never bored me. Fifteen years on from our meeting, everything you say remains fascinating. I value your opinion above all.

This is a letter of gratitude and apology, but no regret. I am delighted to have had you as one of my life’s shaping forces. Our love might have been enough for many people. However, we both concluded we would be happier on our own, despite the punch to the gut of our parting.

This is a letter of gratitude and apology, but no regret. I am delighted to have had you as one of my life’s shaping forces

Thank you for sharing your wit, your intellect and endless talks. Your generosity and tactility - such great man arms! - provided support both physical and psychological.

I will be forever grateful for the way you saw my faults and loved me regardless; for being my family. Thank you for everything I learnt, albeit so much came too late.

I apologise for myself: for being a gadabout, for my drinking, for not being ready and not seeing the preciousness in the mundane. I’m sorry trouble didn’t pull us together, only dragged us further apart, leaving us lonely and mystified.

My brothers will miss you - how you made them laugh. And how lacerating it was when they came to help us move, me weeping into my chip packet as we sat in our now empty home, raising beer bottles to our separate futures. I wished you every possible luck for this future, sweetheart, and begged you to make me a place in it.

For this was no mere failed romance - it was a triumph. I love you and I still love you, as I adore your new partner for being the woman I couldn’t be.

We know each other’s places in our lives - no longer a lover, but a lifetime ally, as the years have proved.

All of which means that, in the end, I didn’t need to write this letter. A different kind of love transcended all.

Love, Hannah

I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE GONE

Rachel Johnson

Dear A,

I first saw you across a heaving punk rock concert crowd. I screamed to my best friend Kate: ‘I think I’ve seen a GOD!’

You towered like a totem pole over the pogo-ing hordes.

You were a 6ft 7in punk with a plumed black Mohican and lived in Billericay. I lived with my mother in Notting Hill and went to St Paul’s Girls’ School.

Rachel Johnson, right, with her then-boyfriend, right, a punk from Billericay who had a plumed black Mohican

You were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen - even though you’d painted the shaved sides of your head with white Dulux paint. You took me home to meet your parents and seduced me in the garage underneath a dangling red lightbulb.

Once, we broke into my father’s flat after my mother kicked us out but then, do you remember, he came home inconveniently from Brussels and caught us almost in flagrante? He sized you up - your Mohawk, the chains dangling from your ripped drainpipe jeans - and merely raised a hand in traditional Indian salute and said ‘How’. But he never said ‘Why?’ and nor did I.

You were handsome, funny, talented. You thought I was pretty even with a bog-brush hair cut.

I wish I could have told you how much I valued your kindness, and your loyalty, and your letters, but I wasn’t evolved enough then to appreciate that sort of thing in the opposite sex.

After wondering what had happened to A, Rachel wrote to his parents and discovered that he had died in a car crash earlier this year. Despite not having seen him since she was 17, she wept and went to visit his parents

Earlier this year, I began to wonder what became of you. I Googled but nothing came up. It was as if you had disappeared. I began to wonder whether you’d died. I wrote to your parents in Billericay.

A month later, your mother called me. She said 20 years ago this August you died in a car crash. You’d gone to art college, had got married, and weren’t yet 30. I hadn’t seen you since I was 17, but the world went dark and I wept.

I wish I’d told you that even though we split up, you were gorgeous and unique and how lucky I was to have you as my first love.

This September I went back to Billericay to see your parents. I watched their faces light up when we talked about you, and it was as if you were there. Your mother said when you died her heart was broken. It’s too late to tell you now, but when I think of you, you’re still 16, and the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen.

Love, Rachel

YOU WERE THE FIRST BOY I LOVED

Linda Kelsey

Dear Timothy,

What beautiful, silky, golden hair you had. Such blue eyes and a smile that suggested, while you looked like an angel, you had a cheeky, self-confident air.

How could the shy seven-year-old that I was, quiet as a mouse, prone to blushing if a teacher so much as looked my way, be anything but in love with you Timothy Andrews, the best looking eight-year-old in my primary school?

Even then, I was prone to flights of the imagination. But because you were far too handsome to talk to, because you seemed such a patrician little English gent in comparison with dark, curly haired, brown-eyed me, all I could do was compose love letters, written in my head, never committed to paper.

Linda Kelsey believed that Timothy, above, with blue eyes and silky blonde hair, looked like an angel

Oh how I sung your praises and told you how clever and handsome I thought you were because I wasn’t too young to know that compliments make people feel nice. I also described how something tingled at the back of my neck when I heard your voice.

I told you that you were the first boy I loved and that maybe, when we were much older, we could get married and live happily ever after even though I didn’t deserve you.

My dreams were almost fulfilled during a game of kiss chase. You were ‘it’ and I got caught by you in an alleyway. You kissed me, quickly, on the lips, wiped your hand across your mouth as though removing a stain, and ran off laughing. I touched my lips and burst into tears. From then on, I was even more embarrassed to have anything to do with you.

I remember you contracted polio. Some people died from this terrible illness, but surely we wouldn’t lose you. We didn’t. You recovered, but you became an even more romantic figure when you returned to school after a lengthy absence.

Ten years ago, we met up and I confessed everything. You were a solicitor, married with two children. You were almost bald, but had the same twinkle. We have remained in contact ever since. I’m glad the things I wanted to say remained as a love letter in my head, because otherwise there would have been no reason to reconnect with you as an adult.

You were the golden boy who gave me something precious - the painfully sweet taste of first love.

Love, Linda

I THOUGHT YOU LEFT YOUR WIFE FOR ME

Lucy Cavendish

Dear Ed

When I was in my early 20s - more than 20 years ago now - I loved you. You were a novelist, married, with two children.

When we first met at a dinner party I thought you were funny and handsome. You had blonde, floppy hair and green eyes and, when you smiled, you looked a little out of place. I found you confusing yet devastatingly attractive with your assured demeanour and flash of insecurity.

We sat next to each other and talked all evening. You drove me home and I sat on a Tonka toy in your car. That’s when it started, I think. I just found you compelling.

Lucy Cavendish believed that the married man she loved would leave his wife for her, but it wasn't to be

For me, it wasn’t an affair. I never thought of myself as your mistress. You were my friend, my lover, my equal. I just loved you. I loved everything about you. We did crazy things together. You’d suddenly show up and say you were off for a week to Central America to work on a book and why didn’t I go with you?

One time you spirited me to New York and we holed up in the Gramercy Tavern for a week and ate room service and smoked out of the window.

Eventually, you left your wife and I thought that was it and we would be together - I was young, naive and in love. I am ashamed to say I didn’t spare a thought for your estranged wife and children. I went away for a planned month abroad and you stayed in my house. When I came back you were at the airport. I was so happy to see you and yet something had changed. You were distant. We had a row and - to cut a long story short - you told me you had found another lover. I was devastated.

A week later, I received a letter from you. It was sad and poignant, telling me that you loved me but you were sorry.

‘I’m a wreck,’ you wrote. ‘And I don’t want to mess up your life. You should find a man who can love you in a way I never can.’

The letter made me angry. I thought it was a cop-out. I was devastated, heartbroken and wanted to punish you, so I didn’t write back.

Two years ago, a mutual friend told me you had died unexpectedly. This friend told me you had wanted to talk to me and see me but, as I hadn’t replied to your letter, you thought I was still angry with you.

I wasn’t, of course, and the thought of you still makes me cry. Why didn’t I write that letter? I know exactly what I would have written. I would have told you how magnificent you were, how just the thought of you made me smile. I would’ve told you how waking up with and just seeing your beautiful face lying slumbering next to mine felt breathtakingly special. I would have told you how much I loved you.

But, the truth is, I didn’t write that letter. I couldn’t. The hurt and anger was too much. But now all those words I wish you’d heard from me are all just too late.

Love, Lucy