The sexiest girl I ever met

The sexiest girl I ever met was Louisa Hayward (pictured). I took this photo of her in October 1972 when she was 18 years old. We were having a picnic at the Rocks Creek on 'Invergowrie', an abandoned sheep farm where I lived. I first met her in the first week of university when she was coming down the stairs in Epsilon Block, Wright College (at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. She was with a geek from the campus radio station called Steve Kelly (who her mother described as her boyfriend). It was decided among a group of us in the foyer that day that she would look good in the shower. So she went in, screaming. She put up a great fight and looked good all wet. I know now she enjoyed it. The next time I saw her (she had been watching me, among others, and saw me once playing in the College rock band, jumping around like a kangaroo) she was coming thru the Block selling raffle tickets for her basketball team. She was drunk. She used to drink a lot in those days. I was lying on my bed reading a book about the Middle Ages (I remember everything.) She ran in, jumped on me, stuck her tongue down my throat, the ran out. I lay there stunned... I was afraid of women. Then I jumped up and found her in another room, this one filled with guys. She was in her element. With such a sales pitch, no wonder she sold more tickets than any other member of her team. (She told me later I was the only one who got the tongue sandwich treatment. I doubt that. She has always been sexually aggressive and genuinely likes men.) The next time I saw her she was drunk again, in a bar with her teammates after having lost the grand final. I saw her face beaming at me out of the crowd. My housemates and I were billeting a group of Japanese students on the farm and were out showing them the sights of the university town. (Normally we would have stayed home and smoked dope.) I went over to her, we talked some, then I asked her to come to a party with me. It was in a student's house in Beardy Street (the main street, named after the two beardy brothers who showed the early pioneers in the district where the best grazing land could be found). The house was so crowded we just got through the front door and couldn't get any further. We didn't mind. I sat down on the umbrella/hat stand seat (used for taking off boots, etc.) and she sat on my lap. I was asking her questions about herself (amazed that any woman would be interested in me) and she burst out crying, saying between sobs some weird things about her father and her mother's death (both huge emotional scars). Somehow we got her back to her college room and me back to the farm without incident. But the next morning I borrowed my housemate Chris Lloyd's Grey holden ute (64 model) and drove in to the University to see her. I brought her out to the farm (a master stroke because it turns out she is one of only two girls enrolled in the Department of Agricultural Economics) and we spent the afternoon walking across the scrubby paddocks talking and talking and talking. The more we got on the worse I felt because if it came to sex (and in 1972 it always came to sex) I was afraid she would discover my acute premature ejaculation problem, and I'd lose her. I avoided it for so long she started to think I didn't like her. I was the first guy she had met who hadn't go for the fucking as soon as possible. I intrigued her. Porbably a good thing. She terrified me. My best friend Mark Jones had whispered in my ear that night when we met in the bar "Mate, she does it." I thought, Oh no, she does it with everyone. She's (a) likely to be untrue (b) likely to be unclean (c) likely to be experienced and have high expectations. It turns out she had done it with one of the guys in the block and he'd told Mark. But more guys reported they'd done it with her than actually did (sound familiar?) and she wasn't a Runaround Sue. (That came later and I caused it.) My secret dread lasted until we had sex. Before we got down to it I confessed. She was so incredibly loving and kind, that I lasted twice as long as I ever had before. Then she greeted me with the immortal line: "Yes, you should see a doctor about that." (Deflated, but not destroyed, I saw a doctor, who gave me a pill, and everything worked out fine. The pill was a placebo, I discovered. My housemate got the same prescrfription form stomache cramps.) Louisa and I becamed inseperable and had the most amazing summer. I joined my first professional band (Four Way Street, doing Crosby Stills & Nash covers - I had the high voice), we got into marijuana and home baking, we mixed with a sophisticated alternative lifestyle set, and I fell deeply in love with her. I spent the summer holidays with her family in Mt Eliza, Victoria (a swank suburb) glad to have a family that accepted me after my Mother had treated Louisa so shabbily when I took her home to Tamworth NSW (Australia's Nashville). Mom put us in seperate rooms, and in the morning I went in to Louisa's room, climbed on the bed and pulled to doona up over both of us - she was beneath the covers and I was not. Mom came in, saw what she thought was her firstborn son in bed with a whore, and treated my beloved with distain thereafter. I bailed on the family right there. It was the first of many misunderstandings that would pockmark my relationship with Louisa. But I never stopped loving her. She is still that girl on the rock with the apple (my Eve). And in the words Mark Twain put in Adam's mouth: "Where e're she went, there was Eden."