LITMIR.BIZ

      “Among the Flowers”. In terms of subject matter, the seventeen-year-old Arlo had risked derision by his schoolmates but the melody he had created was so sublime that it immediately excused the unmitigated romance of the lyric. He wasn’t really aware of the starting point. Usually, the songs he wrote for his band were inspired by his fiery teenage response to political injustice worldwide and his middle-class upbringing. But “Among the Flowers” was utterly at odds with “Soweto Sweat” and “Not Quiet on the Western Front” and “Life under Cardboard” – all of which had swiftly become veritable anthems at Milton College. Perhaps studying Tess of the D’Urbervilles for A level English had been a subliminal source. He’d fallen a little bit in love with Tess, had seen her through Angel’s eyes, when she walks through the juicy grass and floating pollen of the garden at Talbothays, drawn by Angel’s harp but conscious of neither time nor space, her skirts gathering cuckoo-spittle as she meanders through the dazzling polychrome of flowering weeds. But ultimately, Arlo’s Flower Girl was wholly mythical. She embodied the woman he was aspiring to hold as his own one day. He thought that if he could create his ideal, set his wish list to the six strings of his guitar, perhaps he could lure her to him, perhaps he’d give her life.

      His then girlfriend was lovely enough but she didn’t inspire him to write. He’d lost his virginity to the girlfriend before that one and she’d made him horny as hell but love hadn’t come into it. Love was out there, of that he was sure, but even at seventeen Arlo trusted the logic of time and, for the time being, he embraced (rather physically) the fact that schoolgirls were to be very nice stepping stones towards the real thing. Arlo assumed, quite sensibly, that his teenage years should be about amorous fumblings and sticky sex. He had a feeling that university would probably provide more adventurous fornication and a serious relationship or two. And he imagined that his walk through the flowers to the love of his lifetime would probably be taken in his late twenties.

      What he was not expecting, at the age of seventeen and on the day his band had been invited to play a lunch-time set at the nearby private girls’ school, was to come across his flower girl in bud. He had no idea that a fifteenyear-old girl would so completely embody the fantasy he eulogized in “Among the Flowers”. But having sung about Soweto to a sea of bouncing schoolgirls, having had them clap their hands above their heads to “Nuclear No” and chant the chorus of “Set Them Free”, he launched into the melodious and ethereal “Among the Flowers”. And there, from the sway and the smiles of one hundred and fifty pubescent schoolgirls, on that first Wednesday in March seventeen years ago, Arlo Savidge had caught sight of Petra Flint and realized in an instant that he’d written the song solely for her.