As couples get to know each other, they share the songs and poetry that mean the most to them and express how they feel. In the days before playlists, there were mixtapes and, for young lovers with money to spend, there were gifts of books and music.

So, what of these love tokens decades later?

I’ve noticed a few turning up in second-hand shops. They give a snippet of a love story we will never fully know.

The first such emotional missive I came across was in Oxfam in Clifton. The Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets: Erotic Poems was a gift from Nicholas R to Penny, and it’s inscribed with a heartfelt declaration of love including references to the poems he would like her to read, in case he hasn’t quite made his point in his own words. Click on the image below to read it. There is a postcard from him too, kept with the book. He is a man desperately in love even as he hints that she might not feel the same and he will be heartbroken. Did the relationship go wrong because he came on too strong? Or did he persuade her to give him another chance?

Whatever happened, Penny didn’t destroy the postcard but kept it with the book to turn up almost thirty years later, perhaps having had a clear-out, perhaps moving house. Maybe she remembers Nick fondly, although he was too much for her, and she met someone else who was less intense and more fun, and they had a happy marriage and raised wonderful children.

And what of Nick? How did he cope with the rejection? He tells us how on the flyleaf of Erotic Poems.

1. He did not die
2. He regained his sanity
3. He did not harass or pursue her
4. He eventually lost the jealousy he had for the rest of the world
5. He had masses of sexual affairs
6. He did not stop loving her

Penny reads this now, decades later, while she’s packing her books for the move, and is reminded of something she hadn’t been able to fully forget – a doomed relationship, ruined by Nick and his self-sabotaging message to her. Things might have been different. She had loved him, hadn’t she? Maybe. For a while. Why else would she have kept this all these years? The memory is unbearable. The book goes in the charity shop pile, only to be found by a nosey woman who will make stuff up about it for a blog post.

Wherever you are, Nick and Penny, I hope life turned out well for both of you.