Short stories by Jonathan Vernon
These stories are drawn from my teenage years, roughly between 10 and 16. They are grounded in real places, friendships, and experiences — but seen through the shifting lens of imagination. Power cuts, boarding school rituals, discos, family holidays, first loves and losses, laugher and longing: these are the moments where innocence collided with discovery and the universal rites of growing up. They are not memoirs, but nor are they pure invention. They live somewhere in between — the territory of memory, story, make believe and indulgence.
Names and some identifying details have been changed. While certain places are real, the events and characters are fictionalised. Any resemblance to actual people is coincidental.
From time to time, readers encourage me to write new chapters in this collection. Once, a story provoked the opposite — a removal request. That tension reminds me how alive and raw these years remain. And how many more tales are still waiting to be told?
The Girl in the Garden: Innocence at a time of power-cuts (Easter/Summer 1974)
At a Northumbrian prep school in the 1970s, a group of boys discover Lulu, a spirited child from a foster home, slipping into their hidden world of attics, gardens, and woods. Their friendship cuts across the invisible line between their worlds: Lulu’s life shaped by a broken family, strikes, and scarcity; the boys’ by privilege, tradition, and a future of indulgence. For a few dangerous weeks, innocence, loyalty, and imagination hold them together against the order of the school and the weight of class.
On a school cruise, Kit befriends Sephy, a mute girl with whom he can share thoughts. Their mysterious connection blurs the line between reality, imagination, and love.
The Form Photo
Robbie, 16, longs to see the back of his all male boarding school to meet some girls. With his twin sister and a her school form photo (all girls) a hit-list of potential romances emerge. Over one chaotic month, love, faith, and friendship collide in rugby club discos, tennis clubs, private parties, youth theatre, cinemas and church halls.
Ten Days in Beadnell: A Summer Romance by the Sea (Summer 1978)
Robbie and Hildy, a German exchange student, fall into a fleeting but intense romance on the Northumberland coast. Laughter, intimacy, and longing mark their brief time together. What they cannot yet know is that their connection reaches back two generations — to their grandfathers, whose lives collided in a pillbox at Passchendaele in November 1917.
A Lullaby Story : Music and Memory (Summer 1980)
Robbie and Suzi perform at a charity concert, their music sealing a teenage bond. Forty years later, a forgotten cassette revives memories of love, loss, and a lullaby that never left them.
When two young artists agree to pose for each other, Lucinda’s confidence tests Robbie’s restraint. He produces striking drawings — later framed by him — but holds back from the deeper connection that could have grown between them. Their encounters linger in memory, suspended between art, intimacy, and a chance never fully taken.
Some Future Stories:
The Love Chart — a teenage crush mapped as it takes off, collides and crashes in a matter of months.
Love Letters — correspondence with a dozen teen girls all writing to the one boy, ‘looked away’ in posh prison – a British, all-male, boarding school.
Love in the Alps — romantic ideas away from home
Oxford Loves — friendships and heartbreaks as an undergraduate.