JEANETTE KUPFERMANN was astonished when her university boyfriend got in touch to say he loved her

Lockdown days tend to flow into one another, punctuated by occasional bland distractions such as where to source that elusive bag of flour and whether one can really be bothered to put on a nice dress today.

And there I was, entrenched in the fog of domestic ennui, when an email suddenly popped into my life.

It was like Alka-Seltzer suddenly dropped into a glass of stale tap water. There was fizz, excitement and crackle as my day burst into life with effervescence.

Here was a blast from my very, very distant past and yet, at that moment, 60 years could have been wiped away.

I recognised the sender’s name instantly – Anthony, an old boyfriend from university.

My first thought was thank heavens we weren’t on Skype or Zoom and he couldn’t see my wild, untamed hair with its grey roots and all the lines on my unmade-up face – my 79-year-old face. 

I was hardly the pretty, young thing he remembered from 60 years ago – and nor would he be – and yet, suddenly, it seemed to matter a great deal. 

How flimsy is the dam holding back vanity.

This was no casual catching up either. My old flame was swearing eternal devotion to me. I was his first love, he explained.

He had been married four times – and the fourth, to a much younger woman, was about to end, too – which he put down to the fact that he had never really got over me.

‘Take this how you will but I think the only person I have ever truly loved is you. After you, it was a fruitless search to find your substitute,’ he wrote.

There were several ways I could have taken this: flattered, most certainly. Who in their late-70s receives declarations of love out of the blue, from long-lost admirers? 

Bemused, too, that someone could still have these feelings for me over six decades. But my over­riding reaction was one of shock – at my own feelings if not his.

There was a distinct fluttering around the heart, a girlish longing, followed by a tsunami of emotions and distant memories.

Did it mean something? Or was it just that, after all these weeks of melancholic isolation, I was simply longing to feel something other than the fear and uncertainty that this period of lockdown has instilled in us all?

Back in the early 1960s, Anthony had been my college sweetheart for two intense years until continual rows, family tensions and objections on both sides split us up.

He was clever, complicated, passionate and as devastatingly handsome as any Michelangelo statue. Admittedly, we had the odds firmly stacked against us: he  coming from a wealthy Greek family and me from an Orthodox Jewish background.

My father disparagingly called him my ‘Greek God’ and threatened a heart attack if I pursued the romance, which I then decided to keep secret – though my mother knew and had rather a soft spot for him.

Today, it might have been very different but, as far as my father was concerned, he was of the wrong religion so it could not work.

While there is nothing like forbidden love to keep a ‘what if’ hovering in the air. As I read his email after so many years, deep down I knew my feelings weren’t real – but it still felt overwhelming.

I longed for a little of the old passion I used to feel in those faraway days when life was so very different. My mind returned to those years we had both felt so intensely, when every emotion was magnified.   

I could almost feel the sun on my face on a trip we had made together, sailing round the Greek islands and staying in primitive little stone houses on hills. I remembered the delight at how they rose from the sea just like in the myths.  

I could still smell the thyme and taste the freshly grilled barbounaki (little red fish) sitting outside the taverna.

I was transported back to that feeling of exhilaration as I plunged – in my string bikini – into the crystal Aegean Sea, the scent of pine trees mingled with thyme and the plangent sounds of Greek music. 

A handsome young man waving to me from the shore. Oh, the simplicity and magic.

Of course, Anthony is not the only one looking up an old flame during this time: many are losing their heads in a frenzy of nostalgia.

In some cases, all that daydreaming – even fantasising – will place marriages under impossible strain during lockdown.

It may even encourage some to make impetuous decisions to move in with one another.

Our current situation is producing a feeling of carpe diem not unlike the war years, which sparked hasty marriages, casual affairs and passionate outpourings in love letters as people were parted.

I still have a few my father sent to my mother as a soldier in Europe in World War II – and they never fail to move me.

There’s nothing like the threat of death for making you want to seize the moment and assert life. Freud understood the connection between love and death; yet even he might have been unable to predict what is happening now to our subconscious and sense of reality.

You don’t have to ‘look to the science’ to see why many of us are cleaving to the past.

Not just annoying celebrities putting up old pictures of themselves in their past glory, but little private moments where we are overwhelmed by the vividness of old memories with all their scents and sounds.

And I’m certainly not the only one revelling in nostalgia during self-isolation. One friend has reconnected with someone in America she hasn’t seen in more than 20 years and is now talking of going over to live with him as soon as she can fly again.

London therapist Gloria May explained to me: ‘It’s happening to lots of people during this enforced period of reflection when they don’t have their usual distractions. There is a tendency for forgotten memories to surface.

‘Although it can be unpleasant, it has the potential for promoting an increased sense of emotional wellbeing in that it ties up loose ends and allows the digestion of past trauma and unhappy events.’

In any period of crisis or suffering we inevitably retreat into our imagination – to a ‘happy place’ or times when life felt more secure, hopeful or exciting.

Anthony and I had spotted one another at the London School of Economics, where I studied anthropology and he economics in the early 1960s.

He was tall, athletic and sophisticated beyond his years, thanks to a privileged education and years spent travelling the world.

His smouldering good looks had me smitten from the very first glance – and so, I gather, was he when he spotted me modelling at a student fashion show in a tight, white mini dress.

He took me dancing at the most fashionable nightclub, where I wore my favourite Bardot-ish black, silk dress with a scoop neckline and short, tight sleeves, hair back-combed into a heavily lacquered beehive.

We ate sole veronique at Madame Prunier’s in St James’s or beef stroganoff at Luba’s bistro in Knightsbridge. I remember he taught me the difference between ordinary  cream and crème Chantilly and how to eat an artichoke. 

We liked to go boating on the Serpentine, visit the Aldwych theatre and the Royal Festival Hall or shoot up to the oldest pub in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in his sports car.

On Sunday, I would cook a huge lunch for all his friends while they drank retsina, argued about politics and listened to loud bouzouki music.

They were heady days. Ours was a passionate relationship in every respect. A coup de foudre to rival Marianne and Connell of Normal People. Where they had Italy, we had an equally intense trip to Greece.

We went back and forth between trying to make that leap to defy our parents and what was expected of us. We endlessly talked, between tears, of running away together. I was going to leave home but, in the end, neither of us could. There wasn’t a big row; we split with a sad acceptance that it could never be. Such was our sense of familial duty back then.

He went on to have a string of girlfriends that he made very sure I knew about – all blue-eyed brunettes like me – before finally marrying the fiancee chosen by his parents.

Meanwhile, I went to the States and married my late artist husband Jacques, living in New Orleans and Woodstock, New York, before returning to the UK in the Seventies.

Funnily enough, our lives unwittingly tracked each other’s. Anthony went to the States, too, taking up an academic post during his first marriage.

He came back to live in Hampstead, North London, for a spell, as did I – though by that time Anthony had already moved to Greece.

He kept in touch from time to time – just the odd letter in which he would still affectionately call me ‘Dearest’.

But while he was clearly harking back to the halcyon days, I was a happily married mother of two and not in the habit of keeping in touch with old flames.

With Anthony, I was always very aware he was someone from the past and the chemistry that had once existed had been replaced by a less explosive, good-natured amitié amoureuse.

Or so I had thought. The last I heard of him, he had just married for a fourth time and his 30-something wife was expecting a baby.

By then I was widowed, and living on my own – my husband Jacques died in 1987.

I was glad for Anthony, having this fresh chance at happiness and a new child on the way.

I really thought I wouldn’t hear from him again – his hands, and his heart I assumed, were well and truly full.

So his latest email was a surprise, to say the least. I had really thought he would stick with this marriage and was amazed he was facing yet another divorce.

I wrote back saying as much, adding slightly jokily, ‘What is it with you and marriage? Isn’t it about time you stayed single for a while?’

So will we meet again? I certainly suggested as much in my response.

I am single, after all, with nothing – or no one – to stop me entering into a new romance. Also, these weeks, months, of isolation have reminded me how much I miss and crave human company.

I know my grown-up son and daughter would be delighted to see me settled again.

I know, however, that Anthony lives in Greece and it may never happen in reality.

But the lockdown will end some time. Foreign travel, to beautiful Greek islands, will be a possibility again.

Meanwhile, I’ll cherish the little lemon tree my daughter gave me for my birthday, conjuring as it does those Mediterranean idylls of my youth.