Ewan Morrison: 'The deal was clear: if she didn't kick me in the balls, it was proof that we were in love'

MY DAUGHTER has recently started developing an interest in romance. All the films and songs seem to be about it, and every day after school she sees teenagers snogging in the park. But since it still seems a long way off for her (being only seven), and since she considers me experienced in these matters, she's started asking me about my "first love". Little does she know that I first fell in love when I was only eight.

For the sake of protecting the identity of that first beloved, I shall name her J'aime Summer – because my love blossomed in summer – but also after Jamie Sommers: the name of the US prime-time TV heroine that we were all hooked on in 1976: the Bionic Woman. In my mind J'aime and Jamie will forever be short-circuited together.

Eight-year-old J'aime had superpowers: she was hypersensitive and could hear insults from half a mile away, which always caused her to run at great speed to whichever big boy had teased her and kick him directly in the testicles (a thing she was famed for).

She was the school tomboy and I was the school wimp. We were opposites, but like the Bionic Woman we were both social outcasts. Her family did not fit in with the locals, and neither did mine. Whereas I was from middle-class hippie stock, her family were poor.

J'aime did not own a bionic action doll and neither did she dress like the others in regulation Wrangler jeans and Adidas kicks. I had sandals. She had a rough-edged melancholic beauty. This was not just her dark gypsy-like appearance and raven-black hair, but a sadness that emanated from her, that I could feel all the way from the other side of the playground as I stared through the bionic eye of my Steve Austin doll at her while a hundred normal kids played in the vast space between us.

I could not take my eyes off her and felt real pain when she suffered from her ever-changing moods, which went in a flash from sulking to huffing to whatever the emotion is you feel before you kick a boy in the bollocks.

I recall vividly the first time she ever touched me. It was also the first time I ever spoke to her. I had gone over to her side of the play park to share my action doll, and the other kids had decided to have some fun at our expense. They formed a circle and taunted her, shouting: "You love the hippie, nah nah ne nah nah."

They pushed us both together, jeering, goading and laughing. The deal was clear: if she did not kick me in the balls, as she had done to everyone else, then it was proof that we were in love.

She looked at me and our eyes met in a moment of compassion and shared humanity. Seconds later I was crouched foetal on the tarmac trying to work out if my testicles were now repositioned somewhere where my heart used to be.

That week the Bionic Woman TV series came to an end in a two-hour special. Jamie Sommers went insane – her body had rejected her bionic parts.

I recall her spasming in slow motion with horrible electrical noises as she destroyed a phone box, then sparks flew and she died. That week I wept for the loss of the Bionic Woman and for my J'aime, who had joined the gang of the normal kids and so had lost her special powers.