Norman Cooper with his sister Cindy Simmons

LIFELONG black cab driver Norman Cooper has been walking the streets of Camden this week hoping to find his long-lost love, Linda.

It has been almost 50 years since an explosive one-year affair that ended one Christmas in heartbreak.

Now 81, he said he was desperate to make amends with the woman he first met out dancing in Dingwall’s nightclub in Camden Town and whose family home was in Grafton Road, Queen’s Crescent.

Mr Cooper told me: “It’s a whole romantic story, but it’s broke my heart – 45 years later, it still hurts. We used to send cards to each other about how much we loved each other. She was a Capricorn. But now the only pictures I’ve got left of her are in my head.

“I met her before Christmas and left her the following Christmas. It was the worst time to leave really. I wish I never dropped her off at Holborn like that. I want to say to her that I did it for a good reason – I did it for my children.”

He added: “I know she is going to be entirely different. Life will have caught up with her, no doubt. I want to spend as much time as I can with her, whatever she will allow me. I will take her out. I would do anything if she would want it.”

While married, he flew out to Torremolinos in Spain to be with her and they wrote endless love letters that Mr Cooper kept in the boot of his black cab until they were discovered by his late wife.

“And then she kicked me out,” she said.

Mr Cooper said he used to pick up Linda from the cab rank in Hampstead Road outside the “Black Cat” building in Mornington Crescent where she worked.

He said: “Then we used to drink in the Prince of Wales, and also Dingwall’s. And the Piccadilly Hotel, they had a nightclub downstairs. We used to go there a lot. Barry White sang her favourite song everywhere we went, it was called You’re My First, My Last, My Everything. She would remember that.

“We saw a film together called A Touch of Class with George Segal and Glenda Jackson, where they had an affair in a place in Soho. Linda was saying to me we should have done it like that.

“Her mum – I think she used to work at Coram Fields. She used to be a cleaner there in a restaurant. I took her dad to a funeral once in my cab, too. He said he’d never seen anyone dress the way I did. I was always suited, you see. You had suits made for you in them days.”

He said Linda had decided not to marry another man from Kentish Town because of the affair – and that once word had got out he was “frightened I was going to get shot”.

Mr Cooper was down from his home in Cambridge in Camden this week with his sister in a bid to find Linda. They have been to the Town Hall and doctors’ surgeries and have heard that a relative of Linda’s may still live around Kentish Town.

“Everyone’s been so nice to me and along the way they are saying to me I hope I find her. I’ve always felt bad about it you see, and 100 per cent I want to do something about it,” he said.

“All I want to do is say goodbye to her properly before we leave this world.”