Timothy Lea’s Complete Confessions
by Timothy Lea

CONTENTS

Title Page

Publisher’s Note

Introduction

Confessions of a Window Cleaner

Confessions of a Driving Instructor

Confessions from a Holiday Camp

Confessions from a Hotel

Confessions of a Travelling salesman

Confessions of a Film Extra

Confessions from the Clink

Confessions from a Health Farm

Confessions of a Private Soldier

Confessions of a Pop Star

Confessions from the Shop Floor

Confessions of a Long Distance Lorry Driver

Confessions of a Plumber’s Mate

Confessions of a Private Dick

Confessions from a Luxury Liner

Confessions of a Milkman

Confessions from a Nudist Colony

Confessions of an Ice Cream Man

Confessions from a Haunted House

About the Author

Also available in the CONFESSIONS series

Copyright

About the Publisher

Publisher’s Note

The Confessions series of novels were written in the 1970s and some of the content may not be as politically correct as we might expect of material written today. We have, however, published these ebook editions without any changes to preserve the integrity of the original books. These are word for word how they first appeared.

INTRODUCTION

How did it all start?

When I was young and in want of cash (which was all the time) I used to trudge round to the local labour exchange during holidays from school and university to sign on for any job that was going – mason’s mate, loader for Speedy Prompt Delivery, part-time postman, etc.

During our tea and fag breaks (‘Have a go and have a blow’ was the motto) my fellow workers would regale me with stories of the Second World War: ‘Very clean people, the Germans’, or of throwing Irishmen through pub windows (men who had apparently crossed the Irish sea in hard times and were prepared to work for less than the locals). This was interesting, but what really stuck in my mind were the recurring stories of the ‘mate’ or the ‘brother-in-law’. The stories about these men (rarely about the speaker himself) were about being seduced, to put it genteelly, whilst on the job by (it always seemed to be) ‘a posh bird’:

‘Oeu-euh. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

‘And he was up her like a rat up a drainpipe’

These stories were prolific. Even one of the – to my eyes – singularly uncharismatic workers had apparently been invited to indulge in carnal capers after a glass of lemonade one hot summer afternoon near Guildford.

Of course, these stories could all have been make-believe or urban myth, but I couldn’t help thinking, with all this repetition, surely there must be something in them?

When writing the series, it seemed unrealistic and undemocratic that Timmy’s naive charms should only appeal to upper class women, so I quickly widened his demographic and put him in situations where any attractive member of the fairer sex might cross his path.

The books were always fun to write and never more so than when they involved Timmy’s family: his Mum, his Dad (prone to nicking weird objects from the lost property office where he worked), his sister Rosie and, perhaps most importantly, his conniving, would be entrepreneur, brother-in-law Sidney Noggett. Sidney was Timmy’s eminence greasy, a disciple of Thatcherism before it had been invented.

Whatever the truth concerning Timothy Lea’s origins, twenty-seven ‘Confessions’ books and four movies suggest that an awful lot of people share my fascination with the character and his adventures. I am grateful to each and every one of them.

Christopher Wood aka Timothy Lea

Confessions of a Window Cleaner
BY TIMOTHY LEA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ONE

The window cleaning lark first begins to appeal to me one evening when I am up at the pub with my brother-in-law. It is on Clapham Common and we are sitting on a bench outside, watching the sun go down and this big bird with the white silk blouse on. It is a bit small – the blouse I mean – and rides up from her waist so you can see her two tone flesh and the top of her knickers.

She has been in the sun, that is for sure. She has dyed hair, too much lipstick and a diabolical eyebrow pencil beauty spot that dates her a bit, but if she is going down hill I can think of a few blokes who wouldn’t mind waiting for her at the bottom – me included.

“Sup up,” says Sid. “You’re supposed to drink it, not pour it all over your balls. You’re right out of practice, aren’t you?”

I nod and correct the angle of my glass. Sid is right. I am straight out of reform school, ‘for the holidays’, my poxy father says, and there haven’t been a lot of opportunities for elbow bending – or lapping up birds like Silk Blouse. She has a black bra underneath it which I think is a bit of a liberty. Sid looks at her as if it is an effort to keep from yawning. “I’ve had her,” he says, switching his gaze to his finger nails. Very neat they are, too. Say what you like about Sid – and most people say plenty – but he keeps himself in good nick.

“Oh yes,” I say. “You and who else?”

“I don’t know about that, do I?” he says. “But I know I have. Why, don’t you believe me?”

“If you want to put it like that – no?” I say. I mean, she is with two blokes who look sharp as tin tacks and have a white Jag to prove it. I can’t see our Sidney with her legs up against the dashboard of his mini van.

“Hang on,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

Before I can say anything he picks up my glass and slides off towards the bar. The bird hasn’t noticed him up till then, but when she does I begin to believe Sid might be right. She half smiles and shoots a quick glance at one of the blokes she’s with. You can see she doesn’t quite know what to do. Sid is a gent because he nods to her ever so politely like she was his Sunday school teacher and carries right on into the pub. I can’t help it, I’m impressed. Seeing Sid must have done something to her, for her fag goes out and she starts tugging her blouse down and smiling slightly out of time with the conversation she’s supposed to be part of; as if there’s something on her mind. I look at Sid through new eyes when he comes out of the pub. He’s quite a good-looking fellow, I suppose. Not tall, but with very broad shoulders and narrow hips. Looks a bit like one of those poufdah ballet dancers you see on the telly before you turn over to the wrestling. I know my sister thinks his arsehole plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ every time he farts.

“Try and keep this one inside you,” he says, handing me a pint. “You look as if you’ve pissed yourself. I’m ashamed to be seen with you.”

He runs his fingers through his hair, kneading in every wave – Sid has lovely hair, even my mum remarks on it – and gives Silk Blouse a big smile as she glances at him. She blushes and turns away double quick. Sid shakes his head and stares out over the common towards the pond where the kids and the middle-aged wankers sail their model boats. It’s as if he doesn’t want to be the cause of any embarrassment to her. Very thoughtful.

“Well?” he says. “You saw that?”

“Yes,” I say. “She looked pretty twitched up. Who are those blokes she’s with?”

“I don’t know. Her husband travels, I believe. I expect she gets a bit lonely in the evenings.”

“How did you meet her?”

“On the job, how else?”

“What, window cleaning?”

“I haven’t got any other jobs, have I?”

I’m registering surprise because Sid and Rosie, my sister, have been married for three months and Rosie is already great, too great if you ask my mother, with child, which everybody in the family, and even a few of the neighbours, are prepared to accept as Sid’s. What’s more, Sid has only been cleaning windows since they came back from their honeymoon, which is what they called the weekend they spent at Brighton where one of Sid’s friends was supposed to have a boarding house. In fact, they never found a trace of the friend and spent two nights trying to sleep rough at Butlins before they were thrown out. I missed the wedding because I was being reformed at the time and heard all about it, and the honeymoon, from Rosie, who could not be accused of exaggeration because she was bonkers about Sid and would burst into tears every time Dad said he was a ponce.

“What about my sister?” I say, feeling I’d better show a bit of family loyalty.

“She’s getting all she can handle,” says Sid. “You haven’t heard her complaining, have you?”

This is true. I’ve heard my old man complaining about the row they make but not a squeak out of Rosie. In fact, Rosie doesn’t make much noise of any kind. This evening we’ve left her at home in front of the telly, knitting some woolly horror for ‘her Sid’ and I know she’ll be in exactly the same position when we get back, with her head jutting towards the screen and just a few more rows of puce to show for it. She and Sid have been living with us since the wedding and show every sign of continuing to do so until they find ‘the right place’ as Sid puts it. Dad says that Sid’s idea of the right place is the one he seems to be finding every night and he can hardly expect his daughter to be a contortionist as well as a wife. Mum tells him not to be dirty, though she doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. She just knows Dad.

“Anyhow, I’m doing it for her, aren’t I?”

I give him my ‘pull the other one’ look.

“Oh, you can act all disapproving, but you’ve no idea what it’s like. I’m trying to build up a business, aren’t I? Half of these birds don’t just want their windows cleaned. You say no dice and they swear blind you did it anyway. I’ve been told that. Straight up, I have. One terrible old bag, she blackmailed me, said if I didn’t give her what she wanted, she’d start screaming the place down. What could I do? You soon get the message. Put yourself in my position.”

I steal a quick glance at Silk Blouse and wish I could.

“You want to keep them happy, don’t you, because you want the work; and you’re only human, aren’t you? When a bit of stuff like that starts offering to squeeze out your chamois, you don’t start retracting your ladder, do you?”

“I suppose not,” I say. “But is it really like that? I mean, you hear all those stories about milkmen, but I never believe half of it.”

“I don’t know about milkmen,” says Sid. “But you wouldn’t coco some of the things that have happened to me, and I haven’t been in the business four months. I won’t start to tell you, because you wouldn’t credit it. I think maybe it’s because you look more athletic cleaning windows. You might laugh but sometimes I feel I’m almost hypnotising them when I sweep the old squeegee backwards and forwards. I always wear a T shirt or white nylon – that’s favourite because when it gets wet they can see your nipples. Press up against the window and give ’em a smile occasionally. You can see their hands shaking as they put the kettle on.”

“So that bird isn’t the only one?” I say slowly.

“God, no. It’s a bad week in which I don’t get half a dozen solid offers – and that’s new business, not my old customers.”

“How do you manage?”

“Well, you have to box a bit clever, don’t you? You can’t leave them without it for too long, otherwise they get all resentful. You have to spread it out a bit. Keep everybody happy. In fact,” he looks round at Silk Blouse, who is climbing into the Jag and showing thigh clean up to her arse, “the business is expanding, so fast I’ve got almost more than I can handle. Work and all.”

I lean forward hopefully, and the bastard pauses, leaving me dangling on his words. Silk Blouse gives him a discreet little wave as the Jag pulls away and Sid inclines his head. “I was thinking of asking you if you’d like to come in with me—”

“It’d be great, Sid,” I interrupt, thinking of Silk Blouse’s thighs and nearly creaming my jeans. “Great, I’d—”

“—cool it.” Sid’s voice sounds just like Paul Newman’s which is exactly what it is meant to sound like. Rosie, or some other bird, once told him that he looked like Paul Newman and the world has suffered for it ever since, “don’t get your knickers in a twist. I just said I was thinking about it, I’m not certain you’re up to the work.”

“There’s nothing to cleaning windows, is there,” I say. “and I’m not afraid of heights. Shouldn’t be any problem getting a ladder and a bucket – one of those polythene—”

“I wasn’t thinking about that side of it. Rosie said she reckoned you’d never had your end away.”

He runs his fingers round the edge of his glass. It’s one of those tall thin ones and made an apologetic whining noise. They don’t give Sid and me the thick chunky ones with the handles.

“That’s what Rosie said, is it?” I say, trying to give myself time to think.

“That’s what Rosie said.”

Of course, Rosie is right but I don’t thank her for opening her trap to Sid. Must be envy on her part. Before she met Sid she was known as the easiest lay in the neighbourhood. On Saturday night, after the pubs closed, there used to be a queue outside the front door. Talk about watching the quiet ones.

“How does she know?” I say.

“Said you told her.”

This is true too. I once had a confidential word with her because I was desperate to score and I reckoned she must have a mate who could oblige me. Fact was that all the other birds in the district hated her guts because the way she gave it away was ruining the market. Their blokes only had to get a sniff of our Rosie and that was that. In my present mood I have half a mind to tell Sid all about her but I think better of it.

“That was before I went inside.” I say.

“You had birds in there!?”

“Of course. I had this mate. We used to get out at nights and go round the local girls’ school. They’d hang their knickers out of the window so we knew which one to get in at. Very posh birds they were but they were crazy for it.”

Of course, it’s all a load of lies but I think it sounds quite good.

“Really,” says Sid. “Bentworth Grange wasn’t it? Must have changed a bit since I was there. In those days the screws would go spare if you as much as looked out of the window.”

“I didn’t know you were there, Sid,” I say – trying to appear interested.

“Yeah, we went to the same school. I’ll let you borrow my old boys tie some time. Now look, I’m still a bit sceptical about whether you’ve had your end away or not.”

Sid is very strong on long words and ‘Quotable Quips’ he gets from the Reader’s Digest. He used to spend so much time in Doctors’ waiting rooms trying to get a medical certificate that he is quite well read.

“I don’t want to go on about it, but I can’t afford to have someone with me who goes around disappointing people. You’ve got to know how to handle yourself.”

Make no mistake, I’m not a fairy or anything, and my equipment is alright. It’s just that something always seems to go wrong just when I am about to score. The bird passes out or a copper starts flashing his torch or I’m too pissed to do it. A lot of trouble is the birds themselves. Because I am inexperienced I end up with inexperienced girls and of the two of us I have the most to lose. Rosie doesn’t help because I feel embarrassed about her, and that puts me off my stride a bit, and of course, there wasn’t anything happening at Bentworth, apart from the danger of spraining your wrist or getting a bent screw up your backside. I say all this because a lot of people seem to believe that every working class lad has it regular from the age of eight and it just isn’t true. I wish to God it was.

“Don’t worry about me Sid,” I say, “I won’t let you down.”

“Um.” Sid looks at me and then past me to the plump old bird we can see just inside the boozer, sitting up at the bar and sipping what must be a port and lemon.

“Could you handle that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Chat her up, buy her a drink, take her home. She’s a pushover, that one. Always up here begging for it.”

“I don’t fancy her.” I say quickly. It’s the truth too. Talk about mutton dressed up as lamb. She’s bulging out all over the place like a badly tied parcel and they must be able to hear her laughing down at the Plough. It sounds like somebody cutting through giblets with a hacksaw.

“Don’t fancy her? You’re going to be no bloody good to me if you go on like that. Who do you think you are, Godfrey Winn?”

“If I was, I’d be calling her mother. She won’t see forty again if you give her a telescope.”

“You mean you won’t even say hallo to her? Look, go and chat her up a bit, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything. I just want to see how you handle yourself. I tell you she’s a bit of class compared to some of the scrubbers you’ll come across if I take you on.”

“Well I won’t be coming across them then.”

“Get over there and overpower her with some of your sophisticated banter,” sneers Sid, “and remember, I’ll be watching.”

“I won’t forget,” I say and I start towards the bar. I feel less enthusiastic than a bloke setting out to poke a bacon slicer, but it isn’t a boozer I go to a lot, so I can afford to make a bit of a Charlie of myself. Above all, I want to show Sid that I am a man of the world.

The old bag gives me a quick up and down as I go in and returns to her drink. She has terrible legs and wears patterned stockings so you’ll notice it. It is difficult to know where the pattern ends and her varicose veins begin. I stroll up to the bar and lean on it as casually as I can, discovering as I do so that I have chosen a large puddle of beer to put my elbow in.

“Learning to swim, dear?” says the old bag. I blush and hope that Sid has noticed how smoothly I have started a conversation.

“Lovely evening,” I say. The words are alright but unfortunately I am so tense that my voice cracks and the alsatian in the corner growls and pricks up its ears.

“What did you say, dear?”

“I said ‘it’s a nice evening’.”

“Very nice, dear.” She sounds a bit nervous. I can feel. I am sweating and I start licking my lips. The barman is in the saloon and I try to catch his eye.

“I don’t get up this way often.”

“Really dear? I thought I hadn’t seen you before.”

“Not on Thursdays, anyway.” Why did I say that? The old bag looks even more worried. “Thursday is early closing day,” I go on desperately, “I work in a bakery, you see, and we get the afternoon off.”

“Very nice, dear. I expect you look forward to it?”

The barman is coming towards me. Now for my big push.

“Can I buy you a fuck?” I say. She goes scarlet, the barman breaks into a run and the alsatian sits up.

“I mean a drink,” I shout, wishing I was dead.

“Make up your mind,” says Sid, who has miraculously appeared behind me. “You know, sometimes, I think he doesn’t know the difference,” he adds, flashing his pearlies at the old bag who is staring at me like I had eye teeth down to my navel.

“Is he with you?” she screeches. “You want to watch him, he’s round the twist. You heard what he said. He should be locked up.”

“In an asylum, Madam,” agrees Sid, “Anybody making a suggestion like that to you must be insane.”

“Hey, what do you mean,” says the old bag. “You trying to be funny or something? You’re no bleeding oil painting yourself.”

“That’s enough,” says the barman, “You two hop it.” He means Sid and me.

“Why should we?” says Sid. “We aren’t doing any harm. My friend merely asked the lady if she’d like a drink.”

“I heard what he asked the lady,” says the barman, “Now hop it before I call the police.”

“If you’re going to call anybody make it Hammer Films, mate,” says Sid. “They can’t start shooting till she turns up. ‘Daughter of the Vampires’, that’s what she’s in, and guess who’s playing mother!”

“Ooh, you little bastard!” The old bag swings her handbag, Sid ducks, and the barman catches it, smack in the kisser. You have to laugh. At least Sid and I do. The other two don’t seem to be finding it so funny. The barman shouts to the alsatian and before I can get really scared it has torn the old bag’s skirt off. By the time we get outside I am laughing so much I can hardly stand up.

“You did a bloody marvellous job in there,” says Sid all sarcastic. “My God, you came on strong. Nothing like getting to the point quick.”

“It’s no good with me if I don’t fancy a bird,” I say. “If my heart isn’t in it, nothing else is.”

“I don’t believe you could stick your old man in a fire bucket without someone shouting instructions through a megaphone,” says Sid. “What a bloody hopeless performance. That’s done it for me. You’d have both of us locked up on your first morning.”

“Come off it, Sid. You know it was an accident. I just got a bit flustered, that’s all.”

“Flustered?” says Sid. “Christ, I wonder you didn’t stick it in her hand and burst into tears.” I can see there isn’t much point in going on about it, so we walk across the common in silence. Dusk, as they say, is falling and I notice that Sid keeps taking a few strides and jumping as far as he can. I’ve never known him show any interest in athletics, apart from running away from hard work, so I ask him what he is doing.

“Trying to put the alsatian off the scent,” he says.

“You didn’t think of telling me, did you?”

“I was just going to mention it,” he says, managing to sound all hurt.

So I’m off across the common with a hop, skip and a jump and a right fairy I feel. Then Sid tells me to stop.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because I was taking the piss out of you, you stupid berk, and it isn’t funny any more.”

Sometimes I really dislike Sid.

We are near the boating pond by now and I can make out a few shadowy figures moving about in the darkness. Most of them are bent or on the game because the pond, after dark, is very much the place you wouldn’t arrange to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury. There are also a few anglers but their presence is a bit suspect, for the last fish must have coughed itself to death about ten years ago, and the surface is too thick with fagpackets and french letters that you’d need a half pound ledger to get through it. I reckon the anglers just want an excuse to get away from the old woman and have a bit on the side. I must confess, I’ve thought about it myself, but somehow I feel I need something more private for the first time.

“Look, Sid,” I say, my mind returning to the window cleaning, “couldn’t you just give me a trial? A couple of weeks maybe. I’m certain I could do the job. If I can’t, well, O.K. then.”

Sid is exploring the darkness and doesn’t seem to be listening to me. Eventually he sees what he’s looking for and, beckoning to me to follow him, makes towards the pond. By the water’s edge a fat old git is buttoning his oilskin trench coat and spitting words at a thin bird who is picking pieces of grass off her skirt. No prizes for guessing what they’ve been up to. The man bends down and reels in his line which, I notice, only has a weight on the end of it – no hooks. Presumably his technique is to whirl the weight round and round above his head and bash the fish over the bonce with it.

“Hallo, Lil” says Sid all cheerful like, “You busy?”

“With old kinky-coat” says the bird, “You must be joking. He exhausted himself screwing his rod together.”

The fat man says something ‘not nice’, as my mother would say, and collapsing his collapsible stool, hurries away.

“Lil,” says Sid, “I’d like you to meet my brother-in-law, Timmy. Timmy this is my aunty Lil.”

“Not so much of the aunty, ta.” says Lil. “Pleased to meet you Timmy. I don’t remember you at the wedding.”

“Timmy was detained elsewhere. He was giving her majesty pleasure.”

Sid’s aunty! What a turn up. She doesn’t seem old enough.

She’s not bad looking really. A bit tired and a bit skinny but not bad. Fancy her being on the game.

“She’s my mum’s youngest sister. Much younger.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I say. I have a nasty feeling that Sid has engineered our meeting with what the B.B.C. calls an ulterior motive in view. Sid immediately proves me right. Waiting no longer than the space of time it takes fatso to merge into the background he begins to speak.

“Lil,” he says, “with my friend Timmy, actions speak a bloody sight louder than words, or so he would have me believe. He’s not much of a chatterbox but he’s shit hot when it comes to the proof of the pudding. I’d like you to take him in hand or anything else you have to offer and give me your views.”

I start to say something but Sid shuts me up and sweeps Lil away into outer darkness. I hear them rabbiting away and then Lil nips back again all peaches and cream. Before I can say anything she’s kneading the front of my trousers like dough and steering me towards the wide open spaces.

“Hey, Sid—” I begin but there’s no stopping her.

“Don’t be frightened,” she murmurs, “Lil’s going to take care of you.”

The minute she opens her mouth with that quiet reassuring tone I can feel my old man disappearing like a pat of butter at the bottom of a hot frying pan. It’s about as sincere as Ted Heath singing the Red Flag. At the same time I realise that Sid is setting this up so he can see what I’m made of, and that after the last cock-up I can’t afford to blow it.

It’s in this uneasy frame of mind that I find myself wedged up against a tree with the lights of Clapham sparkling all around me and Aunty Lil’s hand pulling the zip of my fly out of its mooring.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” she grunts fumbling away, but my cock has got about as much sensation in it as a headline in ‘Chicks Own’.

“Come on, darling,” she pants, “don’t you want a nice time?”

“I feel we’re being watched” I say and it’s no exaggeration. Talk about Edward G. Robinson in ‘The Night Has A Thousand Eyes’. There’s a crackle of plastic macs around us like a crisp eating contest. That’s another thing I’ve got against Clapham Common. The public don’t only come to watch the football matches.

“Don’t worry about them,” says Aunty Lil soothingly, “they’re only jealous.”

Nothing is happening down below and I can see she’s getting a bit fed up. What with the beer and the tension I’m under, and all those dirty old buggers creeping round us like red indians, I don’t think it’s going to be one of my nights. Lil stops mauling me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Don’t worry about the money,” she says, “it’s on the family.”

I try and blurt out my thanks and in a desperate effort to get in the mood I attempt to kiss her. This is definitely not a good move, for she twists away as if I’ve sunk fangs into her neck.

“Don’t do that!” she snarls, “Don’t ever do that.”

It’s obvious that I’ve seriously offended her and I’ve since learned that a lot of whores don’t mind what you do to them below the waist but they reserve their mouths for their boyfriends – or girl friends since quite a few of them are bent. There is also the problem of smudged make-up and Clapham Common isn’t exactly crawling with powder rooms.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter.

“Get on with it,” she spits. I can see she’s had enough. I’m all for chucking it in but I think of Sid and some kind of pride drives me on.

“Come on, come on.”

I put my hands underneath her skirt and she sucks in her breath because they must be quite cold. She’s not wearing any knicks which is no surprise and I fumble till I find something like a warm pan scourer, Lil’s arms are round me and I’m gritting my teeth and staring over her shoulder towards the string of lights that run across the common. There’s a bit of something going for me down below now, so I grab hold of it and lunge forward until I feel myself secured between her legs. It’s really very disappointing after all I’ve read and heard about it, but at least I’m there. I put my hands behind her arse and start pulling her towards me. Sid should be quite impressed.

“Well,” says Lil, “aren’t you going to put it in?”

“I have put it in!” I gulp.

“You stupid berk. You’ve got it caught under my suspender strap.”

CHAPTER TWO

We return home in silence. At least I’m silent. Sid keeps pissing himself with laughter and has to be left behind to recover. I can hear him wheezing: “her suspender strap, oh my God,” and terrifying people out of their wits. I feel like belting him but I know it won’t do any good and frankly I’m a bit frightened of him anyway.

We live in a semi off Nightingale Lane which is the class street round these parts. In fact Scraggs Road is quite a long way off but my old mum always mentions the two in the same beery breath and the habit has rubbed off on me. Mum is very sensitive about her surroundings and I’ve heard her tell people we live at Wandsworth Common because she thinks it sounds better. I reckon its Balham myself but mum doesn’t want to know about that. She has a photograph of Winston Churchill in the outside toilet so you can see where her sympathies lie. It’s pretty damp out there and poor old Winnie is getting mildew, but when mum gets in there its like Woburn Abbey as far as she’s concerned.

When we lumber into the front room the family are grouped in their usual position of homage to the telly. Dad is dribbling down his collar stud and his hands are thrust protectively down the front of his trousers as if he reckons someone was going to knock off his balls the minute his eyes are closed. As he gets older he gets more and more embarrassing does dad. He must be the world champ at pocket billiards. Mum is sitting there guzzling down ‘After Eights’ and smoking at the same time so the ashtrays are full of fag ends and sticky brown paper spilling onto the floor. Rosie’s position has hardly changed since we went out except that her mouth has dropped open a bit as if her jaw has started melting. Her fingers are still clicking away seemingly independent of the rest of her body. Looking at her I have to confess that our Rosie is going to seed fast.

They are all watching ‘Come Dancing’ and every few seconds the birds make little exclamations of wonder and surprise as another six hundred feet of tuile and sequins hover into sight or Peter West cocks the score up. Dad’s head has lolled back and from the noise he is making it sounds as if his dentures are lodged in his throat.

“Did you have a nice time?” says Mum without taking her eyes off the set. She’d say that to you if you had just come back from World War Three.

“Alright” I say quickly before Sid can get his oar in. “We had a couple of jars at the Highwayman.”

Its amazing but on the mention of the pub Dad’s eyes leap open as if a little alarm bell has rung in his mind.

“Did you bring us back a drop of something?” he says.

“Sorry Dad” says Sid, “we moved out a bit sharpish and it quite slipped my mind.”

“Leave him alone Dad” says Rosie. “That’s a nice little dress isn’t it mum. Eh, Sid, how would you fancy me in that?”

“You’d look bloody nice on top of a Christmas tree” says Sid.

“It’s no good asking him,” goes on Dad, “he can’t even afford a bottle of brown ale for his father-in-law. You won’t get any dresses out of him.”

“I told you, to leave him alone Dad. Sid is saving up for the down payment on one of those new flats up by the common. He hasn’t got the money to keep you in booze.”

“I don’t want champagne and caviar. I just ask to be remembered, that’s all. A bit of common civility – that’s all I ask for. Bugger me, he isn’t bankrupting himself, the rent he’s paying to stay here.”

“Give over, Dad” says Mum. “You’ve already said all that. You know Sid is doing his best.”

“That’s what he tells me” says Dad, who is probably the most boring old git in the world when he puts his mind to it. “I haven’t seen any evidence of it – not even a single solitary bottle of brown ale.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” explodes Sid, “I can’t stand any more of this. I’m going to bed. Look, here’s some money. Go and buy your own bloody brown ale.” And he chucks two bob down at dad’s feet and slams out. Immediately everybody starts shouting and it’s all turning into another typical evening at the Lea’s. Rosie throws a tizzie and has to be comforted by Mum and they both turn on Dad while Peter West tells us it all depends on the result of the formation dancing. Dad is in a spot because you can see he wants to pocket the two bob but knows that if he does the women will really start riding him. He solves that one by picking the money up and resting it casually on the arm of his chair as if he was frightened that someone might trip over it. Rosie is ranting about how they both might as well get out because Dad has never liked Sid and Mum is trying to quieten her down, saying things like “ssh, think about the neighbours”.

She’s very neighbour-conscious is Mum. It nearly broke her heart when Mr Ngobla moved in next door with the five little Ngoblas. She’s dead keen that nothing untoward should take place which might make the Ngoblas suspect that they aren’t a great deal less refined than we are. “Is that really his wife?” Mum keeps saying. “I’d never have recognised her. They all look the same to me. No, of course I didn’t mean to give offence. I thought it was one of his – you know – one of his other ones.”

Dad is much more tolerant than Mum. He’s always leaning over the wall and explaining to them that many of our ways must strike them as being a bit strange and that a few years ago we had some pretty primitive customs ourselves. You can see them looking at each other when he’s talking.

Anyway, that’s nothing to do with this evening’s caper which ends with Central London winning by one point and Mum going off to make a cup of Ovaltine. Dad, choosing his moment well, pockets the two bob and shuffles off to bed. Rosie is still snivelling and showing no interest in professional wrestling from the Winter Gardens, Morecambe, which shows how serious things are. I turn the set off and for a few minutes we have to get used to the strange sound of our voices unaccompanied by the background noise of the telly.

“I should have married Rory,” sniffs Rosie, “that would have made Dad happy.”

Rory was a big silent slob who worked in a garage and used to leave greasemarks all over the settee. He and Rosie were very close for a while and it was a union Dad would have smiled upon since Rory’s old man owned the garage. They even went on holiday once. Rory and Rosie I mean, not his old man. A few months after that Rosie faints down at the palais and tongues start wagging backwards and forwards like wedding bells. They’ve got it a bit wrong though, for it’s about that time that Sid rolls up and Rosie falls like a pair of lead knickers. She nips off to see a friend of a friend one evening and comes back looking pale but relieved. A couple of weeks later they’re calling the banns. Rory is very cut up about it and saying how he’s going to smash Sid’s face in, but he never does anything. How much Sid knows about it all I’ve never found out.

“I saw Rory the other day,” I say. “He was asking after you.”

Now this is a complete lie and I don’t know why I say it but I just have the feeling that I might be doing myself a bit of good. Rosie looks really agitated.

“What did he say?”

“Said how about having a drink.”

“What me?”

“No, no. Me.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said fine.”

“Did he say anything else?”

I’m thinking very fast now. Rosie is obviously dead worried that Rory is going to start blabbing his mouth off. She also has a lot of influence over Sid. More than he’d care to let on. This might be what I’m looking for.

“Oh, he started saying there were a few things he’d like to tell Sid. He was a bit pissed, you couldn’t take him seriously.”

“I don’t want him near Sid.”

“You’ve nothing to worry about. He didn’t say he was going to glass him or anything.”

“No, well I still think its better that they don’t meet. Let bygones be bygones.”

“Yes, you’re probably right. Trouble is, Rory was talking about a job up at the garage and you know what Dad’s been like lately. I was thinking of taking it.”

It’s a fact that Dad has had the dead needle with me ever since I got back from Bentworth, and I usually get more of it than Sid. This evening’s little interchange has not been typical.

The reference to the job with Rory is obviously a master-stroke and I can see Rosie wriggling.

“It’s a bit difficult isn’t it,” I go on, “I mean, I’ve got to get a job and the garage seems favourite but I can understand your feelings about Rory. It would be difficult to stop him coming round here.”

“I haven’t got any feelings about Rory” she snaps, “I just don’t want him telling Sid a lot of lies about me.”

‘No, of course not.” I shake my head understandingly and then my face lights up as an idea suddenly comes to me. “I’ve just thought,” I say, “Sid was telling me that the old window cleaning lark was picking up a treat. Perhaps I could go in with him? Keep it in the family and all that. I’ve heard him saying he’s got more work than he can handle.”

I’m holding my breath and crossing my fingers and, by Christ, it works.

“That’s a good idea,” she says. “Why don’t you have a word with him about it?”

“I would but – you know – it’s his business, and what with him living here and me being family, I don’t want him to feel that I’m pushing it too much. You know what I mean? I think it would be much better if you could mention it to him first. Might make things easier with Dad too.” I soon learn that I’m overplaying my hand there.

“Dad can get stuffed,” she says, “he’s always had it in for Sid and now he’s beginning to do alright for himself he’s getting jealous.” He’s not the only one I think.

“Yes, you’re probably right. Well, if you could have a word with Sid and see if there’s anything going, I’d be very grateful, Rosie. I’m supposed to be seeing Rory tomorrow and he was pushing me for an answer so maybe I can say ‘no go’ and warn him off, so to speak.”

“I’ll talk to him tonight,” says Rosie firmly, “it seems a good idea to me, really it does. And if you can, see Rory doesn’t make any fuss – of course he can’t do anything but you know what it’s like.”

“Of course, Rosie, don’t worry yourself. I’ll see you alright. It’ll be a sort of tit for tat won’t it?”

She looks at me a bit hard but I give her my brotherly smile and I don’t think she suspects anything.

A few minutes later she goes to bed and I have my Ovaltine with Mum. It makes me think how I could have used all that malt, milk and eggs and added vitamins earlier in the evening. I can never understand how the stuff is supposed to give you more energy than you know what to do with and yet help you to sleep at the same time. Mum pushes off and I take a quick shufty in the hall stand where Dad keeps all the dirty books he’s ashamed to bring into the house. Things must be bad down at the lost property office where he works because there’s not so much as a censored copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ let alone the hard core porn he thrives on. Dad and his mates down at the L.P.O. are on to a good thing because, knowing that no one is ever going to come round and confess to having lost a fully illustrated copy of ‘Spanking through the ages’ they nick everything juicy they can lay their hands on.

My room is at the top of the house; in fact if it was any higher my head would be sticking out of the chimney, and I have to go past Sid and Rosie’s room to get there. Normally, at this time, I would be treated to the sound of creaking springs, but tonight I can hear Rosie rabbiting away and Sid making occasional muffled grunts that sound as if he’s got a pillow over his head. I hope she is getting stuck in on my behalf.

I lie in my bed, naked, and listen to somebody’s wireless playing a few houses away. Or maybe they’re having a party. Now that I don’t need it I’ve got a bloody great hard on and when I think of Silk Blouse, or even Aunty Lil, or any of the millions of birds who must be lying alone in bed and feeling like a bit of the other, I’m bloody near bursting into tears.

When I come down the next morning Sid is sitting there with his hands wrapped round a cup of tea and he’s giving me an old fashioned expression that tells me Rosie has been getting at him.

“Morning” I say agreeably. Sid doesn’t answer.

“You going down the Labour today?” says Mum.

“I went yesterday” I say. “I don’t want to look as if I’m begging.”

“Well, don’t leave it too long, dear, you know what your father is like.”

I help myself to a cup of tea and ask Sid for the sugar. He slides it across very slowly without taking his hand off the bowl. I think Paul Newman did it in ‘Hud’ but I can’t be certain.

“I had a talk with your sister last night,” he says.

“Oh, really.”

“Yes, I thought you’d be surprised.”

“Well, I didn’t know you talked to each other as well.”

“Don’t be cheeky” says Mum.

“Don’t suppose you’ve any idea what we were talking about?” says Sid.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well it was about what we were talking about yesterday.”

“Really? Oh, interesting.”

“Yeah. And to stop us poodling on like this any longer I might as well tell you that I’ve agreed to give it a go.”

“Great!” I say. “Ta very much. You won’t regret it.”

“Um, we’ll see.”

“What you on about?” says Mum.

“Sid and I are going into business” I say. “I’m going to be a window cleaner, Mum.”

“That’s nice, dear. Do you think he’ll be alright, Sid?”

“No” says Sid bitterly, “but you don’t expect much from a brother-in-law do you?”

“Now Sid,” says Mum, all reproachful, “that’s not very nice. That’s not the right spirit to work together in.”

“It’s alright, Mum,” I say, “he’s only joking, aren’t you, Sid?” Sid can’t bring himself to say ‘yes’ but he nods slowly.

“Today, you can do your Mum’s windows” he says, “It’ll be good practice for you. Tomorrow we’ll be out on the road.” He makes it sound like we’re driving ten thousand head of prime beef down to Texas.

“That’s a good idea” says Mum, “I was wondering when someone was going to get round to my windows.”

Sid gives me a quick demo and it looks dead simple. There’s a squeegee, or a bit of rubber on a handle, that you sweep backwards and forwards over a wet window and that seems to do the trick in no time. With that you use the classical chamois and finish off with a piece of rough cotton cloth that won’t fluff up called a scrim. It seems like money for old rope and I can’t wait to get down to it. Sid pushes off to keep his customers satisfied and I attack Mum’s windows. Attack is the right word. In no time at all I’ve put my arm through one of them and I’m soaked from head to foot. The squeegee is a sight more difficult to use than it looks. Whatever I do I end up with dirty lines going either up or down the window and it gets very de-chuffing rearranging them like some bloody kid’s toy. When I get inside it’s even worse because the whole of the outside of the windows look as if I’ve been trying to grow hair on them. That’s what comes of wearing the woolly cardigan Rosie knitted for me last Christmas. I get out and give the windows a shave and then I find that there are bits that are still dirty which you can only see from the inside. I’m popping in and out like a bleeding cuckoo in a clock that’s stuck at midnight. Inside at last and I drop my dirty chamois in the goldfish tank and stand on Mum’s favourite ashtray which she brought back the year they went to the Costa Brava. By the time I’ve cleaned up and replaced the broken window-pane – twice – it’s dinner time and I’m dead knackered.

Sid drops in to see how I’m getting on and you can tell that he’s not very impressed.

“At this rate,” he says, “you might do three a day – with overtime.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s a knack. It’ll come.”

Sid shakes his head. “What with that and your lousy sense of direction” he says. “I’ll be surprised if you last the first day.”

But he’s wrong. It doesn’t go badly at all. Sid starts me off at the end of a street and gives me a few addresses and though I’m dead nervous, I soon begin to get the hang of it. I drop my scrim down the basement a couple of times but there are no major cock-ups and nobody says anything. A few of them ask where Sid is but on the whole it’s all very quiet. In fact, if I wasn’t so busy trying to concentrate on the job I’d be a bit choked. After what Sid has led me to believe, these dead-eyed old bags look about as sexed up as Mum’s Tom after he had his operation. Curlers, hairnets, turbans, carpet slippers, housecoats like puke-stained eiderdowns – I was expecting Gina Lollamathingymebobs to pull me on to her dumplings the minute I pressed the front door bell. Perhaps Sid was having me on or perhaps, and this is much more likely, its some crafty scheme to con me into the business for next to nothing. Sid hasn’t been over-talkative about the money side of the deal. I do get one spot of tea but the cup has a tide-mark on it like a coal miner’s bath and I reckon the slag that gives it to me has the same. Perhaps Sid has purposely given me a list of no-hopers after my performance, or lack of it, with Aunt Lil.

This is a subject I tax him with when we’re having a pint and a wad in the boozer at lunch time but he is quick to deny it.

“Oh no,” he says, “I wouldn’t do a thing like that. No, it’s the school holidays, you see. That always calms them down a bit. You wait till the little bleeders go back – then you’ll be amongst it.”

I had to admit that a lot of kids have been hanging around asking stupid questions and generally getting in the way, so perhaps he’s on the level.

“Don’t worry,” he goes on, “I’ve got a little treat lined up for this afternoon. Very good friend of mine, she’ll see you alright.”

“Not Aunt Lil?” I say nervously.

“No. You won’t be seeing her again. Not if she sees you first.”

“Who is it then?”

“Nobody you know. Sup up and we’ll have a game of darts.”

And that’s all he will say. Of course it preys on my mind and I’m playing like a wanker. Two pints it costs me before Sid rubs the back of his hand against his mouth and looks at his watch.

“Right, off we go.”

It’s overcast and a bit sultry as we cycle along and I envy the way Sid handles his bike. With the ladder on my shoulders I’m wobbling all over the shop.

“Where are we going now, Sid?”

“You’ll see.”

We’re round the back of Balham Hill and I’m all of a tingle. What is Sid up to? We cycle past a row of lock-up garages and Sid hops off his bike and swings up his ladder all in one easy movement. I put both feet down and drop mine in the gutter.

“Clumsy berk,” says Sid.

Still with the ladder on his shoulder, he pushes open the gate of one of the semis and does a quick “dum, de, dum dum,” on the doorknocker before running his fingers through his hair and sucking his teeth. The door opens fast and there’s a bird of about thirty, standing there, wearing a short-sleeved blouse and a miniskirt. She has a large charm bracelet round her wrist and high-heeled furry slippers that make her look as if she’s balanced on a couple of rabbits. She has a bright-eyed cheerful face and it looks more cheerful when she sees Sid.

“Hallo Sid,” she says, and I can tell by her expression that he doesn’t have to threaten her with a gun to get through the front door. Her eyes wander over him as if trying to remember bits that she particularly likes and she steps to one side to let him in. Then she sees me.

“That’s my new mate, Timmy,” says Sid without turning his head.

The bird’s face clouds over for a moment and then snaps back to normal.

She gives me the all-over eyeball treatment and I feel as if I’ve been fed into an IBM machine.

“I never reckoned you needed any help, Sid,” she says drily.

“Very kind of you, Viv,” says Sid with dignity, “but you know how it is. You can’t stand still nowadays, otherwise you’re going backwards. If you’re going to get anywhere you’ve got to expand.”

“Fascinating” says Viv. “Well, did you just come round to tell me how it was going to be you and Charlie Clore from now on, or was there something else?”

“We’ve come round to do your windows, of course,” says Sid. “I just thought I’d introduce you to Timmy.”

“Very nice. Hello Timmy.” She half drops her eyelids as she smiles at me and it’s very effective.

“Timmy hasn’t had much experience—”

“—oh dear.”

“—and I’m keeping an eye on him for the first few days.”

“You always were thoughtful, Sid.”

“Yes, well, I’ll leave him to get on with it then.”

“So I won’t be seeing you again, Sid?”

“Oh yes. I’ll be around I expect, you know. I just thought that—”

Sid’s voice tails away.

“Yes?”

“Well, you know.”

“Yes.”

Viv smiles an understanding smile which is obviously aimed at adding to Sid’s discomforture – and succeeds. Seeing that things are getting sticky I decide to take the initiative and step forward smartish only to be brought to a sudden halt in the doorway.

“You don’t use that inside the house do you?” says Viv, “the rooms are quite small, you know.”

I mumble something and take the ladder off my shoulder. Stupid berk!

“Well, ta ta,” says Viv cheerfully.

“Ta ta, Viv! Be seeing you. I’ll see you later.”

“O.K. Sid,” I say and the door closes behind me.

“In there,” says Viv smoothing down her skirt, and her hands don’t have a lot of work to do, I can tell you.

“In there?”

“That’s right.”

Something about the way she says it makes me feel there’s going to be a bloody great four-poster behind the door but maybe it’s my imagination. I push the door open and I’m in the kitchen. She notices my surprise.

“You want to fill your bucket, don’t you.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

She watches me do it and starts fanning herself with the Daily Mirror.

“Bloody humid, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t stand this kind of weather. Makes me feel sort of itchy all over.”

“How long have you been with Sid?”

“On the window cleaning? Only today, but I’ve known him for a long time. He’s married to my sister.”

I wonder if I should have said that but Viv doesn’t seem over-worried.

“So you’re all living with your Mum and Dad?”

“That’s right.”

All this time she’s talking her eyes are wandering over me and there’s a sort of amused expression on her face. You don’t feel that she’s interested in any of the answers she gets but that she’s just trying to unwind you with conversation.

“I don’t think you’ll get any more in there.”

I turn off the tap and empty some of the water out of the bucket so it manages to spill across the floor.

“Don’t worry,” she squeezes me just above the bicep. “You get on with the windows. I’ll clear this up. You’re a strong boy, aren’t you?” She fans herself with the paper so her tits wobble.

“It’s so muggy, I’m going to take a bath. See if that doesn’t do any good. The bathroom curtains are in the wash, so don’t take any liberties, will you?” She reaches down underneath the sink and I practically need another pair of hands to keep the ones I’ve got from grabbing her. Talk about a nice arse. It shouldn’t be allowed, it’s so nice. Once you see that, all other arses are just bums.

I grab my bucket and get outside breathing deep. I do the downstairs windows and am just getting the ladder up and my blood pressure down, when I hear a tapping above my head. It really is very sultry now and the sky looks as if it’s going to piss down with rain at any moment. I’ve seen enough flicks to know that when nature starts rearing it’s ugly head someone usually gets their end away and I hope the signs do not lie. I am round the side of the house and the window from which the tapping is coming is clearly the bathroom as there is a stream of drain-bound soapy water splashing over my boots. Perhaps she has locked herself in and needs help. The very thought has me whipping up the ladder like a clockwork monkey. Viv is pressed against the window which should be alright because the lower half is frosted glass. However, she is pressed so tight that the first thing I see is a nice bit of milky white tit with a flattened nipple in the middle of it. She moves back when she follows my eyes.

“You alright?” I say.

“I haven’t had any complaints.”

“No. I mean I thought you’d, oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“I wondered if you’d like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, that would be nice. I’ve just got the front to do and I’ll pop in.”

“Right, I’ll put the kettle on.”

The inside of the window is steamed up, and there’s a cracking niff of perfume bashing my hooter. She needn’t have bothered because I’d go for her if she had a spoonful of dripping behind the ears – or would I? I can hardly finish the windows for thinking about it and three times I drop my scrim in the same flower bed and have to rinse the bastard out. I’ll never have a better chance to score and yet that very fact is making my old man feel like it would have difficulty making a dent in a plate of cold soup. It’s like having an empty goal to shoot at and knowing you’re going to bang the ball eight yards over the bar. For a second, I even considered pissing off and leaving the whole thing for another time but I know I’ve got to go through with it – or try to.

Taking another of my deep breaths and feeling absolutely certain that my old man has dropped off and got lodged half way down one of my trouser legs, I rap on the back door and wait for Viv’s husband to open it.

“It’s open” she calls and when I go in she’s just taking the kettle off. She’s still wearing the slippers but on the rest of her is one of those big padded housecoats with frills around the hem. It is tied tightly around the waist but somehow manages to spring apart up top so I get another eyeful of her bristols.

“Do you like it?” she says, and for a moment I’m on the point of telling her I like both of them. Then I realise she means the housecoat.

“Very nice,” I gulp. “Er, it makes you look very sexy.”

“You don’t sound very convinced,” she says. “How do you like it, hot and strong like Sid?”

She has this habit of suddenly switching from one subject to another which throws me a bit.

“You mean the tea?”

“What else?”

“Anyway it comes, I’m not fussy.”

“Why don’t you sit down. You make me nervous standing there.”

I sit down and find myself playing with the sugar bowl and trying to think of something to say.

“I think we’re going to have a storm,” I manage eventually.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” she puts a cup of tea in front of me and sits down on the other side of the table.

“Do you smoke?”

“No thanks.”

She lights a fag and blows a puff of smoke at me as if from a peashooter. She’s got that amused, distant look on her face again.

“Cheer up.”

That’s always a disastrous thing to say to me because it’s like telling a bloke you can see his trousers are falling down.

“I’m very happy” I say and listen to the silence. If only I could be like Sid. He’d be chatting her up and dancing about so the whole thing would be like ‘Spring in Park Lane’. The same though obviously occurs to Viv because she rests her head in her hand and gazes at me sadly.

“You’re a quiet one compared to Sid,” she says.

“Still waters.”

“Pardon?”

“Still waters run deep.”

“Oh, I see. You’re a deep one, are you?”

“Well, I don’t know about that—”

She gets up and comes behind me resting her fingers lightly on my shoulders for a second.

“How deep do you go?”

“What do you—”

“—It doesn’t matter. Have another cup of tea.”

She reaches down past me and her warm arm brushes against the side of my face. Now’s your chance, I shout to myself but by the time I get around to moving, she’s over the other side of the kitchen filling the teapot.

“There you are,” she says, “a nice cup of cha. Do you fancy a biscuit?”

“Yes, very nice. Ta.”

She couldn’t be more obliging but she’s obviously waiting for me to do something. So am I.

“Chocolate finger or a ginger nut?”

“Ginger nut, please.”

“I won’t join you because I have to watch my figure.”

“I should think you have a lot of company.” That’s not bad and I can see it goes down well.

“Cheeky. No, its alright for an old married woman, I suppose, but I have to work at it.”

“What does your old man do—” I say very casual.

“Oh, he’s in the navy. In Singapore at the moment, lucky basket. I can just imagine what he’s up to.”

I’m glad there are a few thousand miles between us.

“How long is he away for?”

“Oh, months at a time. Why, are you thinking of moving in?”

“It’s an idea.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic. I know some blokes who would jump at the chance.”

I would jump at it too if I wasn’t such a stupid tongue-tied twat. I can listen to myself like some gormless berk you overhear on the bus and feel sorry for, but I can’t get off my arse and tell her I want to fuck her. I feel it so badly I’m nearly crying but it’s stuck inside me and I don’t think anything is going to bring it out. Now, I can’t think of a thing to say. Not a single bloody little word. I’m sitting there concentrating and I know my face is setting as if its in a jelly mould. I’ve got to get out. The whole thing was a stupid mistake. Its much better if you stick to thinking about it. I stand up fast and my knee jars the tea cup across the table.

“Well—” And then it rains. It doesn’t just rain, it explodes. One moment there’s nothing and then the water is hitting the ground like bullets. One moment Viv is looking at me startled the next our eyes are pulled towards the window. Its frightening – and exciting. Watching it I forget my tensions and when she struggles to close the top window I help her and our bodies are touching and the rain’s splashing all over our faces. I don’t know whether she starts kissing me first or it’s the other way round but it seems like the most natural thing in the world and when I feel her beautiful soft mouth against mine I want to come, it’s so fantastic. Her housecoat falls open and I pull her down on the floor knocking over the garbage bucket as we go. All the rubbish spills out and for some reason I find myself looking at a tin which says ‘Honest Katkins – a satisfied cat or your money back’. But not for long. Viv is coming at me like eight drunken Irishmen locked in the ladies’ and she tears at my fly like it’s the way out of a burning building.

“Get it in, get it in!” she hollers and I’m struggling with my skin tight jeans in a graveyard of potato peelings. I tear my boots off with my feet practically still in them and she’s plucking the buttons off my shirt as if she’s shelling peas. Talk about ‘Beat the Clock’. At last I get my jeans off and she grabs my cock like it’s a lifebelt and she’s going down for the third time.

“Come here,” she howls, and I’m so twitched up I nearly do – on the spot. Once she’s got her hands on you you’d be a fool to try and resist and I’m inside her faster than a pouf on a choirboys outing. Then she really starts. If I didn’t know I’d think she’d just plugged herself into the electrical circuit. I’m not complaining mind you, but it’s all a bit overpowering for me considering it’s my first time and I soon realise that things are getting out of control.

“Yowee,” I howl and suddenly its like going over a bump on a toboggan incredibly fast. Everything speeds up and I hear myself shouting as if from the other end of a long corridor.

“Thank you, thank you,” I sob, “you’re marvellous, fantastic—”

Viv moves her head to one side and squints down my body.

“You’ve cut your heel,” she says, ‘We’d better put something on it before you bleed all over the mat.”

CHAPTER THREE

When I leave Mrs. Stanmore’s – that was Viv’s name because I saw an envelope with her address and a foreign stamp on it in the kitchen – I feel about a hundred feet tall. I’ve scored at last and I want to rush off and tell everybody about it. I am a bit disappointed that Viv seems so unaffected and is thumbing through the T.V. Times when I leave but you can’t have everything. The main thing was that I’ve got my end away, and on my first day too. I rolled my eyes at all the girls I passed and wonder if they knew what they are missing. And a married woman too. She must have been on the pill – or something. How should I tell Sid? For no reason that I can think of I terrify everybody waiting for a bus outside Balham Station by shouting ‘Up the Blues!’ and race myself home.

But I don’t have to tell Sid. A couple of hours later he comes in and chucks himself down in front of the telly. Mum was getting tea and Rosie is washing her hair. Dad is presumably down at the Linnet explaining to those who haven’t heard it before how he won the Second World War.

“How’s it go?” I say waiting for him to ask the same question.

“Much as usual. I brought your ladder back.”

That takes the wind out of my sails. Sid grins.

“Yeah, you start leaving those all over the place and its going to get expensive.”

“Sorry Sid, my mind just went blank.”

“Only just?”

I try and smile but I don’t really feel like it. What did Sid go back for? I don’t have to wait long to find out.

“Viv told me you had a little tussle. Very little I believe, You’ll have to do better than that with Viv, she’s a very greedy girl.”

It occurs to me that Sid has secretly been a bit jealous once he’s handed over his bird and hopped back smartish to see that everything is alright. His swagger suggests that he has been reassured that he is still Number One in the farm yard. Lucky old Viv. She’ll really be looking up when we take on a few partners. I can’t help feeling a bit choked about it but at the same time the fact that Sid might have been worried gives me confidence. I’ve never known him show any signs of flapping before.

“She didn’t seem overimpressed with you if you must know.” I lie.

Sid goes scarlet. “What did she say?”

“Oh, nothing really. It’s not worth talking about.”

“Go on. What did she say?”

“Well, she said – oh, no. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Sid.”

“She didn’t say anything. You’re lying.”

“That’s right Sid. I was just having a little joke.”

“She’s never complained to me.”

“No, of course not.”

Poor Sid. You can see him racking his mind to think of every single time he’s had it away with her.

“She said I was the best poke she’d ever had.”

“Well, there you are.”

“What did she say?”

“I told you Sid. It was nothing really.”

Sid is starting to speak again when Mum comes in with our tea.

“What you got lined up for me tomorrow?” I says to him all innocent like.

“You can get stuffed,” he snarls, and storms out, nearly knocking over Mum’s tray.

“What’s the matter with him,” she says. “You two haven’t been quarrelling have you? Not when you’ve only just started together. Oh, dear, that’s not very nice is it?”

“It’s alright Mum,” I say loud enough for Sid to hear before the front door closes, “he’s strained his groin and I was telling him to look after himself.”

That’s the last bit of spare I get from Sid and for the next few weeks our relationship is dead official. Every morning he gives me a list of addresses and tells me the area he wants me to cover and off we cycle in opposite directions.

My little adventure with Viv has totally changed my approach to women and I’m now a different person. It’s like learning to ride a bike. Once you find you can stay up there’s no holding you. In fact, looking back I think I overdid it a bit. I was all straining biceps and too-tight T-shirts; whistling through clenched teeth and bouncing about like the bloke who takes your money on the Giant Whip. I must have looked like the cover of ‘Butch Male’. Not that I didn’t realise there was room for improvement. I had sensed that Viv went off the boil pretty quickly, before Sid started riding me, and it was easy to tie this in with the fact that I’d been in and out of her faster than the Pope mistaking the local Synagogue for the Gents.

I went down the Junction and bought a book about it from one of those shops that you can never look in the window of without someone appearing beside you. I had exactly the right money and I threw it down and snatched up the book before the wet-lipped old pouf behind the counter had finished leering, “Do you need any other personal requisites?” at me.

It’s very interesting reading and I’m full of things I didn’t know, like birds taking longer to get warmed up than fellows. It occurs to me that if Viv was just getting into her stride she’d bloody kill you once she got going. Anyhow, I get the message that I’m supposed to stick around a bit longer and in this connection there is an interesting passage on something called ‘carezza’. With this you think about a subject totally unrelated to what you’re doing so you don’t boil over. In other words if you think you’re going to come, you immediately start concentrating on your grandmother’s budgerigar. It seems alright to me as long as you have a wide range of things to think about. I mean, I wouldn’t fancy getting a hard on every time I saw grandma’s budgie.

There’s also a lot of other stuff in the book which they say, to my relief, is quite normal. I had always thought I was kinky just thinking about it. At the back are some illustrations which are sealed so you can’t open them till you buy the book. I tear the pages open hungrily but there are only a couple of pictures of cocks and fannies with all their working parts and the posh names for them. Vas Deferens. It sounds like a pop singer.

Now, as you can imagine, all this fruity reading plus the taste I’ve had from Viv is making me keener than a new razor blade and I’m really keeping my eyes open. I don’t have long to wait.

“Don’t hang about out there,” she says, “You’ll catch your death.”

It’s turned a bit colder now and it’s a day that reminds you of what winter is going to be like. I’m standing under the only tree in her little back garden and I’m still getting wet.

“Rain is a nuisance isn’t it?” she says. “If it had started earlier I could have saved myself a few bob – I’m only joking of course.”

She touches my arm quickly to prove she means it. It’s a good sign that arm touching. Viv did it too. It’s like squeezing fruit in a greengrocers. It shows interest and concern. A desire to make contact.

“You’d better have a cup of tea now you’re here, hadn’t you? You know I’m quite glad you showed up. I’d been meaning to do something about the windows for ages. They’re a disgrace, aren’t they?”

She wasn’t one of the regulars on Sid’s list but a bird who had come darting out as I cycled past. A bit on the tall side but with big eyes and good legs. I like her.

“But it’s one of those things, like having the chimney swept. Somehow you can never bring yourself to do anything about it until the grate is full of soot.”

She’s rabbiting on as if she’s really glad to have someone to talk to. I suppose it must get a bit lonely when your old man is away all day and the children are at school and it’s pissing down with rain. The boozer’s shut and you’d get a few raised eyebrows if you went in there on your tod. You might go to the flicks but that’s like a morgue in the afternoon and some nutcase will probably start trying to touch you up. A cup of tea with one of your mates and a natter about the kids is the most you can look forward to. It’s not much is it?

“Sorry the place is in such a mess but I usually do the washing today. Could go down the launderette, I suppose, but I don’t fancy using the same machine as some coon. You know what I mean?”

It’s funny how after the first time I’m so relaxed. I’m letting her do all the talking and I’m thinking about her – not me.

“Still takes all sorts doesn’t it,” I say. “My old man can’t stand the Irish. Always on about the night they chucked one through the window of the Linnet. He’s dead funny like that.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me. I’ve nothing against them. There’s good and bad on all sides. It’s just that we got a few hard nuts round here.”

“Oh yeah, I’m not blaming you. I know what it’s like.”

We sip our tea and I look at her tits and don’t try to hide it. She notices because she sits back in her chair and sticks her chest out. There’s nothing there to give Sabrina a complex but at least she’s putting the goods on show.

“Still,” she says, “you don’t have to worry do you? Big, strong fellow like you knows how to look after himself.”

“Well, I try and keep fit. I play a bit of football and rugby netball.” I say modestly.

“I wish you could get my old man up there,” she says. “He’s gone off something rotten in the last few years. He used to be mad keen on sport but now he can hardly find the strength to turn the wrestling on.”

“Really,” I says, quite liking the way things are going, “that’s a pity. Why do you reckon that is?”

“Dunno. I think its the job. He works down the power station. I think the heat takes it out of him. He’s put on a lot of weight too.”

“You notice a difference?”

“Oh yeah, I notice a difference alright” she raises her eyes to the ceiling which is all flaky and curly like white wood shavings.

“I notice a difference. Look” – she glances round as if expecting someone else to be listening, “I shouldn’t be saying this to you, a perfect stranger—”

“I’m not perfect” I say.

“No, well – oh yes – very funny – well, where was I? – yes – our, what you might call, private life is non-existent these days.”

“You mean—”

“—Exactly. He just doesn’t want to know. Now, I read an article in the paper somewhere that most people do it at least twice a week – are you married?”

“No.”

“Well, twice a week that’s what they said.”

“Did you show the article to your husband?”

“That’s exactly what I did, I said ‘Arthur, you used to be quite a boy once. Now have a read of this’.”

“And did he?”

“Oh yeah! He glanced at it and then he threw it on the fire and said ‘I don’t want to know about all that rubbish, What’s on the telly?’”

“That’s diabolical, I mean its not as if you’re unattractive.”

“I’m not asking for compliments.”

“I wouldn’t say it unless I meant it. I think you’re a very handsome woman. Your old man doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

I can see she laps this up and it’s the first real lesson I learn about chatting up birds. If you’re stuck for something to say tell them they’re beautiful. They’ll always believe that. Even if you’re stuck with some right old slag, find something about her that doesn’t turn your stomach and say “Has anybody ever told you what smashing eyebrows you have?” or “Doreen, I never noticed your ears before, they’re beautiful”. Chances are they’ll be peering at themselves in the mirror for the rest of the evening and saying “He’s right, he’s right”, and they’ll be eternally grateful – or, at least if not eternally, you stand a good chance of getting your end away in the bus shelter on the way home.

Another thing to remember about married birds is that none of them reckon their old men appreciate them. Tell them this and you’re backing up their own judgement as well as flattering them, which can’t be bad. Anyhow, in this particular situation the bird’s hand is shaking with excitement as she pours me another cup of tea and I’m sitting back feeling I’ll soon have to start taking ugly pills.

“You know who you remind me of?” she says all intense like.

“Boris Karloff?” I say, modestly.

“No, stupid. Jackie Pallo.”

Jackie Pallo. I don’t reckon that very much. “Nobody’s ever told me that before.”

“It’s your body.”

“You haven’t seen my body.”

“I’ve seen enough of it to tell.”

“I don’t look a bit like Jackie Pallo.”

“Oh yes you do, look, I’ll show you.”

She pops out and comes back with a bloody great scrap book of male pin-ups going right back to people like Dana Andrews and John Payne. They must have been stuck in when she was a kid. Most of the up-to-date ones are telly stars and she certainly goes for beefcake. There’s hardly a bloke with a stitch on above the waist.

“There you are.” She points to a photo of Pallo standing on some poor berk’s chest with his hands clasped above his head.

“I don’t see it.”

“You must do.”

“I’m not very flattered.”

“You should be, I think he’s smashing. I go all – oh, I don’t know – when I see him.”

“Well, I am flattered then.” I puts my hand on her thigh and gives it a squeeze. She doesn’t touch my hand but looks right past me and her bottom lip starts trembling. I take my hand away.

“I’ve got another one somewhere. I think it’s upstairs.”

“I’ll help you look for it.”

“It’s a bit of a mess up there.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it may be in the kids room.”

“Let’s look there.”

She’s going up the dark stairs ahead of me and I can hear her stockings swishing against each other. Round the bend on the landing and I can see the line of her bra and the bulge of its clip against the small of her back. I’m getting so worked up I can hardly wait to get through the door.

“Now, where did I see it?”

It’s a small room with two kids’ beds close together and the walls covered with pictures of Chelsea Footballers flashing their muscles and looking sickeningly confident. I know how they feel.

She drops on one knee, between the beds, and I’m down there with her like her own shadow. She starts rummaging around a pile of comics and when she turns round I’m right on top of her. I try and kiss her but she pulls back and puts her hand on my arm.

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’m trying to kiss you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t do that.”

This is another little performance you have to learn to get used to. A bird will sandbag you and drag you back to her place but once she gets you there she’ll suddenly start acting all coy and saying things like “do you really think this is a good idea?” or “you just want me for my body”. Bloody stupid, unnatural things that make you want to say “alright then” and piss off. But of course you never do because by that time you’d put a ring on her finger to get your end away.

“Oh, let me kiss you,” I bleat, “don’t be cruel. I think you’re smashing, I really do.”

She makes a bit of token resistance and then comes down on both knees to make herself more comfortable.

“Suppose my old man were to come home?” The minute she says that I know I’m in like Flynn.

“He couldn’t say anything could he. He neglects you.”

I put my hand up her skirt and start kissing her again. She’s good at that and allows herself a couple of satisfied moans.

“You can’t stay long, the kids will be back from school soon.”

We struggle onto the bed and I start fiddling for the hook on her skirt.

“Close the door first.”

I get up and close the door and she’s lying on the bed with her skirt up round her waist, and her face flushed. I sit down on the edge of the bed and start taking my shoes off. There’s a hair pin hanging down by her ear so I take it out and kiss her very gently.

One thing to remember when you’re undressing in front of a bird is to do it in the right order. Get your shoes and socks off first, then your shirt, trousers and pants, if you wear any. I can never understand all those jokers in dirty photographs running around with just a pair of socks on. Always seems very crude to me.

Anyway, I go through this palava until the bird, whose name I haven’t yet discovered, gets a spot of the full frontals without having to turn her telly on.

“He’s very naughty,” she says stretching out her hand, and it’s a fact that I’m standing to attention better than the brigade of guards. I settle down beside her and after a bit more cuddling, because I’ve been reading my book, remember? I unhook her skirt and start to pull it off.

“There’s a zip,” she says. I find that and we’re off again.

So are her pants and tights. I’m starting to unbutton her blouse when she grabs my hand.

“That’s enough,” she says.

It’s a funny thing that, and its one of the differences I find between upper and working class birds. Your upper class bints likes nothing better than to tear all her clothes off and run around starkers showing you everything she’s got, and proud of it, but most of the stuff I tumble with only take their knickers off. Flashers like Viv are the exception. I don’t know whether it’s because working class families live on top of each other and have to be more careful in case the kids suddenly come bouncing in, or because they reckon the whole thing is a bit dirty and least seen soonest mended. Anyway, this bird is dead typical.

“Go on,” I say, “you’ve got lovely breasts.” Notice I don’t say tits. It’s because I’m trying to be romantic and ‘breasts’ seem the right word to use, but I have since learnt that with an upper class bird you’d be much better telling her she had a nice pair of bristols. They go for it if you talk dirty to them, whilst a bird like this one will go spare if you say ‘cock’ when you’re on the job.

“No,” she says, “you mustn’t do that. You just be nice to me, that’s all.” I know what she means so I drop my hands down below and rummage around in her tea-cosy. It’s as slippery as a snail’s front doorstep and twice as inviting. The very feel of it sends electric currents racing round my old man.

“What’s that?” she says suddenly.

“It’s my hand.” I says.

“No, I meant that noise.”

She half sits up and I stop quivering with excitement and start trembling with fear. Our ears strain into the distance and I hold my breath waiting for the sound of footsteps on the stair.

“I can’t hear anything.”

“No, it must have been my imagination. The house creaks a bit sometimes.”

She drops back again and pulls me down to her.

“Sorry, put him in now. I can feel he’s ready for it.”

The habit of talking about my prick as if its something I take round with me on the end of a lead does not appeal very much but I don’t think this is the moment to point it out to her. She’s stroking me up a treat and she must use the right washing-up liquid because her fingers are soft as putty. I don’t need any more urging and I’m inside her easy as wanking. It’s all very pleasurable except for the creaking bed springs and the feeling that I’m going to come any moment. In fact the bedsprings are a help, because I’m so busy imagining someone creeping upstairs under cover of the noise that it quite takes my mind off sex which in turn stops me from boiling over. It’s a kind of enforced carezza but it can’t last for ever because the bird is becoming increasingly noisy and violent which excites me out of my tiny mind.

“Oh no – yes – go on, go on! oh no – stop! no – I can’t – oh yes, no!”

She rabbits on like this so if you was really trying to do what she wanted you’d go round the twist or jack it in in disgust. Experience has taught me that when a bint is sexed up you might as well forget anything she says. You’re better off just wacking away till you hear the old death rattle – if you stop that’s always wrong.

But I’m skating on a bit. On this particular afternoon in late September it’s me who’s hanging on for dear life. Like the book says I’m trying to think of everything under the sun to stop myself from coming – hobnail boots, Jimmy Young, bulldogs, old gramophone records – but it’s no good. I’m just on the point of surrendering to my baser emotions when the bird starts tugging at my arse as if she’s trying to get the whole bloody lot of me inside her and starts hollering ‘Now, now, now!’ Well that’s it. I accept her advice gratefully and a few moments later I’m lying on top of her damp blouse and struggling to get my breath back. It’s dead ungrateful, I know, but the moment I’ve come I wish I could press a button and make her disappear. I just don’t want to know anymore. It seems bloody ridiculous that I could have been so worked up just a few minutes before. Beneath me the bird gives a little wriggle to tell me that she wants me to move and when I don’t carefully eases herself into a more comfortable position.

“What’s your name?” she says softly.

“Timmy.”

“That was nice, Timmy. I’d almost forgotten what it was like.”

“Yeah, good.” I give her a little squeeze while I’m wondering how to get out. With Viv it was easy. I might have been in the Casualty Department of a hospital. She just gave me a plaster for my foot, we dressed and I went home. Dead simple. As it happens my latest turns out to be less of a problem than I imagined – at least in one way.

“My name’s Dorothy – what’s that?”

This time there is something. The front door slamming and the sound of feet pounding up the stairs – two of them. Kids voices shouting the odds.

“Oh yes I did!”

“You bleedin’ didn’t!”

“Get out,” hisses the bird. She’s off the bed like its white hot, and whipping on her skirt. She rolls up her drawers and tights and throws them on top of the cupboard. Quick thinking. I’d be impressed if I had time.

“Stop them,” I whisper while I fumble for my socks. She’s so red she might burst. She takes one look at me which hasn’t got an ounce of expression in it and goes out fast. I can sympathise with her. It can’t be much fun to have your kids find you on the job with the window cleaner.

“Look at that carpet. How many times have I told you to wipe your feet before you go upstairs.”

“But Mum—”

“Don’t ‘but Mum’ me. You can go right back and do it properly.” I hear her voice and the squeaks of protest descending to the hall. Now, how am I going to get out? I’ll have to pretend that I was cleaning the windows. I haven’t brought any of my stuff up with me so what am I going to use? In a flash of inspiration I remember Dorothy’s knicks and tights. I nip up on one of the beds and fish them down from the top of the wardrobe. There’s a toilet next door so I dip them in that and give the windows a quick rub over. Luckily it’s stopped raining about an hour before so it doesn’t look too stupid. There’s a nosy old bag opposite peering at me round a curtain but I don’t worry about her over much. She can’t possibly see what I’m cleaning the window with.

Downstairs and I shove the undies in the bottom of my bucket and smile at the kids. They look at me a bit old-fashioned though it’s probably my imagination.

“That’s it, lady, fifteen bob if you don’t mind. Thank you very much. Ta ta, be seeing you.”

I hop on my bike and start cycling down the street with the funny feeling that none of it really happened. Round the corner in front of me a bloke of about thirty-five is crossing the road. His hair is beginning to go and there’s a dead fag gummed between his lips. He’s fat and scruffy and looks like about ten million other blokes who have got one of their mates to clock out for them and shuffled home early for Bird’s Eye fish fingers and an evening in front of the telly. I know that if I turn round and watch he’ll go into the house I’ve just left. But I don’t turn round.

CHAPTER FOUR

“What’s this then?” says Mum.

She’s got a packet of ants’ eggs in one hand and Dorothy’s undies in the other. Like a good mum she’s started to hang my rags out over the cooker – nosy old bag. Sid nearly chokes on his eggs and bacon.

“Didn’t you know, Mum,” he says, “Timmy’s the demon knicker nicker of Clapham. Your smalls aren’t safe on the line when he’s about. Don’t you ever read the Sundays?”

From the look on Mum’s face I can see she half believes him.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” she says, shaking the stuff under my nose.

“It’s just a joke, Mum.” I start to say desperately, “I put them there myself for a laugh.”

“You want to see under his bed, Mum,” goes on Sid, “there’s two suitcases full of the stuff. I’ve seen him at night, sitting up and counting it. He keeps a list of it all in a little notebook.”

“Timmy!” I can see he’s got Rosie going now. It makes you realise what your own family really thinks of you. They’d probably believe Sid if he said I had a couple of bodies under my bed. Luckily, Dad is upstairs with one of his turns – that’s when he turns over and says ‘fuck it, I’m going to stay in bed all day’. He’d probably run out and start yelling for a copper if he was here.

Sid holds an imaginary microphone under my hooter and puts on his lah-di-dah voice.

“Tell me, Mr Lea, when did you first experience the uncontrollable urge to steal ladies’ underwear that has made you the terror of S.W.12?”

“About the same time as I felt the uncontrollable urge to shove this bread knife up your bracket,” I say. “For God’s sake, Mum, you don’t believe him, do you?”

“Where did you get those panties from then?” says Rosie.

“I bought them—”

“—he’s dead kinky, too,” interrupts Sid, “Go on, take your trousers off and show them what you’re wearing. You never seen such—”

“Shut up!” I yell. “I bought them for a girl friend but they were the wrong size, so I thought I’d have a little joke.”

“You haven’t got a girl friend,” says Rosie.

“That’s all you know. I don’t tell you everything.”

“She must be a funny shape if they don’t fit her,” says Sid, holding up the knickers. “You could get into them, couldn’t you Rosie?”

“Don’t talk dirty and put those things down.” says Mum. “What I can’t see is why you didn’t take them back and change them if they was the wrong size?”

With everybody in the family a bleeding Perry Mason, I might as well give up. I should have told them that Sid put them there to start off with.

“They wouldn’t take them back because they were worn,” I say.

“You mean she had to put them on before she found they wouldn’t fit?” says Rosie.

“No, he did,” said Sid.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“I should hope not,” says Mum, “the very idea.”

It’s amazing how they go on treating you like a kid, isn’t it?

“It all sounds very fishy to me,” says Sid. “I reckon you’d better come clean and open those suitcases. If you took everything back and said you were sorry—”

“He doesn’t want to do that,” says Rosie, “Better to burn them.”

“Everybody’s going to see.”

“Not if he does it at night.”

“Look a bit funny, won’t it, having a bonfire in the middle of the night?”

“Why don’t you all wait till Guy Fawkes day and then get Sid to stand on the fire instead of a guy?” I say. “By God, I’ve never heard such a load of cobblers in my life. Can’t you see that Sid is having you on? There’s nothing under my bed except fluff. I wouldn’t have believed you could have thought so little of me.”

I knock back my tea and push the chair away from the table. They’re all a bit quiet now and Mum and Rosie are definitely looking guilty. I decide to blow my nose to show them how affected I have been by their unkindness and remove my handkerchief with a flourish. Trouble is that in my hurry that morning I have grabbed a hanky down from the clothes line in the kitchen and – yes, that’s right – it’s not a hanky, it’s a pair of Rosie’s drawers. I notice the expressions on their faces first, and honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Even Sid looks at me as if I’ve got blood running down my chin. A glance shows me what I am raising to my nose. Light blue, with a touch of grey lace round the bottom. I start to say something but it’s no good. Everybody is still staring at the knickers like they’ve started ticking. I throw them on the table and Rosie shrinks back in her chair. None of them will say a word. I start to speak again and their eyes slowly swing up to my face marvelling that they could have lived with me so long without suspecting. There’s no point in going on so I stumble out.

I don’t know what they say when I’ve gone but I do know that to this day the subject of underwear makes my mother wince and you don’t see any bras or panties hanging up in our back garden.

As the next few weeks go by I realise that there are quite a few Dorothys about, and I begin to be able to recognise the kind of bird who will be asking you to help her move the dressing table from one side of the bedroom to the other, five minutes after she’s opened the front door. She’s usually been married about seven years – take it from me, the seven year itch is no fairy story – and the last of the children has just begun school, so she’s suddenly got a bit of free time on her hands. Her old man is a dead end nine to fiver, and she’s as bored with him as she is with having nothing to do. She’s read all the stuff in the Sundays about wife-swapping and troilism and she reckons that not only must it be alright to do it but that she is the only bird in the world who isn’t. She’s also unlikely to have thrown it around much before she got married so she reckons she missed out there too, and is dead keen to make up for it. Her trouble is that until she’s done it a few times she’s liable to confuse her natural desire for a bit on the side with love, which can stir up all kinds of problems. Once a customer starts baking cakes for you, or slipping bottles of after-shave lotion in your pocket, you’re better off giving it a miss, believe me.

I remember poor Sid going through a very embarrassing period with this bird who started coming round the house and asking if he could do her windows. She was round there about once a fortnight which was bleeding ridiculous. Added to that, she’s always be walking past dressed up as if she was going to her old man’s funeral. Sid was scared to go out of the house and Mum was giving him the old dead eye. She had a bloody good idea what was going on. Luckily, Rosie had this job in the supermarket so she never twigged. God knows what she would have done if she had. How Sid got rid of that piece I don’t know, because he never talked to me about it, but one day I suddenly think I haven’t seen her for a while and that’s the end of it. Since the business with Viv, Sid has kept his activities very quiet and I think he regrets having opened his mouth that first time up at the Highwayman.

One of the most interesting things about the job is the opportunity it gives you to have a shufty at how other people live. Everybody likes having a poke round somebody else’s place to see what they’ve got. My old Mum for instance. Every time there’s a house in the street for sale she goes round there. She’s no intention of moving, it’s just that she wants to see what kind of wallpaper they’ve got and whether there’s an indoor kasi. She’s also potty on going round the nobs’ houses in the country and coming back and rabbiting on about their stuff as if it’s a dead ringer of hers.

“Little fireplace in the kiddies’ room,” she’ll say, “it had exactly the same tiles as our front room. Very similar, anyway.”

I’m a bit like Mum in a smaller way and there was one job about that time that really sticks in my mind. It was up by the common and one day I’m cycling along when this old bird comes running out holding a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and waving a walking stick.

“Young man, young man,” she calls out. “Are you a window cleaner?”

I feel like saying no, I always cycle around with a ladder in case I forget my front door key, but I don’t, and she says she has a job for me. As I look at her, I notice that what I first thought was a flower pattern on her hat is in fact bird droppings but I imagine she has just been unlucky and follow her into the semi-circular drive of this bloody great house. There’s newspapers and rubbish strewn everywhere and though I’ve been past the place before, I never thought anybody lived there. By the look of the windows, they can’t do, unless they’ve got bleeding good eyesight because they don’t look as if they’ve been cleaned since they were put in.

“It’s gonna cost you a few bob to clean that lot,” I say, because frankly I don’t fancy the job.

“Only the downstairs windows,” she says. “We’re all downstairs.”

That strikes me as being a bit funny because I can’t imagine a lot of people living there. Maybe they are the survivors of a Victorian hippie commune who can’t stand heights. Anyway, we haggle a bit and I agree to do the downstairs windows for a couple of quid. I’m following her up the front steps when I take a butchers through one of the bay windows. I can hardly see anything they’re so dirty, but there seems to be a lot of movement at floor level which puzzles me. I start to take a closer look but the old bird – “My name is Mrs. Chorlwood” – sends me round the back sharpish. “I’ll open the back door for you,” she says. “I don’t want you frightening them.”

Them? What has she got in there? I move round the house very careful-like, and something knocks against one of the windows from the inside which gives me a start, but I can’t see anything. The garden must have been very nice once, but now it’s all overgrown and there are weeds pushing through the concrete in the bottom of the dried up ornamental pond. I’m surprised they haven’t torn the whole place down and built a block of flats there.

When I get round the back, Mrs. Chorlwood is waiting for me and that’s not all. There’s a pile of empty catfood tins large enough to have fed half Brixton. They pong a bit, too, but that’s nothing to what I find in the kitchen. A large saucepan is bubbling away on a filthy greasy stove and the stink attacks you. There are tins of cat food and packets of birdseed everywhere and a slice of horsemeat from something that must have been running before the war – the Boer war. The sink is blocked up and you can’t see the pattern on the lino for all the muck that has been trodden into it.

Mrs. Chorlwood picks up a carving knife and for a moment I’m getting ready to bash her over the head if she tries anything.

“Din dins time,” she says with a sigh. “It’s hard work cooking when you have a family my size. Now, don’t open any of the windows whatever you do, we don’t want anyone getting out.”

By this time I’ve got a good idea what I’ve let myself in for, but I don’t know half of it. Mrs. Chorlwood opens the kitchen door and the pong hits me like a kick in the stomach. Cats. Gawd strewth it’s diabolical! The hall and stairs are crawling with bloody cats which make a great rush for us the moment they see Mrs. C. You can’t put your foot down without standing on one of their turds and the carpets are soggy with piss.

“Naughty, naughty,” says Mrs. C. “Oh, you naughty Jezebel. Not time for din dins yet. Now come on, Pansy, don’t scratch, dear.” She presses forward and I see that the place isn’t only full of cats. Up above, there’s a flutter of wings and we’re being dive-bombed by a flock of bloody pigeons. The picture rails are thick with droppings, the walls are spattered and there’s even a nest behind one of the light brackets.

“They get very excited about lunch time,” says Mrs. C. Too bloody right they do. One of the cats has practically got my boot off and I have to restrain myself from giving it a boot up the backside.

“I think she’s taken to you,” says Mrs. C. “Sabrina is usually rather reserved at first.”

“Don’t you ever let them out?” I say, giving Sabrina a sly jab when Mrs. C. isn’t looking.

“Out!?” says the old bag looking at me as if I’m bonkers. “Into a world like this? Nobody loves animals any more. Look what they do to each other. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let these innocent creatures fall into the hands of the vivisectionists.” I wouldn’t fancy the vivisectionists’ chances if they got their hands on the likes of Sabrina but it’s an opinion I keep to myself.

“Don’t they fight?” I say. “I mean, surely the cats must be after the birds the whole time.”

“This is no microcosm of the world,” says Mrs. C. seriously. “It is an oasis, a sanctuary where wild creatures can live in peace with each other. They all have enough to eat so there is no need for the law of the jungle.”

“What’s that one eating, then?” I say.

I am pointing to a monstrous moggy with a pile of feathers sticking out of its mouth.

“Oh, you wicked Rufus,” says Mrs. C. flying at him. “You wicked, wicked cat. How many times has mummy told you not to do that?” Rufus draws away arching his back and showing his teeth without dropping a feather. Honest, I wouldn’t fancy my chances against him on a dark night.

“They must be hungry,” says Mrs. C. “Really it’s a shame you have to see them when Rufus is playing up. Normally they’re as good as gold.”

She opens a door and we’re in one of the rooms at the front of the house. It’s large but dark because the windows are so caked with bird shit they appear opaque. The carpet must have been worth a few bob in its time but now you’d be better off selling the bird shit on it for manure. In the middle of the room is a telly and two pigeons are perched on the indoor aerial above it. Mrs. C. switches on the set and as the announcer comes up one of the birds disgraces itself all over him. I rather like that, but Mrs. C. doesn’t seem to notice.

“They like the television on,” she says. “Keeps them company when I’m not here. Well, there you are, this is one of the rooms I want you to do. Remember, keep those windows closed.”

“Excuse me asking,” I say, “but why do you want the windows cleaned?”

“So the little chaps can see what’s happening outside. It is getting a trifle dim in here.” She says it as if it is stupid of me not to have noticed it for myself.

“I’m going to get the animals their lunch now. Would you like something?”

“No. No thanks. I’ve just eaten.” I nearly shout it at her. The thought of eating anything out of that kitchen practically makes me spew my ring up on the spot.

“Very well. I’ll just bring you a cup of tea.”

I tell her not to bother but she’s already gone. That leaves me nothing to do but get on with the job. I tell you, I’ve never known anything like it in my life. The pong must be scarring the inside of my nostrils and every time I get a window clean, some bloody bird comes and shits all over it. After a while I let them get on with it. I just want to get out. It takes me all of ‘Watch with Mother’ to clean six panes of glass.

Suddenly there’s the sound of Mrs. C. rattling some tins and the room clears faster than Glasgow on a flag day. Then she comes in with my mug of tea. At least, I suppose it’s a mug. There’s what looks like bird seed floating on top of it and I don’t know quite what it’s been standing in – I can guess though. Poor old Mrs. C. She really is a case. Her hands are raw and scratched and there’s muck all over her clothes which she either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about. I pretend to drink the tea and when she goes out I pour it into one of the geranium pots. As I suspected there’s some more bird seed stuck together at the bottom.

When I get in the fresh air I feel like I’ve just come out of the nick again. I sweep my rubber across the windows and it’s like looking into one of those cages at the zoo. All the cats milling around her legs and Mrs. Chorlwood chattering away to them like kids. She sits down in front of the telly – just knocks a few turds off a wing-back chair and sits down – and they’re all trying to get up on her lap the minute her arse has touched the chair. Trouble is they don’t look like cats to me. They seem more like rats. A living blanket of rats.

“Come back in a couple of months,” she says when she pays me. “I expect we’ll need you again then.”

But I don’t go back. I think about it sometimes and I can imagine her in that chair one afternoon, dropping off and not waking up again. And the cats and the birds waiting for their food; and no way of getting out and, after a while, nothing to eat. The telly going on the blink and being the only living thing in the house, flickering and chattering away. That’s the time the rats would hear the telly and nothing else and start sticking their noses out of their holes, and maybe that picture I saw through the window would be right. Mrs. Chorlwood with that living, twitching blanket on her lap … You can see why I didn’t go back, can’t you?

Earlier on I said that Dorothy was a pretty average sample of the kind of bird you have it away with on this caper. She wants a bit of company, a bit of a change and a bit of the other. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t other kinds – any number of them – but at least once you’ve got to the point with them your problems are usually over. I mean, if it was any other way, there wouldn’t be any point would there? – or would there? You’d have to ask Mrs. Armstrong that because I was never able to. I could never ask her anything.

Mrs. Armstrong lived in one of those large detached houses in Nightingale Lane with a flight of steps going up to two Samson-size pillars which supported a balcony so they didn’t feel starved of a purpose in life. She is what my mother would call a handsome woman and definitely upper class in a way that puts the mockers on you. I mean, though she’s attractive you’d never think of trying it on with. her. It would be like wolf-whistling at the Queen Mother. She has an aristocratic hooter with a bend in it, piercing grey eyes and a very good figure for a woman of forty-plus, which is what I imagine she is. She’s a bit of a twinset and pearls type but her stuff always fits beautifully and she smells nice. I say all this but at the time I hardly noticed it, if you know what I mean. She was just the woman who opened the door and stepped to one side as I went through. As I remember, nothing at all happened the first time but when I next go round it’s in the afternoon and she asks me if I’d like some tea when I’ve finished. I say yes, thinking she means a cuppa, but when I come down she takes me into the front room where there is a trolley loaded with cakes and toast cut up into thin bits and a silver teapot and its friends. I look round for someone else but she waves me to sit down and starts filling a couple of cups. It’s not easy to park myself because the settee is one of those ones you either perch on the edge of or plunge down into and it takes me a bit of wriggling before I can get into a position to receive my cup.

“Two lumps?”

Mrs. A. drops them in with a pair of tongs as if they’re the final ingredient in a Doctor Frankenstein experiment. Since my experiences with Viv and Dorothy I’ve been quite at ease in this kind of situation but with Mrs. A. gazing past me out of the window my hands feel about eight sizes too large for the cup and I drop the spoon down the side of the settee. It’s the old upper class hypnotism I suppose. If she was Dorothy I’d be chattering away nineteen to the dozen. She has got nice legs though. I do notice that. She’s sitting on a pouf – a leather one, I hasten to add – and I can see quite a bit of them.

“I don’t think you’ve met my daughters.” She nods towards the mantelpiece and for a moment I expect to see them sitting up there. In fact, there’s one of those great leather wallets full of photos of everybody including the nursemaid’s dog, and beside it a very posed photograph of two birds holding bunches of flowers. They must have been bridesmaids or something. Anyway they are both lookers and I say so. Mrs. A. nods graciously but continues to avoid my eyes as if she might catch something from them.

“When they’re home,” she sighs, “it’s absolute bedlam. They are attractive, as you say and I have young men round here in droves.”

I’m not certain what a drove is but I imagine it’s one of those flash wop sports cars. Alright for some, I think to myself.

“Where are they now?” I say.

“Oh, Fiona’s nursing at Guys and Viccy is at Sussex – University, you know.”

I didn’t. I mean if she’d have said Manchester, should I have reckoned she played on the wing for United?

“Of course, these boys do lead to some unexpected problems. Very flattering, though.”

I nod understandingly and wonder what she is on about.

“Do you find older women attractive?”

I think of Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. I can never understand what all the fuss is about. I mean they are a bit past it, aren’t they?

“Up to a point,” I say. “I mean, within reason.”

“They’re not mine,” she says, indicating the photograph. “They’re by my late husband’s first marriage. I think she must have been rather an insecure woman. People who know her suggested she had a jealous nature and I think it’s carried over into the children.”

I accept another piece of toast and bite into it so the butter runs down my chin. Mrs. A. is still looking out of the window and doesn’t notice.

“I mean you’d think they’d be flattered if someone found their mother attractive, wouldn’t you?”

I don’t think so at all, in fact it seems a bit disgusting even Dad finding my Mum attractive; though that must have been a long time ago. I start to say something but Mrs. A. rabbits on.

“This Johnathan, I can’t even be certain that was his name. Anyway, he drinks too much at one of their terrible parties and we put him to bed. Poor boy, I know he’s always had a thing about me – I mean it’s perfectly natural, perfectly harmless. I’m trying to calm him down and Fiona comes in. Heavens, you should have heard the things that girl called me.

“She totally lost control of herself. It was so embarrassing. What everybody else thought, I’ve no idea. Poor Johnathan, he was the one I was worried about. He was so upset he never came near the house again – and you can’t blame him.” She takes the empty tea cup out of my hand and sits down next to me on the sofa tugging her skirt down towards her knees.

“Then there was Rollo. Now, he was a charming boy – absolutely charming. Much too good for Viccy. She treats him so badly it’s incredible. I think he turned to me because of it. At least one can be civil, can’t one, but young people today – I know everybody says it but it’s true – young people are so thoughtless, so ill-mannered, it really does upset me. Anyway, on this occasion they were playing tennis and Rollo falls and grazes his leg quite badly. Do you know, all Viccy can do is laugh at him? It really was so cruel. I was mortified. I took him up to the house to put something on his knee and made him lie down on this very sofa.” She pats it like an animal. “Now perhaps it was the brandy, or me in my tennis things – I don’t know what it was – anyway, poor Rollo suddenly becomes terribly affectionate – I mean you can’t blame him the way that girl treats him. I suppose I should have told him to behave himself, in fact I’m certain I did, but he was such a sweet boy. Nothing happened, of course, I wouldn’t have let it, but Viccy comes leaping through the door – she’s quite a big girl really – and the language. I don’t know where she heard words like that – certainly not from me, though I can’t speak for her real mother. It’s much quieter here when they’re both away.”

All the time she has been saying this, her hand has been creeping along the back of the settee and now it is ruffling the hair on the back of my neck. I turn towards her and she suddenly kisses me, so fast she nearly misses my mouth. It’s more like franking a letter than a kiss really.

“Now, I expect you’d like to see my bedroom,” she says.

It’s all moving a bit fast for me and I try and kiss her just to make sure that we’re both thinking about the same thing. But she pulls away like the Q.E.2 leaving Southampton and stands up smoothing her dress down.

“Leave the tea things,” she says, and glides out. I follow her up the stairs and when we get to the top she points to one of the doors along the landing. “I expect you’d like to use the bathroom,” she says.

I wouldn’t dream of arguing with her so I pop into the onyx palace. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing and when I’ve had a quick sluice down I put my clothes on again. I mean I don’t want to wander into her bedroom bollock naked and find she only wants me to mend the plug on her electric blanket.

But when I get to the bedroom I’m dead certain that isn’t what she has in mind. The curtains are half drawn and there’s an electric fire on by the bed. In it, the bed I mean, is Mrs. A. with her back to me. I can see that she is wearing a slip, the straps nudging in to her fleshy shoulders.

“I can’t abide cold hands,” she says firmly, so I take the hint and warm mine in front of the electric fire. What a carry on. I only wish I felt a bit sexed up about the whole thing, but I don’t. I’ve hardly touched the woman and yet I’m practically in bed with her. I mean, even the best of us need a bit of warming up and at the moment I’m drooping like a wet pigtail. If I had an ounce of self respect I’d tell her to get stuffed and march straight out, but of course, I haven’t, so I take my clothes off and slide in beside her, hoping that once I make contact it’s going to be alright. Her back is still turned towards me and I slip my hands under her petticoat sharpish because that usually brings me on a treat – just the feel of it, you know. She isn’t wearing any knicks, wicked old bag, and allows herself a little groan which might be meant to indicate pleasure. If it is she certainly knows how to keep herself under control. I’m nibbling her shoulders and playing her like a Naafi piano but she doesn’t move.

At last I can’t stand it any more and I wrench her round and start raining kisses on her pruin mouth. This has some effect because she grabs hold of my old man and starts yanking it like it’s something to call the butler on. It’s not having the desired effect though and I’m wondering how to escape when she flings back the bedclothes and suddenly sits up. I think she’s had enough too, but her back arches and her head goes down my body.

“Poor boy,” she says, just before she starts, “it’s always the same, what a good thing the girls aren’t here.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Now so far I’ve been talking solidly about birds and you may recall – if you went skipping to get to the sexy bits – how I described the signs that can lead the average red blooded English boy to a spot of nooky: frustration, boredom, seven year itch, everybody doing-it, old man over the top – that kind of thing.

Now all this pre-supposes that you’ve only got to stand there with your scrim in your hand and they’re all going to start tearing your clothes off. Up to a point this is true. If you hang on long enough you can’t fail to get some bag making a pass at you even if you look like Goofie with a hang over. But there are times when it’s in the balance, and then you’ve got to ram home the message wrapped in a bit of sales appeal. In other words it’s no good recognising the ones that will if they don’t know you can.

What I’m going to tell you now is the fruit of years of experience, observation, and advice I’ve received. I certainly didn’t know it all when I was tumbling about with the likes of Viv, Dot and Mrs. A., but they each helped in their own special way.

First of all, you’ve got to like birds. It seems dead simple doesn’t it? I mean every man likes birds. But he doesn’t! There’s a hell of a lot of them would be much happier danging their floats in the local reservoir or checking over their stamp collections. They only make a token effort so their mates don’t think they’re bent or because Mum is always nagging at them. Look at some of your married friends if you don’t believe me. It’s not just that they don’t fancy the old woman, they don’t fancy any one! The telly, the boozer, maybe a spot of football, that’s their lot. They came in with a dud battery hanging between their legs and it’s too late to take it back to the shop. So: Rule One. You’ve got a much better chance of getting it if you really want it.

Rule Two: Make them laugh. This is where you can’t go wrong. Once you’ve got a bird laughing – and especially a married bird – you can practically hear the bedsprings creaking. Birds want to be relaxed, they want a bit of fun and once you’re sharing a sense of humour – well, there’s no limit to what you’ll be sharing. Considering how much time we spend talking to each other, it’s amazing how bad we are at it. The difference between what we want to say – and what actually comes out of our mouths is fantastic. I mean, take me and that first time with Viv for instance. Diabolical. Whereas, if I’d have been able to keep chatting and thrown in a few funnies, I’d have been there nice and easy, without needing a bloody thunderstorm. Most women, though there are exceptions – in fact when you’re talking about women there are millions of exceptions – like to feel that they are being seduced by you, so if you can chat them up, make them laugh, take the micky out of yourself a bit so you seem a human being just like they are, then you’re guiding them gently towards the front room carpet or whereever else they like to do it. Which reminds me of a bird once who – no, sorry.

Rule Three: Be persistent. If you really want it, go hard for it. Don’t take no for an answer. I had a mate at school who had a face like three warts on a carbuncle but his record was fantastic. I know because I saw photographs of some of the birds. In fact I had to swallow one in the middle of the geography class when the master got curious. How he got them to pose like that I’ll never quite know, because he was only about fifteen – they must have been out of their tiny minds. I believe it was because he went on shaking them, like a kaleidoscope, until he got the right pattern or they got so fed up they decided it was the only way to make him buzz off. He was fantastic that bloke.

So remember, when they start coming all that “Oh, Fred, do you really think we should be doing this?” stuff they are asking to be mastered. Tell them to get them off and get on with it. If you start saying, “well, maybe you’ve got a point there, Edith,” they’ll just think you’re wetter than a used nappy liner.

Rule Four: Keep yourself in good shape. You don’t have to look like Rock Hudson but if your gut is spilling over your Y-fronts you’re only going to remind them of their old man and that’s worse than useless. So keep your clobber on the tight side and nip about a bit to show them you’re alive. Sid does a lovely line in sliding down the ladder with his feet on the outside, which goes down a treat and his footwork on the high window sill has to be seen to be believed. I’ve got good shoulders so my forte is the deep breath and the rhythmic to and fro with the rubber. I’ve known times when birds have been doing the ironing in time with me.

Rule Five: Be prepared to forget the other four rules. As I’ve already said, birds are funny, so if you’ve got a good line you might as well stick to it. One of Sid’s mates, known as the Magic Dragon, never used to say a word and he had so much crumpet he didn’t know what to do with it. He was a good looking bloke, I know because I saw him up at the boozer once. He used to keep himself brown with a sun ray lamp and do weightlifting so his shoulders gushed out from his waist as if they’d been forced through a three inch pipe. His line was to get out there all strong and silent, letting his biceps speak a language any woman could understand, whilst he gazed down on them like they were drying foot prints. Faced with this rejection most birds felt like knotting themselves but just when they couldn’t stand any more the Magic Dragon would suddenly suck in a mouthful of air, gorge his enormous pectorals (sit down madam!) and breathe all over the window pane, a big one at first, followed by little, delicate puffs like whirls of cake icing. Hence, his nickname, see? ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Well, I never saw him in action, but apparently you had to sweep up the pieces afterwards. One bird savaged him so badly he had to have fourteen stitches in his shoulder. Alright, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true, so help me. You don’t know what seven years of happy marriage can do to a woman.

Then there was Roy. He didn’t say much either. His angle was to have his lower lip trembling the whole time and to be seen frequently blowing his nose.

Well, no woman could resist this for very long and before you could say “Watch it lady” they’d be asking him what the trouble was. “Nothing, nothing,” he’d sob, “sorry to be going on like this” and poor brave fellow that he was, he’d hurl himself back at the job until he suddenly lost his footing and ended up in a crumpled, shuddering heap at the bottom of the ladder. “Jenny, Jenny,” he’d be moaning as they reached him and then it would all come blurting out. How his wife had run away with the milkman, leaving him with six kids, and how it was his fault because he hadn’t been paying her enough attention because he’d been working evenings trying to make enough money to take the whole family to the seaside for the first time. By Christ, it fair broke your heart to think about it, and it was a hard bitch who didn’t put a protective arm around his shoulders and shove the kettle on for a nice soothing cup of tea. Well, of course, the minute they did that they were done for. Roy’s snuffles would dry against their blouses and hands that had once been clutching desperately as if at a straw, were now invested with a new sense of purpose. “Oh no” Roy would gasp, taking the words straight out of their mouths. “I didn’t think I could ever feel like this again. It’s wonderful.” Up till then they’d been getting a bit worried, but with those words they suddenly realised that they were in the exalted position of being able to confer the gift of life on a fellow human being. This creature desperately trying to pull down their knickers and tights at the same time had been wounded near to death and by a member of their own sex to boot. What better way to offer some reparation than by letting him take the simple pleasure he so obviously sought and which they were in the fortunate position of being able to bestow. I tell you, it was diabolical how he got away with it.

Now, you may well be asking yourselves where I fit in all this; you may equally well be scratching your left bollock, but that’s your affair.

I was learning fast but although I soon got the hang of all the dodges, I knew that I was never going to be in Sid’s class. I was too moody. My ability to chat a bird up didn’t just depend on her but on whether Chairman Mao was being nice to the Russians, or the weather, or how Chelsea had been doing lately. Sometimes I was dead on and sometimes I was dead on my feet, there was no knowing how it was going to be.

Luckily, when I met Sandy it was one of my chirpy days. If it hadn’t been I might have done myself a permanent injury.

One of my better jobs was a small block of posh flats down by Wandsworth Common. One of those big Victorian Houses had been steam-rollered and Green Pastures – yes that’s what the berks called it – had been shot up in its place. It was dead simple because it was all glass and you could have wheeled a pram along its window sills, they were so wide. Window cleaning was included in the service fee the tenants payed so I collected my cash from the caretaker and whipped round with my large squeegee in no time.

At least, usually I did. On this occasion, I was moving along the front of the building admiring the brass rubbings and the bookcases full of paper-backs when I saw something that made my blood turn colder than an Eskimo’s chuff.

In this room there was a naked woman tied up on the floor. Not just tied up, but with so much cord round her it looked as if someone had used her to roll up a piece of string. If she had problems they didn’t end there. There was another bird wearing a thigh length black slip and a very determined expression, lashing her with a riding crop. Now you’ve got to admit that that’s a sight you don’t see every day of the week. Talk about “Kinky Kats on the Rampage”. It made Wardour Street seem like Cheltenham Spa on a wet Monday.

At first I didn’t see it. Call me naive if you like or Flossy if it gives you real pleasure – but I thought that the bird on the floor was being attacked by the other one. My basic, decent British reaction was one of outrage, so I banged hard on the window.

Neither of the bints had seen me and the one with the whip looks up and claps her hands to her tits in a gesture of upper class shock a bit at odds with the cold blooded thrashing she’d just been dishing out. Before I got any further let me say at once that she is a very good looking bird. Black gypsy ringlets coiling down around alabaster shoulders – you know all that crap – big long-lashed brown eyes, tits like pomegranates – in fact she’s like the birds on those Schweppervesence show cards I used to knock off from the local boozer. She’s panting a bit and her complexion would make Mr. Yardley cream his jeans in envy. Even before I notice the small watercolours in the thin gilt frames and the chaise longue I realise I am in the presence of a lady.

“Good gracious” she says, opening the window, “you gave me a start.”

“You don’t look as if you need one,” I say, immediately proving to her what a laugh I am. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

“I was trying to give Amanda an orgasm,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It rather looks as if it’s gone by the board now, doesn’t it?”

I have to agree with her because Amanda who I recall as being rigid with effort is now all relaxed and bulging against her bonds like a rolled sirloin. She is a large girl and you wouldn’t find many people outside that African tribe that goes in for fattening up its women till they look like hippos, that would disagree with me.

“Amanda loves being beaten,” goes on the dark-haired bird. “It’s about the only thing she does like. It was awfully lucky we found out. You see Sebastian, that’s her husband, got rather squiffy one night and suddenly started flailing away at her. We were all absolutely horrified and poor ’Basters was really distraught when he sobered up. But what makes it so terribly amusing is that Amanda absolutely adored it and nearly came on the spot. Never been near it before, had you darling? – Oh I am sorry, you haven’t been introduced. Amanda this is – what is your name?”

“Timothy Lea.”

“Timothy Lea – Amanda Browne, with an e.” Amanda Browne grunts a greeting. She really is a very plain girl and the weal marks don’t help.

“And my name is Rachel Devroon, though everybody calls me Sandy because I don’t have red hair. Yes, well, wasn’t it lucky about Amanda finding out what she really liked.”

This bird is obviously nutty as a fruit cake, but she is very cool. I have to admit that.

“So Amanda’s old man keeps her happy by bashing her up. Nothing unusual about that, it happens all the time round here.”

“If you’re going to do anything, for God’s sake do it,” says Amanda, peevishly, “I’m beginning to get cramp. And do shut that bloody window.”

“Sorry Pet,” says Sandy hopping across the room so her boobs bounce up and down like twins in a rubber baby carriage, “we must get everything right for you.”

Sandy’s thighs are the smoothest way to introduce a leg to an arse I’ve ever seen and when she bends down I can practically hear my mince pies grinding between them, like skinned golf balls. She’s bloody lucky she isn’t tied up on the floor.

“You don’t understand darling,” she says to me, “Amanda doesn’t really get on with ’Basters. Oh, he’s very sweet but he’s a bit draggy at the same time – very ‘where’s my Financial Times?’ – you know? So I find her the most dishy spade who bashes her all over the place.”

“So everybody is happy.” I say.

“No. Racialism rears it’s ugly head. Amanda tries very hard but deep down inside she’s got a thing about coloured men – her grandfather had a tobacco farm in Rhodesia or something, so that doesn’t work either. Spitsville isn’t it?”

“Very,” I say, “So what were you doing just now?”

“Well, Amanda feels that because it just doesn’t seem to work with fellahs, she may be a lesbian and we were just seeing if I could do anything. You were quite enjoying it, weren’t you, sweet?”

“Quite,” says Amanda seriously, “but I don’t think I’ll be able to come. Especially now.”

I suppose I should be feeling guilty but I’m so amazed by what is going on that I can hardly feel anything except a desire to get Sandy’s drawers down. What with the whips and the tying up, it is getting a bit sexy.

“Well, I’m adoring it,” says Sandy, “I can quite see why those awful old harridans were always hanging around the dorms after lights out. Thrashing someone is absolute bliss.” She shudders with excitement and suddenly runs her hand up the front of my trousers where, surprise, surprise, there is someone wanting to greet it. “Oh, super,” she says, “Do you want to join in?”

“Well—”

“Tell you what. You start beating her.” She hands me the crop and has pulled the slip over her head before you can say National Health Service. Her tits are really something and her half cup bra deserves an award for service beyond the call of duty. Never was so much supported by so little. She whips it off and I feel like bursting into applause – or through the front of my Y-fronts.

“Go on, she loves it.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Try.”

“I can’t—”

“Poor darling.”

But she’s not talking to me. She drops on her knees and starts necking with the bird and fondling her breasts. There must be something wrong with me because I find it the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I tear my clothes off and I hate them for every second they stay on my body. Then I’m lying down there chewing Sandy’s neck and peeling her tights off and she’s groaning and all three of us are squirming like electric eels. Amanda wants Sandy and is crying out for her to beat her, and I want Sandy and I’m not tied-up, and I win. I hurl the crop to the other side of the room and unravel Sandy like a piece of rolled up paper till I can pin her down and get above her lovely flat stomach and feel her legs hook round mine and her finger nails sink into my back.

“I’m going to put my mark on you,” she hisses and she clings to me like she wants to suck every ounce of blood, flesh and guts out of me. It must be quite a way to go but I want to do this again so I rev my motor and we’re generating enough power to light up Piccadilly Circus for a month. But not for long though. No force on earth can withstand Miss Rachel (Sandy) Devroon when she shudders into her final gyration and I feel like a piece of fluff hovering at the mouth of a suction cleaner.

“Shit!” she screams, “oh shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!!”

(I may have missed out a few ‘shits’ but that’s the gist of it) and away we go. Eight hundred doors banging, Chaik’s 1812 being performed in your left earhole, upside down on a roller coaster – it does you more good than a cup of Bovril any day of the week I can tell you.

After that lot I’m spent and sucking in mouthfulls of carpet pile but Sandy is made of sterner stuff.

“Super fuck,” she says cheerfully, “Now it’s Amanda’s turn.”

Not with me it isn’t, I vow to myself. Even Raquel Welch would have to wait a few minutes, and with Amanda it might stretch into years. But I don’t have to worry. Sandy wriggles out from underneath me and in a few seconds I hear the contented sounds of her wielding the riding crop. It seems to be a wild success because Amanda is hollering fit to bust and Sandy is cheering her on like a Derby winner. What a performance. You wouldn’t credit it unless you were in the front row of the dress circle.

Well, all good things must come to an end and Sandy unties Amanda and starts rubbing cold cream into her back. The poor old bag really needs it too, but she isn’t complaining.

“That was super,” she says, “Absolutely super. I found it so sexy watching you, I nearly came by myself.”

“But darling, you remember that orgy we had at Tarquins, it didn’t do a thing for you.”

“I know, but it was all so contrived. I mean, when you go through the door and start talking to people about the weather and know that in a few minutes you are all going to take your clothes off. I find that terribly inhibiting. I’m worrying about coming out in a red flush or something. But this was so unexpected, so natural, it was beautiful.” Her eyes suddenly widened, “I say, it was chance wasn’t it, you didn’t lay it on for me?”

“Heavens no, luvie, I know Timmy looks very professional,” Sandy runs her fingers down my chest, and then on a bit, “but he’s just doing it for the love of it like the rest of us. Aren’t you pet”

“Would you like a drink?”

I say yes to both questions and get a tumbler half full of scotch which can’t be bad. Sandy comes down and sits on the floor next to me and already I’m beginning to feel I could be there again. She is a good example of what I said about upper class birds taking their clothes off at the drop of a hint. I can’t imagine Rosie fixing you a drink in the all together. I don’t mind it when I’m having it away but it seems a bit strange sitting around starkers with a scotch in your hand and I reach out for my shirt.

“Don’t do that,” says Sandy, “you’ve got a super body and I like looking at it.” She takes the shirt between finger and thumb and drops it over her shoulder.

“I think you’re bloody fantastic,” I say, and I mean it.

“I think I’d better go,” Amanda drags herself to her feet. “Can I have a bath?”

“Yes, of course, but why didn’t you have one before I put the cream on you?”

“I didn’t want one then,” Amanda goes out showing you that from behind she looks like two shetland ponies on the job.

“I’m thrilled about this,” says Sandy.

“What, about her being satisfied?”

“Yes, you don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“Well what a way to come. Being beaten till your back is like a corrugated iron roof. I’d rather do without, myself.”

“I bet you wouldn’t. That girl couldn’t even give herself an orgasm by masturbating until today. Every woman is entitled to an orgasm and if a man can’t give it to her, she has a perfect right to get one by any means she can.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” Sandy obviously feels strongly about this, “women are fed a lot of twaddle about how marvellous sex is and when it isn’t they feel let down. Some of them don’t even know whether they’ve had an orgasm or not. They get worried. They think it’s their fault. Men don’t have any trouble having orgasms, why should women?”

“They’re built differently,” I say helpfully.

“You’re damn right they are. Sexual discrimination starts right here in our bodies. Whoever designed us would put the handle on a door so you couldn’t reach it standing on tip toe. And men don’t help with the old ‘thank you dear, that was very nice, now let me go to sleep, I’ve got a busy day at the office tomorrow,’ mentality.”

“You don’t seem to have any problems.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve liberated myself. I’m one of the lucky ones. I want to help people like Amanda who have resigned themselves to having rotten sex lives.”

“By beating them?”

“By doing anything to them that doesn’t offend either one of us and stands a chance of giving them what they have a right to. Surely you must believe that anything people do when they’re having sex is O.K. as long as they both want to do it?”

“Yes – but?”

“—There you go ‘butting’ again. I think you’re a hypocrite. You got jolly sexed up when you were watching me and Amanda didn’t you? You found that dirty, or kinky, or whatever you like to call it – and because of that it gave you a sexual appetite. Now you didn’t feel guilty about that, did you? You just responded to a certain stimulus and got satisfaction from it. Can’t you see that that’s what I’m trying to make happen with Amanda? I want to find something that turns her on. They give mental patients electric shocks, don’t they?”

I can’t follow everything she’s trying to say but I agree with a lot of it. She certainly comes across as being sincere and the way she talks to me I might be Malcolm Muggeridge instead of a window cleaner. In short, I’m impressed. She’s so direct she’s like a man, but I find I can accept that.

“I take it from your silence that you’re in total agreement with what I say?”

“I was just thinking that I’d never seen a woman with turned up nipples before,” I says.

“They’re retroussé and recherché,” she says, and because she knows I haven’t a clue what she’s talking about and wishes she hadn’t said it she leans forward and puts her hand between my legs and kisses me on the neck.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she says.

“I hope so.” Down in the forest something is stirring and I take one of those delicious nipples between finger and thumb and give it a friendly squeeze until it feels like a hot bullet.

“This time very gentle please,” she says, so we nibble each others lips for a few minutes before I flip her over onto her back and she flicks her legs up against my shoulders.

“Goodbye cock,” I say as I watch it disappear.

“Remember, darling,” she says, “you’re not losing a cock, you’re gaining a vagina.”

She’s funny, see, and you don’t meet many birds with a sense of humour.

They’re very much worth having.

Take my word for it.

CHAPTER SIX

Of all the birds I had about that time Sandy was the most memorable. I admired her and I felt quite honoured to be having it away with her. She was always dead straight and never talked down to you. Not like some of those upper class birds who could never resist telling you they were slumming, just so they didn’t feel too bad about it the next day. They really wanted a spade but they couldn’t quite stoop to that and you were the next best thing.

I even used to ring Sandy up outside business hours and I went round to her flat in the evening a couple of times. She was always very breathless on the phone as if she was terribly busy and trying to remember all the things she had to do. “Hallo-yes-who? – oh yes – sorry. No of course, I do. Yes that’s fine I think – wait a minute – no sorry. What is today? Thursday? Good God. No I can’t I’ve got some other fellah coming round. Better make it another time. Do give me a ring though because I’d adore seeing you again. ’Bye luv.”

I know its bloody stupid but I was a little jealous of all those other blokes I imagined trooping round there. I knew they existed, of course, but all the same I’d look at my watch a few hours later and think now they’re on the job; now some other lucky bastard is stroking that smooth creamy brown skin; now her pepper mill arse is grinding him into small fragments of ecstasy; now – God! It really choked me I can tell you.

Of the other birds. I steered clear of Viv because I didn’t want to rub Sid up the wrong way but I kept in touch with Dorothy and Mrs. Armstrong. It was always the same with them. Every time I left the house I vowed it would be the last time but a couple of months later I’d be back again and quite looking forward to seeing them.

Before I went back to Dorothy I bought her an outrageous pair of panties from Marks and Sparks which must have made her old man sit up if he even noticed them. Also, a pair of fishnet tights. Once she saw those it didn’t take me long to wonder what they would look like on, we organised a little fashion show upstairs. This proved that the panties were perfect but that the tights weren’t quite long enough in the leg – she had very long legs did Dorothy. This didn’t matter too much because the tights got torn anyway. We were in a bit of a hurry getting them off.

Mrs. Armstrong was more of a puzzle. Everytime I went through the back door I’d start thinking I must have dreamed it the last time. Mrs. A. smelling like the ground floor of Debenham and Freebodys and looking over my shoulder as if she had double vision. But it was always the same. I’d be squeezin’ out my chamois and the old trolley would go rambling past. “I thought you might like some tea”: “Thank you very much.” Into the sitting room and a load of chat about her bloody stepdaughters or how the country was going to the dogs. Then, just when I was looking at my watch and mumbling that I had to be getting along she’d suddenly press her hands together and say something like “Would you like to go upstairs, or would you rather stay here?” Once I said “I’d rather stay here,” and she had me in front of the fire with me watching her head reflected in the side of the tea pot as it bobbed up and down.

If this part of my life represented a bit of variety, things at home hardly changed at all. Dad was off work which was as normal as Thursday – he had trouble with his back which Sid said boiled down to an inability to get it off the bed: Mum was still counting how many Ngoblas went in and out next door and Rosie grew more like an export reject zeppelin every day. As for Sid, the dark shadows under his eyes might have been caused by reading the London Telephone Directory by candlelight, but I doubted it.

All in all, it was a strange time for me to get involved with a bird, but I did. I think maybe it was a reaction to Sandy. I really fancied her but I knew it would never come to anything so I looked around for a substitute to whom I could say all the things I felt but could never seriously express. I think also that I was influenced by all the bints I was making on the job. They could well have put me off the whole idea of marriage but instead, I felt a great desire to prove that there was some bird, somewhere, who could just love me and stay like that. Basically, you see, I was a hypocrite and a puritan and all the things Sandy used to call me. What I did was quite different from what I was prepared to permit my bird to do. Fascinating isn’t it? No? – oh well, you’re probably right.

I met Elizabeth down at the Palais, which, I read somewhere, is where 99.9 percent of British Men meet their future wives. You’d think that armed with a statistic like that no poor bastard would ever go near the place, but I’m one of those berks who get born every minute and takes a 6¾” hat size to prove it.

I used to go with a mate of mine called George who was the perfect side kick because he was good looking and a good dancer but so stupid he couldn’t arrange the words “do fuck you?” into a common phrase or saying, if you put them on a blackboard for him. I used to let him whip them round the floor a few times and then, when they were bored out of their minds with telling him what they did, I’d move in with a bit of chat and – hey presto! their drawers were practically in my jacket pocket.

But Elizabeth – there’s a solid, reliable name for you, nothing flighty about Elizabeth – she was different. When I came bouncing up she looked at me as if I was a run in a new pair of tights. I was really impressed by that, you can’t beat the old cold shoulder for making an impression.

“Fancy you working there,” George is saying.

“My sister works in the haberdashery department. I don’t suppose you know her?”

“I don’t think so,” says the bird. “I haven’t been there long enough to meet many people yet.”

“Her name is Wanda,” goes on George, “tall girl, fair hair. She plays the piano very well.”

“You can’t miss her,” I say, “Just look out for a tall, fair haired girl pushing a piano.” I give her my understanding George-is-a-prat-but-now-I-am-here-everything-is-going-to-be-alright smile. The girl glances at me as if I’d dropped out of the woodwork and turns back to George.

“I don’t think I’ve met her,” she says, “now I really must go and find my friend, she’ll be wondering what’s happened to me. Thanks for the drink.”

She starts to stand up but I’m leaning over the back of her chair so it’s difficult.

“Come on George,” I say, “surely you’re going to introduce me to your friend.”

“Elizabeth – Timmy Lea” says George wearily. “Elizabeth works in the beauty department at Haddons.”

“She must be their best advertisement.” I say.

“Yuk,” says Elizabeth and I fall in love with her on the spot. She scrapes back her chair nods to George and is gone.

“Bitch,” he says, “she had a large gin and tonic off me.”

“You’re a bloody fool then, aren’t you.”

“We can’t all be freeloaders like you.”

“That’s not very nice, I was going to buy you a light ale but now I’ve thought better of it.”

I wander off into the balcony and look down through the coloured light onto the dance floor. Ricci Volare – Alfred Boggis to his Mum and Dad – is conducting his Music Men as if he had a fire cracker stuffed up his arse, and about forty birds are dancing with each other whilst a crowd of blokes hang about like they’re waiting for the Labour Exchange to open. For a moment I can’t see Elizabeth and then I spot her sitting at one of the tables with her friend. This bird has specs and has obviously been selected to make Elizabeth look like a million dollars which she does. She, Elizabeth, I mean, is tallish with a good slim figure, small but shapely breasts and a nose with a slight tilt in it. From the balcony I can’t see what colour her eyes are but I remember them as being on the large side like her mouth. When I describe her she doesn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary but at the time I really fancied her. She looks a bit like Sandy, maybe that’s it.

I consider asking her to dance but only poufdahs go around asking birds to dance at the Palais and anyway it’s too soon after she’s given me the evil eye. Also, I can’t dance. Not this rubbish anyway. A slow grapple to waltz time is about my mark. So I go back to George and we sink a few beers till I’m feeling quite merry. Then there’s a sudden rush towards the floor and I realise it’s the last dance. I have to move fast and I get to Elizabeth just before a large bloke with enough grease on his hair to lay up the Queen Mary.

“Would you care to dance?” I say oozing civility.

“What about my friend?” she says.

I’m on the point of telling her I can’t dance with both of them when grease-bonce grabs goggles and we’re away.

“Have you got to go far?” I say.

“Stockwell.”

“Can I give you a lift?”

“Have you got a car?”

“No, but I’m bloody strong. You could hop on my back.”

She allows herself to smile at that.

“But I don’t know you from Adam.”

“It’s easy to tell the difference, I’ve got more clothes on.”

“Very funny. You’re quite a comedian aren’t you?”

“I have my moments.”

“Well, don’t think you’re going to have one of them with me. If I let you take me home ’Reen comes too.”

That’s bad news. Both for me and ’Reen because I’ve borrowed Sid’s van and there aren’t any seats in the back. Just a couple of buckets which may come in handy if ’Reen gets taken short on the way home but aren’t very comfortable for sitting in.

It is with this thought in mind that I decide to keep the specification of my vehicle a temporary secret but luckily grease-bonce and goggles conceive an instant fascination for each other and after the two birds have rabbitted for about ten minutes I learn that Elizabeth will condescend to come home with me on her tod. There then remains the problem of George who wants a lift but I tell him discreetly to piss off and I’m all lined up.

Elizabeth takes another ten minutes in the Damerie and after a while I think she’s climbed out of one of the windows, but when she appears its been worth waiting for. She’s all powdery and thick eye-lashed and she has a maxi coat with fur all round the bottom that would really keep your neck warm.

“You look smashing,” I tell her, “and you smell fantastic.” I try to bury my hooter in her hair but she pushes me aside.

“Where’s this car of yours?”

“Just round the back.” Actually its about four streets away and by the time we get there Elizabeth is getting worried. She cheers up when we get there though which rather surprises me till I see her standing beside the MGB I’m parked behind.

“It’s this one.”

“I thought you said you had a car. I’d never have come if I’d known it was this.”

“Well, you don’t have to.” I’m getting a bit fed up with her by this time. “You know where the buses go from. That’s the High Street down the bottom there.” But she mumbles something about being too late and gets inside, catching her coat on the door handle which makes her even madder. The engine won’t fire at first and she’s fuming when I shove the thing in gear and accidently hit her leg. You’d think I put my hand up her skirt the way she pulls her coat over her knees. Really it’s so bloody ridiculous. There’s me getting up to all these tricks with a wagon load of birds and this little tart acting like a lady muck because I brush against her leg. Who the hell does she think she is.

“What do you do?” she says.

“The cleaning business.”

“Dry cleaning?”

“All kinds. What do you do – oh I know, you work at Haddon’s, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that where you got the perfume?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it called.”

“Ma Griffe.”

“Mother Unhappiness? That’s a bloody silly name for a perfume.”

“No, it’s French, you fool. ‘Ma Griffe’. Haven’t you ever heard of it?”

“No, I’ve only heard of Californian Poppy?”

“You get that at Woolworths.”

“I know, that’s where I saw it.”

If I was with Sandy now, we’d be discussing our orgasms or having one. I wonder what Elizabeth would say if I asked her if she had good orgasms.

“There’s a good film on at the Odeon next week.”

“Oh, what is it?”

“I don’t know. I know it’s good though. One of my mates told me about it.”

“Well, that’s no good if you don’t know what it’s called.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to go.”

“Well, I don’t know do I?”

“Are you on the telephone?”

“Yes. Why?”

Because I want to write ‘For giant-sized orgasms ring blank and ask for Elizabeth’ in every phone box from here to Vauxhall.

“So I can find out the name of the film and give you a ring about it.”

“Oh, alright. It’s in the book under Roberts E. E.”

“O.K. I’ll remember that.”

We keep up some kind of conversation until we get to her home, which is like every other semi-detached house in every other road in South London. If you took me a couple of streets away and turned me round three times I wouldn’t be able to find it again in a hundred years.

The minute I start slowing down her hand is on the door handle. I turn off the engine quick and reach across to help her.

“Thanks very much. I can’t ask you in because my Mum and Dad will be asleep.”

“Aren’t you even going to kiss me goodnight?”

She resigns herself to offering me her mouth and my hands steal down towards her legs where they are promptly seized by the other pair of hands in the car.

“Naughty,” she says, which must be pretty fast talk for her.

We kiss gently but the second my tongue goes in she pulls away and opens the door quickly.

“Don’t forget the number,” she says, “it’s under Roberts E. E. Goodnight.”

“Ta ta.”

I watch her go in and reply to her little wave from the front door before driving away down the dark, silent street. It’s funny but in a way I’m quite glad she wouldn’t let me put my hand up her skirt. Sandy once said I had a working class background and middle class values and I think maybe she’s right.

It was ridiculous really because about the time I met Elizabeth – I always called her Elizabeth, never Liz or Lizzie or anything like that – I got mixed up with the kinkiest bint yet. She lived up on the west side of the common and she had a maid. If that sounds coming it a bit for Clapham I can tell you that there were a lot of well to do people moving in around then and that the house itself looked as if it had upped sticks and moved in with them. Georgian, set back from the road, gold topped railings, separate gate with a little sign on it saying ‘Tradesmen’. Rather more Chelsea than is the rule around here.

The maid wasn’t French but Lithuanian or something like that which was virtually the same as far as I was concerned. She was small, dark and curvy and though she had a slight moustache I didn’t hold it against her. In fact, because the rest of her was so very female it rather appealed to me. Maybe I was getting kinky too. Anyway, this bird was obviously dead lonely and would follow you around the house offering cups of tea in a fractured English accent and smiling like she was trying to do her mouth an injury. I was reckoning on taking her out so I could do something about it but one afternoon when I roll up there is no sign of Ma Villiers – she’s the one who owns the house, I’ve never seen her old man – so I reckon I can save myself ten bob on cinema seats – I never make a bird open the exit doors the first time I take her out.

Petra, that’s the maid’s name, is waggling her arse like a come and get me sign as I follow her upstairs and isn’t slow to tell me that Mrs. V. has nipped off to the West End with a friend. Some blokes do the windows first, but not me. Take it while it’s there is my motto, you never know what’s going to happen in half an hour’s time. So when we’re passing the main bedroom I stop and take a butchers through the half open door. Inside, it’s all white paint and gilt with full length mirrors and knobbly kneed furniture as far as the eye can see, which is quite a long way. The bed has a canopy over the top and you could get a football team inside it if you liked that kind of thing.

“How do you fancy that?” I say, and she starts giggling, and I give her a little pinch and one thing leads to another and before you say ‘your policemen are wonderful’ we’re banging away on top of the silk bedspread. She has hairy armpits and smells a bit like the municipal changing rooms on Sunday morning but there are many worse ways of spending an afternoon and its obviously giving her pleasure, so what the hell. What I’m enjoying most are the surroundings. The mirrors give you an interesting new slant on things and with Petra stripped down to her black stockings I’m feeling more like James Bond than Sean Connery. I push myself up on my hands and watch my reflection moving rhythmically backwards and forwards with Petra swaying beneath me like weed on the sea bed. This is the life; screwing in style. This big bed, the silk drapes, the antique furniture, Mrs. Villiers standing in the doorway. Mrs Villiers standing in the doorway! I leap off the bed feeling as if I’ve been shot in the stomach. Petra’s face registers surprise, then horror as she looks towards the door.

“Get off my bed, you slut!”

I’ve never heard the word used with such venom before. It comes wrapped in spittle. Petra and I scuttle around, bumping into each other as we try and find our clothes. It could be funny if it wasn’t happening to you. Mrs. Villiers stalks over to the scene of the action and makes another exclamation of disgust as she examines the bedspread. I’ve got my trousers on now and am struggling into my shoes without untying the laces.

“You can get out,” she snarls at me.

“I’ve left my stuff in the—”

“Get out! I don’t want you in my house a minute longer. Get out!” She comes towards me with her face screwed up like a piece of red paper and, so help me, I think she’s going to belt me one.

I’m always dead scared when a bird turns nasty because you never know what they’re going to do. A kick in the cobblers might be the least of it. So I don’t wait to say goodbye to Petra but back away quick with Mrs. V. in pursuit. I half fall down the stairs and I’m out of the front door just as fast as any bloke in my situation ought to be. So fast in fact that it’s not till I’m on the other side of the railing that I remember I’ve left all my kit round the back porch. Now I could go back for it but somehow the thought of another brush with Mrs. V. doesn’t appeal so I decide to push off home and give her time to cool off.

The next morning I hang around at home until Sid has gone out and then nip round to the Big House. I’m feeling a lot better now and a little ashamed that I didn’t go back yesterday. Mrs. V. can’t eat me and the only thing I did wrong was to use her bed. Nothing to get stroppy about.

Round the back and I’m hoping to find my stuff where I left it but no such luck. The old bag has probably moved it inside so she can tear me off a strip when I come to collect it. I give the back door a gentle tap and wait for Petra to open it but that’s not the way it goes. When I look up it’s Mrs. V. who’s fixing me with a steely eye.

“So you’ve come to finish the job?” she says.

I wonder what she means for a moment but decide she isn’t trying to be sarcastic.

“You want me to do the windows?”

“That’s the idea. You are a window cleaner aren’t you – I mean as your first line of business.”

“Yes I suppose so.”

“Well, you’d better suppose right, or you won’t get the work again. You’ll find your things in the garage.”

She turns away and just for a moment I wonder whether to kick her up the backside and tell her to stuff it. But as usual my shrewd business brain weighs up the possibilities and I troop off to the garage wondering where Petra is.

I keep my eyes open as I move round the outside of the house but there’s no sign of her and it occurs to me that Mrs. V. might have given her the chop. Up to the scene of my near triumph the day before and I’m gazing fondly through the window imagining how magnificent I must have looked on the job when Petra comes into the room. She’s got her little black dress on with her frilly white apron and the thing in her hair and – wait a minute! She seems to have got plumper overnight. Her upper arms are definitely more rounded and her thighs – Jesus Christ! It isn’t Petra, it’s Mrs. V. My mouth is hanging lower than a coal miner’s balls and it’s a good job I’ve got one foot hooked over the window sill otherwise I’d be down in the garden. What a carve up. Mrs. V. must have gone round the twist. What in God’s name does she think she’s playing at?

I soon get the chance to ask her because she beckons me towards her with her index finger like my old schoolmaster used to do when he was going to clip you round the earhole.

“Come ’ere you naughty boy,” she squeaks. The accent doesn’t sound like her at all and I suddenly realise that it’s like a Frog speaking English.

“You ’ave been a naughty boy but I ’ave been naughty too, so I zink zat perhaps you should punish me.”

“Oh, no, that’s alright” I mumble, thinking that she’s barmy and wondering whether I ought to get the police.

“Ve should never ’ave come in ’ere.”

Mrs. V. picks up a silver backed hairbrush and hands it to me.

“Ven zomebody ’as been wicked girl they should ’av a little smack.”

She looks quite good standing there with her tits pushed up as if they’re being served up to you on a tray. The fact that the costume is a bit on the small side doesn’t do any harm either. It strikes me that she’s not a bad looking bird. Full mouth, good features, she can’t be much over forty.

“Smack you?” I says.

“Zat’s right.” she lowers her eyes and bows her head like a kid owning up for smashing a window. Some kid! I wonder how long she was standing there in the doorway watching Petra and me on the job. She certainly didn’t start coughing or anything.

“I vill lie on ze bed and you give me a little smack. Yes?”

She pulls up her skirt and shows me one of the sauciest pairs of frilly black knickers I’ve seen outside of those shops in Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m admiring them, when she pulls them down to her knees and bends over the bed. Now I’m only human aren’t I, and I can stand so much. This is so much.

I go over to the bed and put my hand between her legs and tickle the thing that is pressed against the bedspread like a warm, black spider. I’ve got a hard on now like a stick of Blackpool rock with the Lords Prayer printed through it – sideways.

“Smack me.”

I’ve still got the hairbrush in my hand and – well, you can’t refuse a lady can you? – I give her a few taps till her bottom is a delicate patterned pink and she’s squealing like feeding time at the piggery. It amazes me how some birds love being walloped.

Well, you don’t have to read a lot of detective stories to know what happens next. Her drawers complete their journey to the floor where they soon chum up with my jeans and I’m into her faster than a stoat into a rabbit hole.

What a performer. In my experience you can’t beat an older woman. Everytime they do it they do it as if they reckon it might be the last. And they’re not inhibited either. Mrs. V’s attraction to things French goes a lot deeper than just dressing up in her maid’s clobber and saying ‘oo la la’ occasionally. About the only thing she doesn’t do is the Can Can.

Then suddenly, it’s all over. She sits up, pats her hair, picks up her knickers and says “I am going to ze bathroom” and walks out. Well, I can take a hint, and sure enough just as I’m dressed and have swung one foot over the window sill she comes in again – but this time wearing the full Mrs. Villiers kit. She gives me a searching glance as if to say “Keep your nose to the grindstone and your hands off the teaspoons” and stalks out. There’s not even a twinkle when she gives me my money and if it wasn’t for the condition of my old man I might think I’d dreamed the whole thing. But when I examine what looks like a peeled grape with anaemia I realise it’s either been belting the arse off somebody or I must have caught it in a mincing machine without noticing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Now about this time I can hear some of you saying ‘oh yes, very likely, isn’t it. Women dressing up as French maids and having it off with the window cleaner. What a load of cobblers. Who does he think we are, etc. etc.’. Now, I don’t mind. I’m used to this reaction. But I want to warn you against it. Having your doubts is one thing, but complacency is a whore of a different colour. Just because it’s never happened to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to other people. Have a quick butchers at the ‘News of the People’ occasionally if you don’t believe me. I knew a bloke once who came home in the middle of the afternoon and caught his wife curled up in bed with someone else. He went spare. Picked up a lamp to smash the fellow’s face in – and found it was the next door neighbour’s daughter. Now just imagine that; not very nice to find your wife on the job with a bloke, but with a bird? It nearly killed the poor bastard and he’d had no idea his old woman was bent; used to have it away with her whenever he wanted to and she never complained or anything.

It’s like I was saying earlier. You never really know what a woman is up to, and they don’t know themselves half the time. But I can tell you that if you take ’em for granted you’re asking for a nasty surprise – and I’m speaking from personal experience.

A lot of people’s scornful attitude is also caused by a chronic obsession with their own sexual adequacy (phew! not bad, eh? It took me about three days to get the spelling right). Few blokes or birds are satisfied with their plumbing and they’re always looking around a bit nervous-like to size up the competition. To be secure they have to believe that no one is getting it more often or better than they are. The very thought makes their stomachs hiss and bubble like a bucket of Epsom Salts. This kind of person is much happier saying that you’re bull-shitting – and trying to believe it – than grabbing a slice of the action for himself.

I can’t blame them really because the way I go on you’d think I was having a thigh hamburger every hour of the day. In fact it’s like I said at the beginning. Most of them just roll their eyeballs over you and have a little think about it. For every bird that takes you upstairs there’s fifty that don’t fancy it, and five that prefer Ken Dodd anyway. And, by God, if you saw some of them, you’d be bloody grateful for it too. It’s not every day of the week that beauty and lust go hand in hand. I don’t tell you about some of the terrible old scrubbers that tip me the wink because I don’t want to turn you off. I had a mate who used to be a court usher and he told me that if you saw some of the rubbish that came up before the beak you wouldn’t be able to associate them with the tricks they’re supposed to have got up to. You’d think it was six other people.

Talking of tricks reminds me of Brenda; plump little blonde bird with bloody great tits. She was a rotten little tart if ever there was one. She’d strip to the waist to wash her hands in a prisoner of war camp, and the insides of her legs hadn’t touched each other since she left primary school.

She was another one who was always moaning on about her old man. I don’t like that because I’m happier forgetting he exists. Hearing some bird telling me what a prat her husband is makes me feel sorry for the poor bastard and once I feel sorry I feel guilty and once I feel guilty I don’t enjoy poking the bird so much. So Brenda is doing nobody a favour by beginning to rabbit on about ‘The Weasel’ as she affectionately calls him.

“You know what I like about you?” she says to me one afternoon, when we’re tucked up side by side enjoying a marshmallow after the first round of our labours. I’m not kidding. Brenda is always stuffing herself with sweets.

“Don’t be bloody stupid,” I tell her.

“No, besides that – well it is part of it I suppose. It’s your body. You’ve got a lovely body, Timmy.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You conceited bastard!”

“Well, it’s a fact, isn’t it? I’m stuck with it. There’s no point in pretending I haven’t noticed it myself.”

“The Weasel looks like a slug compared to you.”

“Weasels can’t look like slugs.”

“Mine can. Oh, you don’t know what it’s like when he starts pawing you.”

“You’re dead right I don’t.”

“He’s got cold, clammy hands, and hairs growing out of his ears. Trouble is, he’s so sexy. He can’t get enough of it. Every night he’s trying to have it away. ‘Come on Brenda. Just a quickie. It’ll help me go to sleep.’ That’s what he says. I usually give in to him. Just so that I can get some peace.”

“Well, it’s nice to know somebody cares, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t care. I could be half a grapefruit for all it matters to him.”

You damn near are, I think to myself.

“And he’s so mean,” she goes on. “Never takes me out anywhere.”

“He’s frightened of losing you to another man.”

“Go on. Don’t give me that. If I could leave my twat behind, he’d chuck me out tomorrow.”

Most birds never mention their fannies by name but Brenda doesn’t bother about such niceties.

“He’d have a job, wouldn’t he?”

“You ought to be jealous listening to me going on about my husband.”

“Doesn’t sound as if I’ve got much to be jealous about.”

“No. It’s the idea of it. If you cared for me, you wouldn’t want me to mention anybody else.”

“No. I expect you’re right.”

“Ooh. You are terrible. You only want one thing with me.”

“So do you.”

“I don’t. I’m very fond of you. Much more than you are of me. I don’t tell you, but I am.”

“You’re telling me now, aren’t you?”

“If you’re going to be like that, you might as well piss off.”

“That’s what I like about you, Brenda, you’re such a lady.”

“That’s not what you like about me. This is what you like—” She picks up my hand and puts it between her legs. It’s like putting it in front of an electric fire. You could hatch ducks’ eggs down there.

“—and this is what I like.” Brenda’s hands are like a cheese grater and she uses them as if she’s rummaging for a tanner in a sack of potatoes. That’s because she’s a scrubber. A class bird will always treat your property with the tenderness and respect it deserves. However, my prick is so pig stupid it frequently can’t tell the difference and responds to her horrible advances with a speed worthy of a better occasion.

“There’s a good boy.”

Brenda shoves another marshmallow in her mouth and scrambles astride me.

“Where is it? Ah, there we are.”

She settles down like a chicken on to its eggs and starts a slow circular movement which matches the passage of the marshmallow round her mouth. It’s not bad and I lie back and watch her enormous tits. They’re a bit like marshmallows, too.

“Come on, aren’t you going to do anything?”

“I was admiring you.”

“Go on.”

“No seriously. You’ve got fabulous tits.”

I know I said I never call ’em tits, but with Brenda it doesn’t matter. She bends forward so her hair dangles all over my face and her bristols are hanging down like two stockings full of sago pudding. It’s supposed to be sexy but in fact her hair tickles and her tits give me an inferiority complex. That’s why I like small, slim birds. Because I’ve got a penis complex – oh doctor, I thought I’d never tell you.

I tilt back my head and lick the dust of icing sugar on her lips. Somewhere outside men are digging holes in the road, or adding up columns of sales figures, or selling vacuum cleaners, but Timmy Lea is lying here being screwed by Brenda Somebody and it’s not a bad way to make a living, really it isn’t.

“Yoo hoo! Anyone at home?”

I leap about four feet in the air, which is not bad when you’ve got somebody Brenda’s weight sitting on your old man, but bloody painful when you come down again.

“Fuck,” says Brenda. She sounds more annoyed than scared. Not me though.

I’m scared. This is the kind of thing I always knew would happen one day.

“What am going to do?”

“You could get in the wardrobe.”

I rush across the room and tear the coat hangers aside, so I can burrow into the mothballs like a thirteen stone moth trying to commit suicide.

“My clothes?”

“Alright, alright,” she picks up my stuff and pushes it into the wardrobe.

“Here I come, lover.” The voice is about six paces away.

“Close the door. Ouch!”

The last exclamation is occasioned by my cock nearly getting slammed in the door. It must have been done a permanent injury, because it’s still standing stiffly to attention like the boy on the burning deck. Try explaining that one away I think to myself as I crouch there peering through the clothes and the half-open doors towards the bed.

In this situation, I have to hand it to Brenda. You wouldn’t think that her husband was on the point of bursting into the bedroom and finding her boy friend bent double in the wardrobe with an enormous hard on. She drops her nightdress over her shoulders like a tea cosy, hops into bed and is sitting there selecting a marshmallow as ‘The Weasel’ comes into my field of vision. I can see what she means about being sexy. He must be fruitier than a two-ton packet of wine gums. He’s only been shedding his clothes all the way up the stairs and is now wearing a string vest, pants and socks, held up by an arresting pair of yellow suspenders. It is possible that he always goes about like this, but I reject the thought.

“So there you are,” he says, sitting on the bed and helping himself to a marshmallow.

“Cor, you’re looking alright.”

“Help yourself.” Brenda waves at the box on her lap. “Why don’t you take the whole bleeding lot?”

“You don’t seem very glad to see me. I got away special to come over here. Look, I bought you a little present.”

Typical, I think to myself. ‘He never buys me anything,’ that’s what she said to me. You can’t believe a word they say.

The Weasel produces what looks like one coil from a large spring which he must have been hiding in his hand.

“Where did you knock that off from?” Grateful, isn’t she?

“I bought it.”

“Go on. I know you. What is it?”

“It’s a bracelet. It goes on your wrist.”

“I know where bracelets go. I didn’t think it went through my nose.”

Not a bad idea, though, I think to myself. God. but it’s uncomfortable in that cupboard and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stand it without moving. Why doesn’t Brenda tell him to piss off and buy her a packet of aspirins?

“Don’t be like that, Bren,” continues the Weasel. “You know how I feel about you.”

“Yeah. With your dirty little hands most of the time. I’ve had about enough of it.”

“Oh Bren.”

“Get orf me.”

The Weasel is getting passionate and attempts to embrace Brenda, getting a stiff hand off for his pains.

“Come on, Bren, give me a little kiss.” One of his podgy hands closes on her breast. “I did buy you a bracelet, didn’t I?”

You can tell that ‘The Weasel’ is the persistent type and does not take ‘no’ for an answer easily. You may recall my earlier words on how effective this can be. Certainly Brenda is slow to brush the hand away and I can almost see her disgusting little mind thinking that it might be quicker and easier to let him get on with it.

“You’re lovely, Bren. Ooh, if you knew how much I fancied you.”

“I get an idea sometimes.”

Brenda allows herself to be kissed and the rolls of fat on the Weasel’s neck huddle together like shorn sheep. It looks as if I’m going to be right. His hands disappear under her nightie and he’s moaning and trying unsuccessfully to hook off his socks. He looks bloody ridiculous and I hope nobody has ever seen me in the same position. Brenda’s head is on his shoulder and the cheeky bitch raises her eyebrows to the ceiling in a ‘useless’ gesture clearly intended for my benefit.

“Come on then,” she says. “But you’d better make it quick – still, you usually do, don’t you?”

She’s a hard case, that Brenda. The Weasel is trying to slip under the sheets but she kicks them all back so I can see right up to her tonsils. She whips off his pants like they’re a corn plaster and lays back with her hands behind her head. It’s obvious that this is all for my benefit. The dirtly little scrubber obviously gets a kick out of being watched when she’s on the job. The Weasel scrambles on top of her with all the grace of a pelican landing on a flag pole and fumbles his way into her. God knows why she calls him the Weasel. He’s more like an over-fed spaniel. Once he’s inside, she wraps her legs round the small of his back and I’m almost jealous until he gets into his stride. What a disgusting sight. It’s like a couple of hairy, white blancmanges caught in a high gale. They wobble and tremble so I think they might end up on the floor at any moment. I promise you, if you saw what it looked like it would put you off for the rest of your life. Luckily, I don’t have to bear it for long, because Brenda is dead right – the Weasel has hardly started before he is finished. He lets out a groan like the end of three weeks constipation and collapses on top of her as if he’s a beach mattress and somebody has taken the bung out. Over his shoulder Brenda is unkindly giving me a thumbs-down sign.

“Get off, you’re suffocating me.”

Brenda is not one of those women who need to be gently cossetted after the sexual act. She obviously has not read the book I got at the Junction.

“Oh Bren –”

“—Give over, for God’s sake. I’m not in the mood.”

“Bren—”

“—Look, you’ve had what you want. Now, why don’t you piss off?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay here with you.”

Poor sod, I think, you can’t blame him. After all it is his home. If you get off work early and nip back for a bit of the other you expect to be treated better than this. The Weasel must really fancy her because he starts trying to kiss her neck and generally behaving in a very affectionate fashion quite unlike most blokes when they’ve just shot their load.

“Bren, Bren, oh Bren.”

“I’m warning you.”

“Oh, don’t you see, Bren?”

“Right!!!”

Brenda struggles out from underneath him and pulls herself up on her elbows. Her eyes are blazing and she is looking directly towards the wardrobe. What is the stupid bitch going to do?

“Do you want to meet my husband?”

Her eyebrows raise in a question mark but they don’t get as far as my stomach which practically jumps out of my mouth. The Weasel whips round as if his head is attached by a twisted elastic band, and his eyes widen in what I assume is the first indication of insane rage. The bitch obviously wants to see me torn limb from limb. I shrink back into the wardrobe and that must upset its balance because the whole thing starts to tremble and I lose my footing and have to stumble out with my hampton still at the present arms. I put my fists up because I reckon I’m going to have to fight for my life against a justifiably enraged husband but ‘The Weasel’s’ behaviour is a revelation. He leaps off the bed just like you’d expect him to do, and the expression on his face certainly suggests a kind of madness, but instead of hurling himself at me he bursts past and bundles down the stairs as if Old Nick is after him.

At first I’m dead relieved but then I get a bit worried. Perhaps the shock has driven him out of his mind. I hear the front door slam and crossing to the door, see that his clothes are still strewn all down the stairs. The poor berk must be running through the streets of Clapham in the altogether. I am genuinely disturbed but behind me Brenda is pissing herself.

“Oh my God,” she screeches. “What a bloody laugh.”

“Shutup, you crude bitch.” I say. “Are you some kind of nutter, or something?”

But she goes on laughing fit to burst and I find my clobber and start pulling on my jeans. I mean, sympathy is all very well, but with everybody going round the twist you’ve got to look after number one. Maybe he has a friend round the corner with a shot gun.

“You must be sick,” I say, managing to catch my foreskin in my zip which makes her laugh all the more. Really, I could belt her, the way I feel.

“His face, when I asked him if he’d like to meet my husband. Oh my God. I thought I was going to die.” And yours, when you came out of the wardrobe. If you—”

“What do you mean?” I say, but, of course, the moment she says that I twig.

“You mean—”

“Oh no!” Now she can hardly form the words. “Haven’t you got it yet? That wasn’t my husband.”

“Then why the hell did you make me get in the cupboard?” I scream.

“I didn’t make you do anything. I mentioned it and you were in there before I could stop you. You must have had a guilty conscience. Come on—”

She stretches out her hand and tries to ruffle my hair. “Where’s your sense of humour? Can’t you take a little joke? I’m sorry, but I’d forgotten he said he was coming round. Ouch!!”

I don’t approve of belting women but there has to be an exception to every rule, and with Brenda I really think I was justified. What her old man thought when he did come home I don’t know, but with that shiner he must have thought she did more than walk into a cupboard.

With birds like that around it was a relief to be able to turn to Elizabeth. I had taken her to the flicks a couple of times and on the second occasion I actually got her into the back row and kissed her. How about that?

The first time I had to be content with holding her hand during the big feature and her burying her head in my shoulder during the nasty bits. It was a different world I can tell you, and when I went out with Elizabeth I felt as if I was entering an order of monks who had taken the vow of ‘keep your hands off it.’ I was so used to grabbing any part of a bird I took a fancy to that it took me a bit of time to adapt to her standards. And, by God, they were strict. On the way home after our little kissing session in the cinema – kissing, I hasten to make it clear, not necking – she is obviously dead worried that she has gone too far and shies away every time I try and put my arm round her. “I give you an inch and you want to take a mile,” she bleats.

This is typical and with some birds I wouldn’t bother, but, as I have explained, in a funny way, I rather like it. It amuses me to think that I’m having this wild scene with all those dollies and yet this little virgin won’t let me lay a finger on her, She is also a very good-looking bird and I think every bloke needs a steady to tide him over the ups and downs. This thought is particularly sharp in my mind at the moment because Sandy has a big thing going with some Spade – you can take that any way you like – and doesn’t really want to know me. As you can imagine, this is causing me all kinds of little hang-ups.

So for all those reasons I’m quite happy sitting there in the darkness, watching Elizabeth gaze hypnotised at the screen whilst the Dairy Vanilla Walnut Whip Sundae Special drips off the end of her spoon on to the floor.

“That was really nice,” she says to me at the end of one epic load of old rubbish when I have broken all records by actually massaging one of her tits for thirteen seconds before being pulled off. She is not referring to my pathetic advances but to the film.

“Not bad,” I say. “I wish he’d say a bit more, though. I get fed up with this strong, silent stuff.”

“Well, he was meant to be an Inca prince. Perhaps they didn’t speak much. Anyway, I think he’s smashing. My Mum likes him too.”

“When am I going to meet your Mum?”

It’s a fact that I’ve been out with her about six times now and I’ve never been inside the house. Maybe she’s ashamed of it – or maybe it’s me.

“Well, you won’t meet her tonight.”

This is no surprise so I start resigning myself to a wimpy and a quick tussle in the porch, with her rabbiting on about the neighbours.

“They’ve gone to stay with my aunt in Broadstairs for the weekend.”

“What, your Mum and Dad?”

“Yes.”

Now normally you’d expect her to follow that by saying “Don’t get any ideas about coming in and making a beast of yourself.” but she doesn’t. And when she doesn’t the blood starts circulating even faster through my ever-hopeful veins. Perhaps this is my big opportunity. Play it cool and I could be in like Flynn.

So I drop the subject and take her off for a cup of coffee and some more chat about Charlton Heston and how good he was in “The Big Country” and all that kind of thing. She is less talkative than usual and I feel that there may be something on her mind. I wonder what it is.

It starts pissing with rain on the way home and I don’t have Sid’s van so we are getting pretty wet. This is fine by me because I can’t see how she can refuse to let me in, just to dry off, at least.

She pauses with her hand on the gate and I know that this is the moment of truth as they say.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she says.

“Anything to get out of this rain. Yeah, thanks a lot.”

We go up the path and she fumbles with the front door key and looks nervously over her shoulder as if she expects to see the neighbours drawing up a petition to the local watch committee.

“Here, let me do that,” I insert the key the right way up and we go in. Inside it is just like your own house only it smells like somebody else’s, and we take our macs off with a great deal of nervous hairshaking and teeth-chattering on her part.

“Do you find it cold?” she says. “You go into the front room and I’ll fetch the electric fire. It’s up in my bedroom.”

Don’t bother, I feel like saying, let’s go up to your bedroom, it’ll save you a trip. But you can see by her blushes that she didn’t mean to say it, and thinks that I’ll imagine it was some kind of hint on her part so I keep my mouth shut.

The front room is cold and I wander around swinging my arms and looking at the photograph of what must be her Dad on the mantelpiece. It was probably taken during the war – God knows which one – because his haircut practically starts under his scalp and his shorts could pass for Greek trousers in a bad light. Whatever the older generation say about my lot, at least we don’t turn ourselves out as diabolically badly as they did.

Seeing Daddy makes me feel uneasy. I’m never very happy in a house I don’t know well and I keep feeling that the old man is suddenly going to leap up from behind the settee with a horsewhip in his hand. I sit down in one of the faded armchairs with the coloured, leather elephant motif on the back of it and try and prepare my plan of action. Best, I feel, to continue as I am, playing it dead cool, and see what happens. If nothing happens I can always come to the physical bit when it’s time to leave.

Elizabeth comes in with the electric fire and it’s obvious that she’s tarted herself up a bit. A splash of perfume under the armpits, by the whiff of it.

“You did say tea, didn’t you? You can have coffee if you like.”

She is kneeling down to plug the fire in and I have to admit she’s got a cracking body on her. I wouldn’t climb over her to get to Ted Heath.

“No, no tea’s fine.”

“You’re very quiet all of a sudden.”

“It’s such a surprise being invited in that I’m speechless.”

“Oh, I was meaning to invite you in when Mum and Dad were here but you know what they’re like. It’s so formal it’s embarrassing. They never turn the telly off and you have to talk and watch at the same time.”

“You’ve brought other blokes home, have you?”

“Not when I was on my own.” She’s blushing again.

“I should think not. You never know what they might try and get up to.”

She won’t look me in the eyes but she’s still kneeling in front of me and her tits are making a lovely pattern through her pink woolly jumper.

“Some of them had a try.”

I stretch out my hand and rest it gently on her shoulder.

“What about that cup of tea?”

My hand gently ruffles the hair at the back of her neck.

“They’re not coming back till tomorrow evening.”

I pull her towards me and kiss her very gently on the mouth and to my surprise she clings to me as hard as she can, and her kissing becomes clumsy and desperate, as if she’s trying to work my lips away from the rest of my face.

“You won’t give me a baby, will you?” she says.

Well, I didn’t give her a baby. In fact, to tell you the truth, I didn’t give her anything till about six o’clock the next morning, after I’d fallen asleep worrying about it a couple of hours before. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but faced with this innocent virgin, who made me get undressed outside the bedroom and come in when she had turned the light off, I couldn’t do a bloody thing.

She was very pleased about it though. She said that it was nice that we were both virgins.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I still felt pretty ashamed when I did eventually manage to do it. I can remember lying there listening to the rattle of milk bottles on the doorstep and Elizabeth rabbiting on about how it hadn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, and thinking: how could I have managed to make such a cock of it; and when I quite fancied the bird, too. If it had been some old scrubber like Brenda, that I didn’t give tuppence about, I’d have been through her like a dose of salts. Maybe I’d been spoilt. I mean, when you have women who go over you like they’re sorting out the dirty linen basket you begin to take it for granted. You’ve gone past the stage of the simple, straightforward little bird who wants you to take the initiative, and you’ve forgotten what to do when you meet her. I think affection had something to do with it as well. I mean, Elizabeth was the kind of girl I would marry one day and you don’t do things like that to the bird you marry, do you? Well, maybe you do but I still think the first time was made more difficult because I really liked her.

I mentioned marriage then but, of course, I was thinking of it in the distant future. Not Elizabeth. The second she lost her cherry she was planning her trousseau. It was as if by having it away with her I had put the down payment on a wife and three kids. She started fussing around and that very first morning I had to have breakfast in bed. A dead waste of time as far as I’m concerned, because you always get crumbs stuck in the most uncomfortable places and knock the teapot over when you try and fish them out. Then there was washing up together and going shopping together – she even starts looking in the window of furniture shops which turns me off a bit – and in the end I have to pretend I arranged to go to Chelsea with a mate before I can get away.

It’s really good to be back home again, even with Mum going on at me for being out all night and not telling her anything. She’s worried about me but you can see that Dad just thinks I’ve been out nicking something. Not that he’d mind provided I cut him in for a slice. The fact is that since I fell into bad company and did a spot of lead stripping I haven’t laid a hand on anything. And that’s saying something with the chances you get as a window cleaner I can tell you.

Anyway, back to Elizabeth. The next few weeks she’s more difficult to shake off than a pixie’s french letter. I feel she’s taking over my life. And it’s not as if I’m getting a lot of the other from her, either. She doesn’t fancy it on the common, her Mum and Dad are always at home and if they do leave the house in the afternoon she doesn’t like doing it when it’s light. It’s not on, is it? If I had any sense I’d give her the bullet but of course the more she plays up the more I pretend to myself that she is a girl with what Mum would call ‘old fashioned values’. I’m dead simple you see.

Luckily it doesn’t matter too much that Elizabeth’s legs are shut tighter than a pair of rusty scissors because I’m getting more than I need elsewhere. Sandy is still shacked up with her spade and I’ve gone off Brenda in a big way but the rest of them are all ready, willing and very able. Of course Elizabeth knows nothing about this and she still reckons I’m practically a virgin. Not surprising really, because by the time I get round to her sometimes I’m so knackered I can hardly poke my old man through the zip of my fly. Maybe it’s because deep down inside I reckon I’m going to get married and have to settle down, but I’m screwing everything that moves at the moment. It’s as if I’m trying to build up a rich storehouse of memory before I go under.

Thinking about it, that’s probably why I was so glad to meet Sonia.

Sonia was a dancer, an acrobatic dancer. I don’t know what she was like because I never saw her do it – acrobatic dancing I mean – but she showed me an album of press cuttings and there were some pictures of her doing the splits and jamming her leg up against the wall so it looked like a giant hard. She was billed as ‘Kismetta the Fantastica’ which might have gone down well at the Aldershot Hippodrome in 1942 but was hardly going to pack them in now. Somebody else had obviously had the same idea because when I met her she was ‘resting’ as she put it. Anyway, let me tell you the whole story.

One of the places I did was called the ‘Fitzroy Hotel’ but it was more like a doss house really. The glass sign outside was broken so you could see the bulbs inside and the lino cracked up like baked custard. There were never many people there and I can’t see how the place stayed open. I wouldn’t have passed water there let alone the night. The owner was a miserable old git who always tried to knock down my price and said that he’d do it himself if it wasn’t for his back and that I was taking advantage of him. I took this a couple of times and then I told him to stuff the job up his Jacksie, which put our relationship on a more professional footing. After that he never gave any trouble but just wandered round making sure no one had left a light on and that I knew he was watching me to see that I didn’t nick anything.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning when I first met Sonia. I didn’t expect anybody to be around then and I got a bit of a shock when this pile of bedclothes suddenly springs up and flashes a couple of tits at me. It’s worse for her because I’ve woken her up and she glares at me and pulls the sheet up to her chin.

She’s about thirty. I suppose; boney, sallow, hollow-cheeked, lank-haired; her tits are small but they droop like foxgloves which gives them shape. There’s a beat-up, world-used scruffiness about her which I feel at home with. Any bird that sleeps starkers always interest me and she looks better than a lot I’ve seen considering she’s just woken up. Elizabeth has never let me see her naked yet. She always wears a nightdress and though I’m allowed to mess about underneath it, it stays on, come hell or high water. I think it’s because she secretly thinks what we are doing is sinful and feels a bit better about it if she is wearing something.

The bird in the bed is saying something but I can’t hear what it is so I pull the top window down a bit and manage to drop my squeegee into the room. Then I find the bottom window is jammed so I have to indicate that I need assistance. The bint raises her eyes to the ceiling in a ‘you prick’ gesture and swings out of bed wrapping the sheet around herself but not quickly enough to stop me seeing that they’re the same colour as the hairs on her head. She stalks across to the window, picks up the squeegee and hands it to me over the top.

“Haven’t you got a hanky?” she says.

At first I don’t know what she means and I’m wondering if there’s a large bogeyman hanging out of one of my nostrils. Then I cotton on that she’s talking about dropping handkerchiefs.

“Hurrah,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I could see your mind working. You got there in the end, didn’t you?”

“I usually do.”

“What do you mean by coming and waking me up?”

“Somebody had to do it. Do you know what the time is?”

“About eleven?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know what the time is, then, don’t I?”

I’m still standing on the window ledge and I am beginning to feel that this may be a position in which I have difficulty doing myself justice.

The bird obviously agrees with me because she shakes her head and wanders over to the door where there is a dressing gown hanging up. In one quick movement she drops the sheet and has the dressing gown round her shoulders. It’s a man’s dressing gown and it’s far too big for her. She feels in the pocket, pulls out a fag packet and sticks a dog end in her mouth. No matches. She points to her fag and looks at me and I nod. I don’t smoke but I always carry a box of matches for just such moments. It’s like boy scouts carry around those penknives with bits on them to get stones out of horses’ hooves. She shrugs her shoulders and with a feat of strength that impresses me almost as much as the view down the front of her dressing gown she pulls up the window.

“If we’re going to go on handing things backwards and forwards to each other you’d better come in. You’re not going to rape me, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Pity. I feel like being raped this morning. Do you ever get feelings like that?”

“Sometimes. Only it’s different for me.”

“Of course. You’ve got to do the raping, haven’t you? I wonder what happens when somebody who wants to be raped meets somebody who wants to rape someone. It can’t be rape, can it?”

“No. I suppose it’s normal.”

“Or passion – yes. I think it’s probably passion.”

She sits down on the bed and crosses one leg over the other, which is something she does very well. I light her cigarette and start wiping over the inside of the windows.

“What’s that thing called?”

“It’s a squeegee.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of those. I always thought it was some kind of mop.”

“I think it’s that, too.”

“Well, I’m glad we thrashed that out, you learn something new every day, don’t you? Do you want a cup of fabulous, taste-bud tickling Nescafé while you’re here?”

“Yes, ta.”

She has an accent which is a mixture of posh and working class so you can’t quite tell what it is but the vaguely piss-taking way she talks has a definite style to it.

She puts the kettle on and washes out a couple of mugs in the washbasin.

“The milk’s off. Do you mind it black?”

“No, that’s fine. What are you doing here?”

“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? Well, I’m resting, dahling.”

She makes her voice go all husky.

“I’m a theatrical you see and at the moment no one wants to know about me.”

“But why here?”

“Well, I usually stay at the Ritz but when I heard the Aga Khan was staying there I thought it would be more diplomatic if I dossed down somewhere else. We were lovers for years, you know.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“No, well you wouldn’t would you? It was a terribly well kept secret. I used to have a couple of fantail pigeons which carried messages backwards and forwards between us – “Be by the bandstand on Clapham Common at eight o’clock on Thursday. My private plane will collect you” – that kind of thing. Then we’d be off to Biarritz or Budleigh Salterton or wherever his exotic fancy took him, making mad passionate love until it was time for him to go off and be weighed in jewels or something. He was a slave to Islam you know.”

I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about but I’m impressed.

“You’re an actress then?”

“Brilliant. I could see you were a bright boy the moment I clapped eyes on you. Yes, sort of. Ooops – coffee time.”

She switches off the gas and hands me my coffee,

“What have you been in? Anything I’d have seen on the telly?”

She claps a hand to her heart and looks disgusted.

“Television? Oh! Goodness gracious me, no! I work in the live theatre – and besides, nobody has ever asked me.”

“So what have you been in?”

“You are persistent, aren’t you? Well, let me see. I was Becket in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ – no, actually, the last thing I did was to stand next to a girl with a very personal problem in the chorus of “Babes in the Wood” at the Granada, Tooting. You may not have seen the show, but you probably smelt it. You know: two balloons up your jumper and a string of jokes about baked bean commercials.”

“When did that finish?”

“You’re not from the Inland Revenue, are you? My goodness, but you ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m sorry but I’ve never met an actress before.”

“Well, I misled you a little bit. I’m not really an actress, I’m a dancer. An acrobatic dancer – or I was. Now, I’ll do anything within reason, and provided I can keep my knickers on. Would you like to see my credentials? I was waiting for a fan to show up.”

She doesn’t stop for an answer but goes and gets this book of press cuttings I mentioned earlier.

“Come with me down memory lane,” she says and pats the bed beside her. I sit down and she takes me through the book. It’s a bit sad because all the big cuttings are from a newspaper in Baldock which is where she must have come from and which would probably make it a front page story if one of the locals farted outside Covent Garden Opera House.

“Who’s the bloke?”

In some of the pictures there’s a good looking dago dancing with her, wearing some kind of gypsy costume. His hair is slicked down and parted in the middle so the parting looks as if someone made it with a meat cleaver. He reminds me of Valentino who Mum is always going on about, and he’s probably meant to. A few photos later he’s wearing a turban and a lot of boot polish and then he disappears altogether.

“That’s the Great Fakir, if you’ll excuse my pronunciation.”

“The what?”

“That was what he called himself in the act – in that one anyway. He was also known as ‘The Sheik’ and my husband – he wasn’t very good at that though.”

“Is that his dressing gown?”

She smiles and pulls it closer around her. “Yes, I – yes. How observant of you. But then I suppose it’s unlikely that I’d go out and buy a man’s dressing gown, isn’t it?”

“You’re divorced now?”

“No, we were never married. I said he was ‘known’ as my husband. Roy was doing you a favour just to live with you. He was too bloody clever to get married. I was married, though, before I met him. God! But I made a wonderful botch of things. Still, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; a complete stranger who suddenly appears on my window sill.”

“Probably because I ask so many questions.”

“Maybe. Perhaps it’s also – oh, it doesn’t matter. You’d better get back on the job, hadn’t you? – if you’ll excuse the expression. You’re losing money sitting here.”

“That’s alright. I like talking to you.”

I look into her eyes and she looks back at me very cool. I can feel her mind examining the same set of possibilities as mine.

Then there’s a knock on the door.

“To be continued,” she says, and tightening the sash round her waist she opens the door.

“Oh, it’s you, Miss er, Miss Hatchard?”

The voice belongs to the miserable berk who runs the place.

“That’s right. Who did you expect it to be?”

“Oh, no one, it’s just that I saw the ladder outside your window and I wanted to check that everything was alright. You know, I mean you’ve got to be careful these days, haven’t you? I thought you might have gone out and – you know?”

“That was very thoughtful of you Mr. Drake.”

“Well, I like my guests to feel that their welfare is at the forefront of my mind.”

Mealy-mouthed old shit bag. He obviously thought I was knocking off stuff from her room – or wanted to make her think I would do, if I got half the chance.

“Thank you Mr. Drake. I do appreciate that – oh, Mr. Drake,” her voice is soft as a kitten’s stomach.

“Yes, Miss Hatchard?”

“I feel I should tell you that I’ve got a long needle, and if I find you peeping through the bathroom keyhole again I’ll ram it straight through your eyeball.”

She slams the door and stalks back to the bed.

“Dirty little rat. He’s always pawing me with his eyes. Asked me if I’d like to come down and watch his telly the other night. Christ, can you imagine it. Two brown ales and his podgy wet hands creeping towards you. I’d rather be on the game.”

I can see that Drakey has smashed the nice little atmosphere of mutual sympathy and understanding that was building up between us, and that it would be a smart move to get back outside and arrange to see her later if I can. “I’d better get out of here,” I say. “Tell you what, let me buy you a drink later. You get dressed while I finish this place and I’ll take you round to the boozer. It’ll soon be dinner time anyway.”

She thinks about it for a minute and then nods.

“Yes, why not? Thank you very much. I can’t stay too long, though, because I’ve got to go to an audition this afternoon. I’m supposed to be there at two o’clock, though they’ll probably keep me hanging around for bloody hours as usual.”

So I hop outside again and she winks at me through the window, which is a promise of good things to come I carry with me round the rest of the job. Drakey pays up without a murmur, though he gets a bit tense when I ask him why one of his eyes is watering. I also enjoy his expression when Kismetta, or whatever her real name is sails out looking mean, moody and magnificent in a maxi skirt slashed to her navel and her hair practically straight down the front of her face.

I guide her round to the pub and I can see that the lads are impressed. With this in mind, I steer her into a corner and get her a lager and a cheese roll – fast. You can’t leave a bird like that alone for long without reckoning that some other bleeder will be chatting her up.

“Your real name isn’t Kismetta, is it?” I say as I shove the drink into her hand.

“You must be joking, dahling.” She blows smoke over her left shoulder and I can see her lapping up the way everybody is slopping the beer down their bibs because they can’t take their eyes off her.

“No, it’s Pat. Pat Hatchard. That other rubbish is just a stage name.”

“What are you trying for this afternoon?”

“I don’t really know. Theatre in the Round in Streatham or something. Doesn’t really matter; it’s always the same: Right Miss – um Miss Hatchard. Thank you. Very nice. Now there’s a chance that we’ll be playing ‘The Birthday Party’ in our birthday suits this season so I wonder if you’d mind taking off your knickers. You would? Too public, eh? Well, supposing you came round to my flat this evening, more informal you know. No? Thank you, Miss Hatchard. Next please.”

Now, everybody in the boozer hears her going on like this and I’m getting a bit embarrassed. I mean, women don’t say those kind of things round here. Not in the local, anyway. I’ve never heard anything like it since Sid’s mother told Dad to stop squeezing her tits; and that was on Christmas Eve, so there was some excuse. I mean Mum would have done more than just break a soda syphon over his head if there hadn’t been.

“It’s no good if it’s like that,” I say hurriedly. “Maybe you ought to think about doing some other job? Can you type?”

She knocks back her drink and pushes the empty glass toward me expectantly.

“Type? God no! I’d rather go on the streets. Much rather.”

She glances round to see if anybody agrees with her but now they’re shying away as if it costs you five bob to catch her eye. I buy her another lager and the barman looks at me as if I’m a ponce. This is not quite the image-building job I was after. I can’t stand women who are crude in public. Still, having made an investment of two lagers I’m not prepared to quit now.

“Tell you what,” I say to her all casual-like. “If you get the job why don’t we have a little celebration tonight – or even if you don’t get it? It’ll cheer you up either way.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Oh, I dunno. A few beers and then we might take one of those Chinese meals back to your place.”

“To my place?”

“Well, I live with my Mum and Dad.”

“Very nice. But, I mean why don’t we have the Chinese meal in a Chinese restaurant. You can do that, you know.”

“I thought it might be more cosy, more intimate,—”

“—more chance of getting your end away.”

She says that so loud that even the bloke playing darts down the other end of the public bar can hear her. I know because he nearly pins his mate’s ear to the board.

“Oh, come off it.”

“What do you mean, ‘come off it’? You come off it. I don’t mind. I just wish you’d be honest about it. Now, let’s get out of this place. It gives me the creeps. I’ve never seen such a load of fish-eyed old syphilitics in my life. Haven’t they ever seen a woman before?”

And she stalks out leaving half her lager behind. I’m tempted to finish it but my reputation has already suffered enough as it is so I follow her outside sharpish.

I should give it a miss then, but, as I’ve said before, the old bulldog spirit is half the battle in this game, so I eventually get her to agree that I should give her a ring around six so we can decide where to meet. She doesn’t seem all that wild about it but at least she doesn’t say she’s got to visit her grandmother or something.

So at six o’clock I ring the Fitz and – surprise, surprise – Pat has got the job and is as chuffed as a dog with two cocks. “Come on round,” she shouts – “and bring a little bottle with you.” She sounds so cheerful that I don’t mention the pub crawl and go ape with the after shave lotion before blowing 47p on a very nice Spanish Sauternes, which I am confident is a shrewd investment with a bird who’s obviously been around a bit. Six forty-five and I’m striding past Drakey who always pops out like a spider the moment he hears a footstep. The poor sod has opened the register before he recognises me. I put him in his place with a curt nod and sail upstairs.

Rat, tat, tat and – blimey! When Pat swings the door open I wonder why I’ve bothered with the Spanish Sauternes. She smells like a perfumed brewery and has obviously had a few to celebrate before I got there. “Dahling – hic!” she husks. “Come in and let me devour you. Oh! You’ve brought a bottle. How kind. Lovely Spanish Sauternes, as drunk by the Greek gods.” She giggles weakly and falls back on the bed.

Frankly, my feelings are mixed. Obviously it’s on with her, but she’s pissed out of her mind and could start slinging her goloshes out of the window at any moment. I don’t mind, but at the first sign of activity Drakey will be beating his tiny knuckles white against the door panelling.

I don’t have much time to think about it because Pat tears the wine from my hand, sucks out the cork – she must have, she did it so fast – and sloshes half the bottle into a couple of mugs so it’s slopping over the sides.

Her dress had buttons all down the front which I thought were just for show but I can see now they aren’t because the top fifteen or so are undone.

“Come here, you beautiful bastard,” she yodels and gives me a smacking kiss on the lips and half her Sauternes down the front of my trousers. She finds that very funny and starts chanting “Get ’em off! Get ’em off!” loud enough to get herself free membership of the Chelsea F.C. Supporters Club.

Now, I can see that the longer I leave things, the worse it’s going to get, so I grab hold of her and seal her mouth with my lips. This calms things down a lot and she wriggles into my body like she’s trying to find a way through it. She can certainly kiss can Pat and what with that and her fingers running up and down my spine and ruffling my hair it’s easy for the lower half of my body to suddenly decide it’s deeply in love with her.

“So you got the job?” I say when we come up for air.

“Fuck the job,” she says, “Wheeeeee!”

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever leaned against the wall and been kissed by a girl who has one foot on the floor and one on your shoulder, but it’s quite an experience, I can tell you. And what you can do with your hands is nobody’s business.

After we’ve tried that one for a few minutes, she goes through her whole repertoire. High kicks, the splits, everything. There’s buttons popping like Guy Fawkes night and her dress is open right down the front so I can see she’s only wearing a pair of black lace panties underneath – it’s fantastic. She whizzes round the room about five times and then collapses on the bed.

Well, there’s probably about three blokes in the world who would have tip-toed out to get her an ice pack at that moment but I’m not one of them. I’ve got my clothes off faster than a kid unwraps a Christmas present and in no time I’m guiding her knicks down over her knees while she starts grinding her arse into the bed and baring her teeth.

I would like to be able to say that we made love, but I’d be boasting.

She made love and I tried to keep up with her. What an experience!

Whatever you’ve heard about dancers and muscle control – it’s true. Every bloody word of it. All those ladies you see swinging about on ropes at the circus; I bet their old men are walking round with smiles on their faces. This girl can grip you like she’s got a second pair of hands – and as for what she does when she’s got you. Five minutes with Pat and you know how a table cloth feels when it’s being shaken out of the window. She can do the splits with you inside her so that she’s playing footsie and tickling your ear with her big toe at the same time.

Like I said, I’m just lying back and hoping she doesn’t break it off. The whole room is bouncing up and down in time with me and it occurs to me it might be a good idea to lock the door if only to spoil Drakey’s view, through the keyhole.

I am glancing towards it when I suddenly notice the cupboard door start to swing open and close again. It wouldn’t be a surprise if it fell right off it’s hinges but to open and close. That’s strange. Bloody strange. I watch closely and it actually clicks shut. That’s it!

I leap out of bed nearly leaving my cock behind, and tear open the cupboard door. A bloke I’ve never seen before in my life is cowering behind it with his fly buttons open. I won’t tell you what he’s been doing but, according to my Mum, it stands a good chance of stunting his growth if not actually leading to total blindness.

“You bastard!” I shout and I belt him so he goes down in a heap of shoes and coat hangers.

“I don’t think you two have met,” says Pat over my shoulder. “Timmy, this is Mr. Wiseman who is auditioning me today. Tell me, Mr. Wiseman, have I got the part?”

He doesn’t answer because I kick him in the goolies so hard it sprains my ankle.

“You dirty bitch,” I yell, turning on Pat. “I thought you were the girl who never let any bleeding theatrical monkey touch her?”

“I need the work,” she screams. “Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life in this crummy room? Do you think I wanted to do that? Why do you think I’m drunk? Oh, my God.” And she bursts into tears and throws herself on the bed.

She’s just done that when there’s a furious banging on the door and Drakey starts demanding to know what’s going on. I’m not really in the mood to tell him so I pull on my trousers while Pat’s screaming gets louder, the bloke in the cupboard is sick and somebody else starts thumping on the wall.

It’s getting a bit noisy for me so I pick up my jacket and open the door just as Drakey takes a run at it. He sails past me and ends up on the bed with Pat who fetches him a back hander in the mouth.

“Don’t move,” I say. “I always want to remember you like that.”

CHAPTER NINE

You may be thinking that I meet a lot of funny people – well I do. People are funny. When you get inside their homes you find out. How many times have you heard somebody say “ooh, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall.” Well, I am sometimes, just that. I spend my day looking into hundreds of little boxes, some of which have people in. Most of the time nothing is happening but, now and then, very occasionally, something is. Most people still make love indoors, and kill each other indoors, sometimes one after the other. I haven’t seen a murder yet, but I’ve been close to it. People get very worked up, and when they get worked up they look around for something to hit each other with. Once it was me.

Elvie was slim as a boy and flatter than a witches tit. Her hair was cropped close to her head and she had large soulful eyes with dark rings under them. She looked intelligent and intense and as if sex was the last thing she was interested in. She had a self contained flat in one of the big Victorian houses in Nightingale Lane and as it was right at the top I had to ring the bell to get in.

“Window cleaner.” I say cheerfully when she opens the door.

“Oh, yes,” she seems to be thinking about something else, and hardly glances at me. “You’d better come in.”

Inside, the flat is very light and well furnished. There’s a big round chinese lamp that lets down from the ceiling on a kind of pulley; built in bookshelves – some with books, some with ornaments, cream wall-to-wall carpeting and a huge double bed with a white bedspread on it and purple velvet cushions. The curtains match the cushions and are gathered with gold sashes. All in all it’s like something in one of those glossy magazines you find at the dentists. I would like to have a room like it one day. Especially that double bed. It would just about fill the whole of my pad at home.

There is another room leading off which I take to be the kitchen because I can hear the sound of something cooking.

“Excuse me,” she says unnecessarily, and goes into the kitchen. At least she trusts me which is something. You’d be amazed how many people are scared you will start nicking everything in sight the moment their back is turned. I’ve had birds hovering about me I was certain were hungry for a bit of the other, only to find out they were worried about their Post Office Savings book.

There’s a small balcony outside and I hop out and have a little wipe around with my mind idling happily in neutral. The sun is shining and there’s that faint hint of warmth in the air that reminds me of spring – for two pins I’d start whistling the score of Snow White.

In this mood, it is therefore a disappointment and a surprise to find the girl who opened the door kneeling by the bed and crying bitterly. In my simple way I imagine that she must have been trying some new recipe and made a cock of it, as opposed to the French version of the same thing.

I spring into the room and place a friendly hand on her shoulder and enquire what the matter is. From her reaction to my touch you would think I was the Beast from Fifty Thousand Fathoms or John Wayne in drag. She twists away from me and starts chewing on her knuckles.

“What’s the matter?” I say, feeling a bit of a tit. “I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what the trouble is.”

You can see what a bloody good child welfare officer I would have made can’t you? The girl still won’t answer so I am forced to continue with my kindly uncle Timmy routine.

“Is it something you’ve messed up in the kitchen? I know, you’ve just got married and you’ve burned the apple crumble. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.”

At the mention of the word marriage the bird redoubles her sobs and I decide to bury the kindly uncle Timmy routine. Also, and it’s a bit naughty to say this, I find women very sexy when they start crying. I love the way their bodies heave when they’re sobbing; and their wet little faces and moist lips; and the thought that beastly, rugged, brutish old me did it and is so masculine that he might have to kill himself. Terrible isn’t it? But there you are. So, I really have to watch myself when a bird starts crying. Luckily, I know the signs and I’m turning to leave when she suddenly rounds on me.

“Do you know what love is?” she says, and her voice is splintering like a piece of bamboo.

Now this is a very good question and one that I have thought of for myself. I am pretty certain that the answer is no, so my reply is a formality.

“Yes,” I say, “Of course I do. Why, is that what the trouble is?”

“Supposing you loved someone and they suddenly said they didn’t love you anymore and wanted to go off with someone else?”

“Well, I don’t know.” It’s the truth, I don’t know. You could do anything, couldn’t you? Kill him, kill her, kill yourself, shrug your shoulders and go off for a pint. I don’t know.

“Supposing they’d told you once that they would die without you and would never leave you. How would you feel then?”

“I’d feel terrible. I know I would. Look, this has happened to you, hasn’t it?” Notice how my radar mind homes immediately on the truth. “I probably sound callous but it happens to everybody sooner or later. You’ve just got to look at it as experience. In a few weeks you’ll wonder what you were getting so worked up about.”

Good advice isn’t it? If you didn’t know, you’d think I had some idea what I was talking about.

“You’ve never loved anbody,” she says.

“What makes you say that?”

“If you’d ever been in love, really in love, you couldn’t make that kind of glib, smug generalisation. Love invades you, it goes into you like a bullet, turns you over like a spade—”

Her voice dies away and she rests her head on the counterpane so I can see one wide-open shiny eye glinting like a diamond. Now I can smell her; that aroused, liberated smell like a patch of grass after rain. It works on me much better than any perfume ever invented. But, what am I thinking about. It’s like taking advantage of somebody lying on a hospital bed. I shouldn’t be thinking the things I’m thinking.

“I think you’re getting too worked up,” I say, “there’s plenty of other fish in the sea.”

“I know. And too many cooks spoil the broth don’t they? But on the other hand many hands make light work, so where do you go from there?”

“Stop feeling so bloody sorry for yourself for a start. Either get the bloke back in tow or chuck it in and find someone else!”

“Someone else? Oh God. I’ve tried that. This is what led to the hellish trouble I’m in now. I had this person and it seemed – it seemed too constricting. Faced with something you think is totally yours you grow to accept it and then dislike it. Like a room you decorate, and live in, and then suddenly you can’t believe that you could ever have liked it—.”

“So you change it?”

“I didn’t want to change it. Not really. I just wanted to inject some excitement into it. And then before I knew what I’d done I started a chain reaction and now I’m in this mess.”

“But you’ve got to take some of the blame. If you start messing about you can’t be surprised if your bloke does the same.”

“I wasn’t messing about. A little flirting isn’t messing about.”

It’s funny but I can’t imagine this bird flirting, she just doesn’t seem the type. You wouldn’t think she was capable of getting so worked up either.

“It’s that all the things that we’ve said and done together can be so easily swept aside. That you can put three years of your life into something and see it snuffed out like a candle.”

She sits up on the bed and leans forward with her hands clasped between her knees. There’s a small flush beneath one of her ears which is spreading like a blood stain.

“Maybe you should fight fire with fire.”

“What does that particularly ill-favoured homily mean in my situation?”

“What I said means that if your fellah is making you jealous maybe you should give him a dose of his own medicine.”

“Him.” To my amazement she smiles.

“Yes, you’ve tried it once, now try it again. But this time look as if you mean it.”

“Do you think it would work?”

“Look if you love this fellah you’ve got nothing to lose have you? Lay it on really strong. It’s make or break.”

“What’s the time?”

“The time?” The question throws me. Why is she suddenly interested in the time.”

“Yes, what’s the time?”

“It’s about half past eleven. Why, have you left something in the oven?”

“No, come on. I’m prepared to take your advice.” No sooner has she said this than she starts to peel back the bedspread.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking off the counterpane so that we can go to bed together. Now, put your bucket and stuff in the kitchen. It will spoil everything if you’re seen to be the window cleaner.”

“Thanks very much. Who do you want me to look like. Cary Grant?”

“It doesn’t matter. Come on, hurry up.”

She is down to a pair of pants already and they soon hit the deck. She pulls back the bedclothes and hops in, leaving a memory of a neat little arse, smooth, white and round as two onions.

“What’s the hurry. Is this bloke coming round here?”

She nods.

“Great,” I say, “He’s not going to be overthrilled to find us on the job, is he?”

“I thought that was the idea. Anyway, we don’t have to be ‘on the job’ as you put it. We can pretend.”

The minute she says that I suddenly decide I want to have it away with her very much. Pretend indeed – who does she think I am. The door is locked so we can worry about her fellow when he shows up. I know it’s crazy and I’m taking advantage, and she’s bonkers, but all that crying and her little eel body squirming under the sheets is too much for me. I’ve got as much chance of staying out of that bed as I have of pulling my foreskin over my head to keep my ears warm.

My clothes join hers and I’m inside the cool sheets reaching out for her body. But again, as soon as I touch her she rides away as if I’ve got electricity in my fingers.

“What’s the matter. Are my hands cold?”

She doesn’t answer but turns her back on me and curls herself up into a ball. I imagine she is worried about her bloke coming along and finding her on the job but she should have thought about that before she invited me into her bed. I put my hand on her stomach and try to pull her towards me but she starts struggling like a mad thing and splits my lip with her elbow. This really makes me go spare and I pin her arms down and kneel on her thighs which is a pretty effective way of keeping most women quiet. Not this one though because she starts spitting in my face. Anybody would think I was trying to rape her. The minute I think of that I start to get really worried. Perhaps she’s one of those birds you read about in the Sundays who gives you the big come on and then suddenly starts hollering cop. For a terrible moment I wonder if my innocence is being exploited.

To give myself time to think about it I grab a pillow and hold it over her face. I don’t want to smother her, just save myself from the rain of spittle. Well, you won’t believe what I find under the pillow, I don’t know what it is at first. It’s some kind of harness with a cricket bat handle fastened to it. Then I coco. It’s a false prick. Poor kid, no wonder she’s so neurotic. Her bloke obviously can’t do it properly and has to use this thing. She’s probably so mixed up that the thought of real sex terrifies her. I got here just in time.

I pick up the other pillow and there’s something else. A long pink thing like a plastic torch but with a smooth rounded end. Maybe I’m getting dirty minded in my old age but I don’t think it’s used for stirring Christmas pudding and when I give the end a twist and it starts vibrating like crazy I’m damn sure it isn’t. I am on the point of asking a few questions when I hear the key turning in the lock. Bleeding heck! – I hadn’t reckoned her fellow would be able to walk straight in. Now that he’s here I’m feeling a lot less enthusiastic about the whole idea. I was really more interested in a quick bit of nooky than all that rubbish about making people jealous.

I try to get up but the bird has heard the noise too, because she suddenly starts clinging to me as hard as she was trying to push me away a few seconds before. Talk about changing your mind.

“Get off,” I shout, but it’s not half as loud as the scream behind me. It’s not a bloke standing in the doorway but a bird. A slim little blonde job like a choir boy with make-up. She’s looking at us like it’s a bad motor crash. Horrified is putting it mildly.

“Elvie! Oh My God,” she howls, and she pulls the words out slowly as if from the bottom of a deep bag. All the time she is shrinking away but then she suddenly shakes her head like someone waking themselves up from a nightmare and rushes into the kitchen. This is not what I am expecting but beneath me the bird’s face is triumphant.

I’m thick. I’m very, very thick but something is beginning to dawn on me. Something that explains why I’m about as appealing to her as a skunk’s after shave lotion.

“There isn’t a bloke, is there? You’re lesbians.”

She ignores me and lies back clenching her fists.

“Did you see the expression on her cheap little face when she saw us. It was gorgeous. Now she knows what it’s like, dirty little bitch.”

There’s no sound coming from the kitchen and I’m getting worried. The blonde job may be looking for a carving knife. I know enough about women to be scared of them at moments like this. A woman’s scorn and all that malarky. It seems to me that my bent playmates may have been a good deal less than totally honest with me but I don’t know what goes on in the twilight world of Butches and Dykes and with every second in that flat I’m beginning to care less.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and reach down and grab my trousers.

“What’s she doing in there?”

“I don’t know. Collecting her things I suppose. That’s what she said she was going to do. She’s got somebody else, somebody older who can afford to take her around the world as a companion. She’s just a little whore. She’ll give herself to the highest bidder. She’d even sleep with you.”

“Thanks very much.”

There’s the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen and I go and stick my head round the door. Blondie is leaning forward with both hands in the sink and her face is grey. There is an empty asprin bottle beside her and the pieces of broken glass on the floor surround a pap of half dissolved tablets. Not enough though to correct the impression that the major part of them must be in her stomach.

“Christ!”

“What is it?”

“She’s swallowed a bottle of asprins!”

“Whaaat! No! Helen. Darling!”

Elvie shoots past me and grabs Helen like she’s a toddler that’s gone too near the edge of the pond. Helen tries to put her arms round her but can’t do it. As a sight it would really be quite affecting if it wasn’t all so bloody stupid.

“Make her sick!” I say, “Make her eat salt. I’ll ring for an ambulance.”

“Oh my darling,” sobs Elvie, “I don’t wan’t you to go away. I was being cruel. I’m sorry. I’m stupid and jealous. This man isn’t anything. I manufactured the whole thing just to make you miserable. Oh darling, I’m so sorry. Forgive me, forgive me. Don’t leave me.”

“Make her sick,” I shout and slam the door on them.

I ring for an ambulance, give the address and put the ’phone down when they ask for my name. Back in the kitchen Helen has her head in the sink and is making hawking noises. They’re both too occupied to take any notice of me and they always will be so I piss off.

So that was one bird I didn’t make. Another was Carla or Carlotta or something very similar and foreign. She wore one of the most superb bodies I’ve ever seen and her bone structure made Elizabeth Taylor look like she’d gone thirteen rounds with Rocky Marciano. She was a right little darling and the first time I saw her I got my dirty-old-mongrel-confronted-with-small-pedigree-poodle-wearing-blue-ribbon sensation which makes me just as horny and evil as the little-orphan-Nell-sobbing-because-she’s-three-weeks-behind-with-the-rent urge which I described a few lines ago.

Carla, I’ll settle for that, I met when I was whipping my scrim round some grotty little number off Norcote Road. It’s the kind of house you have to be careful about leaning a ladder against in case the whole bloody lot comes down and I would forsee less chance of finding a good looking bird there than in the Gents at Piccadilly Underground – on second thoughts maybe I’d better reconsider that statement. Anyway, I am peering through this window just to prove that my eyes are still working, when I see this delectable bint craning forward to adjust her false eyelashes. She’s wearing a pair of skin tight, flare bottomed, black velvet trousers and a white silk blouse with a mass of frills and ruffles round the sleeves. Her hair is black and shoulder length and she has silver heeled boots, and silver bracelets and rings littering her wrists and fingers. She makes the room look like it must be background for one of those fashion shots in which they photograph beautiful birds lying down in the middle of a rubbish-dump.

I’m so impressed I bang on the window pane and she gives me a big wave and a smile before getting on with her plumbing job. When she’s finished she sidles over to the window and give me a big wink and a flick of the hips that would knock an Irish navvy arse over tit.

“Fantastic!”

“You like it, sailor? I’m very glad to hear it. You not so bad yourself. Now, when you come to do the inside of my windows?” Her voice is husky and her accent, I imagine, Italian. It’s definitely wog anyway.

“When you’ve got a couple of hours to spare.”

“Why? It taka long time to do the inside of the window?”

“It can take a very long time.”

“How long?”

“How long would you like?”

“I think you make a joke with me.”

“I think I do.”

She tosses back her hair and smiles at me – “You are window cleaner, yes? You not tom cat who does pee pee?”

At first I don’t get it and then I realise she means a peeping tom.

“No, I’m being employed by your landlady, the good Mrs. Purvis.”

“If she good then she another Mrs. Purvis. Listen, if you say yes to teabag I make you pot of tea.”

“I say yes to teabag.”

“Good, now you come in and start inside the window.”

So I hop inside and start inside of window. This Italian bint is obviously going to be money for old rope because the minute I touch the floor she gives my arm a big pinch and makes a ‘grrh’ noise, and she’s rolling her eyes at me all the time she’s filling the kettle. I’ve never seen such an odds on certainty.

Down below Percy is uncoiling himself from his afternoon siesta and I’m camping it up like a maniac, sweeping my squeegee over the glass like it’s a paintbrush and giving her a wonderful opportunity to observe how my enormously broad shoulders narrow down to a tiny waist. She clearly laps it up because she has another couple of little goes at me before I finish and stretch out my hand for the tea. This I get, plus a quick massage of the goolies that nearly makes me tip the whole bloody lot down the front of her frills. Talk about forward, this bird is practically behind you! She’s a lovely mover too and is always striking exaggerated poses that show off her body to its best advantage. It’s a job to take my eyes off her and look round the room.

Like I’ve said this is pretty scruffy and distinguished only by the pictures of ballet dancers pinned above the bed. A right load of poufdahs they look too and when I see one pansy with ‘Romeo and Juliet’ written under his kisser I can quite believe it. I can’t see what this bird, who obviously fancies a spot of beef cake, can see in them.

“Are you a dancer?” I ask her.

“You mean, do I lika dancing? – oh, no – I see what you mean. No, I am not a ballet dancer but I like. You go to ballet?”

“No I don’t go much on opera or ballet, I find it boring.”

“That is terrible. It is never boring. How can you say such a thing?”

She’s not serious, just having a bit of fun.

“I can’t understand what it’s all about. They’re singing in Italian, so that’s a dead loss to me and the dancing doesn’t tell a story.”

“But it does!”

“Well, I can’t follow it. All that spinning about and holding birds above your head. It’s always the same.”

We go on with our little artistic chat for a few minutes while I sip my tea, which tastes like virgin’s piss – I reckon she must only have put in one tea bag – and fend off her pinching fingers. She’s always growling and hissing through her teeth and she can’t keep her hands off me – it’s understandable, I can’t myself sometimes.

Well, thank God. one thing leads to another and when she asks me if I’d like another cup of tea I say no and I put my cup and saucer on the floor and she bends down to pick it up and she’s in my lap before I’ve had a time to ask her what part of Italy she comes from. My imagination sweeps me away to the vinefields and in my mind’s eye I can see us lying there in the hot Italian sunshine. The grape juice running down our chins and some wop singing ‘Volare’ in the background. It’s romantic, isn’t it?

Anyway, Carla or whatever she said her name was, is now running her tongue gently over my eyelids and her fingers are unbuttoning my flies, which, if she but knew it, is an act akin to slipping back the bolt on a tiger’s cage. Always eager to join in the fun I fumble for the zip on her slacks, and thwarted, try to put my hand inside them at the waist. She has me between her fingers now and as our mouths meet and drowsily chew each other I put my hand down and—

Have you ever bitten into a ripe peach and then tasted something rotten and found yourself looking at half a maggot? That’s the feeling I get when I find out that Carla should have been called Carlos!

I’m a little hazy about what happened next. I’m only interested in getting out fast and I succeed in doing that without any trouble. I mean I don’t hit the nancy boy. If I did I’d be hitting myself somehow. I grab my stuff and push the protesting little git out of the way and go home and have a wash and clean my teeth.

No harm done, but I still think about it sometimes and when I do I can’t stop that prickling sensation from creeping up my spine.

CHAPTER TEN

Those two little episodes were about the nastiest things that happened to me – mainly, of course, because I didn’t get my end away – but they were what you might call hazards of the profession. The kinkiest lady I ever met was something I got into all by myself – if you know what I mean.

I first saw her when I was in Dad’s boozer. I had to show Elizabeth to Mum and Dad sometime and a quick pint at the local seemed the most painless way to do it. We could get away sharpish without too much trouble and meeting in a pub robbed the occasion of it’s more sinister overtones – potential bride meets future in-laws, all that kind of thing. I knew what was in Elizabeth’s mind and I didn’t want to build up her hopes too much.

The night I choose, Sid and Rosie have found a baby sitter and are there as well, and of course, Sid can’t resist showing us what a wag he is.

“Elizabeth. Pleased to meet you. We’ve heard so much about you. Now we’d like to hear your side of it.”

Elizabeth blushes and turns to me. “What have you been saying about me, Timmy?”

“Nothing. He’s just trying to be funny that’s all.”

“Just a little joke, Liz. I don’t expect you’re very used to them with young Timmy here.”

“Timmy can be very funny,” she says loyally.

“He is funny, I agree with you,” says Sid, “some might say peculiar but I think funny covers it.”

“Now that’s enough Sid,” chips in Mum, “You stop your teasing. He’s a terrible tease is our Sid.”

Elizabeth tries to smile agreeably.

“That’s a nice dress you’re wearing. We saw one just like that at Marks, didn’t we dear?”

“Eh?” Dad is too busy worrying about how he is going to avoid buying a round to think of anything else.

“Did you make it from one of those patterns in Woman’s Own?” says Rosie.

“What are you all drinking?” I can see the only hope is to get pissed and at least while I’m at the bar I don’t have to listen to their balls-aching conversation.

It’s very crowded that night and while I’m waiting to be served, I’m pushed up against the patterned glass partition which divides the public and saloon bars. I take a peep round it and I’m face to face with a handsome blonde (dyed) bird of around forty who looks at me as if I’m something she’s found on the bottom of her shoe after a walk through the farmyard. There is something so ‘piss off’ in her glance that all my sexual aggression is immediately aroused. I want to see her down at my knees begging for cock, while I tell her contemptuously that she’ll have to wait her turn like the rest of them.

She whips her eyes away as if they might catch something by resting on me and addresses someone I can’t see.

“This glass is filthy, George,” she snaps.

“But—”

“No buts! Look at it. There’s lipstick all round the edge. Get me a new one please.”

“Oh, really Alice. I think it’s just the colour of the glass.”

“Colour! That’s a lipstick mark I tell you. What’s the matter, are you frightened to open your mouth? Hey, barman!”

Her screech would make the Queen Elizabeth heave to.

“Yes, Mrs. Evans?”

“You’ve given me a dirty glass.”

“Oh, sorry about that.”

The barman doesn’t even look at it but twirls a new glass in the light and transfers her drink to it.

“I’m not drinking it after it’s been in that glass.”

The barman controls himself and pours her another whisky without a word. Even then the bitch glares at the glass as if she suspects there’s poison in it, and can’t bring herself to say thank you.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” says George.

“If I am it’s no thanks to you.” she snarls, and our eyes lock again for a second. “I can’t rely on you to stand up for yourself, let alone anyone else.”

I get my order in and I don’t think about Mrs. Alice Evans for the next hour or two. By that time everyone is well pissed and telling anyone they can force into a corner, exactly what they think about immigration, feeding tropical fish, Charlie Cooke or you name it. Dad is rabbiting on to Elizabeth about how young people today have it dead cushy, and good luck to them, but when he was a boy etc., etc. Mum is getting sentimental as she always does on a few stouts and telling Rosie, who’s heard it a hundred times, what a wonderful person Aunty Glad was. “Why they took her away I’ll never know,” she says, looking towards the ceiling so you’ll get the message that it’s not the rozzers she’s talking about, “she never had a bad word for anybody.”

In fact Aunty Glad was a foul mouthed old slag whose breath smelt and whose husband has taken on a new lease of life since she snuffed it, but that’s another story. Sid is talking to one of his mates and making eyes at Gloria, the barmaid, over his shoulder. I reckon he’s been there, otherwise he wouldn’t be so secretive about it.

With all this gaiety and excitement going on I’m beginning to feel a bit frisky myself, and looking round to see that Elizabeth is still well occupied, I cast about for a bit of mischief. It’s a good feeling, with a few beers under your belt: relaxed, smooth tongued, the cares of the world a million miles away. Unfortunately, there is nobody nearby to benefit from my good nature, but then I remember the Mary Whitehouse of the saloon bar, next door. I slide out without being noticed and am relieved to find that Mrs. Evans, as I now recall her, is perched elegantly on a bar stool without any sign of George in attendance.

I sway towards her hoping that my stagger will be interpreted as a rolling gait, but from the look of those about me I think it is unlikely.

“Forgive me for coming up and talking to you like this,” I say, “but I wanted to tell you how grateful I was that you took issue about those dirty glasses. It’s something I can’t abide myself.”

Her widening eyes betray initial distrust not to mention alarm, but when I have finished speaking, her face softens into the expression adapted by royalty when receiving bouquets from small children.

“You’ve no idea what a relief it is to find someone who feels as I do,” she says, “you’d be amazed how many people think I’m some kind of eccentric. Even my own husband,” she adds as the unfortunate bastard joins us. “George! You haven’t finished dressing yourself.”

There’s a piece of shirt sticking out of his fly, which has me guessing for a moment.

“Sorry, my dear.”

George fiddles with himself and gives me a searching look that suggests he can see through me like the front door of Woolworths.

“George, this young man was telling me that he approves of my action in sending back that dirty glass.”

“Really, my dear. Very praiseworthy. Tell me Mr.—”

“Lea, Timothy Lea.”

“—Tell me, Mr. Lea, what do you do for a living?”

“I clean windows.”

“That must obviously account for your keen interest in matters hygienic.”

“I don’t know about that. It may have something to do with it.”

Why doesn’t the stupid old git bugger off. Mrs. Evan’s face has now shed a lot of its sterness and she is gazing at me like I’m some kind of long lost son. She also has very nice tits and I want to tell her about them.

“You must get an unenviable opportunity to see how appallingly lax some peoples standards are,” she says.

“Oh, very much so. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I see.”

Mrs. Evans shakes her head. “Awful, don’t you think so George?”

“I was just thinking it might be a good opportunity to see whether this place’s standards have been maintained in the last few minutes. Same again, my dear? And what about you Mr. Lea?”

So I have a scotch, and the pub is beginning to swim in front of my eyes as I try and keep up with Mrs. Evans searching questions. I’m prepared to say anything as long as I can form the words, and when Mr. Evans disappears again I go blundering while I’ve still got the chance.

“Why don’t I come and clean your windows?” I say as if I’ve just thought of it. “I could give them a Dettol rinse. It’s a speciality of mine, though you’d be amazed how few people ask for it.”

“I wouldn’t. Not at all. Yes, why don’t you, 42 Malplaquet Drive.”

I know it, it’s all walnut trees and concrete paths.

“What day would suit you?”

“Let me see. I play bridge on Wednesdays. Thursday? No, Friday? Yes, Friday. I’ll be there in the afternoon. Come round about half past two. Is that alright?”

“That’s fine.” I say. I know I should leave it there but I’m drunk and I’m a fool. “You have beautiful breasts,” I say.

George is coming over to us so she can’t say anything, but she blushes scarlet and digs her finger nails into the back of my hand so deep that I have blood blisters in the morning.

They start shouting last orders then, so I excuse myself and go back to the Public Bar. As is always the case on such occasions no one has missed me and they are still gabbling away to each other like it’s a public speaking contest. Only Elizabeth notices me and she has Sid looming over her so she’s probably looking around hopefully for anyone.

“Don’t forget,” Sid is saying when I come up to them, “I’m going to be angry if you do.” I half wonder what they’ve been on about but I don’t really give it much thought – not then anyway.

“What do you think of him?” I say to her on the way home.

“Think of who?”

“Sid of course.”

“Oh, he’s alright. Quite nice really. He’s a bit crude but he makes you laugh.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing special. You, quite a bit.” She laughs, “Not that you aren’t special of course.”

There’s a very handy doorway just there and I push her into it and have my hands up her skirt faster than the verger trying to replace a fallen bell clapper, but they’re not there for long.

“Not here!” she says, pushing me away from her, “You’ll have to wait till the weekend.”

But I don’t have to wait till the weekend. I look at the blisters on the back of my hand and I grit my teeth and wait for Friday afternoon. If it wasn’t for the scratch marks I’d have a nasty feeling that I’d dreamed it all, and as if it’s a bit difficult to revive my Saturday night certainty that something was on. I keep thinking that she was probably pissed too, and quite likely to run a mile, or call the police, if I show up at the house. More chance of the former, because a lot of birds talk themselves into all kinds of situations when they’re stoned and get the screaming abdabs the next morning when they realise what they might have let themselves in for.

Anyway, I’m an optimist and I’ve got nothing to lose, so on Friday I put on a clean pair of Jungle Briefs, douse Percy with after shave lotion and I’m off to find my fortune.

Number 42 is very like number 40 and not entirely dissimilar to number 38.

There’s a lot of white paint about, venetian blinds, a boat trailer and highly polished carriage lamps. The whole place looks like they’re expecting a visit from Ideal Home not the window cleaner.

I press the front door bell and listen to the chimes echo through the house. Eventually there’s the sound of someone coming and I see a ripple of movement through the frosted glass. A pause by the door, which is presumably so I can be examined through the spy hole, and then it opens.

“Oh,” says Mrs. Evans, and the surprise seems genuine. “Yes?”

“Window Cleaner. You asked me to call.”

“Oh, yes. Did I? Well, if I did, I did.”

“You asked me in the pub, last Saturday.’

“I’m not disputing it,” her voice is sharp, “I just didn’t recognise your face, that’s all.”

Her tone implies that all window cleaners look the same, like coons or chinks.

“You’d better get on with it. There’s a tap round the back of the house by the kitchen door. Careful with the flower beds, they’re full of bulbs that haven’t come up yet and mind the climbing roses. Don’t lean your ladder against them.”

Big deal. I don’t know why I bothered. Mrs. E. is obviously intent on cutting me right down to size, if she remembers me at all.

It’s a pity, because she’s wearing dark glasses and smelling like a pouf’s birthday party, and her tits are practically sitting up and begging.

Something about the old twin set and pearls always gets me going. I feel as if I’m part of England’s heritage: “Remember, Ambrose, the Duke must never know, but since his accident I have realised that he cannot give me the heir the line so desperately needs. So I have decided that, for the sake of the de Pommefrites, I must take you, who exemplify all that is finest in the English male, to my bed. Come, put on this blindfold and take my hand—”

I can just see it, can’t you? No? Oh well then. Neither can Mrs. E. so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

I flug round the back of the house and start bashing the windows as if I intended to set a new world record. They’re all cleaner than a mermaid’s tit anyway, so I’m wasting my time in all directions. However, I can’t very well burst into tears and buzz off. I’m effectively hoisted with my own pederast as Sid would say.

In this situation I become careless, and from there it is a short step to becoming injured. I lean too far, the ladder slips and my hand goes clean through the bathroom window. It’s not a deep cut but there’s a lot of blood and it obviously needs binding up. There’s nothing for it but to report to Mrs. Evans. I shin down and rap on the back door which is opened almost before my hand has touched it. Mrs. E. is standing there with her purse in her hand and an expression not unlike that worn by the Duchess of Bloodshot when the first charabanc of the season arrives.

“How much—” she is starting to say when she notices my hand. “Don’t drip all over the mat,” she squeaks, “hold it over the flowerbed. Oh, dear, you haven’t been leaving a trail of blood round the side of the house, have you?”

“I didn’t bother to look,” I say. “If you can give me a rag I’ll go and wipe it up.”

“I’m sorry. But you know how I like to have everything just right.” So she does remember. “Blood is so terribly messy, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is, and I’m afraid there may be a bit more upstairs. I put my hand through the bathroom window.”

You can see that the news really distresses her and she can hardly wait to wrap a bandage round my wrist, before scooting off to see what the damage is. When she returns it is with one of the bathroom curtains over her arm.

“I’ll put this into soak,” she says, “It should be alright. Oh, dear,” she is looking down at my feet, “you should have taken your shoes off. You’ve left mud everywhere.”

There is a bit of exaggeration but on her highly bulled surfaces a gnat’s heavy breathing would show up. The whole place looks like a new set of doll’s house furniture. It’s so clean it’s unreal. When I think of Mrs. Chorlwood and her cats, my mind boggles.

“How is that bandage holding up, it’s not going to start leaking again is it?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She’s only worried about the floor, of course. “You’d better have a cup of tea, and then I can think about finding someone to mend that window. My husband is hopeless at that kind of thing.”

I tell her not to worry because I will do it and we have a cup of coffee because that is what she really wants and she is obviously a lady who is used to getting what she really wants.

I then take my shoes off and put on a pair of George’s slippers and go upstairs to measure the window. I’m not allowed to clean anything up because Mrs. E. knows I wouldn’t do it properly. The rest of the house is just like the kitchen. Everything spotlessly clean and nothing left lying about to break up the straight lines and smooth surfaces. In the bathroom even the shower hose is neatly coiled and there are no bars of soap or toothbrushes beside the wash basin. You feel it would upset everything if you had a piss.

Mrs. E. is down on her hands and knees winkling out bits of glass and just for a second our eyes brush against each other. Her breasts swell forward and I can feel Percy making an ugly rush in the same direction. Luckily I can control myself and scribble down the window dimensions on a sheet of newspaper before scooting off to get another piece of glass and some putty.

It is raining when I come back and I take great care to leave my shoes at the back door before padding upstairs. A few minutes with Mrs. Evans and you’ve got the message. There is no sign of her so I chip out the splinters of glass from the window frame and set to laying a bed of putty. I am so engrossed that the sound of water pouring into the bath sparks me off like an alarm clock ringing. I turn round and find Mrs. Evans standing there wearing a wide-sleeved, silk dressing gown and a pair of slippers. For a moment I think she’s going to hop into the bath but before I can get my pulse back to normal she’s dropped the blood stained curtain into soak and gone out. What a funny woman! She must be highly strung, or bonkers or something. Why the hell has she taken her clothes off?

I replace the window pane and go downstairs. Mrs. E. is finishing the washing up and I notice she even empties the sugar bowl back into the tin marked – wait for it – sugar, and then washes the bowl. How finniky can you get? I should think that if she ever has it away with her old man she must make him wear a surgical mask and put his cock in with a pair of forceps. I can see that she will be able to supply her own rubber gloves.

“Well, that’s that,” I say, “Sorry to cause you so much trouble, but it’s alright now. I don’t think I left any blood anywhere.” She ignores that and pulls her gloves off so that they make a loud smacking noise. Her index fingers flex like long, thin insects.

“Before you go, there is something I would like you to do for me. Can you fix light bulbs?”

“I can screw them into sockets.”

“Good. There’s one gone in the coal cellar and I can’t replace it. If you can put a new one in I’ll hold the torch.”

“O.K.”

So we trip down some stairs beside the kitchen door and Mrs. E. bustles along in front of me her dressing gown brushing against the bannister. She’s got a good body on her, I have to admit that. Too much sand in the bottom half of the hour glass but you can’t be too choosey, except now perhaps, when it’s not on anyway.

She opens a door at the end of the passage and I can see coal glinting in the darkness.

“Dirty.” she says, but it seems to me that there’s more relish in her voice than distaste. Must be my imagination. She switches on the torch and I can see the light socket hanging down like a piece of black fur. The ceiling is low and its no problem reaching it but some joker has left the remains of the last bulb in the socket so I’m struggling again. Suddenly the torch starts to waver and I hear the rustle of clothing. I turn round to see what the trouble is and – there is Mrs. E. silhouetted in the doorway, stark bollock naked. It’s no accident either, because she advances towards me and I can see areas of soft flesh picked out in the back glow of the torch.

Funnily enough, my first reaction is one of fear because I’ve never felt the same about cellars since I saw ‘Pyscho’. My state of mind is not improved by Mrs. E. dropping to her knees and gripping one of my thighs with something like the intensity she showed when scratching me in the boozer. Maybe she’s got a carving knife concealed behind her back. Just to be on the safe side I sink down beside her and run my hands lightly over her body but all I come up with is a light bulb.

“Put it in,” she moans. This request opens so many possibilities that I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Surely she doesn’t want to have it away here? Not the very clean Mrs. E. But maybe that’s it. Maybe, hygienically sealed away from the world, a very dirty lady has been trying to get out.

Her breath smells of toothpaste and there’s no better indication of a woman’s plans for you. I take the heavy fruit of her breasts in my hands and even in the darkness I can see she looks as if she’s been lying in black sand. Her nipples come up like champagne corks and she sinks back into the coal dust and starts unpopping my jeans.

I’m about to chuck the bulb away but she makes it clear she wants some light on the subject and when I’ve fixed things I find that red must be her favourite colour. The bulb gives off a soft pink glow so the cellar looks more like Father Christmas’s grotto than the remains of last years’ coal supply.

By now I reckon I must be dreaming the whole thing, and when she starts writhing in the coal dust I know I am.

“Come down here, come down here,” she begs. Some might refuse but Percy has become a bit of a handful and I know that in this mood it is pointless to try to control him. So, off with my jeans and down I go, and – oh! what fun takes place. Mrs. E. is a very selfish lover but you don’t mind when she is obviously enjoying herself so much. I mean, for a man, the pleasure has got to be in making someone else happy, hasn’t it? Otherwise we’d all get the problem off our tiny minds immediately and have a nice kip.

By the time we’re finished, we’re blacker than a bus conductor’s finger nails. If Al Jolson saw us he’d be on to his lawyers within seconds.

“Now what?” I say and it’s a fair question. Unless she’s got a shower in the coal cellar her lovely clean house is going to look like her old man is a chimney sweep who brings his work home with him.

“Over there,” she snaps, and it’s obvious she’s reverting to type faster than most. “In the corner you’ll find some plastic clothes bags. Put one on and hop up to the bathroom.”

So help me, she says it just like that. As if she’s telling you where to empty the waste bin. I think she’s joking but when I get over there it’s just as she says. A pile of bags with a sash round them saying ‘One dozen suit or costume containers. Keep away from children’ etc., etc. Feeling like a right Charlie I put one on and start shuffling upstairs. Something inside me makes me almost wish George would come in as I’m hopping past the front door. I think maybe it’s that there are only four bags left in the pile and I’m wondering who the other four blokes were.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I left Mrs. Evans’ place I was still feeling dirty. Not physically, you understand, because Mrs. E. had taken great care to see that there wasn’t a smidgeon of coal dust on me. There was a shower in the bathroom, a proper one with a frosted glass door and Mrs. E. had taken me inside it with a bottle of shampoo and – Well, you can imagine, can’t you? The lather; the warm, wet bodies rubbing against each other; the slippery fingers gliding everywhere. I was putty in her hands – no, not putty. I do myself a disservice when I say that. What I mean is, she had me again, just as she presumably had all the other blokes. I had played my part in her kinky games and when it was over I was patted on the head and sent on my way.

It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t screwing anybody. All these birds were screwing me. When I thought about it, most of the birds I’d been with had made me fit in with their plans. Their fantasies, or whatever, never changed; only the man who took part in them, and he could have been anyone.

Nothing wrong with that except that it was getting more and more complicated and I was never doing things my way. Having it away in the coal cellar was the last straw. A few more like Mrs. E. and I’d probably only be able to do it standing in a bowl of custard with a rose behind my ear. I could see it affecting my relationship with Elizabeth. Nice, simple girl like that, it would break her heart if she knew what I was getting up to. Imagine, on your wedding night having to say, ‘I’m sorry, love, but you’ll have to hang upside down from the lamp bracket before I can do anything – oh, and don’t forget to put on your riding boots.’ I mean, it would put the mockers on everything, wouldn’t it?

I think that was the moment I made my resolve to give up all the frigging about and settle down.

“It’s got to stop.” I can remember saying the words out loud so that an old lady at the bus stop almost jumped out of her skin and I got embarrassed and tried to cycle on and cracked the back window of the van in front with my ladder. The bloke was very nasty about it and I was still thinking about some of the things he had called me when I got home.

When I arrive, Mum is rolling out pastry in the kitchen, and she looks at me with that ‘I’ve-got-something-to-tell-you’ expression on her face.

“Lady left a note for you,” she says.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t stop. I just saw her walking away.” Nobody in the world is faster off the mark than Mum when she hears somebody near the front door, and she has eyes that can see through curtains two inches thick.

“She looked like one of those hippies to me. Got some kind of leather cowgirl costume on and a ton of beads.”

“Well, I’d better read the note, hadn’t I?”

“She went off with a black man on a motor bike.” Mum speaks the words as if she expects to be struck down for blasphemy. She doesn’t go and see a lot of Sidney Poitier movies, does Mum.

“I reckon it must be Sandy. My friend Miss Rachel Devroon to you. She has a lot of time for Spades. She says they are much more exciting lovers than white men.”

“Oh! Timmy!”

I have said that strictly for Mum’s benefit and the reaction is exactly as anticipated.

“How can you say such a thing? I hope you aren’t being silly, are you? You don’t want to get into bad company again. Remember what happened last time.”

“No. O.K. Mum, you’ve made your point. Now where is this letter?” Eventually I get it off her and, as I expected, it is from Sandy. ‘Superthrash. Tonite. Ten till then. Now is the time for all good pokes to come to the aid of the party. So please do. Luv, Sandy.’ Of course it’s typical, isn’t it? I’ve no sooner decided to give it all up and live happily ever after than a bloody great load of temptation lands in my lap. I haven’t seen Sandy for weeks and now she comes bouncing back into my life. I hold the letter up to my nostrils and breathe in memories. Mum looks worried.

“She looked a bit old for you, dear,” she says.

“Don’t worry about that, Mum, we’re just good friends.” I’ve never been to one of her parties though she’s talked about some of the things that have gone on at them. Just this once couldn’t do any harm could it? I mean, I’m giving up my wicked ways and turning over a new leaf, so starting tomorrow won’t make any difference. Just to going to this party will serve as an innoculation against any more depravity.

Well, in no time at all I’ve talked myself into it and decided to do something about Elizabeth the next day. I could take her of course, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to be her scene.

I’m dead right there because I can hear the noise before I even get to the street and the sound waves are coming at you like a coloured hangover.

There are cars parked down both sides of the road and there’s everything from puce landrovers to minis painted like unwound marbles. A group of spades are noshing fish and chips outside the front entrance and there is one guy already stoned out of his mind and doing an old-fashioned waltz on the front lawn – by himself, of course.

You can see where the party is, because through the window it looks like an aquarium chock full of people with a few more slid in sideways along the top to fill in the spaces. Sometimes you feel confident that an evening is going to be different and I have a lot of faith in this one.

I bound up the stairs and go in with the kind of upper class twit I normally meet when he leans out of his sports car and asks me how to get to Dulwich. He is all cuff and silk choker, with shiny black shoes with a gold chain across the instep, and it’s obvious that the dolly who is lumbered with him can’t love him half as much as he does.

“You’re looking drool-making, darling,” he lisps, and for a moment I think he’s talking to himself because he’s certainly not looking at the bird.

“Let’s just take a little looksee and if it’s not us we can slope off to my place for drinkypoos.”

“Super!” says the bird who looks the kind of blonde old English Sheep Dog who can’t say anything else, except perhaps “dishy” when describing people like the upper class berk to her friends.

Luckily Sandy appears before they can really get up my nostrils and leads me to a table which is an alcoholic’s dream. She is wearing a silver suit which fits her like a skin below the waist but on top turns into an open waistcoat so you can shake hands with her boobs if you want to. I do want to, but I content myself with giving her nipples a friendly squeeze.

“Where’s the boyfriend?”

“Oh, he had to go back to Nigeria. He’s king or something. Now, who can I introduce you to?”

“You don’t have to bother. I’ll get amongst it when I’ve finished my drink. Who are those people over by the window?” There are three middle-aged couples sipping what looks like sherry and smiling nervously at each other.

“They’re some of my neighbours. I always invite them as a kind of tip off. The smart ones take the hint and stay with friends for the night, but they obviously haven’t got the message. It doesn’t matter because once they’ve been here they can hardly kick up a fuss about the noise. It wouldn’t be British. Oh, look, there’s Amanda. You remember Amanda, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

So I re-meet Amanda who looks a hell of a sight better with her clothes on, and am introduced to her husband, Sebastian. He is a pleasant enough cove but only capable of talking about rugger which limits our conversation a bit as I don’t know a scrum from a line out and couldn’t care less about either. Not that this worries Sebastian who goes rambling on about building a new clubhouse for the Old Shithousians or someone until I’m getting glassy-eyed. Luckily, a wave of dancing breaks out at this moment and I seize Amanda and plunge into the middle of it. She is a good girl to be with because she’s built like a padded bumper car and soaks up most of the punishment that is being dished out. Some of those spades really cut loose when they’re dancing and the amount of black tit shaking about would fill a couple of hammocks.

It’s about this time that I notice a lot more flesh than I was seeing earlier in the evening and realise that there are a lot of birds following Sandy’s lead. One fantastic dolly with an Afro hairstyle, blue lips and luminous eye make-up has tassels on her tits and could save you buying an electric fan the way she whirls them around.

Not everybody is dancing though. In one of the bedrooms there is a small group of pot smokers passing round a joint and a couple who have just found they are very much in love and are proving it to anyone who cares to watch.

I snake off for a slash because I can sense that Amanda is getting a bit fruity and I don’t fancy it. Also, husband Sebastian is making going-home noises and I can see that a big row is looming up. I want Sandy, but she is being the good hostess and helping people to vomit or find their coats, according to need, so there is nothing for me there. “Later, darling, later,” she breathes.

Frankly, the way things are going, I’m not certain there is going to be a later. I can definitely feel the walls moving when I lean against them and some of the dancing can only be described as screwing to music. The whole scene has gone up as if it had been soaked in petrol and set fire to and when that happens the flames can be pretty high but they don’t last long.

Things aren’t helped by a gang of skinheads who resent the spade influence at the party – and anybody except themselves having a good time – and are pelting the front entrance with milk bottles. This kind of activity is not slow to stir a response and soon the party divides itself into groups. Sebastian at last begins to enjoy himself and leads a party of idiots on to the balcony to hurl bottles at the skinheads; the pot smokers go on smoking pot; a few mainliners are linking arms in the lav and sharing a love fix; and the rest of us are trying to screw each other. This latter pursuit is helped by the fact that nearly all the lights are off and even the most faint-hearted start stripping down to their birthday suits. It is at this moment that Sandy makes a spectacular entrance stark naked except for her minge cosy into which she has woven some luminous coloured wool. This merry little device catches the fancy of everyone and in no time we are all sitting on the floor weaving patterns in each other’s pubic hairs. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But it’s amazing how something as bloody stupid as that can seem like the most amusing thing in the world when you are pissed. Of course none of the patterns ever got finished because with all the touching up that is going on people’s enthusiasm soon gets syphoned away into other pursuits. I am a bit disappointed because I am doing a lovely white Star of David in this black bird’s fuzz when she suddenly makes it impossible for me to continue. Not that I am complaining, mind you, and none of the other writhing couples around us seem unduly upset either.

I never finish with the black bird because Amanda grabs me and by the time I’ve given it a little wiggle for old times’ sake, Sandy is tapping me on the shoulder and I’m in to number three. I am vaguely aware that the battle outside is hotting up and I think I can hear Sebastian yelping because he has got a dustbin lid stuck in his cake hole but I am now only capable of concentrating on the job in hand. The flesh trading is getting a bit complicated because any spare mouth, or whatever, is speedily seized upon so you are never quite certain who is doing what and with which and to whom.

I can’t remember how long we go on like this but I do recall the pressure of feet along the small of my back and someone shouting, “The Fuzz! The Fuzz!” Immediately, all hell breaks loose and there are blokes leaping about like rats in a burning cage. My mind clears faster than Stamford Bridge after an away win and I am out of Sandy and into my trousers before you can say “I was framed”. Not a second too soon either, because the first Bule comes steaming through the door as I am doing up the zip. He has his truncheon in his hand and must feel quite at home when he looks round some of the blokes in the room.

“I don’t remember inviting you,” starts Sandy, but she gets shoved up against the wall and told to shut up. The Bule is joined by a few of his mates and they are all shaking with outrage and excitement. You can see they haven’t had so much fun in years. It is then that I notice the upper class twit who came in with me. He is bollock naked except for a tiny pair of yellow silk pants and though this might cramp the style of lesser men, it has no effect on this Herbert.

“Can you tell me who is in charge here?” he says. “I would like to register a very strong protest. This is a private party in a private house and so far I have seen no evidence of a search warrant or any other reason for your impertinent intrusion. I will most certainly be bringing this matter to my father’s attention and I can assure you that – Ow!!” The exclamation is caused by one of the Bules stepping on his naked foot and causing him to leap back onto the burning joint of the hopped up idiot behind him. A small spot of pandemonium breaks out and the spades around me start muttering about police brutality.

By this time I am dead scared because I can see that my Ovaltiney’s badge will be right up the spout when this little lot comes to court and after my last brush with the law it’s a bit soon to be coming back for another dose. There is only one thing for it. And that is to get the hell out of the place – fast. Choosing the moment when the upper class twit has accused the Bule of stamping on his foot and sparked off a near riot I sidle towards the window and slip onto its broad ledge just as a shout of alarm indicates that my departure has been noticed.

Luckily, as I have said before, you could wheel a pram along the ledge and even at night I can scoot along it easy as winking. My problem now is the crowd gathered outside who start howling the moment they see me. I nip round the corner of the building and to my relief the ground slopes up sharply so I don’t have so far to jump. Right behind me, some old bag is screaming her guts out at the prospect of being murdered in her bed and that is just the nudge I need. I hit the bank as the first Bule comes round the corner and am across the grass at a speed that would have brought tears to the eyes of my old games master. There’s a fence in front of me but I’m over that like it’s an upturned fag packet and crashing through someone’s back garden. Another fence and then a wall. Down from that just missing a bamboo stake and I branch off at right angles and tip toe up beside a house. Tip toe is the right word because I don’t have any shoes on, remember. Behind me I hear somebody curse and two torch beams bob across the garden and disappear over the next wall. I wait a few more minutes massaging my tortured feet and creep on round the side of the house. There is a door and behind that, I hope, freedom. I press the catch and push. At first nothing, then it suddenly cracks open as if it has just been freshly painted and I nip through like a spurt of flame. Beside me a flight of steps is going up to the first floor but as I step forward, all relieved and relaxed, a face suddenly looms over the side so I can smell the stale booze on the owner’s breath. He shows no sign of fear or surprise to match my own, because he is obviously stoned out of his mind; but I see his eyes weighing up my half-naked body. I could run for it but if he starts shouting, the rozzers will come quicker than a Wop in a warm bedroom. Suddenly, to my amazement, a broad smile spreads across his face and he pats me on the shoulders.

“So, he came home unexpected, did he?” he beams. “I wish I had a pound note for every time it had happened to me. Good luck to you, lad.” And off he goes swaying slightly and chuckling to himself whilst he prods hopefully for the key hole.

Dame Fortune is obviously splitting her face in my direction and as danger recedes so my happily pissed feeling returns as if it has just been hiding away in an odd corner of my body till the trouble blew over. Fresh from the jaws of danger I decide that it is a marvellous moment to go and propose to Elizabeth. Half naked and glistening with dew and sweat I will be revealed in the back garden hurling handfulls of earth against her bedroom window. Crummy Charlton Heston couldn’t do it better – certainly not in my condition. I am so possessed of the strange feeling that I have to go to Elizabeth. It’s like a murderer giving himself up. I feel that someone there is saying, “Right, lad, we got you out of that one, but there’s a condition, see?”

Now the problem is how to get there. Elizabeth’s place is a couple of miles and it is beginning to rain. Wearing just a pair of trousers I do look a bit unusual and not everybody I meet is going to be as pissed as my friend on the steps. It occurs to me, in a blinding flash of inspiration, that if I take my trousers off and run in my pants people will think I am some barmy athlete out training. Trouble is, as I discover when my jeans hit the ground, my pants are still in the flat.

This could be a problem but luckily my guardian angel is still earning her keep because I come round the corner to find she has left a brand new bike there for me. There is no one about and it isn’t padlocked so in no time I’m whizzing away on my errand of love listening to the hum of the wheels and feeling the rain sting my face. Exhilarating is the word for it, I think, and I’m almost singing out loud when I skim to a halt a few houses away from Elizabeth’s place. I prop the bike up against the fence and pad down to Number 47. My feet feel like raw frankfurters but I don’t care and swing my leg noiselessly over the gate. There is not a soul about and the only light comes from a street lamp about fifty yards away. Round the side of the house just brushing against a dustbin lid which refuses to fall – it’s my lucky night, see? – and I’m in the back garden. The rain is falling steadily now and I stand there feeling the wet grass beneath my feet and sucking in mouthfuls of air. I’ve had some good times I think to myself, but I’m not sorry it’s all going to change. I look up to the grey waste of the sky and wonder how I will feel in the morning; what I will say to Mum and what Sid will think about it. Rosie will probably start snivelling and Dad will just shake his head and ask if we intend to move in alongside of Sid, Rosie and the baby. I can see it all. Of course, this presupposes that Elizabeth will say yes, but that is an odds on certainty. The bird has been angling for it since the first time I took her out.

I pick out Elizabeth’s window and go over to one of the flowerbeds for a handful of earth. As I bend down, a cat glides silently along the wall above me and my eye follows it up to the small shed at the end of the garden. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I can see a light glowing in the darkness. Perhaps Elizabeth’s old man has forgotten to turn off the lamp he uses in there. As a future son-in-law it is my duty to protect his property so I slope off to see what I can do.

When I get nearer I can see a line of light around the door and am amazed to hear someone talking in a low voice. Even more amazed when I recognise who it is.

“Oh, that was wonderful,” sighs the girl. “I’d no idea it could be like that. You are clever. You’re so clever.”

An ice cold current of electricity surges through my stomach and I try to make myself believe that this is not happening to me. I must be drunk, or dreaming – or anything!

“It’s easy when it’s with you,” the other voice is also known to me and the pain becomes unbearable. “I could go on doing it all night. I don’t know what it is, but you really turn me on—”

“Oh Sid.”

“Liz.”

Now, if I had any sense I’d bite my lip and tiptoe quietly away writing it all down to experience. Sid has done me a favour really. Better now than when we’ve got hitched. God, how bloody stupid can you get? There I was, deciding to give it all up and settle down with this quiet, demure little girl who would make me a good wife and mother, and all the time the dirty little slut is having it away with Sid. There’s no justice in the world, is there? No wonder blokes go off the rails. ‘I’d no idea it could be like that.’ Bloody hell!

“Sid!”

“Oh Liz.”

Bloody hell!!! My howl of rage must be heard the other side of Tooting Bec Common. I go through the door like it’s wet tissue paper and there is Elizabeth lying on her back on the workbench with Sid standing between her legs.

“You bastard!”

“Hey, what the—”

“Oh, no!”

There’s no point in describing it in detail, and I can’t remember exactly what happened anyway. All I know is that when I leave that shed, it is through a gap in the plywood walls which has been made by Sid’s body. Every light in the neighbourhood is on and Elizabeth’s screams suggest a big future in grand opera – provided she can get the fish glue out of her hair – both sets.

I step over Sid and stride away down the garden. Some blokes would probably be able to think of something comforting and profound at a moment like this, but I’m buggered if I can.

THE END

Confessions of a Driving Instructor
BY TIMOTHY LEA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ONE

I don’t know how you would react to finding your brother-in-law knocking off your fiancée in the potting shed, but I can tell you that I was annoyed. Not annoyed so much as bloody choked. I mean, what a liberty. My own brother-in-law! The horny bastard who was living in the room below mine at the ancestral home of the Leas in Scraggs Road. It would have broken my sister’s heart. Poor Rosie thought the sun went in every time he pulled up his trousers. But what about me? Why was I being so generous with my sympathy? The cunning of the bitch. All that ‘butter wouldn’t melt between my legs’ innocence. The reproving looks every time I used a four-letter word, her little hand sneaking over the top of her glass after the second Babycham. Well, she certainly had me fooled.

That’s what annoyed me most of all, really. I’d been fooled. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d reckoned her as being a bit on the flighty side, but I’d never had an inkling. She’d really made a mug out of me.

I must confess that when I’d stalked off into the night, leaving them clambering out of the wreckage of the shed, I though seriously about going straight home and sobbing the whole story to Rosie. But as I strode through the drizzle and my blood cooled a bit, two things stopped me. One was the praiseworthy desire to spare my sister’s feelings already alluded to, and the other, and much stronger emotion, the fear that everybody in the neighbourhood would soon know that I had been shat on by sexy Sidney, Balham’s answer to the piston engine. If I dropped Sidney in it, he wouldn’t be slow to make sure that everybody in S.W.12 knew that my fiancée preferred him in bed, in a shed, or anywhere, and I couldn’t have stood that. Some of the things I’d heard her whispering to him in the shed fair made my blood curdle; mainly because I had a horrible suspicion that she had never felt like that with me. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help it.

Mum and Dad had gone to bed when I got home and I tiptoed up to my attic room and lay there staring at the roof (I didn’t have much alternative because it was about three inches above my head) and wondering what I should do. As is my normal habit in situations like that, I eventually decided: nothing. Apart from Rosie and my reputation, there was the job (Sid and I were partners in a window-cleaning business) and though we went pretty much our own ways, I didn’t want to rock the boat too much there.

The more I rationalised it all the more I put the blame squarely on Liz’s shoulders. I hated her, but at the same time I wanted her more than I’d ever done in the past. Not with any shred of affection, but with a desire to batter her to death with my body so that she died gasping “You are the greatest” with a look of unspeakable contentment etched across her glazed eyeballs. It had been this ability to look on the brighter side that has been my salvation in many chastening situations.

Not that I was prepared to give Sid a book token or anything. The bastard would be dead scared that I’d spill the beans to Rosie and I decided to let him sweat on it. I didn’t hear him come in before I fell asleep and the next morning when I got down to breakfast early, there was no sign of him or Rosie. Dad was sitting there studying his form book and Mum was frying bread. Dad is very working-class because, though he never does anything, he’s always very punctual about not doing it. He gets down to the Lost Property Office where he works a quarter of an hour before they open and then spends forty minutes in the cafe opposite before he strolls in and bleats like buggery about some kid who comes in five minutes late and gets down to work immediately.

“Morning,” I say cheerfully.

“Morning,” says Mum.

Dad grunts without looking up.

“Have you seen your Dad’s Dentucreme?” says Mum. I shudder because I can’t stand false teeth at the best of times.

“I think Sid tried to clean his wet-look shoes with it,” I say.

“Oh, no! You must be having me on.”

“Straight up, Ma. Sid got mad because it took all the shine off and threw it out of the window.”

“Bloody marvellous,” says Dad. “Who does he think he is?”

“You’ll be able to ask him yourself,” I say, as Sid comes in trying to look all relaxed. I am glad to see that there is a lump under one of his eyes and his upper lip is grotesquely swollen. Mum notices immediately.

“Ooh, Sid, you haven’t been in any trouble, have you?”

“No, Mum. Somebody let a swing door go at me. It was an accident.”

He stresses the last word and there is almost a hint of pleading in his eyes as he looks at me.

“Looks as if Rosie has been having a go at him, if you ask me, Mum,” I say. “What have you been up to, Sid?”

“You and Rosie haven’t had words, have you?” says Mum, all worried-like. Mum can’t stand what she calls ‘an atmosphere’ and can remember when Sid came home rotten-drunk and tried to have Rosie on the stairs. This manoeuvre, difficult enough at the best of times and downright impossible when drunk and with Rosie trying to knee you in the groin, resulted in Sid slipping down fifteen steps and nearly doing himself irreparable damage on a loose stair rod.

“No, no,” says Sid. “Rosie and me are fine. It was an accident, I tell you.”

“Of course, I don’t suppose Rosie has seen your face yet, has she?” I say pleasantly. “You came in pretty late last night, didn’t you?”

“I don’t have to clock in, do I?” says Sid, and I can tell he is beginning to lose his temper.

“Come, come, dear,” says Mum, “I don’t think Timmy meant it like that. It’ll be a bit of a shock for Rosie, won’t it?”

“Too true, Ma,” I chip in. “It’s the kind of thing Rosie could get very distressed about.”

“You hadn’t been drinking, had you, dear?” says Mum. “I know it’s none of my business, but I think you ought to look after yourself a bit more. You’ve been looking quite peaky lately. You must get enough sleep if you’re going to be up and down those ladders all day. You only need one slip and that’s your livelihood gone. And with Rosie and, now, little Jason, you’ve got more than just yourself to think about.”

“Humf,” says Dad from behind his paper.

Dad is a first-rate judge of a layabout and has few contenders himself in the over-fifty category. He has always reckoned Sid to be a creep of the first water and not been slow to say so.

“He’s never thought about anyone else in his whole life and he’s not going to start now. You’re wasting your time there, Mother. Any man with a grain of self-respect wouldn’t still be living off his in-laws on the money he’s making. I know what his little game is. He reckons if he hangs on long enough, you and I will snuff it and he’ll have the house. Well, he’ll have to wait a damn long time, I can tell you. I’ll still be sitting here when he’s queueing up for his old age pension.”

“Oh, God! Not again! I can’t stand it at this time of the morning. How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want your rubbishy old house.”

“‘Rubbishy’. Did you hear that, Mother? The sponging layabout has the gall to call our home ‘rubbishy’. If it’s not good enough for you, why do you stay here then?”

“I’m not staying here a minute longer than it takes me to save up the deposit on a flat. You know that as well as I do. And don’t talk about sponging. You get your rent every week. A bloody sight more than you deserve for this dump. I’m amazed the kid wasn’t born with web feet.”

“Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? Did you hear that, Mother? Now he’s sneering at us. You’d like oil-fired central heating, I suppose, and a heated lavatory seat.”

“It’s quite warm enough, the length of time you spend sitting on it,” says Sid, and Dad goes on spluttering while Mum clucks away and the fried bread gets burnt. It’s all going very nicely, though it’s getting a bit far away from Rosie.

Luckily the little lady herself makes a timely appearance and immediately drops her lips to give the loathsome Sid his first kiss of the day. In such a position his battered phizog is clearly revealed to her.

“Oh, Sid,” she squeals. “How did you do that?”

“Yes, Sid,” I say, my voice heavy with menace, “how did you do that?”

“I’ve told you once, you berk. Somebody swung a door in my face.” He sounds worried.

“On purpose?” howls Rosie. “How could anybody do a thing like that?”

“Maybe Sid rubbed them up the wrong way,” I say, helpfully. “You’d be surprised some of the things he gets up to.”

I divide my gaze between Sid and Rosie and they stare at me blankly, but for different reasons.

“You aren’t in any trouble, are you, Sid?”

Very good question. Sid swallows hard and is about to open his mouth when Mum decides it’s time to change the subject.

“I thought your Elizabeth was looking very nice the other night,” she says to me. Stupid old bag. Trust her to let Sid off the hook. But maybe I can turn it to advantage.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I say, grudgingly.

“What do you mean, ‘you wouldn’t know’?” says Rosie, turning her attention away from Sid. “She’s a lovely girl. You should be very glad to have her.”

“Yes,” says Sid, chirping up a bit, “very glad.”

“Depends what you mean by ‘have’,” I say, giving Sid the evil eye.

“I don’t understand you.” Rosie shakes her head.

“Well, Rosie, I suppose I’d better tell you—and you, Mum. You’ve got to know sooner or later—” My voice is trembling and even Dad puts down his pencil and stares at me. Sid’s face screws up like a man threatened with a red hot poker and his mean features plead for mercy.

“I don’t really know how to say this …” Sid pulls back from the throng and his hand dives into his back pocket.

“… but last night I saw Liz and …” Sid pulls open his wallet and points feverishly at a thick wad of notes. My power is total and I can’t resist another turn of the knife.

“It was in her Dad’s potting shed …”

“Her Dad’s potting shed?” says Mum. “I hope you weren’t up to no good.”

“Oh, no, Mum. Not me …”

Sid staggers back against the sink to await the mardi gras, as the frogs call it.

“We had a talk and, well, we decided it wasn’t on.”

“Oh, no, dear. I am sorry to hear that. Are you sure it isn’t just a tiff?” says Mum.

“No, Mum. There’s a number of fundamental issues we disagree on.” (I got that from all those trade union interviews on the telly.)

“Like sex before marriage, I suppose,” sneers Dad, rubbing his fried bread into his egg yolk like he’s trying to clean the pattern off the plate.

“No, we both felt the same about that,” I say, meaningfully, giving Sid’s wallet a hard glance. Sid’s smile is what you might call conciliatory.

“Oh, I am sorry,” says Rosie. “I liked Liz; didn’t you, Sid?”

Sid gulps and nods his head.

“From what little I saw of her.”

Cheeky bastard! That’s going to cost him a few extra quid.

“What do you mean, ‘little’? You two were getting on like a house on fire that night up at the boozer.”

Blimey, I think to myself, even my dozey sister could see what was going on. What a prize berk I must be.

“The course of true love never runs smooth,” chips in Mum. “Don’t be too disappointed. I’m certain it’s not over yet.”

“Oh, I am, Mum. From my point of view, there’s no going back on what happened last night.”

“But how can you suddenly be so certain!” bleats Rosie. “I mean, you’ve been going steady with Liz for months now. You’re not going to tell me that one little row can be the end of everything.”

“It wasn’t so little,” I say with a quiet intensity that would have made Godfrey Winn sound like a fairground barker. “There are some things so fundamental in a relationship that when you stumble across them they spell make or break.”

“I don’t understand what the hell he’s talking about,” says Dad. “You mean you found she was in the family way?”

The stupid old sod doesn’t know how close he is but I dismiss him with a humoring nod of the head and address myself to Sid and his disappearing wallet.

“No, Dad, it’s nothing your generation would understand. I think Sid knows what I mean, don’t you, Sid?”

Sid blushes before my penetrating gaze and nods vigorously.

“Yes, Timmy,” he says, “I had the same problem myself once.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Rosie. “It certainly wasn’t with me. We never had a wrong word the whole time we were engaged.”

“I don’t ever remember that you were engaged,” says Dad.

“Now, Dad …” says Mum.

“If he’s going to start getting at me …” says Rosie.

“I’d better be getting going,” says Sid. “I’ve got an early job. I’ll have some breakfast at the caff.”

I catch up with him in the hall. “Oh, Sid,” I say, “I got the impression in there you might be able to stand me a few bob.”

“How much? A fiver?”

“You must be joking. That’s what you’d pay up the West End. For family it comes a bit more expensive. Twenty-five nicker.”

“Nice bleeder, aren’t you? You’d make a good ponce.”

“Thanks. It takes one to know one. Just take it as being damages for breach of promise.”

“I never promised anything.”

“O.K. Well, consider yourself an unofficial co-respondent.”

“It’s more like bloody blackmail.”

“It is bloody blackmail and you’re bloody lucky to get off with twenty-five nicker and a bunch of fives up the bracket.”

“O.K. Well, I suppose it was worth it.”

“Don’t push it.”

And so on those pleasant terms we part with Sid lighter by the weight of five crisp fivers which he counts three times in case an extra one might have got stuck to them.

It is shortly after this event that, much to my father’s surprise and mother’s sorrow, Sid makes good his promise and moves Rosie and Jason into the wonderful new world of a Span flat, overlooking the common. Dad congratulates himself that it is his non-stop rabbiting that has done the trick but I have a shrewd suspicion that it is the threat of me blurting out a few home truths to Rosie—plus the not inconsequential demands I am making upon his surplus funds. Some might feel the odd pang of guilt, but I console myself with the thought that I am feathering my beloved sister’s nest as well as my own.

With the departure of the Boggetts (that was Sid’s name, poor sod) I move my photographs of the Chelsea football team (F.A. and European Cup winners: ‘We are the champions’) down to their bedroom and prepare to lord it a bit. But things don’t work out the way I’ve hoped. Mum is distraught about losing ‘her little Jason’ and keeps going on about all his lovable little habits like pissing in the coal bucket, and Dad misses having Sid to whine at and starts taking it out on me. Between the two of them, they are beginning to make me feel quite nostalgic for the old days. What I would have done next I’ll never know because at that moment fate intervenes and the whole course of my life is changed at one stroke. Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Oh, well, please yourself.

I have already mentioned that I shared a window cleaning business with Sid and readers of the previous volume of my memoirs (Confessions of a Window Cleaner—Sphere 1971. Ed.) will recall that this led to the odd entanglement with what my old schoolmaster used to call members of the opposite sex. It was such an occasion that led to my eventual, and literal, downfall.

I remember the day well because it was late summer and very hot in a way that only happens in the week after everyone has come back from their August bank holiday. Dogs panted in shadowy doorways and the heat seemed to muffle the noises of the street so that I might have been working in a dream as I lazily swept my squeegee over the top floor windows. I was operating in the front garden of a row of comfortable middle-class semi-detacheds behind Nightingale Lane and was stripped to the waist, not because I wanted to give any bird the come-on, but because I wanted to improve my suntan—though the two things are not entirely unconnected. Most of the windows round here are thicker with net curtains than Dracula’s wedding veil, but Mrs. Dunbar must have had hers in the wash because I can see straight through into her kiddies’ nursery.

Mrs. D. is on her hands and knees behind a rocking horse, and I note with satisfaction the pattern of her knickers showing through her skirt as her delicious little arse bulges over her haunches. Mrs. D. is a regular client of mine but I’ve never had an inkling that there might be anything there for me. To be honest, I find her a bit upper-class and self-confident. I prefer a bird who is more dithery and unsure of herself. Nevertheless, in my sun-sated mood and with a couple of pints from the wood inside me, there are a lot worse things to look at. She has the horse’s tail in her hand and turns towards me and shrugs her shoulder. This is a gesture she could repeat to advantage because she isn’t wearing a bra and her breasts give a little jump like startled kittens. I can see the kittens’ noses, too, pressing temptingly out towards me. Cruel Mrs. D. No animal lover should be so frustrated. The no-bra look has been slow to penetrate into the Clapham and Wandsworth Common area and is another indication of upper-class sophistication and decadence which leaves me trembling with a mixture of desire and impotence—two bedfellows that seldom give each other much pleasure.

Mrs. D.’s gesture is meant to indicate that she doesn’t know what to do with the rocking horse’s tail and a number of tempting alternatives flash across my mind. I reject them and take the opportunity to close the distance between us.

“Let me give you a hand,” I say gallantly, and I’m over the sill before she can say ‘Piss off.’

“Oh, that’s kind of you,” she says breezily. “I’m afraid he’s seen better days.” She isn’t joking because most of the leather-work is hanging off and the screws that hold the horse to its frame all need tightening up. I make a few tut-tutting noises and send her off for the tools to do the job. The way her eyes flit lightly across my pectorals does not escape me. When she comes back I’m tapping in tacks and she asks me if I’ve got any children.

“Don’t think so. What makes you ask?”

“You seem to know how to mend toys.”

“My sister and her husband used to live with us. The kid smashed everything it could get its hands on. I got plenty of practice. You know what kids are like. They enjoy taking things to pieces but they don’t want to put them together again.”

She nods.

“So you’re not married?”

“No. I was thinking about it, but things didn’t work out. You must be, though. How many kids have you got.”

“Two. They’re with their father at the moment. We’re separated.”

“Oh, I am sorry.” In fact, I’m chuffed to NAAFI breaks because there is nothing more likely to put the mockers on a beautiful romance than the threat of a couple of kids bundling in on you at any moment.

“Don’t be. I’m not.” She rubs her hands together lightly and pats her hair. “You’re a fabulous colour.”

“It’s easy on this job.”

“I envy you when it’s like this.”

“Well, you haven’t got far to go yourself.”

“I have to think of the neighbours. Would you like a beer? I think there’s some in the ’fridge.”

Another sign of class. Mostly it’s a cup of tea with my customers. But whatever it is, any form of refreshment is a favourable omen. Many is the pot of cha I’ve known to go cold with only the two cups out of it.

“That’s very kind of you.”

A few moments later she’s back just as I’ve finished the rocking horse.

“Oh, that’s much better. I’d hardly recognise him. The children will be pleased. I hope this is all right. It’s lager.”

“Smashing! Cheers!”

“Cheers!”

I’m down on the floor so I lean back against my handiwork and rub the cool glass against my cheek. She is standing above me pulling at the horse’s bridle as if it is real. I can see up her skirt but not as far as I’d like to. I feel keyed up the way I do just before going out to play football. The sunlight is coming through the window in chunks so you can see thousands of particles of dust dancing in it.

“You said you were nearly married once, didn’t you?”

“Did I?”

“Yes. You implied it, anyway. What went wrong? Forgive me asking, but it’s a subject I’m particularly interested in at the moment.”

“I found the bird I fancied having it away with my brother-in-law.”

“The one that lives at home with your sister?”

“He used to. They’ve got a flat up by the common now.”

“You didn’t like that? I mean, him sleeping with your girlfriend?”

“Not very much. I mean, it doesn’t seem the best recommendation for your future wife, does it?”

“I don’t know. At least you know where you stand with her.”

“It’s who else is standing with her I’d be worried about.”

“You’re the jealous type?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Jealousy is a very self-destructive emotion.”

“Not with me, it isn’t. I’m the last person that gets destroyed.”

“Surely the concept of sexual faithfulness is a bit out of date, isn’t it? Are you seriously going to tell me you will remain faithful to your wife when you do get married? The opportunities you must have in a job like this.”

I try to look as if the thought had never occurred to me.

“I reckon it’s difficult for me.”

I know this remark is going to get her all worked up, but there is no point in putting off saying it. I’m all for complete sexual freedom for women in theory, but the moment some horny bastard gets near my bird a phial of sulphuric acid explodes in my stomach and little green bells start ringing as I look around for an axe. That’s the way I am and I can’t see myself changing.

“Oh God! Even my far from successful marriage had progressed beyond that hoary old male chestnut.” Mrs. D.’s tone is as contemptuous as I had expected it to be. “Why should you have complete freedom to take sex just whenever you want it, whilst your little woman is supposed to sit at home and keep your supper warm?”

I have now decided that the kittens look more like small, fretful tigers jostling each other to escape and get at me. I am prepared for this eventuality.

“You mean to tell me,” I say seriously, borrowing one of J.C.’s successful argumentative devices, “that if your old man came in now and saw us—um, er—” (the indecision is intentional; I don’t want to sound too sure of myself) “making love, he wouldn’t mind?”

“No, of course not. No more than if he found me enjoying a bit of quiche lorraine.” (I don’t understand what she’s on about, but I imagine it must be French for a muff job. Outspoken lady, isn’t she?) “It’s no more than an appetite and as such, it can be controlled.”

“And if it was the other way round, you wouldn’t get annoyed?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“Then what went wrong with your marriage?”

“I found out I didn’t love him any more. It had nothing to do with sex. I was seven years younger than him and I changed—he didn’t. Suddenly I found we had nothing in common.”

I can sense that I have to get things moving pretty quickly, otherwise we’re going to end up having a natter that only needs Adam Faith and the Archbishop of Woolwich to get it on Sunday evening telly. I am still lying down and I want to bring her down to my level. It’s no good with her leaning against the bedroom door. I can’t just get up and grab her, because that is not my style. There is still some lager in my glass so I put it down beside me and then promptly knock it over.

“Oh, sorry. I am a clumsy berk.”

“It doesn’t matter; there’s a cloth in the bathroom.”

She goes out and I dab ineffectually at the stain with my handkerchief until she comes back. Then she’s on her hands and knees beside me and her delicious tits bounce up and down whilst I ache to close my hands around them. Her vest hangs open, and it is like looking into a sackful of apples. “Do something!” shouts the voice inside me. The soft down of hairs on her forearm glistens gold and matches the curls gently caressing the smooth, white valleys behind her ears. “Do something!” She gives one last stain-dispersing rub and sits back on her haunches. The outline of her pants now runs across her stretched skirt like an extra seam. She takes a deep breath and there’s no doubt about it, she’s a real knock-out. “Do something!” The message gets home to me and I lean forward for what is intended to be a gentle, respectful kiss, capable of interpretation as mute admiration rather than slow rape. Trouble is that she suddenly leans forward at the vital moment and nudges me in the mouth with her temple. I taste blood immediately and she doesn’t make things any better by laughing. Nothing bright and breezy leaps to my lips and, sensing my discomfiture, she gives me a light kiss on the cheek.

“I’m sorry—” she begins, but when a Lea’s passions are roused and his pride stung, tidal waves are like a kid’s widdle. I grab her above the elbows and pull her on to my mouth. She struggles a bit and then goes limp so that I can release the pressure on her arms and send my finger up to stroke her cheeks. I suck her lips and her tongue darts against mine. She is rubbing those fantastic tits against my chest and her fingers claw underneath the belt of my jeans. I may have misread the signs but I don’t think she is going to start hollering for a cop.

I kiss her eyelids and with the delicacy of a master surgeon run my fingers along her backbone, dwelling momentarily on each firm protuberance. Her vest is cramping our style and I tug it upwards until the delicious breasts bound into my eager hands and I can soothe the fretting nipples with my kindly caress. Such a shape they have, and so firm. The vest must go and she writhes rhythmically like an athlete winding up to throw the discus, before slipping it over her shoulders. Unimpeded, I now drop my mouth and browse between her breasts, near suffocating in their rich, firm fullness. My hands scout for the hook on her skirt and tug it open, down with the zip, and I can feel the soft sheen of her pants. Her fingers are not idle and she fumbles with my belt, grumbling under her breath. I flip over on my back and slip down my trousers, pants, shoes and socks like a snake shedding its skin. She lies across my chest and her hand tip-toes down to explore between my legs. Deliciously naked and warm in the sun-filled room, I kiss her hard and send my tongue deep into her mouth so that her hand tightens around my fullness and her body squirms against mine. I have had enough of games and even vein and muscle in my body throbs to be at her.

“I want you inside me.”

She tears the words from my mouth and slowly turns on to her back like a frivolous cat, her half-parted lips hinting at the pleasure to come. For a second I savour her and then I am between her legs, pulling down her skirt and slowly removing her pants—women love having their knickers taken off—before softly gauging her readiness with my fingers. She gives a little gasp and stretches out her hand imploringly.

“Please,” she says. “Please put it in.”

Maybe it is an hour later, maybe longer. I don’t know. All I do know is that the sun is still shining, the room is still warm and I have been asleep. Mrs. D. is dozing beside me and I am looking straight into the eyes—or rather eye—of a scruffy teddy bear.

“Penny!”

The voice is loud and male and does not belong to the teddy bear—not that it is coming from much further away.

“Penny! Where the hell are you?”

Mrs. D.’s eyes open and then open a whole lot more. Her head bounces off the floor and she swallows half the air in the room.

Now, at this moment, I should have remembered that Mrs. D. and her husband were separated and that he wasn’t the jealous type anyway. I should have lain back and called out, “We’re in here, old chap. Won’t be a sec. Why don’t you fix yourself a gin and T. and we’ll be right down?” and he would have coughed apologetically and said, “Gosh, I’m most awfully sorry. Hope I didn’t disturb you, what? See you in a few mins.” Then I could have had Mrs. D. again and gone downstairs to talk about how the soil around here was lousy for lupins.

But, of course, I don’t do any of those things. Maybe it’s the look in Mrs. D.’s eyes or maybe it’s the size of the voice outside, or maybe it’s just instinct; but anyway, I’m half way across the room as the door knob starts turning. I pause pathetically, considering snatching up a few clothes, and then launch myself on to the ladder. As I swivel round, my eye captures the scene like a camera. Door flung open, bloody great rugby type filling the space it occupies, Mrs. D. cowering with her pants in one hand and the other draped across her tits. Mr. D. (I have no reason to suppose it is anyone else) sinks the scene in one gulp and bounces Mrs. D. across the room with a belt round the side of the bonce which would have stopped Joe Frazier.

I feel like telling him that I agree with him entirely and that he has all my sympathy, but I don’t think he wants to talk to me. His eyes flash towards the window and as my head drops out of sight I see him reaching for something. This turns out to be a hobby horse, as I find when he swings it at my head like a mace. The expression on his face would scar your dreams for years.

“I’ll kill you, you bastard,” he screams, and he doesn’t have to go on about it—I’m convinced. I’ve hardly had time to rejoice that I’m out of range than he changes his tactics. I’ve got the extension on and there’s a long drop to the ground. Mr. D. decides to speed up my journey and, jamming the hobby horse against the ladder, starts to push it away from the house. Like a prick, I hang on for grim death and scream at him instead of sliding. What a way to go! Stark bollock naked in the middle of Thurston Road! I see Dunbar’s face contorted in a self-satisfied effort and for a moment the ladder trembles. Then I’m going backwards, paralysed with fear, and the house is growing in front of me.

I try to jump and the next thing I know is this god-awful pain in my ankle and the feeling that all the breath has been dug out of my body with a spade.

I’m sprawled across the centre of the road, screaming with pain and fear, Mrs. D. is howling, the neighbours’ windows are slamming open, cars are squealing to a halt, and suddenly a quiet residential street seems like Trafalgar Square on Guy Fawkes night. I’m glad to see everyone, because any second I’m expecting Mr. D. to come bursting through his front door to finish the job. It’s amazing how the great British public react at a moment like this. They are interested all right, but not one of the bastards makes a move to help me. I might be a tailor’s dummy for all they care.

To my surprise, Mrs. D. is first to my side, and she’s alone, thank God. She drapes a blanket over me and that encourages a few helpmates to get me on to the pavement.

“What a load of crap about your husband,” I snarl. “If that was your husband.”

“Yes, yes,” she says, beaming round at the neighbours, who, observing her black eye, are no doubt putting two and two together and scoring well. “I’m sorry about that. He’s phoning for an ambulance now.”

“Sure it isn’t the morgue?”

“No, no.” She pats my arm and smiles again. “I’m sorry. I really am.” I close my eyes because I’m feeling sick, dizzy and knackered. Bugger the lot of them. When I open them again, it’s as I’m being lifted into the ambulance. Mrs. D. follows me in and gives my hand an affectionate squeeze.

“It was wonderful,” she says.

I won’t tell you what my reply was, but the ambulance man nearly dropped me on the floor.

CHAPTER TWO

It turns out that my ankle is broken in more places than a Foreign Secretary’s promises and they keep me in hospital for three days. I have a private room, which surprises me at first until I find out that it is courtesy of a certain Dr. Dunbar—small world, isn’t it? I make a few inquiries and it seems that this party has taken his wife and kids on a camping holiday to the South of France, so he isn’t around to be thanked. You could knock me down with a feather—or half a brick, if you had one handy. So Cupid Lea strikes again! What a carve-up! Why wasn’t I in the marriage guidance business? I might not be able to do myself any good, but I was obviously the kiss of death to the permissive society.

One of the advantages of a private room, apart from the fact that the other buggers couldn’t nosh your fruit, was that it gave you an uninterrupted crack at the nurses, and some were little darlings. I’ve always been kinky about black stockings and Florence Nightingale, and with one pert red-head the very presence of her thermometer under my tongue was enough to raise the bedclothes a couple of inches. There is nothing more randy-making than lying in bed with sod-all else to do but fiddle about under the bedclothes and by the end of my time, the nurses had to come into the room in pairs and my arm had grown half a foot grabbing at them. It didn’t do me any good, although I did corner the red head in the linen cupboard on my last morning and pin her against a pile of pillow cases with my crutch (the one you prop under your arm). I had just got one hand into that delicious no-man’s-land between stocking top and knickers (I hate tights) when Sister came in looking like a scraped beetroot and I had to say goodbye quickly. All very sad but life is full of little might-have-beens.

Eight weeks later it was time to take the plaster off and I was bloody grateful because every berk in the neighbourhood had used it as a scribbling pad to demonstrate his pathetic sense of humour. Word of my escapade had got around and there were a lot of cracks about ‘Batman’ and ‘Peter Pan’ which I found pretty childish.

I hate going to the Doctor because the waiting room smells of sick people and most of the magazines are older than I am. It is cold and badly lit and the stuffed owl in a glass case looks as if you’d only have to give it a nudge for all its feathers to fall out. Everybody seems healthy enough but I have a nasty feeling that underneath the clothes their bodies are erupting in a series of disgusting sores covering limbs held together by sellotape. Behind the serving hatch a parched slag of about 182 dispenses pills and indifference. In such an atmosphere I wonder why the N.H.S. doesn’t dispense a do-it-yourself knotting kit and have done with it.

When I get in to his surgery, Doctor Murdoch attacks my plaster as if gutting a fish that has done him a personal injury. From the look of him one would guess that he had just returned from a meths drinkers’ stag party. The sight of my ankle causes his prim lips to contract into walnuts and I can sympathise with him. The object we are both staring at looks like a swollen inner tube painted the colour of a gangrenous sunset.

“What do you do?” he barks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you’re a ballroom dancer, you’d better get down to the labour exchange.”

“It’s going to be alright, isn’t it?” I whine. I mean, what with heart transplants and artificial kidneys you expect them to be able to mend a bloody broken ankle, don’t you?

“You’ll be able to walk on it, but I won’t make any promises about the next Olympic Games,” says Murdoch who must be a laugh riot at his medical school reunions.

“I’m a window cleaner,” I pipe.

“You were,” says Murdoch. “That ankle has been very badly broken. You can’t risk any antics on it. I’m amazed we’ve got it together as well as we have.” I’m speechless for a moment. All those windows, all those birds. I could weep just thinking about it. What are they going to do without me? What am I going to do without them?

Added to that, there is the money.

“Are you positive?” I gulp.

“Absolutely. Of course, you don’t have to take my advice but you’d be a damn fool to get on a ladder again.”

So there I am, redundant at 22. Lots of blokes would envy me but there is a crazy streak of ambition in the Leas and I’m too patriotic to go on National Assistance—at least for a few years yet. What am I going to do?

Broken-hearted, I manage to get pissed and return to the family home. As I have already indicated relations with Dad have been strained since Sid’s departure and my accident has not drawn forth the sympathy one could expect from a father figure. I suspect that this may be due to some of the rumours that have been circulating. “Look Mother,” he sings out as I come through the door. “It’s the Birdman of Alcatraz!”

This is really witty for Dad and besides confirming my suspicions is an unkind allusion to a few months I once spent at reform school.

“Shutup, you miserable old git!” I say.

“Don’t raise your voice to me, sonny,” says Dad, “otherwise I’ll start asking you when you first began to clean windows in the all-together. Got a nudist camp on the rounds, I suppose?”

Dad and Doctor Murdoch would make a wonderful comedy team, and I’m wondering what Hughie Green’s telephone number is when Mum chips in.

“Do leave him alone, Dad, he’s told you enough times what happened.”

“Oh, yes, Mother. I know all that. He was stretched out on the roof, wasn’t he, having a little sunbathe. Then this bloke opens a window, dislodges the ladder. Timmy grabs at it, slips, loses his balance and does a swallow dive into the street. Sounds very likely, doesn’t it?”

“I really can’t be bothered—” I begin.

“I suppose that bird got a black eye when you landed on top of her?”

“I wonder what your excuse is going to be, Dad?”

“Don’t adopt that tone with me, Sonny Jim. I could still teach you a few lessons if it came to the pinch.”

“Well, prove it, or shut up.”

I mean it, too. Every few weeks or it is probably days now, Dad and I are squaring up to each other and sooner or later I am going to dot the stupid old bugger one. Nothing happens this time because mum throws a tantrum and sister Rosie arrives with little Jason.

“I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” Mum is wailing when little dribble jaws shoves his jam-stained mug round the door and her mood changes faster than a bloke finding that the large lump in the middle of his new cement path is his mother-in-law.

“Hello darling,” she coos. “Who’s come to see his Grand-mummy, then? Ooh, and what a nasty runny nose we’ve got. Doesn’t naughty mummy give you your lovely cod liver oil, then?”

Honestly, Rosie must feel like belting her sometimes. She still exists in a world of cod liver oil, cascara and milk of magnesia. Open your bowels and live might be her motto.

Mum and Rosie go rabbiting on and little Jason rubs his filthy fingers all over the moquette. Just like old times. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about my problem, and nobody would be interested, anyway.

“How are the lessons going, dear?” says Mum.

“Oh, smashing Mum. I’ve got this lovely fellah. Very refined, lovely even white teeth. I think they’re his own. You know what I mean?”

Mum shakes her head vigorously. “Yes dear, some of them are very nice. I’ve thought about learning myself, but your father will never get one.”

What are they on about? I’ve never known Rosie to acknowledge the existence of any other bloke than Sid.

“He’s ever so gentlemanly and he never shouts at me. Everything is very smooth and relaxed.”

“That’s the secret, dear,” agrees Mum. “If you were doing it with Sid he would probably start getting at you. I’m told you never want to take lessons with your husband. Can you imagine what your father would be like?”

They nod enthusiastically.

“Bloody marvellous, isn’t it?” says Dad, letting me in on the secret. “For thirty years I struggle and sweat to support a family and never even sniff a motor car. Now every bleeder has one and your mother starts saying she wants to take driving lessons.”

“Yes Dad.”

I’m not really listening because suddenly I’ve got this feeling that fate—or whatever you like to call it—is trying to tell me something. Become a driving instructor! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? It would be ideal. I can’t hop about on my leg too much and as an instructor I’d be sitting on my arse most of the time, telling some bird to turn left at the next traffic lights. It would be a doddle. And what opportunities to exploit my natural talents! If Mum and Rosie could be aroused, just imagine the effect on a normal red-blooded woman! I’d seen all those ads and tele commercials—that’s where they had got the idea from. Tight-lipped, hawk-eyed young men ruthlessly thrusting home gear leavers with wristy nonchalance whilst, open-mouthed x-certificate “yes please” girls lapped up every orgasmic gesture. It was a wonder a bird could look at a gear stick without blushing. And the whole operation had so much more class than window cleaning. I’d seen them with their leather-patched hacking jackets, nonchalantly drumming their fingers against the side of the window. “Very good, Mrs. Smithers. You really are beginning to make progress. Now let’s pull off on the left here, and I’ll ask you a few questions about the Highway Code—”

“Oh Mr. Lea—”

“Careful, Mrs. Smithers, you’re drooling all over my chukka boots.”

I can see it as clearly as Ted Heath’s teeth. An endless procession of upside-down footprints on the dashboard.

Are you the guy that’s been a pushin’

Leaving greasemarks on the cushion

And footprints on the dashboard upside down

Since you’ve been at our Nelly,

She’s got pains down in her belly,

I guess you’d best be moving out of town.

That’s the way Potter the Poet tells it and that’s the way I can see it.

The rest of the day is background music and the next morning I am round at Battersea Public Library which is the source of all knowledge to the lower orders. I had been simple enough to imagine that you just slapped a sign saying “LEArn with LEA” on your car and you were away. But, oh dear me, no. Not by a long chalk. The lady with a frizzy bun and indelible pencil all round her unpretty lips soon throws a bucket of cold water over that one.

“You’ll have to write to the Department of the Environment,” she says coldly. Me writing to the Department of the Environment! I mean, it sounds so grand I hardly feel I have a right to. Maybe I should chuck it all in and get a job on the buses. But I do as she says and soon receive an AD154 (an official paid buff envelope which Dad snitches to send off his pools), an AD12, an AD13, and AD1 3L, two AD14’s and an AD1 14 (revised). My cup overfloweth. After poring over this lot till my eyes ache I work out that I have to get on the Register of Approved Driving Instructors and that to do this I have to pass a written and a practical examination. I will then be a—wait for it—“Department of the Environment Approved Driving Instructor” and you can’t get much higher than that, can you? D.E.A.D.I.—oh well, I suppose they know what they are doing.

Filling in the application form is a bit of a drag because there is a section about convictions for non-motoring offences and a request for the names of two people prepared to give references. I decide to come clean on the lead-stripping because, on the application form, they give you four lines for details of your offences and tell you to continue on a separate sheet if necessary, so they must be used to getting some right rogues. My criminal record will fit into half a line.

The references are more of a problem because you can’t use family (not that anyone, apart from Mum, would have a good word for me) and I am not on close terms with anyone else in S.W.12. In the end I make up a couple of names and give my sister’s address for one, and a block of flats where I know the caretaker for the other. Both of them get instructions to hang on to any mail addressed to the Rev. Trubshawe or Lieut.-Colonel Phillips R.A. and sure enough, both of them get a letter asking for a character reference.

I am dead cunning with my replies, even getting the Rev. Trubshawe to allude to my schoolboy indiscretion: “no doubt accounted for by his having strayed into the company of the wrong sort of boy”, whilst the colonel says I am a “damn fine type”. My little ruse seems to work because two weeks later I get a receipt for my £5 examination admission fee and am told where to report.

The first examination is the written one and I mug up all the guff they give me so I see road signs every time I close my eyes. I have never worked so hard in my life and I feel really confident that I’m going to do well. But—and that is one of the key words in my life—once again fate puts the mockers on me. This time it is in the crutch-swelling shape of the eldest Ngobla girl Matilda. The Ngoblas are our next door neighbours and, as their name suggests, are blacker than the inside of a lump of coal. Mum and Dad are very cool about it and would never admit to anything as unsavoury as racial prejudice but the Ngoblas are not on our Christmas card list and when Mum smiles at Mrs. Ngobla it’s like Sonny Liston trying to tell his opponent something as they touch gloves. For myself, I am not very fussed either way but I don’t have much to do with the Ngoblas, basically, I suppose, because I never have done.

My encounter with Matilda takes place when I am revising on the eve of my examination. Mum has gone to the bingo and Dad is at the boozer so I have the kitchen to myself and am reading “Driving” for the four hundred and thirty second time when I look out of the window and see Matilda prancing about on the lawn (which is what Dad calls the patch of dandelions by the dustbins). She has just achieved that instant transformation from schoolgirl to woman and with her pink woolly sweater and velvet hot-pants she looks decidedly fanciable. I can hardly believe that when I last saw her she was wearing a grubby gymslip and dragging a satchel behind her. It turns out that one of her kid brothers—there are about 400 of them—has lost his ball over the wall and I help her look for it whilst flashing some of the small talk that has made me the toast of Wimbledon Palais. I am glad to find, when she bends over an old chicken coop, that there isn’t a drop of prejudice in me. In fact, quite the reverse. I could board her, no trouble at all. She looks as if she has been poured into a black rubber mould and the sight is enough to give Mr. Dunlop a few ideas for new products, I can tell you.

I persuade her to pop inside for a quick drink (tea or coffee) and—well, you know what it is like—one thing leads to another and I’ve got her hot pants off before you can say Enoch Powell. A few moments later, we are wearing out the pile on the fireside rug when Dad comes in. He must have crept across the hall on tiptoe, the nosey old sod. He goes spare and starts rambling on about “your mother’s home” and “blackamoors”, “thin end of the wedge” etc., until I nearly go out of my mind. No sooner has he belted up than Mum comes in to hear the whole story and start blaming herself for leaving me alone for a couple of hours just as if I was still a schoolkid. Matilda stalks out with her head in the air right at the beginning and, I must say, I have to hand it to her.

“Ooh, the hussy,” squeals Mum, “can’t you see, it’s a conspiracy. They’ve been trying to lure you for years. Give themselves a bit of respectability. You mark my words, that black trollop will be saying you made her pregnant.”

“She’ll be dead lucky,” I say. “Dad put the kibosh on that.”

“Shut your mouth, you dirty little bleeder,” howls Dad.

It’s all pretty turgid, and when I tell Dad he is jealous and I have watched him giving Mrs. Ngobla the eye for years, he goes stark raving bonkers.

“Get out of this house!” he rages. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

So I do. Straight out of the front door, slamming it behind so the whole terrace sways. And that is the start of one of the worst nights of my life. I am not going back, oh no, not me! But where am I going? Rosie seems a good bet, even if I do have to throw myself on Sid’s mercy, but I find that they have gone to Hastings for the week.

When I think about it, I’ve got the same problem I had when I was looking for a reference. No friends. I end up sleeping, if that is the right word, in one of the tennis court huts on Clapham Common, and I have to hang around there for an hour until the last pair of lovers vacate it. It is bloody cold and I think I still have the pattern of the benches stamped on my shoulder blades. When I eventually drop off it is only onto the floor and then it starts raining so I give up the whole idea of sleep and huddle in the darkness until it begins to get light.

The result of this is that by the time I get to the examination, I am totally knackered and can hardly keep my eyes open. I am not looking my best, either because pride has prevented me from returning to the family home and velvet jeans and a Mr. Freedom T-shirt are a trifle conscipuous amongst the selection of sports jackets set off by the occasional Burton masterpiece.

We have one hour and twenty minutes for the first two papers and by a superhuman effort I manage to keep my eyes open most of the time, though it is fatal if I prop my head on a hand. My habit of jumping out of my seat and taking violent swings at the empty air causes a little surprise though, as does the occasional slap round the chops I administer to myself.

We have a break before the second examination and I nip across the road for some tea and a couple of ham rolls. Trouble is I’ve no sooner sat down than I fall asleep and all the other buggers have been working for fifteen minutes when I come stumbling through the door. I try and settle down but it’s hopeless. Every question I read about five times and I can’t take in the words. I start writing and my mind drifts off into cotton wool and I forget what I was about. Then I make the mistake of thinking that if I could just take a little cat nap I would awake refreshed and be able to dash off the papers in half an hour. The next thing I remember is the examiner tugging my papers from under my head and the trail of saliva running down the desk and on to the floor. My paper has my number on it, the question number and “The interpretation of the reason for failure”. That is all. I could weep.

But of course, I don’t. I drag myself home and go straight to bed, ignoring Mum who is glad to see me, but damned if she is going to show it too much. It’s a funny thing but though I am still flaked out I can’t sleep. I just lie there thinking how I have blown the exam and how bloody unfair it is. After a while, I get up and go through all my AD12 and AD13s to see if and when I can take it again. Three months it says.

Three months! That is a bloody long time; especially now that I have vowed to get out of Scraggs Road just as fast as my tiny legs will carry me.

I pore over my papers and discover a faint ray of hope. I can get a “Licence to give Instruction” which would allow me to do just that whilst I am waiting to take the written exam again. Trouble is, that for at least one-fifth of the time I’m on the road I have to be supervised by an A.D.I. so that means finding a driving school that will accept me as a trainee. LEArn with LEA will have to wait for a bit.

Slightly cheered I pad round the local schools but not a sausage. They are all one man bands, fully staffed or “we only take fully qualified people” said with withering contempt.

So there I am again, on the scrap heap at 22. Stuck between the Devil and the Deep Black Ngoblas for another three months. Dad is, of course, not at all surprised by my failure to pass the exam and the verbal war between us festers unpleasantly with Mum flapping miserably on the side lines. The situation is intolerable, as my old schoolmaster used to say, and I keep out of the house as much as I can. “You use this place like a hotel,” moans Dad, who would start belly-aching about me always being under his feet if I watched five minutes of Coronation Street! It is at this time of frustration and bitterness that help arrives from an unexpected quarter.

I am having a solitary drink in the public bar of the Highwayman when I see Sid in the saloon. At first we pretend not to see each other but then, when I am sitting down thinking how stupid it is and on the point of going over and buying him a beer, he comes in and buys me one. I tell him my problems and he nods sympathetically.

“You want a driving school, eh?” he says. “Funny that, but I just might be able to help you. Bloke I knew in the army runs a driving school. Did I ever tell you about B.S.M. Cronk?”

“Cronk?! That’s a funny name!”

“Yeah. Battery Sergeant Major Cronk. He was the herbert who got me chucked out, bless him.”

Sid had done his national service, which shows you how old he is, and been dishonourably discharged after getting involved in some petrol fiddle. I could never understand the details and Sid swore that he was innocent—not that that meant anything. When he was caught red-handed in a fur warehouse he said he had heard a cat mewing, climbed in to let it out, and picked up the wrong fur in the darkness.

“I had a letter from him afterwards saying that it had all come out and that they now knew I was innocent. I said ‘forget it’ in case they took me back in again. I remember at the time thinking that it was good of the old bugger to write to me.”

“What’s all this got to do with me?” I say, because Sid can go on a bit once he starts his army reminiscences.

“Well,” says Sid, “he owes me a favour; said as much in his letter. I reckon if I dropped him a line and reminded him, he might see you alright.”

“Where is this school?” I ask.

“I dunno. Place called Cromingham, I think. Somewhere in Norfolk.”

“Norfolk! Bloody heck. It’s not exactly round the corner, is it?”

“No, but I believe it’s very nice up there. Very good air, your Mum always used to say. She went up there for her honeymoon, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know where she went. Look, I don’t know if I want to go all that way. It’s flat as a pancake, isn’t it, and there’s nothing there but a load of swede-bashers. What am I going to do in the evenings?”

“What do you mean? It’s a seaside resort, isn’t it? The place will be crawling with birds. It’ll be like a permanent holiday.”

“But it’s November, Sid.”

“Well, all the local birds will be dying for a bit of spare, won’t they? I went to Rhyl in October once and all the local tarts who wouldn’t have looked at you in the holiday season were roaming the streets in packs.”

“I’d have thought they’d have been better off out of season because their blokes weren’t knocking off all the new birds.”

“It works both ways. By Christ, but you’re hard to please. You don’t just look a gift horse in the mouth, you kick its bleeding teeth down its throat.”

“You’ve got a vested interest in seeing me out of the way, Sid. You can’t blame me for being cautious.”

And so we go on until I agree that he should write to Cronk and lend me two quid, the latter negotiation being a bit more difficult to effect than the former. A week later a very official looking letter arrives with “The East Coast Driving School” tattooed all over it. It is from Walter Cronk, Managing Director and Chief Instructor, and informs me curtly that the writer has reason to believe that I wish to become a licensed instructor at the above-named establishment and would be grateful for my verification of this fact and a statement of my availability. I write back saying that my availability is immediate and receive what Mr. Cronk calls a movement order, stating that upon acceptance of my application for a licence to give instruction in the driving of a motor car, provision will be made for me to board with a Mrs. Bendon at 17 Ocean Approach, and will I inform her and the E.C.D.S. of my intended date and time of arrival. Mr. Cronk, or someone, has also thoughtfully enclosed a postcard of the Esplanade at Cromingham which looks not unlike the Esplanade of 132 other resorts, though achieving a certain distinction by the quality of the colour register which is such as to give the effect of a 3D film seen without glasses.

I make my arrangements quietly and secretly and can then achieve total surprise and discomfiture when I announce that I am pushing off. Mum can’t believe it and even Dad looks a trifle cast down. The night before I go he takes me out for a drink, which is totally unheard of, and hardly says anything the whole evening, which is likewise.

“Good luck, boy,” he says, squeezing my arm as we say goodnight. “I’ll miss you.” I think the miserable old sod really meant it.

The next morning I take my sandwiches which Mum has wrapped in grease-proof paper, refuse her tomatoes because I know they will get squashed, and stride off to Clapham South tube station.

It’s funny, but now that I’ve fixed everything, I don’t want to go.

CHAPTER THREE

I change trains at Norwich and up till then the landscape has been flatter than a witch’s tit. After that it is flatter. Ploughed fields stretch away to the horizon and there are occasional lines of straggling trees pinning down the hedgerows. Farm buildings glint from behind the trees but they seem outnumbered by church towers. There must be one for every man, woman and child in Norfolk. Above all looms the sky, totally dominating the earth, the clouds sweeping in like waves on a vast and deserted beach.

The effect on me is depressing. Without a few houses around I feel as exposed as a spare prick at a whore’s wedding and there is something about the increasingly bare landscape and slow unhurried progress of the train that makes me feel I am coming to the edge of the world. Now the fields give way to marshes, pock-marked by brackish pools, and the trees disappear. Soon, I think to myself, the marsh will disappear and we will continue over, into and under the sea without anyone making a move to save himself. We are on the train of the doomed! (It just shows what watching all those late-night horror movies can do to your imagination.) I had hoped that the trip would be enlivened by the presence of a nymphomaniac lady of quality going up to visit her titled husband who had been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident. Unfortunately, once again we seem to have got on different trains and I am forced to blunt my imagination on hordes of yacking schoolgirls who invade the train as it approaches Cromingham. If not desirable, they are at least reassuringly not of the spirit world.

“So I says to ’im, git you your ‘ands off my knicks,” says one of them enthusiastically to a friend in an accent I can hardly understand. With them chattering like starlings and increasing evidence that man has contributed to the landscape, I begin to cheer up and look out hopefully towards the sea. I have been a few times with Mum—day trips to Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings when I was a kid—and I remember the kick I used to get when I suddenly realised that the great blue line running along the horizon was the sea. Unfortunately, today it is a great grey line and what I see through a sudden dip in the landscape is barely distinguishable from the sky. I know Cromingham is next because British Railways have thoughtfully provided a map to which someone has added a piece of chewing gum and the word ‘dump’ next to my destination; no doubt one of my fellow-travellers who is now confiding to a local friend that one Clint Seago, fortunate owner of a Honda motor bike, “be a bit of all right”.

The marsh gives way to dry land again, thus ending my last fears, and buildings begin to appear beside the track as the brakes slam on. I notice that the trees cower away from the sea and their topmost branches are twisted in on themselves like the arms of a beaten boxer trying to protect himself from a hail of blows. When I flick the sandwich crumbs off my lap and struggle out onto the platform I can see why. The wind has an edge on it like a razor and must have been gathering speed ever since it left Norway. I can understand why all the locals scuttle off at an angle of 45º to the vertical. Also why their skins are tanned a kind of golden brown not far short of mahogany. You don’t have to breathe here. Just open your mouth and let the wind rush through every hole in your body.

When I get to the station entrance it is in time to see what I imagine is the only taxi in East Anglia disappearing inland and the last schoolgirl paddling away down the hill towards the town. An inquiry about buses is met with the same puzzled amazement that might have greeted a request for a camel.

I eventually manage to ring for another taxi and settle down to wait, looking over the rows of flint-studded cottages to where clumps of caravans sprout along the cliffs like toadstools. Very few of them seem to be occupied and I’m not surprised. You could freeze to death up there if this weather is anything to go by.

All in all, speaking my mind, and not mincing my words, the place has about as much appeal as an old age pensioners’ nudist camp and I’m seriously considering catching the next train home when my taxi arrives. The driver takes one look at my Hardy Amies original and has me summed up immediately.

“You want the camp?” he says.

“Holiday or army?”

“You can have either.”

“I don’t want either, thanks.”

“Python’s, then?”

“Pythons?” I query, my mind boggling.

“Python’s Pesticides. Look, what do you want?”

He seems irritated, as if there are only three reasons for coming to Cromingham in November and he has mentioned all of them.

“15 Ocean Approach, please.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Bendon, isn’t it? You a relation of hers?”

“No. I’m going to lodge with her.”

“Oh, I didn’t think you looked like family. From London, are you?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t get many folk down from London at this time of year.”

“Maybe they don’t like getting the third degree from complete strangers.”

If this ruffles him he doesn’t show it.

“What are you here for?” he says, letting out the hand-brake slowly.

“I’m joining the driving school.”

“You’ve come all this way to learn to drive?”

“Yes. Princess Margaret told me it was the best in the world.”

His expression doesn’t change and he nods his head.

“Which one?”

“The Queen’s sister, of course; which one do you think?”

“I mean which driving school?”

This is a surprise because I hadn’t thought of there being more than one.

“The East Coast Driving School.”

“Oh yes.” He nods his head again and suddenly lapses into silence.

“How many driving schools are there here?” I ask eventually, unable to restrain my curiosity.

“Just the two. The East Coast and the Major.”

“Which one do you reckon is the best?”

“I dunno,” he says, his expression not changing by the flicker of a muscle. “You’d better ask Princess Margaret.”

We are driving along the front now and below me the sea stretches away like cold porridge, only less enticing. The beach has a generous helping of shingle and is divided into sections by an orderly procession of breakwaters disappearing into infinity as if the effect has been achieved with mirrors. I can see one lunatic sitting against a concrete ramp with a thermos flask in his hands, otherwise the beach is as empty as the collection plate at a Jewish wedding. Quite where all the birds that Sid was talking about are I don’t know, but maybe word hasn’t got around that I’m in town yet. We pass a few shelters built in the style of Japanese prefabs and turn off beyond a row of seedy hotels with names that promise rather more than they look likely to deliver. 15 Ocean Approach is one of a row of what must once have been fishermen’s cottages and has a fading ‘Bed and Breakfast’ sign in the parlour window.

‘You’ll be all right there,” says the driver with meaning as he watches me struggle out with my case. “She’ll look after you.”

I pay him and advance towards the front door, which opens as I reach out for the knocker. When I see what I presume to be Mrs. Bendon, I can understand what the driver was getting at. She must be knocking forty and she has a nice pair of knockers to do it with. Her hair has been freshly permed, possibly for my benefit, and she pats it genteelly as she extends a hand.

“Mr. Lea? I thought so. Do come in. Can you manage? Good. Don’t bother about that. I’ll pick it up later. It is cramped in here, isn’t it? Put your case down there. I’ve got the kettle on. Would you like a cup of tea—or coffee, perhaps? Are you sure? It doesn’t make any difference to me. Really it doesn’t. Give me time and I’ll find out all your little likes and dislikes. Did you have a good journey? It’s a drag from London, isn’t it? That change at Norwich and all those stops afterwards. Of course, Norwich is quite a pleasant city. I go and shop there sometimes. Not like London, though. I was born and bred in London, you know. Within the sound of Bow Bells, though I bet you can’t tell it from my accent. Still, I mustn’t ramble on like this. You must be dying for that cup of tea—or was it coffee? It really doesn’t matter, you know. It’s no trouble. You just say what you’d like. I’ll soon get to know all your little likes and dislikes.”

I can’t get a word in, so I take a cup of tea and sit in the front room, listening to her rabbiting on while I look at the horse brasses and the frilly lampshades and the lace headrests and the painting of three horses running into the rising sun, and her legs. Mostly it’s her legs, which are not at all bad for a woman of her age and have a delicious little swelling rising from her thigh which suggest that she is wearing suspenders. Suspenders! The very thought of it sends new life surging through my jockey briefs. Her complexion is good and though she is a trifle on the plump side it suits her. Her teeth are a bit crooked but this must mean that they are her own and I rate that. I’ve never fancied birds who start dismantling themselves at bedtime. The one big disadvantage I can see at the moment is her non-stop rabbiting, which could well get on my nerves over the next few months, or weeks, or days, or hours.

“… so I married him,” she goes on. “There I was with the world at my feet. A pretty girl—though I say it myself—with a good many beaux to my string, and I marry a penniless fisherman after I’ve known him a week. Foolish, romantic chit of a girl that I was.”

I nod understandingly.

“Not that I had anything to complain about—Ted was a wonderfully kind man. He didn’t say much but you always knew he meant well. Never denied me anything that we could afford. But he wasn’t a thinker. We never talked about things. Do you know what I mean?”

I know all right. The poor bastard couldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if he knew any.

“I’d fallen in love with a dream, you see. When he came in on the boat all bronzed and handsome he used to look like some Viking god. He’d leap over the side and thrust the boat up the beach,” Mrs. Bendon bristles at the thought of it, “and his waders would be slapping together, and the fish dancing and the crabs scuttling.” She licks her lips quickly. “I was so proud of him, I wanted to turn to people and say ‘He’s mine.’” Mrs. Bendon’s voice sinks down below the ecstatic level. “But when we were at home he’d just sit staring at the television or go to bed. I never saw him even look at a newspaper. He was a different man. Of course he wasn’t really. He was the same man but it was just the way I looked at him. Do you know what I mean?”

I nod gamely. Of course I do. She wanted a mixture of Oliver Reed and David Dimbleby. Don’t they all?

“Still, that’s enough of me, going on like this. You’ve only been here half an hour and I’m telling you my life story. Must be very boring for you. You’re probably dying to see your room and get unpacked. Would you like a bath after your journey? The trains these days are so dirty, aren’t they? I don’t think anybody ever cleans them. You’d think those diesel things would be cleaner than the old steam ones, but they aren’t.”

My bedroom is at the back of the house and looking obliquely left over a series of tiny back gardens. I can see a chunk of sea between the gap thoughtfully bequeathed by two boarding houses. In the middle of it nestles a small boat and I think of Mr. Bendon. Mrs. B. has not yet told me what happened to him and it’s a bit early to ask. Maybe he was drowned or maybe he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice any more and kept his boat pointed out to sea.

It is cold so I close the window and switch on the electric fire thoughtfully provided. Five minutes later I realise that nothing has happened and notice a small meter which exchanges warmth for 5p pieces. Mrs. B. is not Nelson Rockefeller in drag. I unpack, wash from the rose-patterned china jug and bowl set—idly wondering whether I’m supposed to throw the dirty water out of the window—and lay down on the bed. I’ve almost dozed off when there is a light tap on the door and Mrs. B. tells me that supper will be ready in half an hour and that I can watch the television if I want to.

Her cooking is not bad and certainly better than Mum’s. Mum has trouble reheating a packet of fish and chips.

“That was very nice,” I say, scooping up my last mouthful of fruit salad—the real stuff out of a tin, not Mum’s bits of cut up orange and apple.

“Thank you, dear. I’m glad you liked it. It’s nice to have someone to cook for again. Once the season is over there’s not much doing here and the locals aren’t over-friendly. I’ve lived here twenty years and they still think of me as being an outsider. Of course, there are a lot of new people moving in. Retired couples, most of them, and there is an awful lot of new building—weekend bungalows, that kind of thing. But it’s not easy to make new friends when you’re a single woman of my age. I’m not a newcomer and I’m not really a resident either. People seem to be at bit suspicious. If you’re not married it’s difficult to fit in, you know.”

I get my nod working again.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Why don’t I help you with the washing up and then take you out for a drink? There must be a nice little pub near here.”

“That’s very kind of you, dear, but what will the neighbours say? Going out with the lodger on his first night. Tongues will be wagging.”

“They don’t have to know, do they?”

“There’s not much that goes on around here they don’t know about. All right, just a quick one. I haven’t been out in the evening for weeks and I think I deserve a little tipple. We’ll take my car.”

“I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Oh, it’s very old. One of the first A40s ever made. I keep it in a garage round the corner. I hope it will start. There isn’t anywhere very nice to drink around here and I’d like to get away from the neighbours.”

By the time we get out it is dark as the inside of a nigger’s nostril and the wind is playing havoc with Mrs. B.’s carefully-tarted-up hair. There is a bit of movement behind the neighbouring curtains and I can believe what she says about them not missing much. You can almost hear the tongues tuning up.

Getting the car out is a bit of a pantomime because there is no light in the lock-up garage and I have to fumble about with controls that might belong to an electric organ for all I can see. Mrs. B. flaps and fusses and when the bloody engine eventually fires into life you would think I’d built it from toothpicks the way she goes on.

“Ooh, what talent,” she squeals. “You won’t mind if I ask you to fix a few things at home, will you?”

“Pleasure,” I say. “Now, which way do we go?”

We tootle inland for about six miles and this gives me time to get acquainted with the perfume she is wearing. It’s the kind that comes at you like the North Korea Army and I think she laces it with chloroform because I am quite drowsy by the time we get to a small country pub with some water glittering in the background. I nip out smartish so I have the satisfaction of opening her door and watching her skirt ride up as she climbs out. Long as I live, I’ll never tire of watching birds get in and out of cars. It’s the little casual things that turn me on more than five hours of strip-tease.

“It’s lovely here in the summer time,” she says. “All kinds of boats. Have you ever been on the Broads?”

I’m a bit slow to answer because most of the time she doesn’t expect you to. Besides, I don’t know what she is on about. I always thought that a ‘broad’ was the American word for a woman and I don’t think she means that.

“The Broads, dear,” she explains. “They’re lakes connected by rivers. You can sail for hundreds of miles, or take a cabin cruiser, or fish. Surely you’ve heard of them?

Now that she mentions it, I do remember Dad going on about how he came up here once with a party of his mates when he was a lad. I didn’t take any notice because I reckoned anything he did must be pretty square and wasn’t worth touching with a barge pole.

“Oh, yes,” I say, “my family came up here once. My father was very impressed. Now, which bar do you recommend?”

Inside there is a big log fire burning and a few old codgers playing dominoes in the corner. They look at us like they’ve never seen another human being before, but after examining every thread of clothing eventually go back to their game as we settle by the fire.

“You’d better not offer to do this too often, otherwise you’ll have no money left,” says Mrs. B., raising her glass of whisky gratefully. I agree with her but I don’t say so.

“It’s my pleasure. The very least I could do after that wonderful meal.”

Smarmy creep, aren’t I? But it’s only common sense to keep on the best side of your landlady. But how far should I go? If it was anyone else I’d be trying to get my hand up her skirt already; but I have to live with her. If she takes it the wrong way or we get too involved, it could be disastrous. I’d better bide my time till I see how the land lies—or the landlady lies.

“You’re looking very preoccupied,” she says. “A penny for your thoughts.”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything really—apart from how lucky I am to be staying with you, of course. No, I think I must be a bit tired. I’m feeling quite drowsy.”

“Not surprising after your journey. It’s probably the air, too. Very bracing, Norfolk air, but it takes it out of you. I’ll buy you one and then we’d best be getting back. There’s not a lot of time before they close, anyway.”

I protest but she is very persistent and in the end she slips me 50p and we have another one.

“Have you got any children?” I ask in one of our quiet moments—these occur when she stops talking to get her breath back.

“Yes. One. She’s at Teacher Training College at the moment. She’ll be home at Christmas. She’s a lovely girl, though I say so myself. You’ve got her bedroom.”

“I hope that’s not going to inconvenience you when she comes home?”

“No, she can move in with me. It won’t hurt her for a couple of weeks.”

“Is that all the holiday she gets?”

“No, but she has lots of friends and she is always going to stay with them. They come here in the summer, though it’s a crush putting them all up.”

I look forward to seeing Miss Bendon and the thought preoccupies me on the way back.

To my surprise Mrs. B. does not get out before we approach the garage but sits there while I open up and edge forward into the tight little nest of darkness. I switch off the engine and the silence is deafening.

“Well,” she says wistfully, “that was very nice.” I can feel her turning her face towards me and I don’t need a handbook to tell me what I am supposed to do next.

“Yes. Very snug little place, that,” I gulp. I’m tempted My God, I’m tempted, but I try to remember my resolution of earlier in the evening. Mrs. B. sighs and puts her hand on the door handle.

“Ah well, I suppose we’d better go home before someone wonders what we’re doing in here.”

“Yes.” I try a light laugh and hop out gratefully. Sitting beside Mrs. B.’s warm, perfume-doused body and listening to the noise her stockings make as they rub together is more than a young boy should be expected to stand.

We walk home in silence and Mrs. B. lets me in. and pauses at the foot of the stairs.

“Would you like Ovaltine or something?”

“No, thanks. I think I’ll turn in. I’m feeling really sleepy now.”

Mrs. B. puts her hand on my arm.

“Breakfast will be about eight. I’ll give you a call. Thanks again for taking me out. I did enjoy it.”

“It was nothing. Really nothing.” I drop my head and give her a quick kiss on the cheek as if the idea had just flown into my mind and been too overpowering to resist. “I’m sorry. I just felt I had to do that. I don’t know what came over me. Sorry.”

I make this speech stumbling up the stairs and at their foot Mrs. B. is gazing at me with what seems like tears in her eyes—or maybe it is the light.

“You’re a funny boy,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “Sleep tight.”

“Good night.”

I scarper across the landing and gratefully close my bedroom door behind me. Not bad, really. Enough done to save my honour and keep Mrs. B. simmering gently, without risking upsetting the apple cart on my first trip to market.

I undress and get into bed and then have to get out again and wedge some paper into the window jambs to stop their persistent rattle performing a Norfolk version of the Chinese water torture. The wind threatens to lift the house off the ground and the sea sounds mean and angry and coming from the next room. Considering I am living in the middle of a town it is amazing how quiet it is otherwise. No cars, no drunks, no Ngoblas extending hospitality Ghanian-style to about 500 guests.

Thinking about home makes me sad again. I imagine Dad dropping off in front of the little white light in the middle of the T.V. screen, and Mum carefully marking up tomorrow’s viewing in the T.V. Times before feeding the goldfish and putting the cat out.

Cromingham seems a long way from all that.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning finds me outside the East Coast Driving School, which is situated in a small glass-fronted shop next to the Majestic Cinema and sllightly larger than it. The cinema is showing ‘The Big Sleep’ and the familiar faces of Bogart and Bacall, sneering at me from the faded stills, are comforting. “Yeah, he’s the kind of guy who would bat all your teeth out, then kick you in the stomach for mumbling.” “O.K., blue eyes, where’s Schultzy? Talk or I’ll give you a row of lead waistcoat buttons.” I turn up my coat collar, stuff my hands deep into the pockets and walk past the E.C.D.S. offices again. I have done this about six times now and the shapely blonde manicuring her nails behind a desk marked RECEPTION is beginning to notice me. She is wearing a silk blouse unbuttoned provocatively so the top of her bra cups show and she is either chewing gum or trying to ease out a stubborn piece of breakfast that doesn’t want to say goodbye to her teeth. She looks a greedy girl and I am prepared to bet that her appetite covers more than a taste for Black Magic chocolates. Besides her, the room contains half-a-dozen chairs and a test-your-eyesight wall chart. It looks like a doctor’s waiting-room.

It is five past nine so I square my enormous shoulders and stroll nonchalantly into the reception area, pausing only to remove the doormat which has hooked itself over one of my shoes.

“Yes?” says the girl, looking at me as if I am something the cat has brought up. “Can I help you?” She manages to make it sound like it is the last thing in the world she wants to do.

“I hope so,” I say. “My name is Lea and I have an appointment with Mr. Cronk at nine o’clock.”

“And you’re five minutes late for it, aren’t you, lad?” The voice belongs to an enormous man with a moustache like one of those things used for cleaning toilets.

He has appeared through a door marked PRIVATE and his bloodshot eyes are going up and down my body like they’ve been caught up in the zip of my fly.

“One thing I can’t abide is unpunctuality,” he goes on. “I saw you slouching up and down outside. Having second thoughts, were you? Or was it the lure of the moving picture house? No joy there, because it’s bingo two-knee-ite.” His voice rises to a shrill screech at the end of the sentence and the word ‘night’ is pronounced as in ‘knee height to a grasshopper.’ His inflection is about as army as a set of mess tins and my steel trap mind springs to a conclusion.

“Mr. Cronk?”

“Key-rect, Lea. Step into my office.”

I go through the door marked PRIVATE and into a neat little rooms which contains a desk, empty except for a set of ‘in’, ‘out’ and ‘pending’ trays, all of which are also empty. On the wall is a picture of Montgomery and a few other geezers who have cleaned up, selling their memoirs to the Sunday Times. Slightly to the left of them is a photograph of Cronk amongst a group of regimental hard nuts posed under a palm tree as if they have just won something—probably World War II.

“Right, lad,” says Cronk, sitting down behind his desk, but making no gesture towards waving me into a seat. “Welcome to the East Coast Driving School. You will find us a happy band united behind the resolve to make this the most successful driving school in the whole of East Anglia. I think I can safely say that already our reputation has spread far and wide and we intend to build on success. That is why you are fortunate to be joining us at a moment when the future looms wide with opportunities. With your assistance, we will take them.”

“Thank you,” I say earnestly. “You can rely on me to do my best.”

“I hope so, lad. I know nothing about you apart from what your brother-in-law wrote to me.” I look questioningly into his face but it doesn’t tell me anything. “I expect you heard that we were involved in a little altercation?”

I nod. “You got him thrown out of the army.”

“Yes, indeed. Terrible business. Mistake. Awful.”

“You don’t want to worry about it,” I reassure him. “Sid was dead chuffed to be out.”

“Nevertheless,” Cronk winces at such blasphemy, “it was a bad business and I hold myself responsible. The least I can do is to extend a helping hand to you as some kind of reparation. But, and let me make this most clear, this is not a charitable organisation. You will be expected to pull your weight and if you do not come up to our standards—high standards, I might add—we will be forced to dispense with your services. Understood?” I nod again. “Now, as I expect you know, one-fifth of all your instructing time must be spent with an A.D.I. until you pass your examination and I’ve asked our Mr. Cripps to accompany you on your first few lessons. He’ll take you out for a tour of the most used test circuits after our little chat.”

‘Chat’ is the wrong word, for Cronk doesn’t give me the chance to say anything. He rabbits on about the importance of not compromising myself and the penalty for ignoring his advice—instant dismissal. Though disturbed by his attitude, I’m cheered to find that there obviously is the chance of a bit of nooky if you keep your eyes open.

I keep nodding and wish I could get a bit of activity into my facial muscles to relieve the monotony, but I can feel my features setting like cement.

“… and so, now that you know a little about us …” I can tell that he is winding up for the big finale, “… and in the weeks to come you’re obviously going to know a great deal more. If there is anything you’re not happy about, anything you want to know, come and see me; that’s what I’m here for. Understood? Good. Any questions?”

“Yes,” I think to myself. “One. Why do you wear that bloody great moustache when you have a small, turned-up nose with a red blob on the end of it like Coco the clown? That moustache needs a great big hooter with a beard in the middle of it.”

“Not at the moment, thank you.” I shake my head and unravel my fingers.

“Right. I’ll introduce you to Mr. Cripps.”

He presses a button in the middle of his desk and nothing happens. He does this twice more and then stalks to the door and siezes the knob as if intent on tearing it from its mooring. Seconds later I realise that this was not his intention because he is looking at the knob in his hand with something akin to surprise. Cursing crudely he seeks the spindle, but this has dropped through to the other side. I find the whole situation a mild giggle but Cronk has turned scarlet and dropping to his knees begins to bellow instructions through the keyhole. These are speedily complied with—possibly too speedily because the returning spindle makes violent contact with Cronk’s eyeball causing him to cry out with pain and anger.

“Are you trying to blind me?” he howls, as the door is opened. “Do you realise there could have been a very serious accident? When is somebody going to do something about that bleeper? I’d be better off with a megaphone. Oh my God, this place is going to the dogs.”

“The man said he’d come yesterday,” says the receptionist who is totally unmoved by the outburst. “Do you want me to see if he can fix the door handle as well?”

“Yes, please,” says Cronk making an obvious effort to control himself. “I’d be very grateful if you would. Now, can you ask Mr. Cripps if he would be kind enough to step inside my office as I’d like to introduce him to Mr. Lea.”

Cronk sits down behind his desk and applies a spotless white handkerchief to his weeping eye. Everything about him is immaculate in a square sort of way. His shirt looks as if it is part of a new set of tennis kit and you feel that the creases in his trousers must score grooves in the underside of his desk. The contrast between him and the figure that stumbles through the door is remarkable.

Mr. Cripps, whom I assume it to be, looks as if he keeps a moulting polar bear as a suit press and the layer of dandruff on his shoulders would come up to a moth’s knees. He wears a grey nylon shirt, darkening to black at neck level and a frayed tie with so much dirt engrained round the knot that one supposes it is never untied but merely loosened to afford a passage over its owner’s head. The face is that of a life-battered fifty-year-old and everything sags, mouth, eyes and even a sparse moustache that looks as if a strong gust of wind would snatch it away across the North Sea. The total effect of flabby incompetence is cemented by the footwear—yellow plastic sandals worn over holed grey socks.

I was expecting a Nazi stormtrooper to bound through the door after Cronk’s pep talk and the reality is a bit of an anti-climax. Not that I am complaining, mind you. Seeing Mr. Cripps makes me feel much happier.

Cronk can obviously read my mind because his eyes travel over Cripps without looking as if they are enjoying the trip very much.

“Good morning, Arthur,” he says. “This is Timothy Lea who I told you about. He’s joining us under licence and I’d like you to take him round the town this morning. Show him the ropes.” He turns to me almost apologetically. “Mr. Cripps looks after our more mature learners. He’s a veritable font of patience to those who aren’t as quick as they might be.”

Mr. Cripps extends a damp hand and looks patient. “Pleased to meet you,” he says.

“Likewise,” I murmur. “When will I start instructing?”

“If everything goes alright today, it could be tomorrow,” says Cronk. “We’ll see.” We go out and I smile at the receptionist but she looks through me as if I am the most boring thing since rubber spaghetti and goes on inspecting her nails. I could shaft her on the spot.

“What’s she like?” I ask Cripps as we climb into a scruffy Morris Minor with a large red and white sign across the top.

“Dawn? Oh, she’s not a bad girl. A little flighty and impertinent but it’s mostly high spirits I believe.”

“She does a turn, does she?” I ask eagerly.

Cripps blushes. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he says primly, “perhaps you would care to drive.” His voice sounds as if its coming from half way down his throat and when he speaks his lips don’t move. He would make a marvellous ventriloquist, only it would be impossible to hear him if you weren’t sitting in the front two rows and no self-respecting dummy would want to work with him. I reject the thought as being unkind and peer back through the window of the driving school where I catch one of Dawn’s heavily made-up eyes. I stick my tongue out at her but she merely directs her gaze towards the ceiling and my rapist fantasies become homicidal.

This is probably why I nearly clip a milk float as I pull out. There is a screech of brakes and a crate of milk shatters all over the road.

“Dammit, boy,” shouts the enraged driver, “how many lessons you had to come swinging out like that before giving any signals?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you,” I say.

A small crowd has gathered and Cronk and Dawn are watching through the window. Not one of my best starts.

“Didn’t see me!” snorts the yokel. “You better have your eyes tested, boy. You want to watch it, Arthur. You should have taken him up to the golf course before you let him have a go. He won’t pass his test if he can’t see proper.”

I could belt the bleeder, but after a few more insults we help him kick the broken glass into the gutter and can get on our way. Cronk’s face is a picture but he stays inside. For the first time since I have been there, Dawn is smiling. What really gets my goat is that Cripps does take the wheel and drive up to the golf course before he lets me have a go. I feel like accelerating to the cliff edge and slamming on the anchors inches from the brink but the poor sod can’t help being like he is so I don’t do anything and meekly drive towards the club house as instructed.

It is about ten o’clock when we get there and he flashes inside mumbling something about “call of nature”. I don’t know what kind of piss house they have in there but when he comes back there is a new spring in his gait and a faint whiff of Scotch around his chops. I don’t pay much attention but not more than half an hour later it is the side entrance of the Metropole and he has disappeared again. I am therefore not surprised when eleven o’clock finds us outside the Admiral Nelson and Cripps asks casually if I would fancy a quiet half of shandy or something. His “something” turns out to be a large Scotch and you don’t have to have an I.Q. of 150 to guess what he spends all his pocket money on.

Marvellous, isn’t it? After all that bullshit from Cronk, I’m driving round with a chronic boozer who can’t last half an hour without having a snifter. Not that it seems to affect him. He looks just as docile and disinterested as he did when I first saw him.

“You have to be a bit careful with the stuff, don’t you?” I ask him.

“Oh yes. But it’s no problem with me. I just have a quick snort occasionally to keep my spirits up.”

“How long have you been with Cronk?”

“Oh, let me see, I suppose about five years. I knew him in the army, you know. He used to work for me then. Very conscientious chap, and behind the gruff exterior, exceptionally kind-hearted.”

“What made you leave the army?”

I can sense that this is a question he would have preferred me not to ask and for a second I wish I wasn’t such a nosey sod.

“Oh, a number of reasons. I was getting a bit old for it. I felt I needed a change, one or two other things. You know how it is.”

I don’t, but I hold back from telling him and we go on to talk about our respective digs and how his landlady’s coughing keeps him awake at nights and her cat gives him hay fever. All in all he is a bit of a sad case is Arthur Cripps.

Lunch is taken in the Red Mullett and is mostly liquid as far as Arthur is concerned and by four o’clock I feel I know the pubs of Cromingham better than the test circuits we have been driving round.

For all the booze he has put away he still seems his normal unexciting self but I am glad when he suggests that we call it a day and I drop him behind the Grand Hotel where no doubt another bar stool is waiting for his arse to polish it.

A small seaside resort out of season is like an empty house. It goes to seed pretty quickly. The paint starts peeling, the signs start drooping, the waste paper baskets look as if they haven’t been emptied since the last visitor pulled out and the dirty postcards begin to turn yellow and peel at the edges. In another five months, the residents will probably start soaking their paint brushes in turps, but it seems a long time to wait.

I park the car and wander around for a bit learning how to lean into the wind like the locals and comforting myself that the air is probably doing me a lot of good. Once you get away from the sea front and the centre of the town, the streets fall into orderly rows of detached bungalows with names like “Shangrila” and “Trade Winds” and they are shooting up like bean stalks. The turves have no sooner been laid in the gardens of Seaview Close than the developers are levelling the foundations for Cromingham Heights. Most of the residents that I can see look like newcomers to the district. Retired, a lot of them, but a few middle executive type families with dad probably working for “Python’s Pesticides” whose “factory in a country garden” is just outside the town. Good fodder for the E.C.D.S. all of them.

I walk back past the closed cafes with their whitewashed windows, and dead bluebottles who never made it to the door in time, and take a turn round the pier. The old geezer who grabs my money looks surprised and irritated to see me and says they close in ten minutes. Through the rusty salt-eroded turnstiles and I listen to my footsteps thudding against the planks and watch the greeny brown water swirling thirty feet below me. It is difficult to imagine anyone coming here for a holiday. At the end of the pier is the lifeboat station and two or three anglers wrapped up like Egyptian Mummys and gazing unemotionally at the spots where their lines disappear beneath a choppy sea. I look round hopefully for some sign of a catch but there is only a tin of rather frayed-looking worms. It is funny, but though I don’t fish because I find it boring, I watch fishermen for hours. It’s the same with cricket.

The wind is now blowing so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole pier broke away from its moorings and started to drift out to sea. I watch with child-like excitement as one of the fishermen reels in his line, but there is nothing on any of the five hooks—not even a worm. He glares at me if he suspects I might have had a hand in nicking them and I push off back towards the turnstiles. In the centre of the pier is—would you believe it?—the Pier Pavilion, which has apparently been entertaining the masses with Eddy Seago’s Summer Follies, produced by Arnold Begstein, in collaboration with Lew and Sidney Godspeed for Wonderworld Enterprises in conjunction with Mash International. This starred, not unnaturally, laugh-a-line Eddy Seago—star of T.V., stage and screen—which probably means he once appeared in a dog food commercial—Conny Mara, Ireland’s little leprechaun of song, and the “Three Rudolphos” Jugglers Extraordinary. They were supported by Lady Lititia and her talking dogs, a group called “Armpit”, which I recall once having a record that got into the top thirty when you could still fix the charts and “that maestro of melody, the ever popular Harvy Pitts at the electric organ.”

Looking through the glass I can see the chairs lying just where they must have been left since the last audience stampeded for the exits. I wonder where they all are now, Eddy, Conny and the rest of them. Rehearsing for “Babes in the Wood” at Darlington probably, or working their fingers to the bone ringing their agents.

Looking along the coast I can see the lights of another resort beginning to multiply in the fast-falling darkness. This must be Shermer and it occurs to me to have a quick look at it before finding out what special delicacy Ma Bendon is whipping up for supper. I don’t hold any hopes that Shermer is going to be any more exciting than Cromingham but you never know.

Unfortunately, I never find out. Not then, anyway. I’m in the Morris and just pulling up at the junction with the coast road when a Viva screams up from nowhere and draws alongside. You must be in a hurry, I think to myself and I take a cool look at the bloke who is driving. From what I can see in the lamp light he is a good looking bloke with blond curly hair and neat, regular features. He looks like a college boy in an Amercian movie and has the same spoilt, arrogant expression playing round his chops. I take an immediate dislike to him and it must be mutual because he sneers back at me and edges his car into the main road before pulling away towards Shermer with tyres screeching.

Once he is ahead I notice the sign on the roof: “The Major School of Motoring”. So! Someone in the same line of business and not over-friendly with it. Having cut me up at the road junction I expect him to zoom off but the berk now proceeds to dawdle along in front doing about 25 mph. There is a bend about sixty yards ahead but with nothing coming towards me it is perfectly safe to overtake so I put my foot down and pull out alongside the Viva. Immediately blondy accelerates to keep pace with me. At first I think it’s just my imagination but when I put my foot hard down he is still purring along inside me.

Just at that moment a car’s headlights come stabbing round the bend towards me. I immediately step on the brakes but, like it’s my shadow, the Viva slows down too. The bastard is obviously trying to wipe me out. I am screaming curses which are nine tenths sheer bloody funk and the headlights are bearing down on me like the Empire State Building on wheels. The road is not wide enough for the three of us so I throw the wheel over and swing across the road, just missing the oncoming vehicle’s near side wing. I am so close I can smell what the driver had for dinner. I don’t have time to think it though, because the Morris smashes against the verge, bashing my head against the roof. There is a crack of splintering wood and a spray of water lashes the windscreen as my forehead jerks forward to meet it. To my horror I feel myself sinking.

I am panicking, trying to remember whether you let the car sink to the bottom and then open a door, or open a window first, or do neither, when the sinking stops. I raise my head, still mumbling with terror, and find that I am tyre-top deep in what seems to be a duck pond. The six white ducks hurriedly climbing out the other side would agree with me, anyway.

Both the other cars have disappeared and I am alone with the darkness and what passes for silence in these parts, i.e. the sound of a fifty mile an hour gale tearing through the treeless wastes. I manage to get one of the doors open and scramble to the bank to find that I have crashed straight through a wooden fence. This feat does little to cheer me when I consider what damage has probably been done to the car. Now that I have proved to myself that I am definitely alive, fear is being replaced by a homicidal desire to get my hands on the blond bomber in the Viva and bash his face in. My job with the E.C.D.S. is probably up the spout and only revenge is left.

Filled with this warming thought I hook my thumb viciously at a few passing cars but either they can’t see me, or they don’t want to know and I’m forced to squelch back to the nearest garage where I manage to chivvy up a breakdown van. I also take the opportunity to phone the police and report my version of the attempt on my life but when we get back to the scene of what they laughingly call the accident, I am surprised to find a Mini parked there and a man with a flashlight camera hovering expectantly.

“Excuse me, but were you driving this vehicle?” he asks clicking away before I can say anything.

“Yes I was. Who are you?”

He is a nervy little sod hopping around like a jack rabbit and his eyes never stop moving.

“Gruntscomb. East Coast Echo. You’re an instructor, are you? I don’t think I’ve seen you before?”

“I’ve only just arrived. Look, I was driven off the road you know. Some bastard from the Major School of Motoring. At least, he was in one of their cars.”

“Really? Very lucky to be alive, aren’t you? Have you been instructing long?”

“I’ve just started. I’m under licence.”

“Oh.” Gruntscomb scribbles something in a little black note book. “Got your L-plates up have you?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Look, would you mind getting back in the car again. It would make a great photograph.”

“No.”

“Oh, good. Hop in then and—”

“I mean yes, I would mind. It’s embarrassing enough as it is.”

I wish I had not said that because Gruntscomb writes something else in his little black book.

“O.K. Just as you like. Well, thanks. See you around.”

He snaps his notebook shut and is gone.

It takes about ten minutes to winch out the Morris and in all of that time I’m waiting for the police to show up and even wondering if I shouldn’t have left the car where it was until they got there. But the boys in blue don’t put in an appearance, and I am back inside the Morris trying to make the engine turn over. It must be wetter than a mother of the bride’s handkerchief because it splutters a bit and then refuses to make a sound.

“It’ll be dried out by the morning,” says the breakdown man, cheerfully. “You don’t want to drive it now, anyway, because you don’t know what else might be wrong with it. It needs a thorough overhaul.”

So I’m forced to sit beside him and listen to his harrowing tales of limbs strewn across the road and cars full of courting couples plunging over cliffs whilst the Morris bobs along behind like a fat minnow on the end of a fishing line. My mind is working overtime on what Cronk is going to say and I can see his face swelling up and exploding like a big red balloon.

I hope to God there isn’t too much damage.

I tell the breakdown man that there will be a few bob in it for him if he can get the garage working on the car first thing in the morning and push off back to my lodging with my tail between my legs like a barrel bung.

It is half past nine when I get there and Mrs. Bendon is showing signs of both alarm and irritation.

“There you are!” she exclaims. “I was getting quite worried about you. Been having a few drinks, have you? I suppose you realise your supper is quite ruined. Lovely piece of fresh mackerel, too. I’d be grateful if you could let me know if you’re going to be in late for meals. I did say half past seven and it’s not easy keeping food hot without it drying up. I hope you understand. I don’t want to start laying down rules, but—”

“I had an accident,” I say. “Someone forced me off the road.”

“You were driving?”

“Yes. I wasn’t instructing. I was going to have a look at Shermer.”

“Well, that was something. Is the car all right?”

“I don’t know. It went straight through a fence and into a pond. It doesn’t look too bad.”

“Gracious me. You’re lucky to have escaped alive. You are all right, are you?”

After that, she can’t do enough and I gobble down her mackerel while her eyes roam over me as if expecting parts of me to start dropping off. It’s like being watched by a cat when you are opening a tin of salmon.

“That was very nice,” I say, wiping my mouth on the patterned paper serviette she has thoughtfully provided.

“Thank you, dear. I’m afraid there’s not much to follow, but I’ve got some nice crisp Coxes.”

“An apple would be very nice.”

“Would you like some coffee afterwards?”

“No, thanks, don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother.”

‘No, thanks. It might keep me awake.”

“That’s right. You don’t want to lose your beauty sleep. Though you’ve got nothing to worry about. Not like me. I need every second.”

I am obviously expected to say something and I don’t disappoint her.

“Come off it! You’re a very handsome woman. I bet you’ve got every bloke in town chasing you.”

“A few as shouldn’t, but not everyone by a long chalk. You sure about that coffee?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“There’s one of those ‘Plays for Today’ on the telly if you’d like to look at that.”

The truth is that I am thinking about that heap of twisted metal sitting in the garage and I am finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Even the sight of Mrs. B.’s rich, ripe, round arse rearing up at me as she rummages at the bottom of the linen basket is hardly enough to divert my thoughts from the wrath to come tomorrow.

“I think I’ll turn in,” I say. “I am feeling a bit shaky. Is it all right if I take a bath?”

“Of course, dear. The blue towel is yours.” She stands up and smooths down the front of her sweater so that her breasts lunge out towards me like they are on springs. Such is my pitiful condition that I hardly notice them.

“Thanks.”

I pad upstairs and savour the unaccustomed luxury of a bath. This was one feature of gracious living that Scraggs Road did not offer, and I supplement the ecstasy by covering myself in Mrs. B.’s talcum powder.

No sooner am I tucked up in bed than there is a knock on the door and Mrs. B. comes in before I can say “Get your knickers off”—not that I feel like saying it, anyway. She is carrying a tray and wearing a pink fluffy dressing-gown which presumably has a nightdress underneath it. I say ‘presumably’ because all I can see are the Bendon boobs lurching towards me again like a flesh Etna erupting.

“I thought you might like a mug of Ovaltine,” she says. “It helps you sleep, you know.” She is wearing that perfume again and it doesn’t take any prisoners, I can tell you! By the cringe! When she sits down on the edge of the bed, I feel I am being anaesthetised.

“You shouldn’t have bothered, really you shouldn’t,” I say—and then I notice she has started sniffing. It must be her talc she can smell. God knows how, with the pong she is giving out.

“You naughty boy,” she says, all skittish like. “You’ve been at my Rose Blossom, haven’t you?”

Before I can say anything she leans forward and flicks open the front of my pyjamas. “Where have you put it all?” she says, running her finger down my chest. Most of it is between my toes and at her present rate of progress it won’t take her long to get there. Normally I would have her into bed quicker than you can say ‘Eric Robinson’ but tonight I just don’t feel like it. I can’t forget the bloody Morris and what I am going to say to Cronk in the morning.

“Sorry,” I say. “I won’t do it again.” I spring back against the pillow and pull my pyjama jacket together. “I’ll buy you some more talc.”

Mrs. B. takes her rebuff coolly and shakes her head.

“You’re a funny boy,” she says. “Don’t bother about the talc. There’s plenty more where that came from.” She stands up and puts the tray down on the bedroom table. “Make sure you put the mug back on the tray. It leaves a ring otherwise. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. And thanks.”

She goes out and I am left listening to the sea and the wind. They don’t sound so loud tonight. Maybe I am getting used to them.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Oh, it doesn’t do you justice, luv,” says Petal. “I’d hardly have recognised you. They’re beasts, those reporters, you know. They just don’t care about people’s feelings. All they want is a story.”

Petal—real name, Peter Flowers—is about five foot six low, with dyed blond, razor cut hair, and is wearing a white safari jacket with purple silk scarf, blue towelling trousers that cling as if soaked in water, and dinky little brown wet-look shoes with enormous butterfly buckles across the insteps. He looks as out of place in the front office of the E.C.D.S. as Sammy Davis Junior at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Despite that, he is one of my fellow instructors.

We are looking at the front page of the East Coast Echo which carries a picture of me silhouetted against the half-submerged Morris under the caption “New driving instructor loses his way on the first day.” The E.C.D.S. sign is clearly recognisable in the photograph and the school is mentioned again in the jokey story below.

I am double choked because I have skipped one of Mrs. B.’s excellent breakfasts in order to be at the garage since eight o’clock—holding my breath while they give the Morris the once over and picking pieces of duckweed off the chassis. To my relief, there is nothing seriously wrong with it apart from a broken headlight and a few more bends on the front bumper, and once I have had the headlight fixed and wiped over the bodywork with a damp cloth it would take a keen eye to notice that anything has happened. With a bit of luck, Cronk need never know, and I can settle up with the bleeder in the Viva later. I have a faint fear that the police will suddenly start getting interested but—

All ‘buts’ are swept aside by the poxy little shit from the Echo. Now I have no more chance of keeping my little mishap dark than Raquel Welch has of being mistaken for Twiggy.

As if to confirm my view, Cronk comes in looking as if he is about to announce the outbreak of World War III.

“Into my office, lad,” he snarls without looking at me and marches on ahead so that the papers on Dawn’s desk skip and dance in his slipstream.

“Ooh, you’re for it,” squeals Petal, obviously relishing the thought. “He’s in one of his real paddys. He can be a tartar when he likes, can’t he, Dawn?”

Dawn nods and it may be my imagination, but I think I can see a trace of sympathy wrinkling her make-up.

“Just tell him what happened,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Too true, dear,” says Petal. “Those bastards have tried it on with me before now. This place is getting like Chicago. I remember one day down by the pier—”

I leave him rambling on and go into Cronk’s office wondering what time the next train leaves town. Cronk wheels round on me.

“Right,” he says. “I’ve heard it from Mr. Padgett and I’ve read it in the papers. Now, what’s your version?”

“P-Padgett?” I stutter.

“He runs the Clifftop Garage. Rang me up at home this morning.”

Bloody marvellous, isn’t it? The Russians have nothing on this lot, I can tell you.

“I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any serious damage,” I whine.

“Very considerate of you. Now, tell me about the accident.”

So I tell him that it wasn’t an accident and that this crinkly-haired bugger in a Major Driving School Viva has tried to force me under an oncoming car and the expression on his face does not change by one twitch of a muscle.

“Did either of the other cars stop?” he says.

“No.”

“Did you get their numbers?”

“No.”

“Were there any witnesses?”

“I didn’t see any.”

“So the fellow in the Viva could say that you were trying to overtake him and misjudged the distance?”

“Yes, I suppose he could, but it would be—”

“Shut up! Did you have anything to drink when you were out with Cripps?”

“A few halves. Surely you don’t think I was—”

“Shut up! I won’t tell you again. You were bloody lucky the police didn’t breathalyse you. They’re getting very hot on it round here.”

“I wasn’t drunk!”

“I know, I know. But don’t you see what I’m getting at? It’s your word against the fellow in the Viva and, if I suspect rightly, that’s Tony Sharp and he’s a darn sight better known that you are—and that counts for something around here, I can tell you. Even if you could find the chap in the other car, he probably didn’t see anything conclusive. Face up to it, lad. You haven’t got a leg to stand on.”

“You know the bloke that did me?”

“I think I do. Look, lad; let me explain. I served in the army under a man called Major Minto. We didn’t get on well then and we get on a bloody sight worse now. The problem is that he runs the Major School of Motoring, so the situation has to be watched very carefully. He’s on the council and has quite a few friends around here—that little creep from the Echo was probably one of them. If we put a foot wrong we’re in trouble, but they can ride us and get away with it. I’ve said the man you describe as running you off the road was probably Tony Sharp, their chief instructor. He’s a cocky sod and it isn’t the first time he’s tried something like this.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” I shout, showing him that the red blood runs thick in my veins.

“You aren’t going to do anything, lad. You concentrate on your instruction and leave Minto and his lot to me.”

His tone suggests I don’t argue with him, so I stand there humbly like I used to do in front of my old schoolmaster.

“Right, off you go,” he says. “I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt this time, but watch it! Miss Boswell will tell you who you’re with today.” I turn for the door. “Oh, by the way,” he adds, “what did you do about paying for the damage to the Morris?”

“I told them to send me the bill.”

“Well, we’ll get the insurance to cover it this time. I’ll tell the garage.”

“Oh, thanks a lot.”

“One more thing.” He ignores my grovelling and drops his voice confidentially. “You probably noticed that when you were out with Cripps that he fancies his tipple. It’s not a good habit to get into and I don’t recommend you to try to keep pace with him. He’s had a lot of practice, if you know what I mean.”

I nod wisely.

“Keep an eye open for him, because he’s a good bloke really, and he may need your help one day.”

“You were in the army with him, weren’t you?” I say casually to draw him out.

“That’s right,” says Cronk firmly and finally. “Now, you’d better be getting on with the job.”

I soon find that army service with Cronk is a common bond between all the instructors. Even Petal, who hardly comes over as an advertisement for the Royal Marines, was a cook and occasionally makes wistful references to it. “Totally untrue what they say about the army food, duckie. Considering the conditions I was working under, I was performing bloody great miracles every day. Nobody ever grumbled about my food.”

“Few of them lived to.”

Interjections like this usually come from John ‘Garth’ Williams, who stands about six foot four on other people’s stockinged feet and needs a shoe horn to get into his Triumph Herald. He is the clumsiest man I have ever met and is always apologising for knocking things or people over, and running his fingers through his tousled hair in gestures of helpless self-exasperation. Despite that, he is a handsome bloke in a craggy, beefy way that went out of fashion the day they opened the first male boutique, and I can imagine women fancying him.

I am glad to see him, because I don’t reckon that either Petal or Cripps go much on birds and it’s nice to have someone to compare notes with occasionally. Now that I’ve got through my first day and am beginning to feel the lay of the land, my normal appetites are returning and a bit of nooky seems just what the doctor ordered. I look at Dawn and she crosses her legs and looks straight back at me.

“What have you got lined up for me today?” I say, “or can I choose?”

“You can do what you like,” she says wittily, “but you’ll be going out with Lester and a few of the old faithfuls this morning. In the afternoon you’re solo with Miss Frankcom.”

Miss Frankcom. The very name reeks of sex. I can see already, five foot eight and a half inches of insatiable nymphomaniac. Hardly outside the 30 m.p.h. limit and she’s abandoned all pretence of handling the gear stick and is rampaging across the front of my cords. “Miss Frankcom, please! Miss Frankcom, you mustn’t! Not here. Oh, no, oh!!!!” I can hardly wait.

Poor Dawn, if only she’d moved a bit faster, she might have been in with a chance.

“What’s Miss Frankcom like?” I ask Garth. Garth reflects for a moment. “Mature,” he says. He winks at me and I reckon I must be on a good thing.

The thought of what is to come keeps me going through a very dreary morning. Lester Hewett is the fourth member of the instructors’ pool and is a silent, spotty youth I imagine to be about the same age as myself, though without any of my physical magnetism. There are white sweat patches under the armpits of his sports jacket and nobody would even think of asking him to do a Colgate commercial.

Not surprisingly, his pupils seem to have been selected on the basis that if Lester pongs a bit they will never notice and it is not just for the hand signals that I keep the windows well down. Lester sniffs in the back and occasionally whispers unhelpful comments into my left ear, thus undermining my authority and alarming some of the pupils, who I can see suspect him of being a potential hi-jacker: “O.K. Start driving towards Cuba.”

In the course of the morning I get lumbered with three real draggies. Firstly, a middle-aged schoolmaster type who grips the wheel with such feverish concentration that I expect to see additional mouldings on the plalstic when he releases it and yelps “Oh, my God!” at moments of tension—which occur pretty regularly. He has considerable difficulty judging the space into which the Morris will fit and steers down the middle of Cromingham High Street as if transporting a load of nitro-glycerine across a bumper car track. Faced by an approaching vehicle, his first impulse is to stop and wave the madcap oncomer to the side of the road.

No sooner has he staggered away shaking his head than I am stuck with the colonel’s lady, who calls me ‘young man’ only because she suspects I would not understand the Hindu for ‘hey you’: “Young man, I have arthritis and it is impossible for me to hang my arm out of the window”; “Young man, the gear lever does not appear to be working properly”; “Young man, my seat belt is cutting into my shoulder.” She is dead ruthless and I would not fancy my first pupil’s chance if he met her coming the wrong way up a one-way street. She is also incapable of accepting anything as being her fault. “Wretched car!” she hisses every time she mangles the gears. “Witless ingrate,” she levels at some old age pensioner taking his life in his hands by stepping on to a zebra crossing thirty yards ahead. All in all, she is pretty exhausting company, but I can see how we got our Empire.

My third pupil is the enormously pregnant Mrs. Owen, who can hardly get behind the steering wheel and rabbits on continuously about how she is having lessons to take her mind off the baby. It may take her mind off it, but every time she leans forward I expect the little bleeder to come popping out under pressure. She keeps making jokes about how it might be safer if we practised three point turns outside the Maternity Hospital and that doesn’t do much for my state of mind, either. I am well pleased when it is time for dinner.

Lester offers me one of his crust-free salad spread sandwiches but I refuse with ease and leave him slopping his hot Bovril into the plastic top of his thermos flask. By my standards it has been a successful if fairly tedious morning and I want to compose myself for going ‘solo’. I have tried hard not to think about Miss Frankcom in the belief that things thought about never come up to expectations but this has proved impossible, so I now think about her continuously in the hope that this double bluff will fool fate into making her everything I want her to be. I sit in one of the shelters on the front and marvel at the amazing softness of her skin, the exquisite whiteness of her teeth seen through lips half-parted by the outward symtoms of acute ecstasy, the fawn-like gentleness of her exploring fingers …

It is therefore something of a surprise at two o’clock to find that Miss Frankcom is about seventy-five and nutty as a fruit cake. To think of her in relation to sexual intercourse seems as crazy as entering Charlie Drake for the Olympic high jump.

“Thirteen times she’s taken her test,” says Garth, “and on one occasion the examiner was crying at the end of it.”

“You bugger!” I hiss at him as we watch her innocently studying the Highway Code as if she had never seen one before. “You never told me she was like that.”

“I said ‘mature’,” says Garth innocently. “You can’t argue with that.”

“‘Mature!’ By the cringe, she’s obsolete. There must have been a bloke with a red flag in front of the car when she first took the test.”

“Look on it as a challenge,” says Garth, trying to sound reassuring. “If you can handle her, you can handle anything. You’ve got to watch her all the time, because she can do some very funny things. I remember when she drove straight into the fire station—luckily there weren’t any fire engines there at the time.”

“Why the hell do we take people like that?”

“Use your common. Miss Frankcom must have poured thousands into this place through the years. There’d be no future in the business if everybody passed their test after three lessons. You need the right balance between people who whip through fast and act as a good advertisement, and all those poor sods that Crippsy and Lester take who pay the bills.”

“Crippsy and Lester and me,” I say bitterly as I see Dawn giving me her ‘You’re on’ nod.

“Just at the beginning,” says Garth cheerfully. “It’s all good practice.”

I say something unprintable to him and am introduced to Miss Frankcom, who feels certain she has seen me before but can’t place me. She has a deep booming voice and a body like a dust sheet over a grand piano, and she is eager to go.

“Now we’ve number thirteen out of the way, I’m certain I’m going to pass. I never felt happy coming up to thirteen. Fourteen seems a much happier number, don’t you think?”

She nearly proves herself wrong by driving into the back of a bus with that number plastered across it, but I just get my foot down in time.

One thing I have to give Miss Frankcom—she does not let little things like that put her out of her stride.

“Whoops! That’s how I failed number ten,” she says cheerfully. “Can we practise emergency stops today?”

I can see little chance of us doing anything else, but I concentrate on getting her out of town and along the coast road. It is amazing that a woman who has had so many lessons can still mistake her clutch for her brake pedal and our progress is one of fits and starts—most of the fits being thrown by me.

“I think having a new instructor is making me nervous,” she confides as I nearly go through the windscreen for the tenth time. “I’m trying so hard to impress you I’m becoming tense.”

I know the feeling and eventually come across an entrance to a disused airfield where we can practise reversing with comparative safety, though even then she nearly has the car over me when I step out to arrange a few bricks.

“Dangerous to bend down,” she sings out cheerfully. “I nearly didn’t see you.”

In no time at all she has reduced the bricks to rubble and I wouldn’t lay odds on her being able to reverse through the doors of an aircraft hangar.

“I think I’m getting the hang of it now,” she chortles. “I’m feeling much more relaxed. My trouble has always been that I concentrate too hard.”

So saying, she knocks down the only sign on thirty thousand square yards of tarmac. There is no doubt about it—preparing her to be unleashed on the public highway is like raising ferrets in a chicken run.

“Clumsy me,” she squeals. “But you don’t expect anything to be here, do you?”

I agree with her and suggest that we make our way back to town. This we achieve without mishap but it is where I make my fatal mistake. Coming towards us along the pavement is a blonde bird wearing black woollen hot pants with a red butterfly motif patched on one thigh. By local standards she is a knock-out and I watch her, wishing I had my drool cup within reach.

“What’s the time?” I hear Miss Frankcom saying, but I am watching the girl’s swelling crutch quivering above white lace-up boots.

This is how I had imagined Miss Frankcom and the sight of this tasty dolly grips my attention like a 32A cup on a 40-inch bust. But not for long! Suddenly the scenery changes through 180 degrees as Miss F. wrenches the wheel over and we skid across the road, narrowly missing a Guinness tanker. My foot plunges down—but nothing happens. The dual control has chosen this moment to pack it in or die of heart failure.

“Brake, brake!” I scream desperately and Miss F. stamps hard on the accelerator. Not that she need have bothered because we are poised at the head of a steep slipway and the car starts to plunge down towards the beach like a pair of lead knickers. Over the cobble stones we go with old men in waders and blue jerseys scrambling out of the way and shouts of fear and warning fading away behind us. Miss F. is hunched over the wheel like a plaster cast and I lunge for the wheel as we head straight for an upturned fishing boat. Lobster pots scatter like a flock of sparrows as we take a layer of paint off the boat and career on downwards. I haul on the handbrake which comes away in my hand and stamp desperately between Miss F’s feet in the hope of locating some means of stopping us. Miss F. obviously shares my belief that we are going to die because she emits a high pitched “wheeeeeh!” noise from between her clenched gums and her eyes are tight shut. The next thing I know is that the ground begins to level out, my head makes a dent in the roof and we are bowling across the beach, narrowly missing an ancient salt with a paint brush in his hand, whose eyes open wider than serving hatches as we speed by. Fortunately, the tide is just on the turn and the wet sand slows our progress until the car slides to a halt in a flurry of small wavelets. Gazing out across the grey ocean I compose a few prayers whilst Miss Frankcom remains hunched over the wheel muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” under her breath until I could belt her.

“Tell me, Miss Frankcom,” I say eventually, marvelling at how calm I can make my voice sound, “why did you do that?”

“I was trying to tell the time, dear.”

‘Trying to tell the time,” I repeat wearily. “You mean you suddenly remembered where there was a clock and turned right to find it?”

“No, dear. I was trying to look at the one on the dashboard and one of the spokes of the driving wheel was in the way.”

“So you moved it?”

“That’s right, dear. I suppose it was rather silly of me, wasn’t it?”

I watch the water slurping against the hub caps and nod my head slowly.

“Yeah. I think it probably was.”

I get out slamming the door rather harder than is necessary to shut it and look back along the tyre tracks to where a posse of lucky-to-be-alive bystanders and side-leapers is beginning to close in on us. The tracks directly behind the vehicle have now disappeared and the Morris is settling comfortably into the sand like an old lady into a bath-chair.

Thinking of old ladies reminds me of Miss Frankcom and I wade round to the driver’s seat and suggest that she gets out.

“But it’s wet,” she exclaims in horror. “I’m not stepping into that. You’ll have to carry me.”

Either that or wait for a boat to take her off. The sea doesn’t mess about round here when it decides to do something and already the occasional wave is smacking against the side of the door. So, adding insult to injury, I have to stagger up the beach with this monstrous old rat bag threatening to ruin my marriage prospects with every stride. I dump her beside the first aid post—closed of course—and look around desperately for a telephone. If I don’t find a garage soon, I will need an underwater salvage team.

Luckily this isn’t necessary because the fishermen have a contraption which winches their boats up the slipway and moving at a speed not normally associated with East Anglians they have secured a wire to the back axle and are dragging the Morris up the beach.

But not quite fast enough. Across the beach wings Gruntscomb of the Echo, waving his arms and pausing every few strides to unleash another volley of camera shots at this newshound’s dream. I attempt to hide behind a boat but Gruntscomb’s eyes don’t miss much.

“Mr. Lea, isn’t it? Good heavens. Don’t tell me you were in this one as well. Fantastic! What happened? You what? Unbelievable! Quite unbelievable! Lucky to be alive, eh? What about your passenger? Miss Frankcom? Oh, her! I’ve heard about her. Taken the test fifty times, hasn’t she? Thirteen. Oh, I thought it was more than that. Oh well, it doesn’t matter.” Click, click, click. “You like water, don’t you? No, I’m sorry. Of course it isn’t funny. Yes, I’m sorry you didn’t like our last story. Most people thought it was very good, but there you are. Oh, is that Miss Frankcom? I must have a word with her. Miss Frankcom, Miss Frankcom!” And he pisses off across the beach to where Miss F. has foolishly revealed herself. Apart from jumping on him and his camera and burying them both in the sand, there is very little I can do, so I return to the Morris which looks like a boiled sweet some toddler has spat out into an ash can and imagine Cronk’s face when he opens his morning paper or the Norfolk Mafia get on the blower to him.

To my amazement the engine fires first time which is either a credit to British engineering or an indication that it is getting used to working on a mixture of petrol and water. I dish out some silver to my fishermen friends: “You be lucky there, bor” and pull alongside Miss Frankcom who is clearly relishing Gruntscomb’s greasy attentions.

“No, I haven’t tried the Major School,” she is saying. “After so long with the East Coast I feel I should see the thing through with them. To change now would be an admission of failure. Almost like giving up.”

“Touting for business, are you?” I snarl.

Gruntscomb looks aggrieved. “No, I was just trying to get the whole story. I wondered if this incident would have any effect on Miss Frankcom’s future plans.”

“No, dear,” says Miss Frankcom considerately, “it was an accident and I don’t blame Mr. Lea for anything.”

That’s enough for me and I bundle her into the Morris before she can say anything else more quotable.

“You must be shaken after that,” I say comfortingly, “let me run you home.”

“Aren’t we going to finish the lesson?” she says.

Somehow I manage to resist strangling her—mainly because I don’t reckon my hands will fit round her bloody great throat—and dump her outside her bungalow. I am so choked that I could easily drive the Morris over the nearest cliff but I know Gruntscomb would be waiting there with his crummy little camera poised for action so there is no point. Why should I give the bastard any more free material?

Determined to make a clean breast of it I give the Morris a wipe down and return to the E.C.D.S. where Dawn, presumably wearing dark glasses to celebrate it being the coldest day of the year, looks up as I come in.

“Where’s Miss Frankcom?” she says.

“Good question, I filled her knickers with paving stones and pushed her off the end of the pier.”

“Did she sink?”

“Not her. She was running up the beach thirty seconds later shaking like a golden retriever. Where’s Cronky?”

“He’s out playing golf. Where is she, really?”

“You mean you haven’t heard yet? I thought the telephone would have been ringing all afternoon. I could hear the drums beating outside the coast guard station.”

“You haven’t had another accident? I don’t believe it!”

So I tell her what happened and I must say she is quite sympathetic in a “well I never” “ooh er, you didn’t” sort of way. It is the first time I have ever known her show any emotion apart from when she spilt nail varnish on her new tights and in my present mood her interest is most welcome.

“What are you going to do?” she asks eventually.

“Go out and get pissed … the minute the pubs open,” I say, “do you want to keep me company?”

To my surprise she takes the invitation seriously and I can see her little mind ticking over.

“I don’t fancy sitting in a pub all night,” she says, “but there’s a dance at the Shermer Young Conservatives—” her voice tails away temptingly.

“Will they let me in? I haven’t brought my passport with me.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s nice. They’ve got a good band up there.”

So a few hours later I am building up my confidence with a few pints in the “Three Jolly Rapists” or whatever Mrs. Bendon’s local is called and thinking of the reproachful look in her eyes as I slid out of the house in my zoot suit. A frilly blouse she had on and when you look down her cleavage it’s a poor reason to be leaving home on a cold night.

Luckily Dawn, running down the concrete path of her council house looks a very reasonable alternative even if it is by lamplight. Not the kind of girl you would take home to mother perhaps, but dad would be very grateful. She smells like homage to “California Poppy” and has bloody great curtain rings hanging down from her ears, but her tits stick out where tits ought to stick out and her mouth looks a bit more exciting than the slit in a pillar box—not much smaller, mind you, but more inviting. I feel the dark glasses could be dispensed with but I don’t want to pick a fight with her at this stage of the evening.

“You look fabulous!” I say, and from my waist down I mean it.

Shermer Y.C.s hold their dances at the tennis club and from the “Shermerlins” to the cider cup the festivities live down to my expectations so completely as to be not worth describing, but luckily I have taken steps to make good the foreseen absence of strong liquor by bringing my own half bottle of scotch. With this, I lace every drink sipped by the fair Dawn until she is snuggling up to me as if I am her favourite teddy. I do nothing to disillusion her and am awaiting the right moment to suggest we hit the trail when I notice a familiar face propped up by the doorway.

It belongs to the long blond streak of piss that drove me off the road. Tony Fart-features or whatever his name was supposed to be. As I see him so he recognises me and our eyes meet with not enough love left over for a parish funeral. He sneers and turns away and my fists contract. My first reaction is to belt the living daylights out of him, but there are other considerations. Am I going to risk leaving this gorgeous half-cut hunk of mammal sleepily kneeding my thigh for a mere affair of honour? Am I buggery! I can catch up with shag-nasty any day of the week. Tonight I intend to be up at the crack of Dawn.

“Come on, gorgeous,” I murmur into one of her stretched ears—those earrings really are heavy—“time to go home.”

She doesn’t argue and I half carry her to ‘Ladies Cloaks’ and hope she doesn’t fall asleep inside.

While I’m waiting I take another look around the dance floor and watch. Tony Sharp waltzing with a pert little brunette who he seems to be massaging into his body like embrocation. Whoever it is, she obviously fancies him, which, I guess, makes two of them. I try to catch his eye for a further staring match but he is too busy to notice and they disappear into a scrum of bodies.

Behind me the door opens and my dream girl lurches out. She has left her dark glasses behind but I don’t care because it gives me my first opportunity of the evening to admire the acres of mascara plastered round her eyes.

“You look fabulous,” I say pulling her towards me by the lapels of her synthetic fur coat. I may have said this before, but I can’t say it often enough: always tell them they look great. You will never find a woman who will think any less of you for it.

I kiss her gently on the side of the cheek—it’s like kissing a flourbag—and steer her outside. In the car park, it is as cold as an eskimo’s chuff and that is a real passion-killer. I can see Dawn coming round faster than if I had poured a bucket of cold water over her. This is obviously death to my plans so I push her into the car and turn the heater up to full before remarking casually that I think I may have a drop of whisky somewhere and would she care for a reviving sip. “Never touch the stuff,” she says primly, which shows how much she knows. I take a quick shot and making a low grunting noise, which is meant to indicate that I can’t resist the pull of her overpowering, female magnetism any longer, attempt to take her in my arms.

“Not here, you fool,” she says as if we had been sitting on the high altar in Westminster Abbey and, in fairness, I suppose that to someone like Dawn, a mixture of the Y.C.s and the Tennis Club is a bit overpowering.

“Sorry,” I say gazing moodily into her virtually invisible face, “but you’re looking marvellous.”

I am cheered by her “not here” because it obviously means that it will be alright somewhere else, and this is where I intend to take her as quickly as possible. Back along the coast road we spin with me humming “I’m in the mood for love” and her head dropping down against my shoulder in a gesture I first interpret as affection and then—when I hear the snores—realise means she is falling asleep. I adjust the heater to spark her up a bit and pull off the road on to a parking area affording a view of two large concrete litter bins and the North Sea—in that order.

I switch off the ignition and Dawn shakes herself awake.

“Ooh, I was just dropping off. Where are we?”

“Somewhere where I can kiss you,” I say. “You really are fantastic.”

With all the trouble and expense I have put into this evening I have really got to believe it and I sweep down on the mouth she thoughtfully offers like a hot avalanche. “Fantastic breasts,” I murmur, inserting my hand into her coat and running my fingers over them gently. Normally I might pursue this line a bit longer, but as I get older I get more impatient and my evil little fingers soon drop down to floor level and start climbing up again.

This is the moment when any great artist holds his breath. Will the thighs slam shut? Will steel-grip fingers close round my wrist? Will her body stiffen and her head jerk back?”

“You don’t waste any time, do you?” she says, opening her legs a little wider to make it easier for me, “you might have warmed your hands up first!” Once my fingers are strolling round that delicious, honeyed moisture, I feel like a flat battery that has been plugged into a generator. A charge of lust floods through my system and I have her knicks and tights in the glove compartment before you can say Mary Whitehouse. Dawn hangs on to my arms and makes a few moaning noises but she is not a great contributor—more the lie-back-and-enjoy-it-while-you-get-on-with-it type.

In my present mood of animal rapture I can put up with this and I drop between her legs and start trying to get to grips with it. My efforts are crowned with something less than success because the gear stick gets stuck up the back of my belt and the room I have to work in makes a changing cubicle in a London boutique seem like the stateroom of Queen Mary. Of course, we could go outside but this might lead to frostbite of the hampton and even the detour to the back seat could be dangerous.

I am now reckless with desire and drag the protesting Dawn over into the back seat and manoeuvre her into a position across my thighs. By this time the whole adventure has no chance of becoming a follow-up to “The Sound of Music” and sweat is pouring down the inside of the windows. Nevertheless, I am not a man who is put off by his surroundings and I bring the episode to a noisy and successful—for me at least—conclusion with a few dynamic thrusts which I could swear—when I step outside to rearrange my clothing—have moved the Morris a few feet nearer another trip to the beach. Just in case you should think me careless, I should add that she has breathed those words every man yearns to hear—“It’s alright, I’m on the pill.”

The journey home is inevitably an anticlimax with Dawn struggling into her tights and grumbling about feeling sick and me wishing I had punched Sharp on the nose when I had the chance. It’s sad how all the romance evaporates so quickly, isn’t it?

I drop Dawn off, telling her I will see her in the morning which doesn’t surprise her much, and nip back to Mrs. B’s. Maybe it is because I am tired or pissed, or both, but I am a bit careless and stagger in through the door with half Dawn’s make-up smeared across my face. Mrs. B has obviously been waiting up for me and when she sees me, an expression close to pain flashes across her face. I start to say something but her nostrils flare like a fish’s gills and I am left with the swish of her nightgown as she turns and sweeps upstairs. Bang! goes the bedroom door and I have a nasty suspicion that relations are going to be a bit strained from now on.

CHAPTER SIX

Breakfast the next morning has as much snap, crackle and pop as a damp cornflake and I am relieved when I can escape from the brooding Mrs. B. and head for the E.C.D.S. At least my reception there won’t be silent. If Mrs. B. goes on like this, I will have to change my lodgings, though probably after my latest episode, that will be taken care of for me.

I am working out my best approach to Cronk when I notice a primrose Rolls Royce pull up alongside me at the traffic lights. It is cleaner than a choirboy’s foreskin and has a venetian blind at the back and a few magenta cushions scattered along the width of the rear window. The driver is about fifty, with close-cropped hair, a small waxed moustache and a pillar box red complexion. He is wearing a camel hair overcoat and backless driving gloves and tapping the wheel impatiently whilst peering fixedly at the red light. Even before I see Sharp sitting by his side I feel positive it must be Major Minto. Neither of them takes any notice of me and as the amber comes up, the car leaps forward and roars out of sight. Nobody at M.S.M. seems to like driving slowly.

I get to the E.C.D.S. before nine o’clock but it is not early enough to beat Garth, Crippsy, Lester and Petal who are all hovering like expectant vultures and waving their morning papers.

“Ooh, but you’ve had it this time, ducky,” squeals Petal, “front page news on half the nationals. Cronky is going to go out of his tiny mind.”

Sure enough “The Sun” carries one of Gruntscomb’s poxy photographs with “How Miss Frankcom was driven to the drink” plastered above it and the “Express” combines that with a picture of the duckpond incident under the headlines “How to make a splash as a driving instructor”. Very funny. Gruntscomb has obviously done a world-class job.

I have no more time to sample the wit of the British press because Cronk sweeps through with an expression on his face like a man who has had his “Special K” laced with cement. He says nothing but merely jerks his thumb at me to follow him into his office.

“Is it going to be like this every day?” says Petal. “I can’t wait to see tomorrow’s papers.”

I tell him to get his roots tinted and pad after Cronk.

“Now—” he starts, but then the telephone rings. He lets it ring for a few moments and then snatches it up. “Where the hell is that girl? She’s never on—. Hello, East Coast Driving School. Oh, I was just beginning to wonder where you were. Yes, I’m sorry to hear that. O.K. Well get in when you can. Goodbye.” He slams down the ’phone. “She’s got ’flu and won’t be in today. Now—” His ’phone rings again. “Good morning, East Coast Driving School, Cronk speaking. Oh yes. Did you—wait a minute. I’m afraid my girl’s away, I’ll have to get the book.” He turns to me. “Get the appointment book from Dawn’s desk.” I hand it to him and he flips through the pages. “Yes, we can manage tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock. You know where we are? And the fees? Good. Oh did you? But then things do get exaggerated a bit you know. Yes, well, goodbye. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.” He puts down the ’phone and turns back to me.

“The dual control packed in,” I say desperately. “You can check it yourself if you like.”

“I will do that. Now perhaps you can explain how the Echo seems to be following you about everywhere you go. This publicity could ruin us.”

The telephone goes again. “Good morning. East Coast Driving School. Yes, yes. Yes I think we can.” He flips through the book again. “Mrs. Dobson? Fine. Right, we’ll see you then. Oh, did you? Yes, I know what you mean. I’m talking to the young man now. Do you? Well, we’ll have to see about that, Mrs. Dobson. It all depends on our rotation schedules. Goodbye.” He puts the ’phone down and shakes his head. “Woman must be mad, quite me-add! Now, where was I—oh yes, I was talking about all this rubbish in the papers. It’s making us a laughing stock. At your current rate of progress, we’ll be out of business in a few weeks if I go on employing you.” The ’phone rings again.

“East Coast Driving School. You saw our what in the paper? But we don’t advertise. Oh, well. It doesn’t matter. Of course we’d be delighted to enrol you.” He reaches for his pen.

And that is how it goes on all day. Any publicity seems to be good publicity and there are twenty people who ring up to say that they had been meaning to take lessons for years and decided to do something about it after reading about us in the papers. Faced with this sudden upsurge in business Cronky finds it increasingly difficult to keep the rough edge on his tongue and by the time someone from Anglia T.V. rings up to see if I will appear with Miss Frankcom on “Anglia in the News”, he is almost purring.

In fact, I do trip along to the studios and, though I say so myself, I am a wild success, mentioning the East Coast Driving School twice and giving the impression that I love helping old ladies across the road and being kind to animals. Petal notices that my fly is undone but you can’t have everything and overall it must have gone well because for the rest of the week we are besieged with people wanting to learn to drive and one woman from Felixstowe who craves a lock of my hair—I send it to her, of course.

I continue to take Miss Frankcom and people nudge each other in the street as we go past. We are like a travelling advertisement for the E.C.D.S. With all this goodwill and public image flying about I am keen not to spoil it by kicking Sharp in the crutch but this does not change my resolve to get the bastard when the right moment comes along. In the meantime, there is Mrs. Dent to keep me occupied.

She is one of Garth’s pupils, and I can see why when I get a crack at her while he is taking a week’s holiday with his aunt under the shadow of the Brecon Beacons. She is a wispy blonde of about thirty who is constantly biting her lip and fingering her necklace when her hands aren’t creeping round the edge of the driving wheel. She chats to herself at moments of stress and is as mixed up as a kid’s fishing line. I remember birds like her from when I was cleaning windows and I am quick to check out her background as we spiral up towards the golf course.

“What kind of car does your husband drive?” I say conversationally.

“Some kind of Jag, I think. The latest saloon.”

“Has he ever taken you out in it?”

She laughs derisively. “You must be joking. I hardly ever see either of them. No—that’s a lie. I see them together on Saturday mornings when he’s cleaning the blasted thing. I’ve often wished I could get that much attention, but it’s difficult when you’re a woman.”

“He’s fond of the car, is he?” I say innocently.

“Fond of it!? If he had the choice between it and me and the kids I wouldn’t fancy our chances. That and his golf are the only things he cares about.”

For a girl with a soft face she comes over very hard and her voice is flat as shovel.

“What does he do?”

“He’s a Brand Manager for Python’s. That’s like being one of the ones who was crucified next to Jesus.”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“It’s the only thing you ever hear about in our house. That, and ‘why don’t you try and do a bit more with yourself. I give you enough money, don’t I?’ I’m supposed to prance around in front of his business associates just in case the marketing director has a heart attack.”

“What, because of you prancing around in front of him? Don’t hog the middle of the road so much!”

“No! Because of the—oh, it doesn’t matter. The whole bloody thing doesn’t matter. Look, can we stop for a cigarette in a minute?”

“Yes. There’s a lay-by up here on the right. Pull in there.”

She dives in her handbag and lights up as if she was doing it against the clock; then puffs a thin stream of smoke over her left shoulder.

“Do you want one?”

“No. I gave it up.”

“That’s very strong-minded of you.”

“Not strong-minded. Just scared. I was frightened of killing myself.”

“You could die crossing the road.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t do it by throwing myself under a car.”

She shrugs her shoulders and gazes out across the golf course.

“That’s the seventeenth over there,” she says.

“Oh.” I try to sound interested. “Do you play too?”

She smiles. “No, I don’t. Where’s Mr. Williams?”

“Garth, you mean? He’s visiting his mum in Wales, I think. You have him usually, don’t you?”

She looks at me a bit sharpish as if she suspects I might be trying to suggest something.

“Yes, that’s right.” She decides that I didn’t mean anything and her expression softens. “I didn’t know you called him Garth.”

“Well, he’s a big fellow, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he is. What do they call you?”

She settles down in her seat and tilts her head back so she is blowing smoke against the car roof. Her tits stand out firm against her blouse and I would like to put my hands on them. Sitting like this she is asking for it. But you never know with some birds. Often the pushy ones are the first to start yelling for a copper. It’s the quiet ones who won’t look you in the eyes who usually turn up trumps. At least, that is how it was when I was cleaning windows and my clientele is not all that different.

“Well?” she says.

“Well what?”

“What do they call you?”

“Oh!” I’ve been so busy looking at her tits I have forgotten what she was rabbiting about. “I don’t know. I haven’t been with the firm long enough to get a nickname.”

“You make it sound as if you qualify for one when you retire. My husband would approve of that. Another non-contributory fringe benefit.”

Back to the old man again. I don’t have to be able to do the Times crossword to get the message that he is not looming very large in her legend at the moment. It would be nice to think that this probably spelled out a big welcome for my hand testing her knicker elastic but that might not be true either. I have often found that women who rabbit on like maniacs about how wonderful their husbands are become the first to ask you if you would like to see their new counterpanes. This is because they feel guilty about their adulterous desires and don’t want to commit the additional sin of blaming their innocent husbands for them. Similarly, the women who bitch about their husbands are really making them scapegoats for their own lack of guts in not having an affair. “If my husband wasn’t so pathetically jealous and old-fashioned,” they grumble to themselves, “I could have a whale of a time.” The fact is that they are usually dyed-in-the-wool Puritans who would pass out if you tweaked their suspenders coming out of a ‘War on Want’ lunch.

Fascinating lot of old cobblers, isn’t it? No? Oh, well, I don’t blame you if you disagree with me. Any theory you have about women is unlikely to be provable in more than one case. Anyway, there we are, with Mrs. Dent flashing her tits at me and throwing in a bit of thigh for good measure and me wondering what is the best method of getting my hands on both of them. I am also wondering just how much driving Mrs. D. expects to fit into an hour’s session. I don’t mind watching the East wind turn every blade of grass on the Cromingham golf course into a hunchback, but I feel I should be doing a bit more for my money.

“Is this what you usually do when you’re having a lesson?” I say.

“It depends on the instructor,” she says, looking at me like Lauren Bacall used to look at Humphrey Bogart. I wait for her to eject a meaningful puff of smoke in my direction, and sure enough she does.

“You mean that some are more easy going than others?”

“You could put it like that. I prefer to say that some are more imaginative than others.”

“What do you mean?” It’s always worth while asking women that when you don’t know what to say next.

“John Williams knows that there is more to playing golf than hitting a golf ball four hundred yards. Do you know that if there’s a hint of sun, you can lie in the bottom of that bunker by the seventeenth green in a bikini?”

“Fascinating, but what’s that got to do with learning to drive?”

“What’s learning to drive got to do with learning to drive?” She laughs hollowly. “I came out here with my husband once when he was flogging his way round with one of his clients. You could smell him three holes away. Scared stiff that he wouldn’t put up a good show. Wanting not to appear wanting.” She laughs again. “I watched him digging a hole in the bottom of that bunker with the sweat dripping off him and his expression getting more and more racked. And do you know? Just where he was flapping away I had been lying a few days earlier with my lover. Ironic, isn’t it? I started laughing out loud and that made him furious. We had quite a row about it.”

“What did the client do?”

“He didn’t mind. I’m having lunch with him tomorrow.”

“Sandwiches at the seventeenth?”

“No. He’s staying at a hotel. You sound as if you don’t approve.”

“I’m jealous.”

“There’s no need to be.”

She turns towards me and reaches up an arm to pat my cheek. That’s it! I don’t have to have a crystal ball to know what she is thinking. I bend down and kiss her and her tongue comes out like one of those curled up squeaker things that kids blow at Christmas time. At the same time her hand goes down to my fly so fast it might be tied to the top of my zipper with a piece of elastic. She is the quickest worker since God made the world without breaking into double time. I hardly have time to breathe in through the nose before her practised fingers have poured over the side of my jockey briefs like Attila the Hun and she is rummaging away like a champion shop lifter who has got her hand caught down the side of the deep freeze cabinet. Not that there is much frozen goods being displayed. That kind of thing brings me on faster than a Derby winner and I’m giving her a bit of the same before the first appreciative murmur has escaped from her throat.

“It’s a bit cramped in here, isn’t it?” she says.

“Yeah! I used to have a pantechnicon but I fell behind with the payments. Let’s go back to your place.”

“I daren’t do that. I’ve got too many nosey neighbours. What about you?”

“No dice. I’ve got the same kind of problem.” I can just see Mrs. Bendon’s face if I rolled up with this one. She would do her nut. “Come on my lap,” I murmur, helpfully.

“I don’t like that. I can only come when I’m lying flat out.” She’s honest, isn’t she? Germaine Greer herself could not be more direct. “There’s a bunker at the fifteenth,” she goes on. “Let’s go there.”

“Not the sixteenth?”

“It has sentimental memories for me.”

I would not have suspected that she was the romantic type, but there you are. As an alternative to my usual chores as an instructor a length on the links seems very attractive—but in mid-November?

“It’s going to be a bit parky out there, isn’t it?” I say nervously.

“I’ve already told you. Once you get out of the wind it’s alright. Look, there’s even a bit of sunshine.”

She is right, too. A few perished shafts are breaking through the blanket of grey that has hung over my head ever since I left Liverpool Street Station.

“O.K. Let’s give it a whirl.”

“You needn’t sound so enthusiastic. I know some fellows who’d stay all night in an open lifeboat for a chance to hold my hand.”

“I can believe it,” I lie enthusiastically. I mean, really! Twice round the boating pool whilst you finished your cheese sandwich would be more like it. Some women get delusions of grandeur about what they are trying to give away. At least a whore has the guts to put a price on her goodies. As my old schoolmaster used to say: you don’t have to like capitalism but at least it separates the professionals from the amateurs.

Anyway, off we go across the golf course with me trying to look at my watch without her noticing and hoping that we will be able to squeeze a happy memory out of the fifteenth. I reckon she must have played every hole on the course in her day because she does not deviate by an inch but pushes through the bracken and brings us out a long-distance spit from a neat little circle of grass with a flag in the middle of it.

“Where do we go from here?” I ask, but she is already scrambling up the side of a low mound and beckoning for me to follow. When I get there, I can see that we are perched on the edge of a deep sand trap and she squeezes my arm ferociously, presumably intending to suggest the pleasure to come. Down we go and she leans back against the wall of the bunker and gazes at me expectantly. I have to confess that out of the wind it is almost bearable, though I don’t go a bundle on the old Woodbine packets and the used french letter I can see out of the corner of my eye.

“You see,” she says. “It’s quite cosy, isn’t it?”

It is hardly the word I would have used but then I am not a country boy at heart.

“Come here,” I say, which is another great non-phrase I use a lot with birds. Roughly translated, it means: “I can’t think of anything to say so I am going to try to kiss you/put my hand up your skirt/both.”

Mrs. D. offers me her mouth and we chew away hungrily whilst her hands start a reprise of ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ on the zip of my fly. The sand is a bit damp and I would normally reckon this as being a knee-tremble job but for what Mrs. D. said about liking to get stretched out for maximum satisfaction. She has pulled open my trousers like the mouth of a flour sack and has got both hands round my hampton while I am easing her knickers down to knee level with a skill any window dresser would envy. It may not be the most elegant sight in the world but it is giving us both a lot of pleasure and I am fast forgetting about the weather. I prod forward a couple of times and Mrs. D. gives a shiver of passion which just might be for real and starts licking my ear.

“I want to lie down now,” she says, “and then you put it in.”

Try to stop me, I think, and, perfect gent that I am, I bend down to remove the panties that are flapping pathetically round her ankles.

In doing this I am hindered by her whole weight suddenly flopping over my shoulders as if she wanted to be given a piggy-back.

“Hey! Steady on—” I begin, thinking this is some kinky game she likes to play, or a request for a muff job, but when I straighten up she slides down between my legs and I notice there is a swelling on the side of her head which is growing as I look at it. There is also a small white ball nestling beside my foot and it has more pock-marks on it than my Aunt Ethel. Some clumsy berk has bounced a golf ball off her bonce! Just my flaming luck. The bloody game should be banned.

“Wake up,” I squeal, slapping her cheeks and gazing into her lifeless mug. “Are you all right?” She does not say anything but groans weakly and pulls her hands up to her head. She is not going anywhere in a hurry in the next few minutes and I am prepared to lay bets on it. One possible taker is the prick who clobbered her and I raise my head carefully over the side of the bunker to see if anyone is coming. By the cringe! Two blokes are striding purposefully towards us and I recognise both of them. Minto and Sharp!

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about my slice,” sings out Minto and I can’t hear what Sharp says. Minto may think he has problems but they are fleabites compared with what is facing me. Caught in a bunker with a senseless, knickerless pupil can’t be good for business. Knickerless! I snatch up Mrs. D.’s panties and shove them into my pocket, dislodging one of her shoes in my frenzy. I force it on again and there she is, looking just like any other thirty-year-old woman you would expect to find lying senseless in a bunker every time you play a round of golf.

It is then that I act foolishly—well, act foolishly again, if you feel that trying to shaft a bird in a golf bunker in the middle of November is a bit stupid in the first place. I pick up the ball and roll it carefully onto the fairway, hoping that Minto and Sharp will stumble upon it and not the lovely Mrs. D. and myself. No sooner have I done this than my pupil starting groaning like she is auditioning for the ‘Red Barn’ and I spring to her side and try to muffle the noise with my shoulder. In this position I am glad to hear a cry of surprise from the fairway.

“Good God, is this your ball?”

“No, I’m on the green,” says the blond streak of piss impatiently, “and you’re in the bunker, so don’t try anything.”

“I’m not trying anything, you fool.” Minto’s voice is quick to sound irritated. “This is a number four and that’s what I’m playing. It must have hit something and come out.”

“Or pigs can fly, or it’s somebody else’s ball. We’ll soon find out.”

Before I can congratulate myself on another great idea, Sharp’s self-satisfied mug appears over the side of the bunker and he pulls back in surprise. Since Mrs. D. and I are kneeling against each other like a couple of out-of-work bookends it is an emotion you can forgive him.

“Good Gawd!”

Sharp’s voice usually sounds dead middle-class with pretensions to something better, but now, caught off guard, it slips a couple of notches.

“What is it?”

Minto looms up at his elbow and his mouth jumps open when he sees us.

“What the hell are you doing down there?”

He is blustering because he is frightened. I don’t blame him. So am I.

“This lady fell into the bunker and hit her head,” I say. Well, it must happen all the time, mustn’t it? Sharp obviously does not agree with me.

“How long have you been there?” he says, suspiciously. “Wait a minute! I know you. You work for Cronk’s crowd. You were at the Shermer YCs the other night with their receptionist. I’ve seen this bloke before—” he starts explaining it all over again to Minto.

“Yeah. And I know you,” I chip in. “You forced me off the road and nearly killed me.”

“You forced yourself off. It was a bloody stupid place to try to overtake.”

“I don’t like this,” says Minto, who has been staring fixedly at Mrs. Dent ever since he saw us. “She’s got a bump on the side of her head.”

“I told you: she fell in,” I say desperately, but Mrs. D. doesn’t help matters by redoubling her groan rate.

“I see what you mean,” says Sharp menacingly. “It’s not the first time something like this has happened up here.”

“Yes. There was that chap—what was his name? Medley? Smedley?”

“Bachelor. Strangled them and then—”

“—when he’d sexually assaulted them—”

“—he buried them in the bunkers.”

“That’s the one.”

They beam at each other like a couple of excited kids who have just landed a large minnow.

“You’re round the twist,” I say indignantly and start to pat Mrs. D.’s cheeks gently.

“Come on, love. You’re all right. Pull yourself together.”

To my relief, her groans start turning into words and she stretches out her arms for support.

“What happened? Where am I? Was there an accident?”

“No, no, it’s all right,” I say soothingly. “Everything is going to be fine.”

But it isn’t. Mrs. D.’s faltering fingers catch hold of her knickers and pull them out of my pocket.

The following few seconds seem like hours and then Mrs. D. drives the final nail into my coffin by uttering her first recognisable words in minutes.

“Those are my knickers,” she says, and her voice has just the right note of surprise and indignation to ensure that any judge worth his assault would have me inside for eleven years.

“Now wait—” I begin, but Sharp does not. Leaping into the bunker, he brandishes his putter like a club of the non-golf variety and throws a few words over his shoulder to Minto.

“You get the police. I’ll hang on to this bastard.”

“Don’t be wet,” I tell him. “You’ve behaving like an overgrown boy scout. I’m no more a sex maniac than you are. A bloody sight less if what I saw last night is anything to go by.”

Although constructed purely out of spite and imagination, this is a master stroke because Dawn has told me that the bird Sharp was with at the YCs dance was none other than Minto’s daughter and that they are practically engaged. Certainly Sharp’s interchange with Minto before my discovery has revealed a considerable familiarity. From the looks on both their faces I can see that this may well be a thing of the past, and I am not slow to follow up my advantage.

“I saw you in the car park with that dark-haired bird. Bloody good job the police didn’t. You want to get some blinds on the car if you’re going to carry on like that.”

“Shut your lying mouth,” howls Sharp, clenching his teeth and bringing back the head of the putter.

“Why? A bit close to home, is it? You don’t mind pointing the finger at other people, do you? But when it comes to—”

“Get the police!” snarls Sharp. “Can’t you see he’s trying to play for time? If we hadn’t got here when we did, he’d probably have killed that poor girl.”

“Just what I thought last night when I saw your friend’s feet wedged against the windscreen,” I go on. But I don’t get any further. Sharp takes a swing at me and the putter slices the air above my head. Before he can try another one I step forward and hook him hard to the pit of the stomach. His head jerks forward and my left swings in and catches him flush on the side of the jaw. They are as pretty a couple of punches as I have ever thrown and when my left whips into his mug I know it is going to need a crane to set him on his feet within five minutes.

At the sight of his mate biting the dust, Minto looks about as happy as a goldfish dropped into a tank of piranha, but he still tries to come cocky with it.

“Stay where you are,” he snaps, his voice quavering a bit. “Don’t try anything.”

“Piss off,” I say, because I am no stranger to the big bluster myself. “Get in my way and I’ll push your face in.”

I get my arms under Mrs. D. and haul her up until I can give her a fireman’s lift on to my shoulder. Sharp is beginning to stir but he is in no mood to cause anybody any problems and I step over him and out of the bunker like Edmund Hillary. Minto runs along beside me, jumping up like a Yorkshire terrier.

“I’ve warned you. You won’t get away with it. Put that woman down. I’ll fetch the police.”

“Why don’t you do that. I’ll lend you a soap box if you have trouble reaching the receiver.”

He splutters something and I keep walking. In fact, I have no idea what I am going to do apart from getting the hell away from the place. Fate obviously does not want me to become a driving instructor and after today’s little episode my career beside the wheel seems likely to become one of the shortest on record.

I stalk over to the car and pour Mrs. D. into the back seat whilst Minto makes an M.G.M. production of taking my number from a safe twenty yards.

“There’s three more on the seventh green,” I shout to him. “I cut them up into little pieces and poked them into the hole with the flag.” I throw in my mad laugh for good measure and he starts scuttling off down the road towards the clubhouse. Good luck to him.

I climb behind the wheel and jet off towards town, wondering what I am going to do with Mrs. D. I am supposed to take her back to the School but I don’t fancy that although I don’t know where she lives. I wish my mind would sort itself out and start thinking clearly, but it won’t.

Luckily, Mrs. D.’s mind is more helpful.

“Ooh, my God!” she groans. “What happened?”

“We were having a quick grope in a bunker when you caught a golf ball across the side of your nut.”

“Ouch!” She touches her temple gingerly. “My God, it feels like another head.”

“It’s not so bad. Just a bruise. You’ll be alright.”

“You don’t sound very worried. I might have been killed.”

“That’s just what my friends thought.”

“What are you on about?”

So I tell her and she makes a few clucking noises and tut-tuts a couple of times and then she actually laughs.

“I don’t see what you’re worried about,” she says finally, patting her hair into place.

“I’m worried about getting fifteen years nick, aren’t I?” I tell her.

“Well, that all depends on me, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they’re only going to be able to put you inside if you were assaulting me and I’m the only person who can say whether you were or weren’t.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.” I look at her with new interest. “You’ll tell them it was an accident, of course. Better stick to my story. You know, how you fell into—”

“Turn left up this track,” she interrupts. “You’ll like the view.”

“Well—er—yes, alright.” I would be a mug to argue with her, wouldn’t I? We go along the track for fifty yards and then we are in the middle of a clump of trees with no way out except the one we came in by.

“Where do we go from here?” I ask.

“That’s up to you.” She turns and faces me with her elbow resting on the back of the seat.

“Are you feeling all right?”

She looks at me very levelly. “I’ve got a little pain you might try to kiss better.”

She is a game girl, isn’t she? Either that or a bit gaga after her bash on the bonce. Either way, it’s not in my interest to be less than co-operative, so I slide my arm round her shoulder and start pulling her mouth towards mine. To my surprise, she puts her hand on my lips and shakes her head.

“I thought you said you wanted me to kiss it better?”

“I did, but that’s not where it hurts.”

She stretches back in her seat and at the same time drops her hands and starts gently pulling up her skirt. My eyes go down and I don’t need crystal balls to see what I am expected to do.

“Good boy,” she says, stroking the hair at the back of my neck. “I feel better just thinking about it… .”

Twenty minutes later I am driving Mrs. D. home when a police car roars up alongside me and I am crowded into the side of the road before you can say “All coppers are bastards”. Four fuzz pile out of it like it is on fire and one of them wrenches open my door and stands there breathing hard. He is about to grab a handful of me when he sees Mrs. D.

“Thank God!” he says. “Has this man attacked you?”

“No,” she says. “Have you got one that will?”

This is so clearly not the answer he was expecting that for a moment he is speechless.

“Were you up on Cromingham golf course with him about half an hour ago?”

“About that, yes.”

“And he attacked you in a bunker?”

“No, nothing of the kind. Look, let me tell you what really happened. Mr. Lea here was giving me a driving lesson and I felt a bit sick—something I’d had for lunch, I think—and he kindly stopped the car and walked me across the golf course for a few minutes deep breathing. I must have been a bit off colour because I stumbled and fell into a bunker and the next thing I know was Mr. Lea being menaced by a tall blond man who was threatening him with a golf club. It was horrible.”

Listening to her, I almost believe it.

“Luckily, Mr. Lea managed to overpower the fellow and we got away. There was another one, too. An ugly little red-faced man with a moustache like Gerald Nabarro’s. We were on our way to the police station to report the incident. Perhaps if you got up to the golf course you might still find them. They probably make a living robbing members whilst pretending to be them, if you know what I mean. What a blessing we bumped into you when we did!”

“Are you sure you’re all right, Madam?” The poor sod looks as miserable as Christmas Day with your in-laws.

“Positive, officer, thanks to Mr. Lea here. You will try to catch those men, won’t you?”

“We’ll certainly do all we can, Madam; you can rely on it,” he says grimly and I wish I could be a fly on the wall when he gets back to Sharp and Minto. “Sorry to have troubled you.” He throws a half-hearted salute and goes off talking furiously to his three mates. Four car doors slam in unison and they roar off up the road.

“Phew! That was close,” I gasp. “You were bloody good. Thanks.”

“A girl has to protect her reputation,” says Mrs. D. coolly. She smiles gently and feels in my pocket for her knickers.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After the Mrs. Dent incident, things quieten down a bit. Well, they have to, really, don’t they? It couldn’t go on like this without somebody having a hernia or a nervous breakdown, or something. Too exhausting for words, ducky! as Petal would say.

Garth comes back from holiday and takes Mrs. D. off my hands, amongst other things, and I go on with the likes of Miss Frankcom and the rest of the ‘halt and the lame’, as Crippsy calls them. No more is heard from the Major mob but I keep my eyes open because I know Sharp is not going to take the belting I gave him lightly. Dawn, who I have it away with occasionally, is more in touch with the Shermer Jet Set and she says that the whole of the side of his face is swollen up like a sockful of dough.

Days turn into weeks and during that time every A.D.I. in the School takes it in turn to supervise me occasionally like it says in the manual. Even Cronk comes out once or twice and I have the chance to find out what a lovable old cove he really is. Why he bothers with all that bullshit I don’t know, because anyone can see that behind all the huffing and puffing you could start cutting handkerchiefs out of his shirt tail and he wouldn’t say anything. I suppose it’s what they teach you in the army. Make the right noises and everybody will jump about for you—like the bloke I read about in a detective story once who had a safe that was operated by his voice saying ‘open shazam’ or something like that. What makes Cronk’s bustle and bluster more ridiculous is the scruffy bunch of blokes who operate for him. Crippsy looks like the ‘before’ part of a dandruff advertisement and the length of Garth’s hair would break a sergeant-major’s heart. Petal is a screaming pouf and Lester Hewett couldn’t see daylight between the springs of a chest expander. But somehow they do come over as a team, and they do look after each other. “Watch out for Flowers today,” Garth will say when Petal returns red-eyed from a weekend in London. “I think he’s having boyfriend trouble.” So everyone buys Petal tea and is sympathetic without bursting into tears when he comes into the room. Likewise, if Crippsy looks a bit the worse for wear, Petal or Lester will steer him off home and take over his stint with apologies for his unavoidable absence. It may just be their army background, but I think it’s something deeper than that. Over the weeks I discern that every A.D.I. in the School, apart from Cronk, was dishonourably discharged. They have all served with Cronk and he has obviously been the means of giving them a job in civvy street. Looking at them all, I come to the conclusion that failure can often bring closer together than success.

What they were all kicked out for I never find out. With Petal and Crippsy it is easy to guess, but with ‘Garth’ Williams and Lester Hewett it could be anything from pigeon toes to rape. Apart from asking them or feeding all the alternatives into the conversation and watching their faces, I can’t think of another way of knowing and I don’t fancy alternatives.

Almost before Cromingham’s excuse for a supermarket has stuck little pieces of cotton wool all over its windows, it is what Cronk calls ‘the fest-e-e-ve season’ and the E.C.D.S. holds an office party to prove how wrong he is. A great deal of South African sherry is drunk from chipped cups, Crippsy gets smashed and starts crying, Petal makes a pass at Garth, Lester pukes in the middle of Cronk’s message of Christian goodwill: “Backs to the wall, you play ball with me, and let’s all go forward to the promised land”; and I have it away with Dawn in the ‘out of order’ ladies’ on Cromingham station before I catch the three-thirty back to civilisation. Two things stick in mind about the whole pathetic business: some of the incredible things those birds had written on the bog walls and Dawn telling me she is three weeks overdue as the train pulls out of the station. Bloody nice Christmas present, isn’t it?

It doesn’t really need that to make Christmas with the folks as bloody as it is, but it helps. Sid and Rosie have gone to his parents, so I am left playing Wimbledon tennis between Mum and Dad, and going ape with the crystallised fruits which they have got because Mum remembers how much I used to like them when I was a kid. It makes it even sadder, somehow, the way they are so pleased to see me. I would like to be able to blame them for the whole turgid proceedings and it is a real effort having to watch the royal laugh riot from Sandringham without feeding it my usual chorus of eye-rolling yawns. Dad’s eyes close and he starts dribbling down the front of his new Marks and Sparks pullover, which he will change on Monday, whilst Mum’s expression registers the kind of blind devotion usually seen in dogs when it is getting near feeding time. I have been through the whole bad scene too many times and I can actually remember the first time I realised I was not enjoying it. I remember the feeling of guilt. It was like having a wank when you knew that it was an odds-on certainty that you would go blind if you did. This, and numerous other memories of past Christmases at the family Lea haunt me through the next few days until I can lie myself back to Liverpool Street Station with a carrier bag full of furry dates, burst figs and all the other rubbish that nobody else wants. I have told the parents that I have to work on New Year’s Eve but in fact I intend to go back to Cromingham and drown my sorrows between Mrs. Bendon’s legs. From a hundred and fifty miles away she has become a mixture of Marilyn Monroe and Silvano Manure, or whatever that big Italian bird’s name is, but, of course, when I get back I find a note explaining that she is still with her sister in Stockwell. Stockwell! I could weep. Three stations away on the Northern line and I have struggled all the bloody way back to living-death-on-sea. What a tragedy! I try to ring up Dawn but she has been invited to the New Year’s Eve ball at the golf club so I don’t even know if there is still an infant Lea up the spout. Bloody marvellous way to see out the old year, isn’t it?

I’d like to be able to report that a raving nympho with a bottle of Scotch in her hand threatened to slash her wrists if I don’t belt the arse off her, but in fact I end up in the public bar of the Sailor’s Return watching a bunch of half-pissed old tits link arms and sing Auld Lang Syne thirty seconds before the landlord shovels them out into the street. Thank you and good night!

Luckily, Dawn is not in the pudding club, so I can breathe again there, but when Mrs. B. returns from London there is a noticeable change in her attitude which does not bode well. She keeps mentioning some bloke she has met. “I don’t think Mr. Greig would agree with you there,” and makes dark references to needing the spare room at some not too distant date. The crowning insult comes when I ask her out for a drink and she says no: “Thank you, dear, but I’ve got a bit of a chill and I think I’d better stay at home. Another time, perhaps?” Of course, all this makes her so desirable I nearly explode every time I see her and I could kick myself for not having got across it when I had the chance.

The arrival of her daughter, on whom I had set high hopes, is a bit of an anti-climax, too. I had imagined myself staggering from one to the other or indulging in some monster orgy with both of them on the white rug in front of the ‘Cumfiwarm living-flame log-effect gas fire’, but Jenny sweeps through on the way to stay with friends at Brancaster—which is apparently the only place to have friends—and looks at me as if I’m somebody who brings in the logs in a Victorian melodrama, the kind of thing the BBC put on the telly every Sunday teatime.

Putting it mildly, she is a right pain in the arse and I spend a frustrating night thinking of ‘Mummy’ and her lying there in the big bed and of all the things I could be doing to them both. She is pretty, too, which makes it even worse.

But, fortunately, even my life does have its occasional moments of pleasure, and about the time that the first snowdrops are trying to force their stupid way through the rock-hard earth, a really nice piece of nooky drops into my lap. ‘Drop’ is not quite the right word, because for some time I have been conscious that Dawn has a lot of control over the way the new learners are allocated and is using it to divert anything that approaches being a good-looking bint from yours truly. I accept this because I can understand any woman wanting to hang on to me, and you can’t always have your cake and heat it, as King Alfred found out to his cost. (Ugh! Ed.)

I land up with Mrs. Carstairs because there is no alternative available. Garth has the ’flu, Petal is in the South of France with one of his actor friends—bloody nice being a pouf, isn’t it?—and the other two are booked up to the eyeballs, so Dawn has to grin and bear it.

Mrs. Carstairs makes Mrs. B. sound like a nun that has taken a vow of silence. From the first moment she rears up like a female polar bear in the E.C.D.S. reception, covered from head to toe in furs, she never stops rabbiting.

“You must think it absolutely amazing that anyone of my age doesn’t know how to drive,” she yodels as we sweep through the door with me trying to keep up with her. In fact, I would never have given it a thought, but I don’t have time to tell her because she is already trying to climb into the driver’s seat.

“If you haven’t driven before, I think we’d better start somewhere a little less crowded,” I suggest, steering her across to the other door.

“You’re probably right. It would be a bad advertisement if I killed somebody outside the School, wouldn’t it?”

I smile my ‘customer is always right’ smile and whip her up to the golf course. By the time we get there we have covered Vietnam, pollution of the environment and vivisection—or rather she has. Some of her sentences end in questions but I never have time to answer them because she has done that herself or started on something else. I don’t mind too much because I am busy lapping up her luscious contours. She has ‘lovely bones’, as my Mum is always saying about the nobs she so much admires, and big blue eyes you could comb your hair in. She must be over forty but is better preserved than Dad’s war record and her figure would win whistles on a girl of nineteen. What I like most about her is her smell. My hooter is very sensitive to the perfume a bird uses and it is a change to have something that tickles your scrotum rather than bashes you over the goolies with a rubber mallet.

She is also no fool and from the very first lesson performs a bloody sight better than most of the rubbish I get lumbered with. She is confident—possibly too confident, and takes in what you have to say very quickly. I can see what Garth means about bright pupils being death to a driving school. I learn that her old man is a director of ‘Python’s Pesticides’ and that she decided to take lessons because she was bored. Normally, my ears would have pricked up at the mention of the word ‘boredom’ because a bored woman is nine-tenths of the way towards taking her knickers off for you, even if she doesn’t know it at the time; but in this case there is something so assured and upper-class about Mrs. C. that I dare not entertain any hopes. Maybe I take after Mum, but an upper-class accent and a bit of swank always make me reach for my forelock.

“I tell you this at the risk of boring you out of your mind,” says Mrs. C., “but if I have to entertain one more Scandinavian expert on how to wage germ warfare on slugs I will go stark raving mad. I think it affects them, you know. I mean, working with pesticides. Something gets into them and makes them mentally and physically impotent.”

“Don’t you mean sterile?” I say, because all the long words I know come from the sex books I used to get out of Battersea Public Library.

“Mr. Lea,” she says, shaking her head in a mock-serious manner, “I fear that in my case it may be both. Very unkind of me to say so of the man who provides my wherewithal, but I think that somewhere along the line he’s been got at. I could probably make a fortune telling the story to the Sunday newspapers.”

“Why don’t you?”

“There is such a thing as family loyalty, Mr. Lea. And anyway, what’s a few thousand compared with George’s nice steady income? No, I’m very fond of sex, but there are other things—even if I can’t think of them at the moment. Oh, shit!” The last exclamation is caused by her nearly driving into an oak tree some fool has left littering the side of the road, and it is a few minutes before I hear of her other interests besides taking driving lessons.

“Don’t get the idea that I just sit at home twiddling my thumbs all day. I sit on a lot of committees, which is damn hard work—mainly because the rest of the old harridans on them are so obstreperous—and I paint. Very well, though I say so myself, although it could be better if George would let me indulge myself on a European tour. But he’s too mean—and too jealous; he imagines I would be pulling every Italian waiter in sight into my bed. Can you imagine?”

From the waiter’s point of view I can. Only too well. If it was me she wouldn’t have to break into a muck sweat to do it.

“I think it all goes back to the perils of Python’s Pesticides,” she continues. “When he was in the first flush of youth, so to speak, he was a most unjealous man—is there such a word? It doesn’t matter anyway. Now that sex has its problems for him, he’s suspicious of his own shadow—that’s rather good. Can you imagine being cuckolded by your shadow?”

I can’t, because I don’t know what ‘cuckolded’ means, but it sounds pretty painful and I nod my agreement.

“What kind of things do you paint?” I ask as we speed back to the E.C.D.S. with me safely behind the wheel.

“Oh, everything. Landscapes, still lifes—or should it be still lives?—nudes. It’s difficult to get models around here, you know. I think most of the locals think it’s ‘a bit orf’ or that I’m going to practise withcraft on them. George sits for me sometimes but he is clearly embarrassed, poor dear, and not very inspiring. Especially when he is poring over his balance sheets and sucking his teeth all the time. I know—” I can feel her eyes flitting over me and I tilt back my hear to tighten up the jaw muscles “—could you, I mean would you sit for me?”

“What? Me?” It is difficult to get exactly the right note of slightly confused amazement into my voice but I think I do it quite well. “I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“No experience necessary. Just keep reasonably still. I’d pay you, of course.”

“Well, I don’t know.” I pretend to be giving the matter serious thought.

“I’m sorry. I can see that you don’t really like the idea. I should never have asked. Look, can you drop me here? I want to pop into the butcher’s.”

“Oh no, I’d like to do it,” I blurt out. “When would you want me to start? I’m free most evenings, or there’s mornings or some afternoons.”

I feel I have overdone it a bit as soon as I close my mouth and Mrs. C. looks appropriately confused.

“Are you sure? You seemed so hesitant a moment ago.”

“Yes, well, I was trying to think what spare time I had in the next few weeks.”

“I don’t intend to cast you in bronze. I won’t be making much of a hole in your time off. Just an hour here and there. How can I get in touch with you?”

“I’m not on the telephone at my digs. You’d better mention it to me when you’re having your lessons.”

“O.K. I can leave a message at the School, can’t I?”

I don’t disagree with her but I can’t see Dawn responding very well to that. She looks me over pretty closely when I report back at the School as if checking that my flies are still done up and that I am not covered in lipstick, but it is Cronk who shows most emotion. He flashes out of his office as I go in and demands almost hysterically where Mrs. Carstairs is.

“Real feather in our cap, that one,” he tells me when he finds I haven’t driven her off the end of the pier. “If we can do a good job with her, we’ll be on the map and no mistake. Once she starts chatting to the top brass at Python’s they’ll all be down here. Directors’ wives, managers’ wives, right down to the shop stewards eventually. It’s up to you, lad. Pull out the stops on this one.”

I give him my plucky ‘do my best sir’ smile, borrowed from all those British war films you see on the telly and wink at Dawn, who scowls and looks the other way. Poor kid, I can understand how threatened she feels and she doesn’t know the half of it: me naked on some rug with Mrs. C. trying to stop the paintbrush dropping from her twitching fingers—my mind races away into overdrive as usual.

In fact, Mrs. C. hardly mentions her painting the next time I take her out and I am on the point of deciding she has thought better of it when a sour-faced Dawn hands me a piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it and tells me that “your fancy bit rang and asked you call her this afternoon.” This leads to a lot of leg-pulling from the rest of the lads, which I am secretly very pleased about although I play it all dead casual.

I have nothing on after eleven o’clock so I spin out my pint of lunch and hop round to the nearest telephone box dead on the stroke of two-thirty, which I consider to be sufficiently far into the afternoon not to appear too eager. Of course, it has been stripped by vandals, and so has the next one. The Post Office is shut because it is early closing day and I am half way to Shermer before I find a box that is operational. I know it is operational because there is a bloke inside dialling numbers he has listed on a piece of paper as long as your arm. I don’t know what he is doing—probably making obscene telephone calls—but it takes him nearly half an hour to do it. By this time I am getting fidgety, to put it mildly, and when he comes out without even saying sorry it is more than I can stand.

“Do you mind if I use your phone?” I ask him.

“Yer what?” is all he can manage.

“I thought you were running a business from in there. How much does it cost to rent it?”

“Get stuffed.”

Now he is talking my language and we have a merry little battle of words before he drives off and I ring up Mrs. C., to find that the number is engaged. This is the last straw and I have asked the operator to check it before I eventually hear a harrassed upper-class voice bark “Cromingham 234.” This would be fun if it was a female voice but, to my surprise, it is nothing of the kind. I ask to speak to Mrs. Carstairs and there is a curt “Hang on a minute” before I hear the bod who answered the telephone shouting out to someone.

“It’s some peasant for you, darling. Hurry up and get rid of him, will you, otherwise I’m going to be late for the plane.”

There is a further interchange and then Mrs. C. comes on, all instant charm. “Hello. Julia Carstairs speaking. Who is that?”

“It’s the peasant from the driving school,” I say haughtily. “You asked me to ring you.”

“Oh, yes. Mr. Lea. Thank you so much. I’m awfully sorry about my husband. He’s got to rush off to Stockholm and he’s a trifle out of sorts. Aren’t you, darling?”

There is another little interchange in which I can hear a voice being raised in the background, and then she returns to me. “He agrees with me. Now, let’s see. Where were we? I expect you know why I rang you. The muse is on me fit to bust at the moment and as soon as I’ve run my grumpy husband to the firm’s airstrip I’d like to get down to work. Are you available at the moment?”

I am still smarting at being called a peasant, but of course I say yes and it is agreed that I will report to the Carstairs residence—”You can’t miss it; it’s the only house in the lane”—at six o’clock, with the promise of a drink and some supper should our session go on long enough.

Ever hopeful, I retire to my lodgings and have a bath, carefully anointing my body in strategic places with some Odour (sic. Ed.) Cologne I keep for the purpose. Thus fortified and having swilled half a cup of Mrs. B.’s Dettol round my chops, I lie down until it is time to go into action.

At six o’clock on the dot my finger is pressed firmly against the nipple-like bell-push of Cavenham Lodge: all white stucco and green shutters with a circular lawn in front cut closer than a guardsman’s chin.

I am trembling with excitement and cold beneath my flared denim jeans and too-tight T-shirt worn under my genuine shaggy sheepskin overcoat and I hope she has got central heating. It occurs to me, as it always does when it is too late to do anything about it, that nothing has been said about posing in the nude. I might be landing myself with a two-hour stint of gazing at a bowl of fruit.

The door springs open and Mrs. C. is revealed, wearing what appears to be judo kit: baggy trousers and a kind of wrap-over waistcoat secured by a sash which matches the one holding back her hair. The action woman bit surprises me as I had been expecting a spot of the long cigarette holders and “Do come in, dahling.”

“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you’re punctual. I’m itching to get at you.” She smiles brightly and leads me through a couple of rooms furnished so that you expect to see John Betjeman standing on the mantelpiece.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit of a shambles where we’re going. Make sure you don’t step on a tube of paint.”

She opens a door in the wall next to what looks like the fiction section of Battersea Public Library and waves a hand at a welter of canvases, trestles and easels which appear in a room slightly smaller than the centre court at Wimbledon. She is not kidding about it being in a mess and it takes me a bit of time to pick out the canvas she intends to work on. This faces a low divan with a few rugs lying on it and is in front of a long mirror which covers one wall of the room.

“The artificial light is a damn nuisance,” she says, fiddling with a few switches. “But if I can sketch in a framework, perhaps you can come back when you have a free afternoon—or morning ideally.”

“I’ll try,” I say. “What do you want me to do?”

This is the sixty-four thousand dollar question and I don’t mind telling you that the sight of the divan has started a few naughty thoughts on a slow bicycle race round my mind.

“Well,” says Mrs. Carstairs slowly, “perhaps I should have told you this before, and I sort of tried to in a way; the particular subject I have in mind requires you to pose in the nude! I didn’t want to mention it right away in case you thought I was some kind of crank.”

When she leans forward to adjust a spotlight I notice that she is not wearing a bra, and I wonder what the rest of her breasts look like. Pretty good, I would reckon.

“That’s all right,” I hear myself saying. “What exactly do you want me to do?” I start to give her the famous Lea slow burn but she is still farting about with the lighting, so I decide to hold it for a couple of minutes.

“I’m going through a classical period at the moment,” she rambles on enthusiastically, “and I have a certain fondness for the Rape of Lucretia.”

Well, we all have our funny little ways, and who am I to point the finger at anybody?

“Oh, yes,” I say, with the easy nonchalance that has made me the toast of the Streatham Ice Rink. “Very nice.”

“Probably something very Freudian about it,” she gushes, “but one can’t help one’s id, can one?”

She is leaving me behind fast, but I smile graciously and start taking my shoes and socks off. She fills me in on the background: how this Roman gent called Tarquin fancied a married bint called Lucretia, who was one of the old-fashioned kind and told him to get stuffed, thus making him decidedly narky to the point where he rammed his nasty up her before she could put down her spaghetti bolognese, thus causing a good deal of ill-feeling all round.

It occurs to me that I am a certainty for the part of Tarquin but that unless the whole thing took place in his imagination, we are going to need a bird. No doubt Mrs. C. has thought of this and I look round hopefully for signs of my fellow model.

“Get on the couch,” says Mrs. C. “I want to make sure I’ve got the lighting right. You needn’t take off your pants yet. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

I stretch out on the couch and she gives me a few instructions whilst sketching away with a piece of charcoal. Apparently satisfied, she pins up a new sheet and smiles at me encouragingly.

“Right, off we go,” she says, and to my amazement she starts to peel off the top part of her robe. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with a rather uncomely Lucretia for a few moments.” Off come the baggy trousers and she is naked except for a tiny pair of panties. And they are on the floor in the time it takes me to write this.

“I daren’t ask any female I know to model in case they think I’m a lesbian,” she goes on, “so I have to do it all myself. That’s why the mirror is such a blessing. Now, let’s see. What shall we try first?”

She is standing beside the divan and her muff is practically tickling my nose. By the cringe, but she is a lovely bird. Ripe and curvy like a basket of pears just before they start attracting the flies.

“Let me lie down while you get on top of me,” she says.

It can’t be bad, can it? I swing my legs over the side of the divan and she snuggles down and tilts back her head.

“Hold my wrists. That’s right. Now bend them back so I look as if I’m being staked out over an anthill. Excellent.”

I imagine she does all this because she likes to live the part in order to get a bit of inspiration and I am about to give her some help when she turns her head to one side and twists away from me.

“Now stick your legs out as far as they will go and lie on top of me. Not bad. Not bad at all.”

She is looking away from me again and I suddenly realise she is studying the shape our bodies make in the mirror. Two more contortions and she leaps off the divan with everything shaking and starts hammering away with the charcoal.

“If you can remember that position it will be a big help,” she yammers. “I’m afraid I’m a bit of a painting-by-numbers expert, no imagination at all. I have to see what I’m doing. Oh dear. I can’t remember how that bit went. We’ll have to do it again.”

And she is over on the divan again with me on top and the faint smell of her perfume playing merry hell with my nostrils and her soft flesh kneading against mine and—

“I can’t go on!” I yelp.

Mrs. C. is surprised. “What’s the matter? Have you got cramp or something?”

“Mrs. Carstairs, you’re a very, very attractive woman. I can’t be as close to you as this without feeling that I want to make love to you—not ‘want’, have got to make love to you. It’s not fair to my nervous system.”

If Mrs. C. can’t feel Percy pressing forward hopefully, like a friendly killer shark, she must be dead from the waist down.

“Well, that is terribly flattering of you. I feel quite overcome. But are you sure? I mean, you’re a young man and I’m old enough to be your mother. Surely you don’t really find me appealing?”

“Put your hands between my legs if you don’t believe me,” I pant. “You’re lovely, gorgeous, fantastic, absobloodylutely marvellous.”

“You’re very naughty,” she says. “I’m not certain that I should encourage you.” What her right hand is doing would seem to contradict this. “Still, I’m incapable of resisting flattery and it might help to relax you, mightn’t it?”

“It might,” I murmur. “Oh, Mrs. Carstairs, it just might.”

“All right,” she says. “In the cause of art I will allow you to make love to me and also”—her fingers wind round the back of my neck and pull my mouth down on to hers—“because I want you to.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

That little incident with Mrs. Carstairs is the start of a whole series of classical paintings we collaborate on, all of which seem to require a good deal of frisking about in the altogether! I am nothing loath, but I sometimes wonder what Mr. Carstairs makes of it all if he ever sees his wife’s work. Frankly, I reckon she is a lousy painter, but then I don’t know much about art. I just know what she likes.

On the Driving School side everything is going well for a change. I retake the written part of my Register Qualifying Examination and pass without breaking into a sweat. Now, all I am waiting for is a date to take the practical part at Norwich and if I pass that I will be a ‘Department of the Environment Approved Driving Instructor’ and small dogs will wag their tails at me and beautiful women swoon at my feet.

Needless to say, it is at this potentially happy time that an incident takes place which nearly puts the kibosh on everything. I am foolish enough to tell Garth about Mrs. Carstairs and he is very interested. Especially when he hears that her latest masterpiece is to be based on ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’. I am quite happy to carry on raping by myself, but Garth’s relationship with Mrs. D. is going a bit flat and he suggests that their participation might pep things up in more than just an artistic sense. I try to forget the idea but he keeps on at me and eventually I mention it to Mrs. C. To my disgust she is quite keen and tells me to bring ‘my friends’ along at our next session. Frankly, I am not ecstatic about a foursome because I can see my John Thomas being thrown into competition with Garth’s and it is not a challenge I relish. Whatever crap you may hear to the contrary, most blokes do feel that their cocks are not big enough and most women agree with them but are too kind to say so. If Garth’s plumbing lives up to the rest of him, I might as well not bother to tug down my Y-fronts.

It is with this unwholesome thought nagging away at the back of my mind that I find myself standing on the doorstep of Cavenham Lodge one February afternoon with Garth and Mrs. D. giggling in the background. Mr. C. is in Oslo working on the problem of putting D.D.T. into the water supply, or something, so his missus feels that she is able to “take advantage of the light,” as she so delicately puts it. Frankly, I am becoming more and more disbelieving of her artistic integrity, especially since stumbling across a pile of half-finished canvases, showing some very athletic activity in which I had certainly played no part. I have a strong feeling that a few other blokes have been grappling with Mrs. C.’s problem.

“Come in, all of you,” she yodels as the door creaks open. “So good of you to come. You’ve no idea how much this means to me. Would you like a hot drink before we start? It must be bitterly cold out there.”

We work our way through a fairly standard range of pleasantries and then it comes to the crunch. Mrs. C. downs her last drop of coffee and gives us all her best beaming smile.

“Right. Into action we go. I thought it might be an idea to use the pool. At least it’s a bit warmer in there. You come with me, my dear, and we’ll leave the men to get on with it. Everything off, remember.”

She sweeps past with Mrs. D. following on behind and beginning to look a bit uneasy. No sooner is she out of the room than Garth digs me in the ribs.

“This is the life, eh, boyo?” (He is inclined to go a bit Welsh in moments of excitement.) “To tell you the truth, I thought you were having me on before we got here. I hope my bint isn’t going to let us down. She was looking a bit green behind the gills, wasn’t she? It’s a pity, because she can be as brazen as buggery when she likes, but then you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” He adds a wink to another nudge in the ribs. I smile weakly, wondering what Mrs. Dent has passed on concerning our adventures on the golf course and nearby; nothing very flattering, I’ll be bound.

“When do we change?” He is practically licking his lips—big randy sod.

“Change?”

“Well, take our clothes off, then. Don’t start mincing your words, boyo.”

I take him through to the swimming pool which has been built on to the end of one wing of the house and has a glass wall which slides back to give access to the garden in summer. Now the glass is all steamed up and even the climbing plants which straggle from pots around the walls are wilting a bit.

“Phew! It’s hot in here,” pants Garth. “You need to swim if you’re going to stick it for long.”

There is a room at the end full lof deckchairs and general poolside clobber and Garth has soon stripped down to the buff to reveal that my worst fears are justified. Like a donkey’s dongler it is, and faced with this competition I can feel my own equipment making a bolt for it between my legs. Maybe the humidity will coax it out a bit extra to save me from total humiliation.

As if he didn’t have enough natural advantages, Garth now proceeds to prove what a great swimmer he is and starts performing a one-man water ballet whilst I am doing a spot of crafty stretching behind the tropical undergrowth.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he shouts, bouncing up and down on the springboard. “It would be worth coming without the extras.” He jets into the air, touches his toes and flashes into the pool like a steel blade. Honestly, it makes you sick to watch him.

“Bring on the dancing girls,” he bellows. “Come on. What’s happened to them?” “I think Mrs. Carstairs said something about them putting on costumes, didn’t she?” I say. Frankly, I wish I had never mentioned the whole bloody business. I recall the way Mrs. C.’s eyes rolled over Garth’s physique the first time she saw him and I shudder at what I have let myself in for. I will be lucky to end up washing out the paint brushes.

“Watch this one,” sings out Garth. He is on the diving board and facing inwards with only his toes on the board. “Tell me if I go in straight.”

I am wearily focusing my eyeballs on his heavily muscled back and thinking how much better it would look with about nine inches of carving knife sunk into it when I suddenly become aware of a figure standing in the doorway. And it is not Mesdames Carstairs or Dent. It is a tall, distinguished-looking geezer with horn-rimmed specs and a leather briefcase in his mitt. He looks as if he has just arrived from distant parts and I have a shrewd suspicion I know where he finds his toothbrush every morning.

“Here we go,” hollers Garth, all cheerful and unsuspecting, and propels himself into the air. The newcomer has not looked towards me yet, so I sink down behind a convenient pot of giant spinach and leave Garth to introduce himself. He disappears below the water with hardly a splash and rears up seconds later like a cheerful seal.

“That felt pretty good,” he begins and then sees our new friend, who puts down his briefcase and folds his arms menacingly.

Now, I have never thought of Garth as being particularly quick on the uptake, but his reactions in this situation are razor sharp, to put it mildly.

“Good afternoon,” says the stranger, pushing his specs up on his nose and making his voice sound about as welcoming as an icicle sticking out of the tap marked ‘hot’. “Might I be presumptuous enough to inquire what you think you are doing in my swimming pool?”

“I’ve been overhauling the filtration system, guv,” says Garth. “You know, your annual check-up that everything is functioning O.K. We don’t want your clunge outlets clogging up, do we?”

He pulls himself out in one easy, graceful movement and taps one of the grills in the wall. “I’d watch the temperature in here, if I were you. Too much humidity can fur up your spangers.”

He says it so naturally that he almost has me convinced.

“Very interesting,” says Mr. Carstairs in his best Nazi. “I’m glad my ‘spangers’ are in such good hands. But one thing puzzles me slightly: why it is necessary to perform the service in the nude?”

I would have refused to answer that one on the grounds that it might incriminate me, but it is underarm bowling to Garth in his present mood.

“Checking the chlorine level, guv’nor. I don’t really know how it works myself but over the years your skin works up an incredible sensitivity to the chlorine content of the water. It’s a bit like taking canaries down the mines.”

“Remarkable,” says Mr. Meany, all sarcastic-like. “And this amazing talent is denied its full expression if you are wearing a pair of bathing trunks?”

“Exactly, guv, the tactile stimuli are impeded by the presence of any form of clothing.”

Mr. Carstairs snorts and is obviously going to contribute something further to the conversation when Mrs. C. appears. I am glad to see that she is fully dressed and that there is no sign of Mrs. Dent. With a bit of luck we might still get away with our balls unsinged.

“Darling,” she squeals. “What a heavenly surprise. I had no idea you were going to be back before the weekend.” She gazes at Garth as if he had just floated out of the exit duct and flashes a quick glance round for me.

“Evidently,” says Mr. C., allowing himself to be kissed on the cheek. “I’m sorry to have spoiled your surprise.”

“Surprise, darling?”

“Having the ‘clunge outlets unclogged and the ‘spangers’—it is spangers, isn’t it?”; Garth nods—“having the spangers protected from furring up. It was very thoughtful of you. This sturdy servitor of aqua-hygiene has been telling me all about it.”

“Oh, well, yes.” Mrs. C. starts fingering a necklace she isn’t wearing and struggles for inspiration. “I thought it was about time somebody had a look at it.”

“Yes, indeed. Well, now you can tell me what you’ve been doing, while our friend here gets his clothes on.”

Thank God, I think, now they’ll piss off and I can slip out with Garth. But not a bit of it. The bastard sits right down on the edge of the springboard while Mrs. C. rabbits on about her painting and Garth slopes off to get dressed.

By now I am sweating like a pig and there is something crawling up my legs that feels as if it has come all the way from Africa with the undergrowth. Garth comes out of the changing-room and I can see my T-shirt sticking out of his hold-all.

“Goodbye,” says Mr. C. like a python talking to something that is already half-way down its throat. “I’d like to say I hope to see you again, but I’m certain that someone with your obvious talents will be moving on to bigger and better swimming-pools.”

Garth mumbles something cheerful and is half-way to the door when Mr. C.’s voice cuts in again.

“Oh, by the way, I believe my wife has been using a model who probably needs a lift back to town. Perhaps you can help her out?”

“Certainly, guv. It’ll be a pleasure.”

He bundles out and I wait hopefully for Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs to follow him. Mrs. C. doesn’t need any pushing, but Mr. C. suddenly starts loosening his tie.

“Are you coming, George?”

“No. I rather fancy a swim. I want to see if I can feel the chlorine level.”

“You what?”

“It doesn’t matter, dear. It was something the service man was talking to me about. I’ll see you later.”

He disappears into the changing-room and Mrs. C. gazes desperately round the room for me. She even looks into the pool as if she expects to find me holding my nose on the bottom. I have half a mind to make a run for the door, but before I can pull myself together Mr. C. has shot out of the changing-room sporting a pair of moth-eaten red woollen trunks. Why he bothers I can’t think.

“You go and get some supper, dear,” he says. “I feel like building up an appetite.”

And this is just what the bastard does. Up and down the pool he goes until the sweat is making a puddle at my feet and I have to lie on my stomach to get over the cramp in my legs.

He must have done about a hundred lengths before he clambers out and slowly towels himself down. It is now dark outside and I don’t relish exposing my body to the kind of weather Cromingham dishes out. I could eat a horse and the heat is giving me a headache. “Piss off out of it, Carstairs,” I murmur to myself and at last the bugger moves towards the door that leads into the house proper. A few more minutes and I will be able to escape while he is feeding his stupid face. I begin to move myself into a position from which I can get up when suddenly Carstairs pauses in the doorway and swivels his gaze to exactly where I am hiding.

“I must say you’re doing a most conscientious job checking those plants,” he says mockingly. “I’ll turn the heating up so that you don’t get too cold in case there’s a frost tonight. I know it may fur up the spangers but I’m certain your associate would understand.”

And with that he closes the door behind him and I hear the key turn in the lock. Bloody swine! He has known I was there all the time and been making me sweat it out—literally. Rage boils up inside me. I could probably sue him for the diabolical liberties he is taking. You can’t lock up people in your heated swimming-pool just because they might have been about to have an orgy with your old woman. This isn’t a police state yet, Mr. Carstairs! This and a few hundred other thoughts march through my mind as the humidity increases to a point where I can hardly breathe and snowflakes whirl down through the darkness outside.

What a carry-on! I might as well be spending the night in a Turkish bath; and if I do get out, other than in a sponge, I will probably freeze to death. Luckily I can crawl into the changing-room but, as I had suspected, the brilliant Garth has taken all my clobber. All I can find to wear is a pair of kid’s bathing trunks and a white coat such as worn by cricket umpires, doctors and ice-cream salesmen. Not much cop for the great outdoors. There is no outside door to the changing-room and the door to the house has been locked by creepy Carstairs. I try to slide open the sheet glass windows but they, too, appear to be locked. Apart from lifting the grille in the bath and chancing my luck down the outlet channel, there seems to be no alternative, other than smashing a window or waiting to be released. The destruction involved in the former is a bit monumental even by my standards and I decide to wait and see if Garth or Mrs. C. comes to the rescue.

Hours later I am still waiting and there is no sign of either of them. I have a pretty good idea where Garth is, and the very thought of it is more than I can bear in my condition. By this time I have returned to the changing-room, where it is slightly easier to breathe and am trying to sleep on one of the benches. I must have half dozed off when I hear a ‘click’ which sounds like a key turning in a lock. I listen for a moment but there is no other noise, and it is only desperation that makes me drag myself across to try the door. It opens! Either Mr. Carstairs has relented or Julia has managed to slip away and release me. Probably the latter. There is nobody on the other side of the door so I don’t hang about but tiptoe across the ankle-deep carpet and climb out by the first sash window I come to.

By the cringe, it is cold! It has stopped snowing and is now freezing hard and I almost wish I had hung on long enough to find a pair of shoes before doing a bunk. Unless I keep moving the soles of my feet stick to the ground and the wind cuts me like a knife. Luckily, I stop a bloke in a van at the end of the lane and scramble in before he has a chance to see my bare feet. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he does and drives like fury to the end of Mrs. B.’s road, where I thank him through chattering teeth and stagger the last hundred yards trying to keep my circulation going by swinging my arms.

Of course, I don’t have a front door key, so I have to steer a frozen finger to the bell-push and after a couple of rings a light goes on at the top of the stairs.

Mrs. B. pulls open the door and I practically fall into the hall before she can say anything. She has obviously been on the point of giving me the mother and father of all bollockings but my pitiful condition changes all that.

“Good heavens!” she gasps. “What on earth have you been up to? You look half dead.”

A glance in the hallstand mirror confirms her impression. There is a rim of frost across both eyebrows, my eyelashes look as if they had been dipped in sugar, and my hair is white. I might have been chipped out of a deep freeze.

“I b-b-b-b-b-b—” I croak and luckily the Florence Nightingale in Mrs. B. comes surging to the fore.

“Never mind,” she says urgently. “You can tell me later. If we don’t do something about you, you’re going to freeze to death. Can you get upstairs?”

I nod bravely and reach for the bannisters whilst she goes on ahead to run a bath. Can my body stand it, I ask myself. Boiled alive one moment, frozen the next; it reminds me of how we used to harden up conkers when I was a kid. Certainly my own personal set are in a pitiful condition, having shrunk to a size that would give a four-year-old boy an anxiety complex. But that is not one of my immediate problems. My body is so numb that you could drive nails through my feet without me feeling anything. But when I get into the bath—yeeow! The pain is excruciating and I groan away, hardly conscious that Mrs. B. is standing there watching my naked agony.

“Brandy and hot lemon. That’s what you need,” she says motheringly. “I think there’s some in the medicine cupboard.”

She pads off and slowly the pain is replaced by a kind of pleasant tiredness. I pull myself out of the bath and have just draped a large towel round my shoulders when she reappears, carrying a steaming mug. It must be one of the best drinks I have ever tasted and I gulp hungrily, trying to make grateful noises between mouthfuls.

“That’s all right, dear. Don’t talk. You’re not up to it.”

I become aware that Mrs. B.’s sensitive fingers have started towelling me down and that her warm, fragrant-smelling body is close to mine. She is wearing a long, white linen nightdress dropping low enough at the front for me to see her rich creamy boobs and this revelation coincides with the arrival of her healing fingers at the source of most of my great moments in sport.

“O-o-ooh, that’s good,” I moan.

She can take that any way she wants and I don’t think it is my imagination when the pressure round my John Thomas increases.

“You poor boy,” she murmurs. “You poor, poor boy.”

She is shivering more than me now and somehow our mouths just seem to collide. My towel drops to the floor and I am digging my fingers into her soft arse as her tongue fights to get past mine.

It’s funny, but sometimes when you are nearly out on your feet you really fancy a bit of the other, and tonight is no exception. I feel warm and cosy, but at the same time charged with a great desire to make love. I start to pull up Mrs. B.’s nightdress but she takes my hands and leads me down the corridor to where her bedroom door opens invitingly. I can see the outline of the big double bed and the eiderdown swollen like an over-pumped Lilo. The sheets are thrown back from when she got up to let me in and there is a soft white valley into which we collapse. Her hands help mine to pull the nightdress over her head and I reach out to support her freed breasts.

“Come down into the warm,” she murmurs and wriggles over on to her back, pulling me and the bedclothes with her. My fingers glide over her belly and down to the smooth luxury of her thighs, which part invitingly. Her hand reaches past mine and removes a hot water bottle which I hear thud against the floor.

“We won’t need that now,” she says, and, hugging me to her, she sets out to prove it.

CHAPTER NINE

Garth is very apologetic about not coming back, but says that Mrs. Dent had his old man out before they got to the crossroads and that one thing led to another and that he thought Mrs. C. would let me out anyway and that, yes, he knew I didn’t have any clothes but it would have been giving the game away to leave mine in the changing-room and he thought Mrs. C. would take care of that too.

I can’t really blame him because I don’t reckon I would have acted any differently in his position. Mrs. Dent, I know from experience, can be a very demanding lady.

I am pretty certain that I will never see Mrs. C. again and this worries me somewhat because Cronky thinks that the Department of the Environment shines out of her arsehole and is not likely to take kindly to the disappearance of his favourite pupil. But, to my surprise, she shows up per schedule, bright as an old penny, and starts gushing the moment we have got out of earshot of the E.C.D.S.

“Frightfully sorry … felt so awful … poor you … wasting away … what a shame … your divine friend … silly old George … can be so difficult … bee in the bonnet … had the most awful trouble … couldn’t get away … marvellous idea … new wonder pills … two in his brandy … mad lust … endless lovemaking … staggered down … hardly turn key … sorry too much.”

I get interested towards the end and make her take me through it again. It appears that she has got her hands on some tablets which are the ideal cure for wilting Willy. Not only that, but they are a winner on the old desire stakes as well. Given a couple of those in their Ovaltine, Lady Lewisham and Malcolm Muggeridge would have to be separated with a firehose. Quite where Mrs. C. got them from is a secret she keeps to herself but I have a suspicion she has been having it away with some boffin at Python’s Pesticides who specialises in that kind of thing. Certainly her old man didn’t give them to her—be a bloody fool to, wouldn’t he? They must work, because she is highly chuffed and makes no reference to another painting session. Bloody egg heads put the mockers on everything. But, I reason to myself, if science can work against me, it can work for me, and you never know when the deadly brewers’ droop is going to strike. One or two of those little fellows could come in very handy. I press Mrs. C. on the point and after a fair amount of dithering she promises to get me a few.

“But for heaven’s sake, Timmy,” she warns me, “whatever you do, don’t use more than one at a time. I gave George two and they turned him into a ravening beast.” She smiles happily at the memory.

Well, of course, I promise I will be very careful and the next time I see her she slips me a small phial of what looks like saccharin tablets. I was expecting something the size of bantams’ eggs but you have only to take a butchers at Mrs. C. to see that, however small they are, they work. There is a comfortable, satisfied look about her and she hardly talks throughout the lesson. I throw in a hopeful reference to painting but she says that she has not been doing much lately and is spending her time getting ready to accompany George on a business trip he is making to Copenhagen. Bloody nice, isn’t it? A couple of love pills and a ‘live show’ and I reckon Python’s could say goodbye to both of them.

I pop the pills in my pocket and though I continue to do so every morning, after a while I almost forget they are there. Almost, that is, until the day of the Shermer Rugby Union Football Club seven-a-side tournament.

Winter has given very grudgingly to spring along the North Norfolk coast and Mrs. Carstairs has passed her test first time, as I always knew she would. Mrs. Dent has failed hers for the third time, as I also knew she would, because she likes getting poked by Garth. In fact, she is a first-rate driver, and if it was not for the fact that she would be jumping out every two minutes and trying to screw the other competitors I would enter her at Indianapolis. Mrs. C.’s success means that Cronky looks upon me as a second son and can hardly take his eyes off the door in case the Queen Mother comes in. Needless to say, the latter event does not take place and it is left to Garth Williams, six foot four of craggy Celt, to inject some excitement into our cold spring days.

“Ever played rugby, Timmy?” he says to me one morning.

In fact, I have played rugby netball, which is a game found nowhere else outside Clapham Common and too complicated to describe in detail here, but once I have told him about my shattered ankle he shifts his attention to Petal.

“You must be joking, luv. I don’t even like the shape of the ball. And all that physical contact with people you’ve never seen before in your life. I should coco!”

I don’t usually agree with Petal but I am on his side there. What kind of bloke is it that spends Saturday afternoon trying to push his head between two other blokes’ arses? And all that frisking about in the showers afterwards? And singing dirty songs in the ‘men only’ bar? It’s a bit strange, if you ask me. Would you want to spend Easter in a coach with thirty-two men? Of course you wouldn’t. I wonder The People haven’t exposed it.

“I’m trying to get a side up for the Shermer seven-a-sides,” says Garth. “They’re a bloody load of snobs and they win their own tournament every year, so it’s time somebody fixed them. Raymouth have gone off on tour and I’ve persuaded one or two of their blokes that couldn’t go to turn out for us, but I need a couple more class players if we aren’t going to look bloody stupid. Your friend Tony Sharp is their star, Timmy, if that’s any incentive.”

It very nearly is but I still get the odd twinge from my ankle and I reckon I’m ahead in the Lea v Sharp series, so I shake my head. “Sorry, mate, but my ankle isn’t up to it and I’d probably let you down anyway, but tell us when it is and we’ll come along and support, eh, Petal?”

“If I’m not in London, lovie, I’d adore to,” says Petal, totally without sincerity, “but I’m very heavily committed in the next few weeks. One of my friends is coming back from Australia and I haven’t seen him for years.”

“Worked his passage, did he?” says Garth.

“I beg your pardon?” says Petal. “Let’s have no more of that.”

So one Saturday afternoon, when the wind has dropped to gale force and a few super optimists in the High Street are beginning to scrape the flaking paint off signs saying ‘Olde Englishe Tea Roomes’ and ‘Ye Noshery’ in anticipation of the first rush of holidaymakers, I pick up Dawn and we take the coast road to Shermer. The rugby ground is tucked away in a corner of the golf course and the clubhouse is one of the new concrete type that looks like a public lavatory on two levels. From the moment we get there I can see what Garth means about the Shermer crowd being snobs. The two blokes selling programmes at the gate are both retired Indian Army and look a bit horrified when they see the E.C.D.S. sign on my car.

“Sure you’ve got the right place, old man?” says one of them condescendingly. “This is the Shermer Rugby Club, you know.”

I tell him I do know and we pay our 50p and go in past a crowd of blokes and birds leaning out of an old banger and shouting “You beast!” and “Oh, Rodney, don’t!” at each other.

I must confess that my unease is slightly heightened by Dawn’s clobber, which differs considerably from that on any other bint I can see. Her white high-heel shoes soon start sinking into the pool of mud outside the clubhouse and I don’t think that the stockings with two sailors climbing up a ladder pattern are being generally admired. Add to that a miniskirt, short fur coat, black patent leather handbag and the usual make-up counter of Woolworth’s plastered all over her mush and you can see that she would be a teeny bit overdressed for Raymouth Palais on fancy dress night. She does not help by rabbiting on about how cold and dirty it is and I wish I had left her at home, especially when I see some of the class talent lying about. I recognize the neat little dark-haired job that Sharp was with at the Y.C.s dance and give her a warm smile across the pile of sliced bread she is coating with sandwich spread, and she smiles back, which presumably means no more than that she thinks I am one of Tony’s friends. How wrong can you get? There is no sign of Sharp but I don’t have time to think about that because Garth comes bustling up.

“Thank God you’ve come,” he says. “One of the bloody Raymouth mob hasn’t turned up and we’re a man short.”

Now, normally I would have referred him to my wonky ankle but I don’t fancy being lumbered with Dawn for the whole afternoon and this might be a good opportunity to escape for a bit. We are certain to be knocked out in the first round so I shouldn’t come to any harm. Garth can see me weakening.

“Come on,” he says. “It’s only seven minutes each way and we’ve got a bye in the first round. You might even get a chance to kick Tony Sharp in the crutch. Have a go if only to give the rest of our blokes a game.”

“Oh, look,” says Dawn, “there’s a juke box over there. I think I’ll have a little dance to keep myself warm.”

“I’ll play,” I say.

It is half an hour before anyone starts playing and another half hour before we leave the crypt-like cold of the changing-room and start trotting towards a pitch which looks about half a mile away. ‘We’ are the Cromingham Crabs and, looking around my fellow team-mates, I wouldn’t back us against a day nursery when their best players were down with nappy rash.

Garth is all right, of course, his thighs sticking out of his shorts like sides of beef, but the rest of them! One long streak of piss with hair hanging down in front of his eyes like a Yorkshire Terrier, two small fat men and one big fat man who have to stop running before we even get to the pitch, and a bloke about my age who looks all right until he hands someone his glasses and then practically has to be led on to the field. The fact that only two members of the side are wearing the same coloured shirt also tends to convey the impression that we may be a bit short of teamwork.

We are playing Python’s Pesticides and, frankly, they don’t look much more imposing than us, though they have beaten Old Crominghamians II in the first round and are all wearing the same strip.

“Where do you want me to play?” I ask Garth.

“You’d better go on the wing,” he says comfortingly. “Do you know how to throw the ball in?”

“No.”

“Well, watch the game over there and you’ll see.”

He starts doing fast press-ups, slapping his chest after each press, and I am glad to see that someone is fit. The rest of our team are passing round fags and boasting about how long it is since they played.

The game on the other pitch features Shermer and that is where most of the spectators are gathered, shouting “Olly, olly Shermer” and similar idiotic expressions of upper-class encouragement. It does not take me long to see Sharp because the minute I arrive his lean frame can be seen streaking away and the cries of the faithful rise into a crescendo as he grounds the ball behind the opposition’s posts.

“Oh, well played, Shermer.” “Beautiful, Tony.” “Give ’em a chance, lads. Don’t score too many.” Sharp walks back nonchalantly, holding the ball at arm’s length with one hand and thinking how wonderful he is. I have to admit he can move a bit and I don’t reckon I would be able to live with him for speed. Luckily it’s not likely to come to the test.

Shermer score two more tries and it is obvious that they are a class outfit. The whistle goes and they give three ever-so-sporting cheers and trot back to the clubhouse whilst the shattered opposition can hardly drag themselves off the pitch.

“What’s on over there?” says a sheepskin-jacketed twit with a half-drunk pint of bitter in his hand as the crowd disperses.

“Python’s and Cromingham Crabs,” says the pork-pie-hatted berk with him. “Nothing worth watching.”

“God, no. Load of rubbish. Let’s go and chat up Fiona in the pav.”

It seems as if most of the spectators agree with them because only about half a dozen people and a stray dog are left watching us when Python’s kick off. Dawn is not one of them, having retired to the car because she is bored and cold. I, too, am cold, but not bored. As the ball rises into the air so I experience the almost painful thrill of anticipation which comes to me when playing any game. Unfortunately, for Python’s, the ball lands in Garth’s arms and he begins to amble towards the touchline, pulling half the opposition with him. Four strides and he suddenly changes direction and accelerates, leaving two men groping. By the cringe! But he can move for a big man! Somebody gets an arm round his shoulder but he shakes him off like a drop of water and has one more man left in front of him. For a horrible moment I think he may pass to me, but he drops his shoulder into the poor bastard standing bravely in his path and charges over his spreadeagled body to score under the posts. It is magnificent to watch and a murmur of surprise and appreciation rises from the onlookers. Garth boots the ball between the posts so we are five points up and the crowd waits expectantly for more. They get it, but not in quite the way they anticipate.

From the kick-off the ball goes to my short-sighted friend, who lets it bounce straight off his chest into the arms of a Python’s player following up. Garth dashes him to the ground but there is another man backing up who grabs the loose ball and reaches the line unchecked.

“Watch your handling,” snarls Garth, as we pant between the posts. “If in doubt, die with the ball. Don’t try any stupid passes.”

The kick misses, so it is 5–3 to us but soon afterwards our bean-pole carefully avoids contact with a member of the opposition, who scampers gratefully to the line and scores to the elation of his team-mates.

“You funk another tackle, you gutless prat, and I’ll break your fucking neck,” says Garth so that his spittle spatters the offender’s face, “and that applies to all of you.”

He turns his gaze on the rest of us and there are universal murmurs of assent. The conversion attempt fails again and so it is 6–5 to Python’s and mercifully the half-time whistle goes shortly afterwards. I have only touched the ball twice and that is to throw it in from touch, a fact that does not escape Garth’s attention.

“Right,” he says as we suck our scrag ends of lemon. “Get your knees brown this half—all of you. We’ve nothing to lose, so get stuck into them. You won’t be able to live with yourselves if we lose to this shower of shit.”

I will be able to live with myself very happily, but I don’t thing it is a good moment to say so. I feel my ankle, hoping that some sinister swelling will give me an excuse to hobble off, but it seems as strong as a Hashamite’s hampton.

“Right, lads,” says Garth in a voice that would warm the cockles of Cronky’s heart, “let’s be having you.”

The whistle blows and we start another seven minutes of agony. This time it is our turn to kick off and Garth gives the ball a cunning side-foot jab which sends it bouncing up invitingly in front of the bloke with the eighteen-inch fringe, who has an empty field before him. No doubt remembering Garth’s words, he snatches at the ball and knocks it on. Garth’s scream of rage and pain drowns the referee’s whistle and there is another scrum which claims the flagging energies of the two small fat men and the big fat man. The big fat man is not in the middle, which means that the scrum spins round and round like a dog chasing its own tail and the ball cannot be put in. Everybody except me gets their knickers in a twist and the minutes tick happily away with the score still 6–5 to Python’s. Eventually the ball squirts out on the Python’s side and despite another crushing tackle by Garth, they work it out to their wing, who comes haring towards me. Remembering my instructions, I dare not let him pass and crouch expectantly, waiting my moment to spring. No doubt sensing my resolution, the winger artfully chips the ball over my head and attempts to race after it. I say “attempt” because a reflex action makes me stick out a leg and he doesn’t touch the ground for about ten yards before landing smack on his face. Cries of outrage from the touchline mingle with those on the field and the referee awards a penalty try.

“Hard luck, boyo,” says Garth who doesn’t give a monkey about playing the game if it is a choice between that and winning. “You couldn’t do anything else.”

The kick is in front of the posts and should be a formality but the man who takes it is in too much of a hurry and slices it past a post. Nevertheless we are 5–9 down and with seconds left to play I feel a sense of relief that my afternoon’s sport is over without me suffering serious injury.

I reckon without Garth; the Pythons are watching him like a monk on a nun’s outing and seeing them all bunched up in front of him, he kicks the ball over their heads and jets off after it by himself. One of them gets there first but hardly have his hands closed round the ball than Garth sends him flying and snatches up the bouncing ball. Two blokes jump on his back but he strides on carrying them with him until the line yawns in front of him. Only then does he begin to falter but with one last superhuman effort he twists free and hurls himself over by the corner flag. It is stirring stuff and even I find myself cheering. I don’t want to play another game but as I watch Garth carefully placing the ball by the touchline, I have an unshakeable feeling that it will go soaring between the posts. Garth carefully brushes the mud from his toes, rubs his hands thoughtfully and—thud! The ball soars into the air and curves smoothly over the bar. The final whistle goes and we have won 10–9.

“You’re bloody lucky to have that bloke playing for you,” says one of the Pythons as we trudge back to the changing room. “We’d have pissed on you otherwise.” I am about to tell him to get stuffed when an old geezer wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat with the flaps down shuffles up and jabs at me with his shooting stick. “You’re a cad, sir,” he squeals, “that was the worst foul I’ve ever seen and I’ve been playing and watching the game for over fifty years.”

“Stick around for my next appearance,” I tell him. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” But there is nobody on the touchline for my next appearance. A lot of faces pressed against the windows of the clubhouse but only fourteen poor sods and the referee out there on the pitch.

For some time the sky has been darkening and ugly black clouds have been bumping into each other menacingly. As we are about to leave the changing room, there is an enormous clap of thunder and the rain pisses down like it’s under pressure. I expect us to wait till it’s all over or pack it in, but no, out we have to go.

In no time, the pitch is like a kids’ paddling pool and the ball more difficult to handle than a bar of soap in an Italian restaurant. We are playing R.A.F. Great Grunting or the Gee Gees as their big-mouthed captain keeps calling them. On a dry day they would probably have murdered us but in these conditions they keep dropping the ball or falling over and the more mistakes they make the more rattled they get. This, coupled to the fact that the two teams are soon so covered with mud that nobody can tell the difference, helps us to score our vital try, and natural Lea modesty will not prevent me from saying that I am responsible for it.

One of their big blokes is making progress towards our line with the ball when Lanky earns his keep at last by leaping on to his back. This slows the bugger down a bit and he looks round for some support. “With you,” I shout, and like a lamb he passes me the ball. Garth is hovering about and quick as a flash I hand it on to him and he is away loping through the puddles to score under the posts.

“You dirty bastard,” shrieks the airman who is being viciously abused by his team-mates. “I’ll get you for that.”

“Don’t be soft,” I tell him. “You want to use your eyes.”

There is nearly a punch-up but the referee gets between us. Garth kicks the goal, and play is resumed.

After that incident a certain amount of needle creeps into the game and this is totally to our advantage. Most of our team are only good at close range fouling and as curses and threats rebound round the field and a pall of steam rises from the scrum, the minutes are ticking away.

Half-time comes with the score still 5–0 to us and it is late into the second half with the rain still pissing down that the airmen get near our line. Despite the miserable cold and the wet I am hardly aware of either and have now totally abandoned myself to winning at any costs. With this in mind, I blatantly obstruct their winger who is about to receive the ball in a scoring position and a penalty is awarded against us, from which one of their big men forces his way over between the posts. They only have to convert and it will be five-all.

“Try and charge the bugger down,” orders Garth as we wait poised behind the line for their kicker to move. The bloke makes a Cecil B. de Mille production of getting ready for the kick and then, as he runs forward, I let out an ear-splitting shriek and charge at him. Obviously unnerved, he pauses and I am able to get to the ball first and lash it into his goolies. He collapses, screaming in agony and the referee’s whistle nearly fractures my ear drum.

“I’m warning you for ungentlemanly conduct,” he hisses, barely able to keep his hands off me. “The kick will be taken again without a charge.”

“Oh, ref. It was an accident,” I bleat. I ruffle the writhing airman’s hair in the hopes that this will be interpreted as a sporting gesture of true penitence but the referee waves me back behind the posts and turns to the stricken kicker.

“Nice going,” says Garth admiringly. “I think you’ve buggered him.”

In fact, I have, because the poor sod is borne away still groaning and an anxious conference takes place amongst the opposition as to who should be the kicker. Their fears are justified because there is now a pool of water in front of the posts and it is necessary to build a small island of mud to raise the ball above water level.

“No charge, and no shouting,” says the referee sternly and all eyes are turned towards the Gee Gees’ kicker. Their captain has decided to take on the job himself and, also, that the best method of succeeding is with a hefty belt. To this end he stands fifteen yards behind the ball and then charges at it sending up a spray of water like Silvana Mangano running through a rice field to meet her lover. Thud! bang! crump! The ball flies like a rocket, hits the underside of the bar and ricochets down on to the back of our big fat man’s head, hitting him half a second before the bar it has dislodged.

For a moment, nobody knows what has happened and then we realise that we have won. All, that is, except fatso who is lying face downwards in the mud in real danger of drowning. We scrape him up and return rejoicing to the changing room avoiding contact with a few members of the opposition and my friend with the shooting stick, who are obviously not happy with the result or the way it was achieved.

“Bloody marvellous,” exults Garth. “Well played all of you. Especially you, Timmy. Are you sure you don’t have any Welsh blood in you?”

“I pop out for a leak occasionally,” I say wittily and feel warmed by the maestro’s praise. That is about the only thing there is to warm me because we are all soaked to the skin and have no clean kit to change into. Garth has a track suit which he pulls on before lying down on a bench and closing his eyes. “Keep warm, keep off the beer and report here at five forty-five,” are his last words to us.

That is nearly an hour away and I wish I was relaxed enough to take a kip. But I’m not. I am the neurotic type who has to wander about picking his nails until the action starts. I leave my team-mates who are all describing how they won the last game! “I knew I had their big fellow when I saw his plate wobbling”; “so I belted him one and I didn’t hear a squeak out of him after that”—and make my way outside. The rain has stopped and miraculously the clouds split open to reveal the sun which pops out like the yolk from two halves of an eggshell. Its arrival coincides with the appearance of the Shermer team who then proceed to crush Old Repseans 23–0 in the other semi-final. Watching them, I reckon that we are going to need an earthquake to stand a chance against them. The hated Sharp flashes around like a dose of clap at a hippies’ gang bang and the whole team are big, fast and competent. The draw must have been woefully mismanaged if we can have emerged as the team to meet them in the final. I wander back inside with my spirits lower than a dachshund’s balls and decide to have a cup of tea. Sharp’s bird is still behind the counter and she gives me a nice smile as I go over.

“You look frozen,” she says pleasantly. “Haven’t you got anything to change into?”

“No. I got all this stuff out of the laundry basket by the changing room and there’s not much left.”

It’s a fact. Thirteen left boots—twelve without studs, two grey jock straps, a pair of gym shorts and a brassiere with one cup missing. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

“Oh well. Have a nice hot cup of tea, then. How many lumps?”

“Five, please. I need to build up my strength for the final.”

“You’ll have to excuse me because I’m terribly ignorant, but who do you play for?”

“Cromingham Crabs. Don’t worry. Nobody else has heard of them either. We only got together for the tournament.”

“My goodness, you have done well. You won’t win the final, though.”

I would like to be able to disagree with her, but I can’t.

“I shouldn’t really say that,” she goes on, “but my fiancé plays for the Shermer team.”

“Oh, really? Which one is he?”

But she doesn’t have to answer because a slightly muddied Sharp comes striding over and pats her on the cheek.

“Did you see my last try?” he begins and then notices me.

“Oh,” he says—it is really more of an ‘ugh’ than an ‘oh’, but no arrangement of letters gives quite the flavour of the original—“don’t tell me we’re going to have the pleasure of meeting in this final?”

“Depends whether you beat Old Repseans,” I say weakly.

“Oh, we did, old lad, we did.” I can see the whites of his knuckles and for a moment I think he is going to have a go at me there and then, “so you needn’t have any worries on that score. Just worry about the one in the final.”

“Oh that’s very good,” I turn to the bird, “it’s a play on words, see: ‘score’ and ‘score’!”

“Don’t clown with me, you oik,” hisses Sharp and I can see a punch-up is about 1.5 seconds away. His bird can see the same thing because she shoves a kettle into his hand and point towards the kitchen.

“Get some more hot water, Tony, there’s a love; and don’t be such a fool.” Sharp looks at the kettle, then at me, and grits his teeth.

“I’ll see you on the field,” he snarls and stalks away before I can think of anything memorable.

“Phew!” says his bird. “I’ve never seen him so worked up. What was all that about?”

“Well,” I say archly, “I don’t really know, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that I work for the East Coast Driving School. I believe he works for Major’s and there’s not much love lost between the two organisations.”

“Well, I never!” she says. “So I’m talking to one of the hated rivals. I’m Valerie Minto. How do you do?”

“Timmy Lea; pleased to meet you.”

What a turn-up, this lovely bird springing from the loins of the monstrous Minto! I hardly know what to say.

“Have you seen my father?” she goes on. “He’s around here somewhere. He’s president of the club, you know.”

“Really?” I murmur in my best upper-class twit manner. So there we are, all the gang are gathered to see me make a berk of myself in the final.

“I’d better go and have a rest,” I say. “Thanks for the tea; it was delicious.”

I give her my look of gangling, unaffected innocence, which has brought a few pairs of drawers tumbling down in its time, I can tell you, and replace my cup.

“I suppose I shouldn’t wish you good luck,” she says, “but, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Another of my Outward Bound School smiles and I amble back to the changing-room where the rest of the Crabs are stretched out trying to relax. The concrete floor is now littered with mud from scores of boots and the whole scene looks like the reception area in a morgue. I pile a few jackets on top of myself and try to kip, but it is no good. My limbs are stiffening up and parts of my body I never knew I had are starting to ache. The cold crucifies and my borrowed kit is chafing my thighs. I might as well try to sleep on a bed of nails.

I am about to go back to the bar when Garth swings his legs over the side of the bench. “O.K., lads, let’s be having you. None of the Shermer mob are in here, are they? Good. Now look. They reckon they’re going to cakewalk it. They’re so relaxed they’re nearly asleep. We’ve got to get amongst them right from the first whistle and really knock them off their game. Run them ragged. Remember how we shook those R.A.F. buggers? Every time one of them gets the ball—pow!” He smashes a giant fist into the palm of his hand. “Hit him for six! And when we’ve got the ball, use it! No stupid passes. Give it to me if you can, but if you can’t see a man to pass to, die with it.”

It is all good, dynamic stuff, but when I gaze round the blokes listening, it might be Dad’s Army having a pep talk from John Wayne. Most of them look as if they will have to be carried on to the field and big fat man is still grumbling that he can’t see properly. Now, nearly half the team have trouble with their eyes.

“And remember, the final lasts for ten minutes each way, so you’ve really got to motor.”

Twenty minutes! Shermer will run up fifty points in that time and I will probably drop dead of exhaustion. Why the hell did I say I would play? I go into the bar and find the answer. Dawn is perched on a stool flashing her minge at anybody who cares to look at it and sipping Babycham like the darling of Roper’s Light Horse.

“Oh, there you are,” she squeals. “Have you been hiding from me or something? I haven’t seen you the whole afternoon.”

I mumble about having to take it easy because of the final and notice that Sharp is perched at her elbow with his back to us. He bestows a contemptuous glance and goes on talking to one of his team-mates. The whole Shermer side have changed into clean kit and are lounging about as if waiting to have a photograph taken. A glass of what looks like orange squash is resting by Sharp’s hand and a diabolical scheme begins to take shape in my sordid little mind. “Knock them off their stride,” Garth had said. None of us seems capable of doing that, but supposing I could slip Sharp a couple of Mrs. Carstairs’ sex pills. They are supposed to have a pretty shattering effect.

“A gentleman would see that my glass was empty,” whines Dawn.

“I’ll have to get some cash,” I say and streak to the changing-room.

“We’re on in two minutes,” says Garth. “Don’t get lost.”

I fumble in all my jacket pockets and at last find the phial of tablets. Back outside and I realise I have forgotten the money for Dawn’s bloody drink. More fumbling and I emerge again to find to my relief that Dawn and Sharp are still where I left them.

“Same again?” I say, snatching her glass and leaning across the bar so I am operating from behind Sharp’s back. There is a lot of activity because people are ordering up before the final and it is easy to manoeuvre the phial to the edge of Sharp’s glass without attracting attention. I look round carefully and am just about to dispense a couple of tablets when some impatient sod pushes forward, jogs my arm, and the whole bloody lot go in! They start fizzing immediately but before I can do anything, Sharp snatches up his glass and downs it in one gulp.

“Right! Forward to battle,” he says, and, slapping his mate on the back, makes for the door.

Christ, I think, what am I going to do? I may have killed the bloke. Should I tell him? What can I tell him? Perhaps an anonymous phone call to the police.

“Oh, there you are.” It is Garth by my side. “Come on, they’re waiting for us.”

My eyes follow Sharp to the door and suddenly I see him give a little skip and a jump followed by a puzzled shake of the head as if he did not quite know what had come over him. I also see Minto for the first time. He is carrying a megaphone and gives Sharp an encouraging pat on the shoulder. In reply, Sharp’s hand drops and gives Minto’s balls an almighty squeeze, which makes their owner leap about three feet in the air. This little scene is not generally noticed but I see one of the tea ladies nearly drop her plate of Spam sandwiches in amazement. Like a man in a dream, I follow Sharp out of the door and see that he now has his arm round his team-mate’s shoulder and appears to be whispering something in his ear—or is he whispering?

“Get off!” screams the poor bloke in outrage and proceeds to wipe his ear with a handkerchief. Sharp has been nibbling it.

This stuff obviously works fast, and indiscriminately, but is it fatal? I have got to do something quickly or the game will have started. Maybe exercise would be the best antidote. Sharp is now kissing the referee and trying to hold his hand. At least he looks all right; he is not turning green or anything.

“Their kick,” says Garth. “Now remember what I said.”

The referee has shaken himself free and Sharp has his arm round one his team-mates. I am standing near the touchline and can hear puzzled murmurs blending with the chorus of support for Shermer.

“What’s Tony playing at? Is he trying to pretend he’s a pouf or something? Olly, olly Shermer!”

The referee blows his whistle and the most incredible rugby match ever played begins. The ball is kicked to one of our little fat men, who is half scragged but manages to scramble it into touch. A line-out forms and Sharp, standing next to one of our men, starts to stroke the inside of his thigh, and nuzzle him. He gets a belt for his pains and promptly lopes over to the referee to tell him all about it.

“Stop playing the giddy goat and get back in the game,” snaps the official, clearly embarrassed. Sharp shrugs and starts towards the line-out when someone in the crowd catches his eye. “Yum, yum,” he yodels and hurls himself at a tall blonde wearing lace-up boots and green hot pants under a maxi-coat. He has his arms round her in a trice and starts trying to undo her braces. “Lovely dolly,” he groans. “Tony wants you.”

It takes two men to pull him off and the struggle seems to have some effect, because he shakes his head a couple of times and wanders back on the field looking a bit more like his old unpleasant self.

“Next time you go off, you stay off,” warns the referee. “I will not tolerate any more fooling about.”

“Give us a kiss,” says Sharp, but the referee pretends not to hear him.

In goes the ball and Sharp leaps like a performing seal to knock it high in the air. Garth sees his opportunity and comes in like a ton of bricks. He jumps, catches the ball, and his impetus takes him through the Shermer forwards before they know what has hit them. The scrum-half is trampled into the ground and the winger gets some free plastic surgery from Garth’s mighty mitt. Two men see the danger and race to cut him off, but, as they close, so Garth lobs the ball over their heads and Lanky folds it to his chest and just has the speed to make it to the line.

The silence that greets this effort could only be bettered by a Liverpool supporter watching Everton score their fifth goal at Anfield Road and I have to look at the referee to be certain that he has awarded a try.

Garth shapes up to take the kick and it is only then that I notice Sharp still lying on his back where the line-out broke up. He is peering down the inside of his shorts and singing “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts.” It may be true, but it is obviously causing a fair amount of embarrassment to those standing near him. It doesn’t help Garth much either because he misses his first kick of the afternoon and we are just three points ahead.

Sharp makes another half-hearted attempt to invade the crowd but is thrown back on to the pitch by the worried Shermer supporters—a big mistake, as it turns out.

From the kick-off the ball goes to big fat man, who promptly knocks it on. Scrum-down. Sharp tries to bind down with his other two forwards but is promptly pulled out by his captain, which is just as well because he is already trying to love-bite his prop’s neck. The problem is: where to put him? On the wing he might run amok amongst the crowd; in the scrum and his obvious desire for close physical contact is being given full rein. Eventually they send him off to the centre of the field and play continues. The ball goes in and whips back on the Shermer side whilst our forwards wilt visibly. Scrum-half, fly-half, and out to Sharp. It looks an easy try and the Shermer supporters are in full song when Sharp stops dead in his tracks and holds out the ball invitingly.

“Give us a kiss and it’s yours,” he says. My short-sighted friend purses his lips, snatches the ball as Sharp closes his eyes and starts scampering down the field with the Shermer backs in total disorder behind him. They pull themselves together and charge off in pursuit, but by this time Garth has taken the ball and scored under the posts.

The Shermer supporters are now in open mutiny and when Garth kicks the goal there are shouts of “Keep it away from Sharp, for God’s sake,” and “Get him orf!”

Sharp is now sulking because our centre cheated by not kissing him and this is to his side’s advantage, because without him taking part in the action they have no difficulty scoring a converted try before half-time to make the score 8–5 to us.

I watch Sharp carefully whilst we suck our lemons and pretend to listen to Garth’s ranting, because I still fear that he may suddenly drop dead. But he looks all right as he invites the rest of his team to peep down the front of his shorts and it occurs to me that Python’s Pesticides would do well to solve the problem of gender discrimination before they put their wonder drug on the market.

“… and really get amongst them,” winds up Garth. “I don’t know what’s the matter with that daft sod Sharp, but he’s worth playing on.”

He is indeed. But only if he can get the ball. The rest of his team have now wised up and keep it away from him at any cost. In the first minute of the second half their scrum-half breaks from a line-out and scores under the posts. The try is converted and we are 10–8 down. If this was not bad enough, straight from our kick-off their wing catches the ball and races the length of the field with Garth just failing to stop him getting over in the corner. The kick fails but we are now 13–8 down.

As we trudge back to the centre line, morale is at truss height and even Garth is silent. The Shermer supporters are on top of the world and I feel mentally and physically knackered. I really believed we had a chance and now my dream is punctured like a french letter with ‘Made in Hong Kong’ stamped on it.

But I reckon without the crafty Celtic cunning of Garth. Seeing the opposition bunched protectively around Sharp, he taps the ball over the ten-yard line, sprints after it, sweeps it up and is striding away for the line with the nearest Shermer man ten yards away. He scores untouched and the score is 13–11. We kick the goal and it is 13-all.

Our mood is now transformed and straight from their kick-off big fat man catches the ball and charges forward as if nothing on God’s earth is going to stop him. In fact, three Shermer players stop him very comprehensively in the first four yards, and he goes down twitching and groaning. The referee blows up and the crowd surges forward to inspect the damage.

Luckily for us, Sharp is equal to the situation.

“Give him the kiss of life,” he shouts and promptly starts to pull down the victim’s shorts.

“Not there, you fool,” cries one of his team-mates, aghast. “On the mouth.”

He must have wished he had not said it because Sharp needs no further encouragement before subjecting Fatso to the kind of kiss that would clear all the blocked-up sinks in a toffee factory. A cry of horror goes up from the crowd and strong men turn away in disgust. Willing arms haul Sharp from his prey and the referee’s finger points rigidly towards the touchline.

“I’m sending you off for ungentlemanly conduct,” he says sternly, his lower lip trembling. You feel that the total horror of the situation is almost unhinging him. Sharp’s hand immediately shoots out and dives down the front of the official’s shorts.

“Give us a gobble,” he says.

Shermer try to rally after Sharp’s departure, but it is obvious that their hearts are no longer in the game. Not many teams can have lost a player for attempted buggery with a member of the opposition, and for a side showing all the symptoms of being gentlemen the load is too much to bear. Seconds before the desperately relieved referee blows his whistle for full-time Garth takes advantage of a moment of indecision in their defence and snatches up a loose ball to plunge over and score.

WE HAVE WON!!!

We hug each other and try to carry Garth back to the clubhouse, but we are too fagged out and he slides down into the mud with us giggling weakly. What a performance, we tell each other. By God, but we were magnificent! Mrs. Minto turns up from watching the Sunday afternoon T.V. movie to present the cup and prizes, and starts saying what a wonderful tournament it has been until somebody whispers to her to belt up. We have our photograph taken by Gruntsomb of The Echo—who else?—and a jug of beer is produced by Crippsy, who has turned up to see the final.

It is the first of many and by the time I have had a quick dip in the cold bath full of the mud left by the other fifteen teams, I hardly know what way round my trousers go.

We blunder out into the bar, expecting to find it jumping, but the place is strangely empty and most of the people there are members of the guest teams.

“Where is everybody?” I ask nobody in particular.

“They’ve gone home,” says a voice at my elbow. “They’re not very used to losing—not like that, anyway. Well done! My good luck must have worked for you.”

It is Valerie, who has been clearing away the tea things. Seeing her reminds me of Dawn, but to my relief she seems to have pissed off.

“Yes, we were a bit lucky,” I say modestly. “Er—how is Tony? I haven’t seen him since the game.”

“Neither have I, and I don’t particularly want to. I think they took him home.”

“How are you getting home?”

“I’ll ring for a taxi.”

“No need to do that. I’ll take you.”

“Are you sure it’s all right?”

“I’m not drunk.”

She blushes. “No, I didn’t mean that. Don’t you want to stay and celebrate with your friends?”

A few moments ago I would have said yes, but now, seeing her has brought home to me the whole point of getting drunk.

“No, I’ve had enough. Are you ready to go?”

She nods her head. “I’ll just get my coat and lock up the kitchen.”

Somehow I know it’s on. I don’t know how—I just know. It’s been one of my days. It’s The Day. My jacket pocket bulges with a pewter tankard inscribed ‘Shermer Seven-a-Side Tournament Winners 1971’ and I have this gorgeous little bird to escort home—or somewhere. She reappears by my side, looking sweet and pretty, and I tell her so.

“Where’s your car?”

“It’s over on the other side of the car park. It’s one of the opposition’s, you know. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not as long as it’s got an engine in it.”

I say goodbye to Garth and the rest of the Crabs, who are now too drunk to take in anything except more liquor, and we go outside. The puddles glint in the frosty moonlight and I steer her round them to where I can see the familiar outline of the Morris. There are a number of cars left but only mine has steamed-up windows. I notice the fact casually and it is only when I bend down to open the door that I realise why. Two completely naked bodies can be seen entwined across the back seat and the sole of a foot is clearly visible against one of the windows. It is moving as if gingerly probing the glass to see if it is real.

I recognise Dawn first because her smudged, sweaty face is gazing up with unseeing, half-closed eyes. The man is Valerie’s property and she is quick to speak his name. “Tony,” she cries out despairingly. “Oh, no!” She turns and starts running through the puddles. I could go after her but I don’t think there is anything for me there now, and, anyway, the night air is beginning to make me feel sick.

I could start making a scene about Tony and Dawn, but I don’t fancy her above waist level and I feel I owe Mr. Sharp a favour after all he has been through on my behalf. You can’t go on holding a grudge for ever, can you?

I leave the foot tapping rhythmically against the car window and make my way back to the bar to continue celebrating.

CHAPTER TEN

The next morning the Harlem Globetrotters are bouncing a concrete basketball round the inside of my nut and my tongue feels like the mat the All-Nippon Sumo Championships have been wrestled on. Added to that it is Monday, and only a berk of the first water would bother to show up at work. Nevertheless, I push my face round the door of the E.C.D.S. mainly because I want everybody to say flattering things about my performance in the sevens.

Sadly, the subject is hardly mentioned—certainly not by Dawn, who does not put in an appearance all day—and when Cronky arrives it is to brief us all on our part in the approaching Cromingham Carnival.

This riot of colour and spectacle occurs every year and is supposed to coincide with the arrival of spring—or April 1st, as it is known in the absence of any dependable signal from the weather.

It appears that all the local tradesmen take part in a procession of floats through the centre of the town and that it has been decided that the Major School of Motoring and ourselves will each contribute one vehicle with an instructor sitting beside his latest pupil to pass the test. Miss Frankcom is due to take hers again for the umpteenth time and Cronky is obsessed with the idea that, if she passes, she will be the ideal advertisement for the E.C.D.S.: the perfect, happy ending to all the free publicity we had the year before. I can’t get very excited myself but I play along to humour him.

I have my own test to worry about and it so happens that on the very same day that Miss F. is due to go into action I have to report to Norwich to take the practical part of my Register Qualifying Examination. Eyesight, driving technique and instructional ability are the three things I am tested on and, though I say so myself, I hardly put a foot or hand wrong and pass with flying colours. At last I am a ‘Department of the Environment Approved Driving Instructor’. I should be highly chuffed but now I have qualified it is rather like getting married to a bird you have been knocking off for months. There is nothing new to look forward to and you wonder why you bothered. When I first thought about it, being a driving instructor seemed quite a class profession, but now I’m not so sure. The more you come into contact with the nobs, the more you fancy a bit of their style of living, and when I look round the E.C.D.S. I wonder what my chances are of getting amongst it. Even Cronky, who runs the joint, can hardly be said to be overloaded with mazuma.

These and similar thoughts are running through my mind as I drive back to Cromingham, but they soon get pushed to one side when I pull up outside the office. Quite a party is going on and it appears that Miss Frankcom has passed her test and bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

“Oh, there you are, dear,” she says when she sees me. “We’d almost given you up for lost. Aren’t I a clever girl?”

“Very,” I say, giving her a peck on the cheek. “I passed as well, so we can have a double celebration.”

And we do. Gruntscomb of the Echo rolls up to take a few pictures and we all chip in for a couple of bottles of plonk, which go down very nicely. Miss Frankcom says she will be delighted to appear in the procession and Cronky beams away like a headmaster on Parents’ Day.

Unfortunately, his smile dries up on the morning of the carnival because Miss Frankcom rings in to say she has twisted her ankle and won’t be able to make it. He fumes and sulks but there is nothing he can do about it so we have to dig up a substitute. This proves no problem and Dawn, who is now back with us— and joining me in making no reference to the Shermer Sevens—soon gets a chap called Roper to agree to turn out.

He seems quite normal when you look at him. About fifty, with leather patches on his elbows and a white nylon shirt. His hands shake slightly but I don’t pay much attention to that—not then, anyway. We tell him what to do and he is perfectly relaxed about it all.

The procession forms up behind the bus station and the big scene there revolves around whether the M.S.M. should take precedence over the E.C.D.S. or the two of us should drive abreast. It is all so bloody petty, but in the end Minto and Cronky have to toss for it. Minto wins and with obvious satisfaction waves his bulled-up Ford in front of my equally gleaming Morris 1100. In order not to be upstaged by Minto, Cronky has lent his brand new private motor and had an E.C.D.S. sign mounted on its roof.

The instructor is Tony Sharp, who, for some reason best known to himself, has decided to wear a racing driver’s tunic. He looks a right berk, I can tell you. Rumour has it that blood samples taken from him at the hospital after the Sevens revealed signs of drugs, and there are differing schools of thought as to whether he was nobbled or took an overdose when trying to pep up his own performance. No prizes for guessing which version I am supporting.

“Take it nice and easy,” I say to Roper. “No need to get too close to him. Let the crowd have a good look at you.”

For once the Town Council have got their dates right and it is a nice day—the best I can remember in my six months at Cromingham. I wind down my window and savour the warm sunshine on my cheek. Behind us a party of six fishermen sit on a float, representing the sea-bed, and make unfunny jokes in order to hide their embarrassment. Beside the inevitable Neptune with a pitchfork for a trident there is a self-conscious mermaid sporting a fish-net brassiere and what looks like jodhpurs sticking out of the top of her silver foil tail. She is obviously not taking any chances with the weather.

At last the Town Cleric gives the signal and the procession lumbers off with all the proud patrons racing back to the middle of the town to watch their underlings make fools of themselves. Past the Methodist chapel we go and Roper is performing perfectly. Sharp’s ex-pupil is a middle-aged, middle-class woman dressed up as if for a Buckingham Palace garden party, and I watch her flowered hat practically obscuring the windscreen in front. The first part of the procession hits the High Street and I can hear the cheers beginning to build up. A policeman waves his arm officiously and I tell Roper to take up a position in the middle of the road. There it is, the High Street. Bunting and flags everywhere. Dear old Woolworth’s next to the new Marks & Spencer’s, the ‘Comeinside Cafe’ (called the ‘Semen’s Rest’ by Garth), the crab shop, ‘Cromingham Crafts’. I look at all the familiar landmarks and feel almost attached to the place. The Majestic Cinema—are they still showing ‘The Big Sleep’ or is it that they never change the posters?—and opposite, in all its shabby glory, the East Coast Driving School, with Dawn, Cronky, Lester, Petal and Garth all waving from the first-floor window.

I am wondering where Crippsy is when Sharp’s car suddenly back-fires. I have only just woken up to what the noise is when I am thrown back in my seat as Roper’s foot goes down on the accelerator.

“The swine’s firing at us,” he screams and rams the Ford up the backside.

“Stop it, you bloody fool!” I begin, but before I can grab the wheel he has done it again.

Crunch! The Ford shudders forward a few feet and the beautiful flowered hat is jerked over its wearer’s eyes.

“Fight fire with fire,” shouts Roper, who is quite clearly mad. “That’s the only thing the bastards understand.”

He gets in one more lunge just as Sharp is clambering out of the passenger seat and my rival is thrown into the gutter like an ejected cartridge.

“They’re abandoning ship! We’ve got ’em! Depth charge the survivors!”

I manage to turn the ignition off and Roper and I are wrestling over the front seats.

“Bloody Kraut-lover! Don’t you see, you fool? If you don’t get them, they’ll get you.”

It must be shell-shock or battle-fatigue or something, but why does it always have to happen to me?

Suddenly Roper changes tack.

“We’re sinking,” he howls. “Let me out of here. Let me out! Let me out!” He begins beating against the windscreen and pressing the horn as if he intends to push it out through the front of the car.

“Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”

Bugger you, I think, and start to open the door.

“Women and children first, you swine,” he hisses. “I’ve met your kind before.”

I can’t bring myself to say anything so I shake him off and climb out.

But my troubles are not over yet.

Sharp is coming for me, bristling like a fur jelly.

“What in God’s name are you playing at now, you fool—” he begins.

Sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that the gods intend to destroy you and that you are only delaying the inevitable by trying to deny them. This revelation comes to me with startling clarity when I see Sharp’s undershot jaw quivering invitingly eighteen inches away. I swing my fist into it so hard that his feet nearly leave the ground, and I stride across the road to resign.

Ten minutes later I am leaving Cronk’s office and my career with the East Coast Driving School is over. I have done most of the talking, but Cronk has been quick to agree that my particular streak of impetuosity and ability to attract questionable publicity makes me somewhat of a liability to any firm not registered purely as a tax loss.

As I come out, Gruntscomb of the Echo is lining up a photograph which captures both Cronk’s mangled Morris and the front of the office. He is working with swift relish and I shudder when I think of the headlines in the evening.

“Well, that’s it, lads,” I say to the assembled throng. “I’m off! Great to have worked with you all. I’m sorry it has to end like this and I hope this little lot doesn’t cause you too much embarrassment. I’ll probably see you if Sharp brings an assault charge—remember, it was self-defence—or maybe I’ll be back with my bucket, spade and icepick one day.”

“You can’t go just like that,” says Garth. “You’re staying for the Ball, aren’t you?”

I may not have mentioned that the day’s activities culminated in a Grand Fancy Dress Ball at the golf club with cabaret by an entertainer whose last recorded public appearance had been at Bow Street Magistrates Court on a charge of accosting males in a public lavatory—big deal!

“How can I?” I tell him. “I’m going to be a dead embarrassment, aren’t I, with Minto and all his mob there in force. It would probably end in another punch-up. Besides, I told Cronk I’d get out right away.”

“Well, have a drink before you go. I know a little place where we can knock back a couple undisturbed.”

So we all slope off and it develops into quite a session, I can tell you. One by one they drop out, starting with Dawn and working through Lester, Petal (“… look me up—and down—if you’re ever this way again, duckie … lovely working with you …”) to Crippsy, who we meet in the club, and finally Garth, who breathes a few emotionally charged words: “How are we going to win the Sevens next year without you, boyo?”—before we both stagger away, pissed out of our tiny minds.

Even in my paralytic state I am aware that Mrs. Bendon is going to be a problem. I have been having it away with her on a pretty regular basis recently and I don’t think she is going to take kindly to me suddenly announcing that I am never going to darken her bath towels again.

Maybe it is female intuition or something, but she looks uneasy when I come into the parlour—and not just because I catch my foot on the flex and bring down the standard lamp.

“I don’t know how to say this,” I mumble, deciding to come straight out with it, “but there was a bit of trouble during the procession today—you may have heard about it—and I handed in my resignation. That means I—that I—well, I will have to—I can’t stay here and it’s probably better if I go as soon as possible.”

“How soon?” Her voice seems remarkably composed.

“Well, if I paid you this week’s rent in lieu of notice, I was wondering if I might go immediately. Tonight, in fact.”

I hold my breath but she does not turn a hair.

“Yes, that seems quite fair, dear. In fact, it works out very well. I don’t mean your spot of bother, of course. No, I mean your vacating your room. My friend Mr. Greig, who you’ve heard me talk about, was saying he would like to sample a little sea air and it would be very useful having your room back again.”

My face must mirror my feelings pretty accurately because she stretches out a hand and squeezes my arm.

“Of course, I’ll be very sorry to see you go, dear. But really, to be honest, it would be better for me if you left. I want to get married again and having you in the house doesn’t help at all. It was very nice, what happened, but it couldn’t go on, could it?”

She is right, but the cool way she puts it leaves me a bit lost for words.

“You pack your things,” she says firmly, “and I’ll make us a nice tea to have before you go.”

I go upstairs feeling choked. I don’t want Mr. Greig sleeping in my bed or kicking his slippers off under Mrs. B.’s. I wish, too, I had got across Mrs. B. when I first had the chance. I hardly feel I have had my money’s worth.

Carefully draped across a chair, my Harlequin costume reminds me of the evening I will be missing. I have tried it on half a dozen times and would be the last person to deny that I look pretty magnetic in it. It is skintight so you get the total broad shoulders narrowing down to kitten hips bit, and with the mask to add an air of enticing mystery I would have been half-way to scoring before I opened my mouth.

The mask! A thought coincides with my discovery of the two quid admission ticket I had meant to give to Garth to flog. If I do look in for a couple of hours nobody need recognise me and it seems a shame to chuck a couple of oncers down the drain—not to mention the cost of hiring the costume.

That settles it. I throw my things in a case and spend fifteen minutes easing myself into my suit of lights. Snazzy is too small a word for it and my spirits perk up a bit. One thing I will say for myself: I may be a bit moody, but I am never down in the dumps for long.

Looking as good as I do, it is not surprising that I should draw a few admiring words from Mrs. B. and on the strength of this and with an attack of the ‘Auld Lang Synes’ surging through me I suggest that a bit of the other would be a nice way of saying goodbye—I also have two hours to kill before the carnival ball starts at nine o’clock and I don’t fancy wandering around the streets of Cromingham until then dressed in a style that might easily be misinterpreted by the bloody-minded locals. Unfortunately, Mrs. B. is not of a mood to take advantage of my suggestions and after a while I wish I had never raised the subject—about the time she hits me over the head with a frying-pan, in fact. This incident does at least rob our goodbyes of any lingering embarrassment and I find myself on the doorstep with my suitcase quivering beside me and her last words coming at me through the letterbox: “Don’t come back. If you’ve left anything, I’ll drop it in at the driving school.” I turn round and all the lace curtains in the street drop back into place.

What am I going to do now? Luckily it is a fine evening by local standards, so I can walk more or less upright to the bus stop and wait for half an hour for something to take me to the station. By the time it comes, there are four small urchins and a dog watching silently as if they expect a spacecraft to arrive for me instead of a bus.

“Gonk gannet gub gub,” I say to them humouringly as I climb aboard.

“Git you back to Lunnon, you girt nancy boy,” they shout. The passengers do not receive me any more warmly, but at least they keep their mouths shut, and, having overcome the embarrassment of opening my suitcase to delve for the bus fare, I gratefully slip through the station entrance. There is a train in half an hour, which I am tempted to catch, but my native meanness and the considerable amount of liquor swilling about in my veins persuades me to stick it out until eleven forty-five, when the next and last train of the night goes. I commandeer the waiting-room and by putting a jacket and trousers over my costume manage to look less like a refugee from a Martini advertisement. In this condition I nip across the road to the Railway Hotel and sink a few swift pints until darkness coincides with the arrival of the nine-fifteen. Back to the station and I strip for action, leave my case with a suspicious porter and ring for a taxi.

The driver turns out to be the one who picked me up when I first arrived and is quick to remind me what a good memory he has.

“Hello, hello,” he says, “if it isn’t Anthony Armstrong-Jones come up for the festivities. No prizes for where you want to go to, squire.”

I smile grimly and we don’t speak again until I amaze him with the smallness of my tip at the golf club.

“Are you sure you can afford this?” he says sarcastically.

“Now you come to mention it,” I say, removing my tanner from his outspread palm, “no.”

He makes a few unpleasant remarks about my costume not being right for Shylock, but I ignore him and, pulling my mask over my eyes, I stride up the flight of steps in front of the club. A Dresden Shepherdess tears my ticket in half and I go through to mingle with the cream of Cromingham Society. A champagne buffet is included in the price of a ticket and if you look up ‘buffet’ in a dictionary you will see how accurately it is described: ‘knock, hurt, contend with’ it says, and if you want any champagne that is just what you have to do. Half Cromingham seems to be waging war over a pile of sausage rolls and cress sandwiches with a glass of lukewarm pomagne for the tenacious winners. I can resist this, and retire to the bar to case the joint. Minto and Cronk seem to have tables at opposite ends of the dance floor, which shows good planning on somebody’s part, and I can see Mrs. Dent dressed up as a pantomime cat, sitting by herself on a table with a Python’s Pesticides pennant on it. Normally I would not start moving in too early, but it is now ten o’clock and I have no time to waste. Pausing only to take a last, longing look at myself in the bar mirror, I skim over to Mrs. D.’s side.

“Would you care to dance?” I say in my best upper-crust accent. Mrs. D. cranes forward as if she has difficulty hearing me and it occurs to me that she might have had a few herself. Couldn’t be better.

“Do I know you?” she begins; then she waves her hand in a self-dismissing gesture and starts to get up. “Doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t. I’m not sitting here by myself any longer. Lead me to the floor.”

We weave our way unsteadily through the tables and I am just beginning to wonder whether the band are supposed to be playing a waltz or sounding the retreat when Mrs. D. grips my arm.

“Let’s go to the discotheque,” she says. “The sight of my husband chatting up the boss’s wife is more than my stomach can stand.”

I follow her glance and there is a balding thirty-five-year-old dancing elaborately with Mrs. Carstairs who has on her best ‘be nice to the natives’ expression. As we watch, Mr. D. starts patting his bonce with his breast pocket handkerchief and it is obvious that a combination of heat and nerves is bringing him out in a muck sweat. He looks less competition than Quasimodo with lockjaw, and this, coupled with the fact that Garth is tied up with Mrs. Cronk, makes me daring.

“Come on,” I say passionately. “I want to find somewhere where I can hold you very tight in my arms.”

I take her by the hand and lead her into the welcome darkness of the discotheque, which is full of twitchers and gropers, either doing the total dance bit or touching up each other’s wives. I fall very speedily into the second category and start moulding Mrs. D. to my torso like I am using her to take a plaster cast of my body.

“Hey,” she pants, “who are you? There’s something about you that’s familiar—apart from what you’re doing with your hands.”

“I took your knickers off once,” I say, “and I’d like to do it again. Right now!”

“Can’t you give me any more help than that?” she says.

I lean forward and whisper into her ear what I did when her knickers were off.

“Oh, I know who you are,” she says. “Colin Kelly.”

“No!”

“David McMillan? Peter Por—”

“Look! Let’s forget it,” I yelp. I mean, you can take just so much, can’t you?

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m a little bit pickled tonight, but—” she struggles close to me, “I’m certain whoever you were it was very nice. You’ve got a lovely body.”

“Just what I was going to say about you, darling,” I murmur, deciding to forgive her, “and very soft lips.” I am prepared to gamble that they don’t feel like emery paper and I am right.

“You might have worn a dress,” I grumble. “I want to put my hand up your skirt.”

“This takes off very easily.”

“But where?”

“That’s up to you.”

I seem to remember that we have been through all this before. But that time I was sober. Tonight I am drunk. And when I am drunk and there is a chance of getting my end away, I’d dive through a plate glass window for it.

“I’ve got a car outside,” I lie.

“I don’t like it in cars.”

“This is a big car.”

“Well, I don’t know—”

“Come on!” I kiss her passionately on the mouth, almost loosening one of my front teeth in the process. “I’ll see you round the corner from the front entrance.” I lead her back to the table before she can argue with me, and nod politely at Mr. D., who is leaning forward earnestly in case Mrs. Carstairs wants to stub a fag out in his ear. Mr. C.’s eyes flicker over me for a second, but I don’t think he remembers where we last met. Mrs. C. is dancing with somebody else. I thank Mrs. D. and make tracks for the side entrance which leads to the car park.

I need a pee but there is no time.

Outside the night air makes me giddy but I take a few deep breaths and start checking out the cars. There is a bloody great Vauxhall station wagon, an Alvis and—Minto’s Rolls. I wonder! It would give me a lot of satisfaction to have it away in the back of a Rolls—especially Minto’s. I might even forget to tidy up afterwards. I have no sooner tried the back door and found it open than I see Mrs. D. hovering in the entrance. I kiss her quickly and draw her after me into the shadows.

“This isn’t yours,” she hisses when she see the Rolls. “This is Major Minto’s. Supposing he comes back suddenly?”

“He won’t,” I comfort her. “He’s drawing the raffle at midnight.” This, of course, is a complete lie but it shows you how fast on my feet I can be. ‘Lea the flea’ they call me. I kiss her again and pull her into the car. The door shuts on us with a click as gentle as the snapping of a sparrow’s wishbone.

“Roomy, isn’t it?” I murmur, but Mrs. D. was never one to waste precious moments on conversation. She starts kissing me like she is trying to make my mouth fray at the edges and her fingers tie knots in the hair at the nape of my neck. It is no problem finding the zip of her cat-suit and as it plunges down to the small of her back she wriggles forward so that I can feel that she is not wearing a bra. I run my finger over her body and she sinks down until she is lying across the length of the back seat. I peel off her suit, which for some bloody stupid reason reminds me of the Babygro my sister Rosie’s kid used to wear, and see she is naked except for a pair of panties. I take a firm grip on these and as our mouths meet again I pull them down inch by inch over her straining body. She must be near coming now because her legs are rigid and trembling, and I’m not exactly thinking about Chelsea Reserves’ chances in the London Combination Cup either.

“Lick me,” she moans. “Please lick me.”

Well, you don’t like to disappoint people, do you? And, as I’ve said before, get a few beers inside me and I make your average eyetie seem like Sir Alec Douglas Home with a heavy cold. I am kneeling on the thick pile carpet and just about to make her a very happy lady when I am reminded again of my body’s urgent need for a piss. Better to go now, I think, for in a few minutes it’s going to be impossible. So, detaching myself with difficulty from Mrs. D.’s imploring fingers, I tell her where I am going and nip over to the nearest wall.

I don’t know how many of you have experience of pissing with a hard on but it is bloody difficult. With my hampton sticking up in the air like a level-crossing pole, I nearly pee up my own nostril and end up scoring a direct hit on the Vent-Axia unit. I have just tucked everything away and am about to return to the quivering Mrs. D. when somebody comes round the corner and I shrink back into the shadows. It is, in fact, two people, and to my amazement I recognise Dawn and Tony Sharp, the star-crossed lovers of the Shermer Sevens.

“Oh, God, I want you,” breathes Sharp, sounding like a poor imitation of me a few minutes earlier. “I’ve got to have you.”

They clinch enthusiastically and for a few moments I think they are going to have it away there and then. Before they can prove me right, there is the sound of somebody else approaching and Gruntscomb of the Echo looms into the light.

“Oh, excuse me,” he mumbles, “not trying to be a Peeping Tom. Oh, it’s you, Mr. Sharp. Good evening. Sorry about your accident today, but it didn’t half make a lovely picture, didn’t it? Did you see it in tonight’s Echo? I should think your friend Cronk must have felt like shutting up shop immediately. And, you know—” he drops his voice conspiratorially, “—there’s better to follow. We’ve got an interview with the man, Roper, who was driving the Morris, and he has practically admitted that it was the pressure that he was subjected to when he was with the E.C.D.S. that made him crack up. That’s not going to do them any good, is it? We’re printing his story tomorrow and we can get a very good slant on it, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re doing a grand job,” says Sharp hurriedly, obviously worried because Dawn had been listening. “Enjoy yourself—we’ll be in touch.”

“What was all that about?” says Dawn when Gruntscomb has padded away. “You’ve really got it in for poor old Cronky, haven’t you?”

She doesn’t seem that worried and when Sharp starts mauling her again she soon forgets all about it.

“What are we going to do?” she pants, when they come up for air.

“Have you ever made love in a Rolls Royce?” says Sharp, “It’s unforgettable.”

Oh no!!! I think.

“What do you mean?” says Dawn beginning to sound excited.

“I drove Minto here tonight and I’ve still got the keys. Come on, I love screwing you in cars.”

“You’ve only done it once.”

“That was enough to know I liked it.”

“Where’s the car?”

“Over there.”

“It’s a bit near the golf club, isn’t it?”

“You didn’t mind last time.”

“I didn’t have any alternative last time. You practically raped me.”

“You didn’t mind that, either.”

“I don’t want to do it here, that’s final! Come on—” she squeezes his arm enticingly—”take me for a spin, and then we’ll make love.” Sharp thinks about it and I pray that he is going to say no but of course his twisted, cock-happy little mind reacts in exactly the same way that mine would have done.

“O.K.” he says. “A quick spin along that road that goes out to the fourteenth. We can’t be away too long. Valerie will start getting neurotic.”

And as I hold my breath, they walk towards the Rolls and climb into the front seat. Sad as it is from my point of view, I can’t help feeling a bit amused. The naked Mrs. D. squatting in the back, no doubt hearing voices and wondering what the hell has happened to me. Sharp and his lady love purring off into the countryside, little knowing what awaits them when they eventually fumble towards the rear seat. I wish I could have a photograph of it all. It would be almost enough to make up for my disappointment.

Wait a minute. Photograph! A scheme of monstrous brilliance suddenly occurs to me. Majors are always trying to drop the E.C.D.S. in the brown stuff. Why shouldn’t they have a taste of their own medicine?

I race inside and as luck would have it bump straight into Gruntscomb.

“Quick,” I shout, “where’s a telephone? I’ve just seen a couple of roughs driving off in Major Minto’s Rolls.”

“Really!” Gruntscomb swallows it hook, line and sinker. “which way did they go?”

“That road that goes out towards the links. They’re probably taking a shortcut to Aylsham.”

The last sentence is spoken to myself for Gruntscomb is off to get the biggest scoop of his life. I dial 999 and wait to be put through to the police.

“Hello. Good evening. I’d like to report the theft of a car. A Rolls Royce. I saw it being driven away from Cromingham Golf Club on the links road. About five minutes ago—yes, I’m quite sure. Major Minto … Look officer, I know this sounds stupid, but I was certain I saw a naked girl on the back seat. I thought it might be some of those hippies going to have an orgy. It would be like them to steal the best car they could get their hands on, wouldn’t it? Yes, I’ll be here. My name’s Roger Carpenter, didn’t I tell you? I am sorry.”

I ring off and pass the good news on to the night desks of the Sun, Express and Mirror and by the time I have finished the Rolls was loaded to the roof with naked hippies, many of them bearing a striking resemblance to members of the royal family.

It would be nice to do more but it is now eleven fifteen and I barely have time to catch my train. A shame I won’t be able to see the meeting between Sharp, Mrs. D., Dawn, Gruntscomb and the police, but luckily I have a vivid imagination and it will give me something to think about on the way to London.

I dig out my last 2p bit and start dialling for a taxi.

THE END

Confessions from a Holiday Camp
BY TIMOTHY LEA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ONE

Mum was glad to see me when I got back from Cromingham. Just as she had been when I got back from the nick. A bit worried too – just as she had been when I got back from the nick.

“Everything alright at the Driving School?” she says casually, as I fold my mits round a cup of cha, made as only my Mum can make one – diabolically.

“Fine, ma,” I say, equally casually, trying not to let my expression reveal the death struggle of my shrivelling taste buds. “I’ve decided it’s time I moved on to something else, though.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, ma. It was good experience but I feel like a change and Cromingham was a bit dull.”

“I thought you’d settled in.”

“Yes ma, but—”

“I do wish you would find something a bit permanent. Your father and I get quite worried about you sometimes. You’ll never get married at this rate.”

Marvellous, isn’t it? Another step on the way to National Health gnashers and my old age pension. Get married, settle down, have children, drop dead.

“I don’t particularly want to get married, Mum.”

“Well, you want a decent job, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Well then.”

“Yes, Mum.”

There is no point in telling her about how my career as a driving instructor ended: agro, needle, nudity. You want to protect your old Mum from things like that, don’t you? I pick up the paper and glance at the headlines, evincing less interest than Germaine Greer being shown round a brassiere factory. Apparently the police have found two half-naked birds and a bloke in a stolen Rolls Royce on Cromingham Golf Course. Funny that.

I toss the paper aside and thankfully gulp down the last of the tea. By the cringe, there are enough dregs at the bottom of the cup to tell the fortunes of Lana Turner’s bridesmaids.

“Well, whatever you do,” grinds on Mum, “I wish you’d get a steady job. Look how well Sidney has done.”

Odious Sid is my poxy brother-in-law and always dragged in to conversations of this type as a symbol of what hard work and a bit of nous can do for you. In fact Sid is a bit stronger on the latter than the former, though you can’t point the finger at him for that – two is nearer the mark with Sid. He and I were partners in a window cleaning business until he got a bit too close to a girl I was thinking of getting spliced to. In fact “a bit too close” is putting it mildly. He was so close he was touching her in about half a dozen places. In her dad’s garden shed, too. I still get a red flush every time I think about it. Mum and Rosie, she is my sister, don’t know about that little incident, though I keep the threat of revelation dangling over Sid’s nut like the sword of Dan O’Kleas.

“How is Charlie Clore, then?” I say trying not to sound too bitter.

“Don’t be bitter, dear,” says Mum. “Just because Sidney has taken his chances—”

I start choking at this point and it’s not just because Mum’s omelettes taste like they have been made with Great Auks’ eggs.

“Don’t gulp your food, dear,” continues Mum, “I was always telling you as a child. Now where was I? Oh, yes. Sidney. Do you know what he is doing now?”

“Six years in The Scrubs?”

“He’s working for Funfrall Enterprises.”

She makes it sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury so I am obviously supposed to be impressed.

“Oh yeah. And what’s that?” In fact, I can vaguely remember having heard of it but I don’t want to let on to Mum.

“You know! They own all those Dance Halls and Holiday Camps and Health Centres and things. You’ve seen the Miss Globe Contest on the tele?”

I have too. Like an explosion in a dumpling factory with dialogue by Andy Pandy.

“He’s taken over from Michael Aspel, has he?”

“No, no. He’s nothing to do with beauty contests—”

“You can say that again.”

“—he’s tied up with the holiday camps. Promotions Manager or something. He’s doing terribly well.”

I can imagine it, too. Jammy bastard. Well we all know what goes on at holiday camps, don’t we? Just Sidney’s cup of tea. Timmy’s too!

Maybe Mum is a mind-reader.

“Perhaps he could help you find a job, dear?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so, Mum,” I say, turning down the idea on principle. “I think it’s about time I found something for myself. How are Rosie and the kid?”

I soon learn that Rosie and little nephew Jason are full of beans and now living in their own house in tasty Streatham. Sidney’s cup must be over-running right down to his Y-fronts. After a few more painful details of his new car and their holiday in Majorca I am forced to escape by switching the conversation to the unsavoury subject of Dad. I learn that the man who contracted out of the rat race because the other rats objected is still filling in some of his waking hours down at the Lost Property Office. Plentiful evidence of this fact is provided by a quick butchers round the walls of the ancestral home of the Leas. Dad is what you might call a collector. What you might also call a grade one tea leaf. Moose heads, stuffed fish, millions of umbrellas, enough binoculars to supply the Royal Box at Ascot. All saved from the incinerators – so he says. I reckon that most of the stuff was left on public transport because it wouldn’t fit into the dustbin.

The pride of Dad’s collection can be discovered in the hallstand underneath the telephone directories – we don’t have a telephone but Dad is prepared for this eventuality. Here can be found all the porn that Dad and his mates down at the L.P.O. know will never be claimed. The tattered, drool-sodden fixes of a brigade of plastic-macked sexual fantasists: “Kinky Kats on the Rampage”, “Corporal Ecstasy”, “Leatherworkers’ Handbook”, full of dead-eyed girls with tits like policemen’s helmets, who look as if they should know better – and have certainly known worse.

Not that I want to sound as if I’m always writing to Malcolm Muggeridge about it. I have never been able to resist a quick flick through Dad’s library and it’s to this that I retire when Mum has cleared away the breakfast things and toddled off to the launderette.

I am not disappointed. There, beneath the 1968 A–D nestles “Wife-swapping, Danish Style” with a cover that leaves nothing to the imagination, not even my particularly fevered article. The inside is even worse, or better, according to your personal tastes, and I am beginning to crowd my jeans when there is a sharp rat-tat on the front door. Cursing under my breath, because Sven and Brigitta and Inga and Horst are just beginning to forget about the open sandwiches. I stuff the magazine under a cushion and do a ‘mum through the lace curtains’.

Standing on the front door step is a pneumatic brunette of about twenty-five, carrying a map board and chewing the end of a pencil as she examines our door-knocker. She is not at all bad and in my present keyed-up condition could be a lot worse. Pausing only to make sure that my eye teeth are not showing, I speed to the front door and hurl it open.

“Good morning,” says my visitor with practised cheeriness. I note that her eyes are making a lightning tour of my person and allow myself a similar liberty with her own shapely frame.

“Good morning,” I say.

“I am doing some research for a company called Baspar Services and I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about shoes.”

“Shoes?”

“Shoes. It won’t take very long.”

Take as long as you like, darling, I think to myself, wincing at the discomfort her too-tight sweater must be causing her tempting tits.

“Come inside, we don’t want to stand out here on the doorstep.”

The girl looks a little doubtful.

“Is your wife at home? I’ve got some questions for her, too.”

This is obviously a ploy used to discourage potential rapists. Funny how my expression always gives me away.

“Oh, I’m not married,” I say jokily as if the whole idea was too funny for words, “but my mother is doing the washing.”

I don’t say where, so she trips over the threshold and I steer her on to the settee in the front room. This puts her at a disadvantage because generations of Leas watching tele, or grappling before it during power cuts, has forced the springs down to floor level. One either sinks without trace or perches on the edge. My guest starts off by doing the former and then struggles uncomfortably into an upright position revealing a good deal of shapely leg which I pretend not to see. In reality, I am finding it difficult to control myself because the adventures of my Danish friends are still firmly rooted in my mind.

“Well, let’s get down to business,” say Miss Shapely-Thighs, briskly. “First of all, how many pairs of shoes do you have?”

She chews the end of her pencil and I could do without that for a start.

“Sixty-nine,” and her eyebrows shoot up.

“I mean six—er—yes. I think it’s six. Sorry, I don’t know why I said that.” I don’t either. I have this terrible habit of saying what I am thinking, sometimes. Very embarrassing.

“Six,” she repeats and makes a tick on her questionnaire. “When did you last buy a pair?”

Talking of pairs, I think that’s a lovely set of knockers you’ve got there. I wouldn’t mind doing a few press-ups on top of that lot.

“About a month ago,” I say.

“Where did you buy them?”

“At the shoe shop. I can’t remember the name. Maybe it’s on them. I’m wearing them, you see.”

We smile at each other as if it’s all terribly funny really and I wrench one of my casuals off and gaze hopefully into its interior. Nothing, except a shiny brown surface and a lived-in smell I would not try to sell to Helena Rubinstein. I put it on hurriedly.

“I think it was that one down by Woolworths. It was in the High Street, anyway.”

“Can you remember how much they cost?”

“About a fiver I think. Shoes are diabolically expensive these days, aren’t they?”

I throw that in because it is about time I started showing a bit of initiative. Horst and Inga would have had each other’s knickers off by now on half the wordpower.

“Terrible,” says the bird, “and it’s not as if they’re made to last.” She flexes her calf muscles and indicates some disintegrating stitchwork before realising that I am casing her joints and snapping back to being Miss Efficiency.

“Do you have any wet-look shoes?”

“Three pairs.”

“What colours?”

“Two black, one brown.”

“How do you clean them?”

“I breathe on them,” I say, fluttering my lips at her. “And then I rub them over with a duster.”

“Have you ever used an aerosol?”

“Only my sister’s hairspray.”

“On your shoes?”

“No. I was trying to stick Mum’s Green Shield stamps in with them. They got left out in the rain and all the glue came off.”

There doesn’t seem to be a column on her questionnaire for that so she gives a little sigh and gets on with it.

“I meant an aerosol shoe spray,” she says. “They’re specially made for wet-look shoes.”

“They cost a few bob, don’t they?” I say suspiciously.

“How much do you think?” She sounds all eager and her pencil is poised expectantly.

“Oh, about five bob, twenty five p, forty seven rupees, or whatever it is, these days.”

“What is the most you would be prepared to pay for an aerosol shoe-spray?”

“I’m quite happy with breathing on them like I do at the moment.”

“But supposing you wanted to buy an aerosol.”

“But I don’t.”

Not vintage Noel Coward, is it? And certainly not getting me any nearer a dramatisation of “Wife-swapping, Danish Style”. It’s a shame really because she’s a lovely bird, even if she does seem married to her craft.

“You must get a few passes made at you on a job like this,” I say chattily. “Have you been doing it for long?”

“Six months,” she says. “Now try and imagine that you do want to buy an aerosol. 20p? 25p? 50p?”

She does go on, doesn’t she?

“Well, it’s difficult, isn’t it?” I say. “Do you fancy a cup of tea or something? It must get a bit knackering wandering about the streets all day.”

“Thank you, no,” she says. “Look—” and she dives into a large satchel-type handbag she is carrying, “—this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

She produces three aerosol canisters and lays them on the settee. One pink, one black, one green.

“Oh yes,” I say, trying to keep my enthusiasm within bounds. Actually I am quite glad that we have found something to play with. I always reckon that it is easier to get to grips with a bird if you have something to keep your hands occupied. Start with your stamp collection and you will soon be showing her your tool set is one of my golden mottoes.

“How does it work?” I say, wrapping my mits round one of the canisters. “Oh dear—”. This latter remark is prompted by the fact that I have depressed the plunger and ejected a large blob of frothy, white liquid over my visitor’s skirt. If standing in the dock of the Old Bailey I would probably say it was an accident.

Faced with this emergency I move swiftly and muttering profuse apologies ram my hand up Miss Shapley-Thighs’ skirt. This manoeuvre, though liable to misinterpretation, is of course intended to prevent the gunge soaking through to the tights whilst also affording me a firm and uncontroversial surface on which to perform mopping up operations.

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” squeals my visitor.

“I’m trying to stop your skirt getting stained,” I bleat. “You’d better take it off.”

“Take it off?!”

“Yes. I’ll get some water from the kitchen. I’m terribly sorry. I’ll buy you a new one if it’s ruined.” This show of efficient concern is obviously reassuring because when I return with a beaker of warm water she is standing behind the sofa with her skirt over her arm. She has fantastic legs that go straight up to her armpits and her arse would trigger off a wop’s pinching fingers like a burglar alarm. My hands are shaking as I put down the beaker and it is all I can do to control myself.

“You have a marvellous figure,” I tell her breathlessly. “I hope you don’t mind me saying that?” No woman ever has and I can see that my boyish enthusiasm is not entirely repulsive to her.

“Thank you,” she says permitting herself a slight smile. “I bet you say that to all the girls you squirt aerosols over.”

She bends forward and starts rubbing away at her skirt and again I have to put a hammer lock on my impulses.

“Let’s have a drink while you’re doing that,” I say. “What do you fancy? Gin, whisky, sherry?”

In fact, I know the sideboard contains a half-bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine and an empty Chianti bottle Rosie was going to make a lamp out of seven years ago, but I want this to come as a complete surprise.

“No thanks,” she says. “I’ve finished. Now, where can I put it to dry?”

I whip the skirt down to the kitchen and drape it over the stove and when I get back the lovely girl is curled up in an armchair with her questionnaire over her thatch patch.

“Back to the questions is it?” I observe. “My, but you take your work seriously, don’t you?”

“It’s my first job,” she says. “OH!”

I follow her eyes and see that one of the poxy aerosols has started leaking all over the settee. Mum will half kill me and for the first time since I peeped through the lace curtains, all thoughts of bayonet practice are banished from my mind. Snatching up the damp rag I dive onto my hands and knees and start rubbing away like a maniac. So wrapped up in my task am I that I do not immediately notice that Miss Research is doing her bit beside me. It is only when I accidentally bounce against her boobs that it occurs to me that Mum doing her nut is not the only thing I could be up against. The damp patch is half across the sofa, the questionnaires are strewn all over the floor and the aerosols have rolled under the sideboard.

“It’s not our lucky day, is it?” I say into her mouth which is a couple of inches from mine. I smile and she smiles and her eyes make a quick trip round the features that litter my face.

“Um,” I murmur, which is a handy excuse for conversation at moments like this. “Let’s forget it.” I slip my lips into forward gear and accelerate swiftly onto her mouth. This feature is so meltingly tender that on impact my toes glow like brake lights and I feel small ripples of excitement breaking up and darting away down the long corridors of my body like kids coming out of class. I slip my hands up underneath her blouse and gently mould her back until my fingers are flicking to and fro across the catch of her bra. Her mouth is still against mine and showing no indications of finding the position unpleasant so I carefully release the catch and feel her breasts swell forward gratefully. To my surprise, she begins to tug the hair at the back of my neck and squirm against the thick bars of muscle which decorate my chest. By a happy accident a pillow drops to the floor and it is down on to this that I gently press her, running my right hand over the smooth sheen of her tights until I can feel her minge fringe stirring beneath my fingers like the fur of an animal. Her lips are half parted and her eyes closed. Glancing away from them I see that “Wife-Swapping – Danish Style” has suddenly emerged from its hiding place behind the cushion and that Inga and Horst are revealed in a manner calculated to win a warm glint of approval from any manufacturer of chocolate bars. This glimpse of our Scandinavian chums at play is sufficient to give the market garden down the front of my jeans a decidedly tropical flavour and I start peeling her tights off like there is an Olympic Gold Medal for it. It is at moments like this that I wish I could press a release mechanism and feel my jeans zooming into space like ejected pilots.

She pulls me down towards her and we wrestle with each other’s clothing whilst trading mouths and gasping and gurgling like we are drowning in lust and going down for the last time. She helps tug my jeans over my heels and we ruckle against each other so that I can feel the buttons of her open blouse biting into my chest. By now you could paint my old man green and call it a cucumber and her greedy little fingers have hardly settled on it before I am checking on the best place to tuck it away. Luckily I am no stranger to the area and soon find the ideal spot. Warm like a pot of cha brewing under a silk cosy it is, and I have to bite my lips and think of hob-nailed boots to control myself.

“Go on! Go on!” she bleats and it is going to take a battalion of Gurkhas to stop me. Rising up in the litter of questionnaires and pausing only to tuck Inga and Horst discreetly down the side of the settee, I launch myself into her like a nuclear sub gliding down a narrow slipway. Her hands close around my backside like she is frightened it might suddenly drop off and we start beating out the theme from Ravel’s Bolero in a way that would bring tears to the composer’s eyes. Powerful stuff it is, too, and once into our stride we are not easily disturbed.

This is something I realise when I hear Mum’s voice from the hall.

“I can smell burning,” she says.

Now we have been going at it a bit – but burning? I don’t think so. Not that I would be prepared to argue with her because at that moment I am riding a tidal wave of passion and would not be diverted from my purpose if the Dagenham Girl Pipers started marching around the room. My friend obviously feels the same because she is carving finger holds in my shoulder blades and making a noise like a donkey with hiccups. A few mighty thrusts and the deed is done with a mutual shriek of ecstasy that must rupture eardrums as far away as Balham High Road.

Mum certainly hears it because I look up to see her peering down on us with a face turning the colour of a baboon’s bum. As is always the case with me, I now begin to wonder what I was getting so worked up about and my passion evaporates like spit on a stove-top. Not so with Mum.

“Timmy!” she screams. “Oh no! How could you? It’s horrible! Oh no! Oh no! no! no!” I have never known her behave like this before and it is really quite disturbing. We uncouple and I scramble to my feet just in time to give Mrs. Wagstaff a glimpse of the full frontals which obviously takes her back a bit – about forty years I should think. Mrs. Wagstaff is one of Mum’s friends and the biggest gossip and ratbag in the neighbourhood. The last person Mum would have chosen to witness our little domestic upheaval. She is carrying my friend’s skirt which is soaking wet – what is left of it, that is. A quick glance at the charred remains convince me that it was a bad idea to drape it over the oven to dry.

‘Ooh!!” says Mrs. Wagstaff. “OOoooh!”

“My skirt!!” squeals Miss Aerosol. “It’s ruined; ruined!!”

“How could you do this to me?” howls Mum. “How could you?!! On the sitting room carpet as well.”

I don’t really see what that has to do with it but I don’t argue the point. After all, one doesn’t want to upset one’s own mother too much, does one?

CHAPTER TWO

It was as a direct result of this little incident that I found myself pacing up and down in the reception of Funfrall Enterprises a few days later. Mum has been decidedly stroppy about my little flirtation on the hearth rug and has passed the ill tidings on to Dad who has reacted in characteristic fashion and done his nut. Like all dyed in the wool dirty old men, Dad has a deep-rooted objection to anyone else but himself getting their end away, and is very quick to come an attack of the total outrage.

It is perhaps a trifle unfortunate that he discovered me breaking down racial barriers with one, Matilda NGobla, on that self-same rug a few months before. She was one of our next door neighbours and never a favourite with my parents who are so bigoted they drape a blanket over the tele during the Black and White Minstrel Show. Anyway it has now got to the stage where Mum and Dad start going over the seat covers with a vacuum cleaner before they sit down and I have clearly got to head for the wide open spaces again.

I don’t fancy volunteering to become callus fodder down at the Labour Exchange so, bearing in mind what Mum has said about Sidney wringing gravy out of his turn-ups, I pad round to get the gen from sister Rosie. I am fortunate enough to find her between the slimming salon and the hairdresser’s and a glance round the eye-level grills and the louvred cupboard tells me that Mum has not exaggerated. Sidney must be on to a good thing. Rosie fills in the plot by telling me how Sidney sold the window cleaning business for a ridiculous sum of money and moved into Funfrall on the strength of a contact – Sidney has contacts like dogs have fleas. It is painful to listen to and I am quick to down my cup of Blend 37 and leave Rosie to wrestle with her Boeuf Strogonoff.

The reception area of Funfrall Enterprises is like an ice rink which may have something to do with the personality of the receptionist who would turn a cupboard into a refrigerator by sitting in it. She is like one of those frigid bints you see photographed in opticians’ windows, and watches me as if she reckons I am going to start nicking the magazines. With a choice of “The Director” or “The Investors’ Chronicle” she must be joking. Her makeup looks as if it has been put on with a spray gun and it can hardly withstand the strain of her telling me that Mr. Noggett’s secretary will be waiting for me by the lift on the fifth floor.

This girl is easy to recognise because she is breathing heavily and there is a large red flush on one side of her neck. I look at this pointedly and watch her tucking in her blouse as I follow her tight little arse down the corridor. It looks as if Sidney hasn’t changed much.

The man himself is staring out of the window with his back to me when I come into his office and I notice that on his desk there is a photograph of Rosie clasping the infant Jason to her bosom. There is also a strong whiff of perfume, aftershave lotion and togetherness, but perhaps I am imagining it.

“It suits you,” I say when Sidney turns round.

“What? Oh, you mean this?” He fingers his moustache as if he hadn’t realised what I was talking about. “Rosie nagged me into growing it.”

He is looking well, there is no doubt about it. A bit plumper round the chops but still a fine figure of a conman in his Burton Executive suit. I wonder if I am actually turning green.

“So you’re back again,” he says. “Decided that being a driving instructor wasn’t quite your line?” I nod. “I don’t know how many jobs you expect me to find you before you settle down.” When he says that I wish I hadn’t come, but I keep my mouth shut.

“Still, you’ve got to make allowances for your brother-in-law, haven’t you?”

“That’s what I always say about you.” I mean, there is a limit, isn’t there?

“Saucy, saucy.” Sid wags his finger at me.

“Don’t bite the hand that lays the golden egg.”

The news that Sidney had problems with his Eleven Plus will surprise nobody.

“Look, Sid,” I say. “I don’t want to grovel. Have you got anything that might be up my street?”

‘Well, I don’t know. It all depends.” Sidney fiddles with his cigarette case. “You know I’m Promotions Manager for our holiday camp circuit?”

“Mum said something about it.”

“Yes, well amongst other things, that means I have to recruit our Holiday Hosts.”

“You mean Redcoats?”

Sidney’s face turns white and he darts a glance around the room as if he expects Fu Manchu to leap out of the air conditioning.

“Don’t mention those words,” he hisses. “There is no other Holiday Host than a Funfrall holiday Host. We do not recognise the existence of any competition.”

He sounds as if he is reading the words off a fiery tablet and I don’t mean the kind you take for tummy upsets.

“O.K. O.K.” I say. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I was only asking. What the the chances of me becoming a—a Holiday Host?”

Sidney leans back in his swivel chair and puts his finger tips together in a gesture he must have borrowed from “The Power Game”.

“It depends,” he says. “Do you play any musical instruments?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Can you do conjuring tricks?’

“No.”

“Are you of instructor standard at any popular recreational activities?”

“Well—I—er—”

“I didn’t mean that! What about children. Do you like children?”

“I like little Jason,” I lisp untruthfully.

“That’s why he bursts into tears every time he sees you, I suppose?”

“I think he’s a bit highly strung,” I murmur, thinking that about six feet off the ground would be favourite.

“What about dancing. Tap or Modern Ballroom?”

“You know I don’t go for that kind of thing.” Rape, arson, murder, yes. But ballroom dancing? Do me a favour!

“And women. How do you reckon you would get on with our lady visitors?”

“Birds? Now you’re talking, Sid. All those love-lorn little darlings looking for a bit of slap and tickle. I’ll be in there like a vat of Enos. You know me Sid—I’ll—”

“Forget it!” Sidney bashes his hand down on his paper knife and bites back the pain.

“As a Holiday Host for Funfrall Enterprises, you would be the repository of a sacred trust. Your role is that of a happy holiday guide, counsellor and friend – not some sex-mad raver trying to shove his nasty up every bint on the camp.”

“Beautifully put, Sid,” I observe. “At least, the first part was. Straight out of the text book. But, how can you say it. I mean you of all people! Do you remember Liz and the toolshed. How you—”

“Yes, yes,” he gabbled, rising to his feet, “but things have changed since then. You’ve got to develop a sense of responsibility in this business, I’ve got a position to think of.”

“Quite a few of them, if I remember rightly,” I observe, “and by the way, your flies are undone.”

You don’t often see Sidney lost for words but his mouth gapes open like a serving hatch and he strikes sparks as he yanks his zip up.

“I bet she leaves the cover off her typewriter, too,” I say. For a second I think he is going to belt me but then he relaxes and the veins go underground again.

“Sit down and shut up,” he says. “Go on, sit down. I want to talk to you. Look, Timmy. I’m going to be honest with you.”

When Sidney says that, strong men start checking their wallets. “If it wasn’t for Rosie, I wouldn’t give you a job cleaning up after an elephant act. But I know that if I don’t, she’ll nag the bleeding arse off me.”

“Thank you, Sid,” I say, interpreting the way things are going.

“Don’t thank me. I’m only doing it because I like sleeping at night. And let me make it quite clear. You cock this one up, and Rosie or no Rosie, I’ll flog your balls to a driving range. Are you with me?”

“Yes, Sidney. How do you see me fitting in?”

Sidney snorts and fiddles in one of his drawers. “Don’t tempt me. I’ve got a job here for a Host at Melody Bay. The last one—oh, it doesn’t matter what happened to the last one.”

“Melody Bay? I’ve never heard of it.”

Sidney goes over to a wall map of the British Isles and jabs his finger at it.

“I didn’t know they had seaside up there.”

Sidney jabs again.

“This blue bit is sea and it stretches all round the country. That’s why we’re an island.”

“I knew that, Sidney. It’s just that I never—oh well, it doesn’t matter. What do I have to do?”

“I’ll give you a book about that and they’ll tell you when you get there. It’s what you don’t do that I’m interested in.”

“Yes, Sidney.”

“Lay off the campers. If you’re caught on the job with a guest, you’re out of one. Got it?”

“Yes, Sidney.”

“It isn’t always easy. By gawd it isn’t.”

Sidney gazes ceilingwards like a man who has had to withstand terrible temptations in his time.

“If you must indulge choose a Funfrall employee.”

“Like your secretary, Sid?”

Sidney momentarily closes his eyes as he controls himself.

“There are Funfrall Hostesses, and you are, of course, free to make such arrangements with them out of working hours as you may mutually deem fitting.”

“Where did you learn to speak like that?” I ask, because this is a new dimension to the Sid I used to know.

“We use all the latest training techniques from the States,” says Sid smugly.

“I’ve just come back from a Method in Management course and we pay a lot of attention to organisation and forward planning.”

“How did you get taken on in the first place?”

“I knew somebody.”

I have a lot more questions, like how much bread I am going to get, but suddenly Sidney’s telephone lets out a non-stop high-pitched shriek and a red light on the top starts flashing angrily. Sidney snatches it up like it might explode at any second and the expression on his phizog combines elements of fear and panic.

“Yes, Sir Giles,” he yelps. “Yes, yes—I have—nearly finished —it’s right—” He tears open another drawer and starts throwing files on to the floor until he finds what he wants.

“I was just completing the figures—interview—yes—no—yes—alright. I’ll just look it up.” He presses a buzzer on his desk and his secretary shoots through the door like from a catapult. “Is the Miss Globe file up to date?” he screeches, slamming his mit over the mouthpiece. The girl shakes her head and I am glad to see that the red flush on her neck has subsided, leaving only a couple of toothmarks. “I haven’t had time—I—”

“Oh my God!”

Sidney applies his quivering lips to the mouthpiece again. “Hello, Sir Giles. I’m afraid it’s not here. I lent it to Jefferson to have a look at. Yes. Yes. I know—Yes, yes—I know—I know—Yes, I know, I know.”

“Why doesn’t he come right out with it and say he knows?” I remark to the girl, “I hate people who are always beating around the bush.”

“Bugger,” says Sidney, slamming down the telephone.

“Have you got the up-to-date entry figures? Thank God. Add ’em up quick will you, darling, otherwise I’m up the schittenstrasse mitout ein paddle.” He turns back to me. “Right, I’ve got to go now.”

“So I gather.”

“We’ll send you a form to fill in, but that’s just a formality. Consider yourself hired.”

“Thanks, Sid—”

“Don’t thank me. Just don’t drop me in it, that’s all. I’ve got enough problems at the moment.” All the time he is talking, he is walking me to the door and the next moment I find myself alone in the corridor wondering which way it is to the lift. Poor Sid. I have never known him like this before. Big business has certainly taken its toll of Clapham’s answer to Paul Newman. If this is what Sir Giles and Funfrall Enterprises do for you I am not sure whether it is worth the fringe benefits.

The thought is still playing on my mind three weeks later as I stand at King’s Cross Station weighing up the paperback covers. Honestly, I have never seen so much tit in my life. It is getting so if you see a cover with five naked birds plastered across it, you know it is a reprint of “Little Women”.

I am supposed to be catching the 15.30 to Nowheresville and, as at all such moments of decision, my feet are colder than a penguin’s chuff. What with Sid’s list of ‘dont’s’ and the memory of his face when he was talking to Mr. Big on the telephone I feel like jacking it all in and sliding off home for a cup of tea and a wad. Trouble is that leprosy would be more welcome there than me at the moment. Mum has made it clear that she will never forgive the matted hairs on her fireside rug and Dad keeps throwing out offensive remarks about the stain on the sofa and making a great show of examining every chair in the place before he sits on it. All in all, it is more than a person of my sensitive nature can stand.

Luckily the path of duty is made smoother for me by the sight of a right little darling sweeping past and pausing only to totally ignore me. Sid always reckoned that when a bird really fancied you she went out of her way to treat you like air and I think he had something. I have known chicks who would cross the road when they saw me coming. Anyway, this particular specimen is carrying a suitcase and she gives a lift to my Y-fronts by getting into my train. Pausing only to slam down 30p for an epic entitled “Terrible Hard Says Alice” which I remember Sidney raving about, I slope in after her and wander down the corridor casually glancing into the compartments until I find her. My luck is in, because she has discovered an empty compartment and is just struggling to get her case on to the rack as I appear. Nice curve to her calves there is too as she teeters with the case at shoulder height. Nearly doing myself a nasty injury in my haste, I gallop through the door and prepare to show her how strong and gentlemanly I am.

“Here, let me do that,” I yodel, snatching the case from her fumbling fingers, pausing only to destroy her with the fruits of about half a ton of Colgate and years of hard brushing (children, please note), I toss it lightly on to the rack and follow up with another flash of the gnashers. She has a nice smile too, and we stand there beaming at each other so it might make you feel sick. She is blonde and she has big blue eyes and mouth so generous it looks as if it might give away kisses to strangers. I wouldn’t mind receiving the rest of her as a free gift, either. Smashing tits, as Wordsworth would say, and all the better for nestling under one of those thick woolly sweaters which make you think of stroking animals – or what you thought of stroking in the first place. I wouldn’t complain to my M.P. about her legs, either. Speaking as I find, all in all and putting it bluntly, she is definitely a looker who could well have her way with me if she played her cards right.

“Oh, thank you so much.”

“No trouble.”

We have another little smile and I make sure to sit down in the opposite corner to her. I want to fill up the compartment and I don’t want to crowd her too much to begin with. After all, we have six hours alone together.

But I speak too soon. Just as I am beginning to feel the first little electric thrill of anticipation as she crosses her legs, and the train gives a sympathetic jerk forward, so the compartment door slides open and a strong contender for the Upper Class Twit of the Year award hoves into view. In fact, I do him an injustice. If I was betting money I would put the lot on his nose – all fourteen inches of it.

“Phew, oh I say,” he chortles, “damn close thing, eh what?” He crashes one of his great nobbly brown shoes onto my multi-patterned suedes without giving any sign that the encounter has caused him pain, bashes his pigskin case against my knees and slumps down opposite my bird. I can see that she is no more pleased to see him than I am and this makes his presence doubly choking.

He is wearing a sort of poor man’s Sherlock Holmes uniform with a check cloak and a non-flap Deerstalker that looks as if it ought to be covered in trout flies. In fact, any kind of fly could cover the whole blooming lot of him without feeling it was living above its station.

“Had the devil’s own job finding a cab,” he confided, as if we cared. “There must have been a garden party at Buck House, or something.”

There is nothing there for me so I exchange a commiserating glance with Big Eyes and look out across the corridor to where there is a large expanse of tunnel on which to project my thoughts.

Captain Chinless is obviously desperate for conversation because he slips into full bore.

“My own, fault, I suppose. Didn’t leave enough time, eh, wha-a-at?” He strings out the last word so that it sounds like someone gargling. “But demned if I was going to rush my lunch. Very bad for the indigestion, that’s what nanny used to say. Chew each mouthful sixty five times – or was it fifty five? No, I think it was sixty five – that’s the only sound way to digest it, wha-a-at?”

If he is going to keep on like this to Newcastle I’m going to swing for him and that is the honest truth.

“The family never missed a train when nanny was around. Nanny Pecksmith; that was her name. I can still see her as if it was yesterday. Remarkable woman. Tremendous disciplinarian. Hated television. Used to read Pilgrims Progress to us all the time and the next one, what was that called?”

“Carry on Pilgrims Progress?” I say.

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“Onward Pilgrims Progress?”

“No, no. That’s a hymn.”

“Oh, of course.”

Tragic isn’t it? The world’s most attractive male animal thwarted by this throwback from Berks peerage and I don’t mean Burke’s. The poor Lea-besotted bird in the corner must be heartbroken.

“Tea is now being served,” says the waiter in the pumice stone coloured white jacket.

“Oh, super. Just what the doctor ordered. Would you care to join me for a spot of tea?” says Sherlock Twit.

“I’d love to,” says my bird.

And the consequence is that they have disappeared up the corridor before I can say Fascist Hyena. It is diabolical, isn’t it? The titled twit hasn’t even asked me if I fancy a cup of tea. I try and immerse myself in my book but even the multiple talents of Christopher Wood fail to wrest my uneasy mind from the thought of Sherlock and Big Eyes grappling over the tea table. She is obviously the kind of chubbycheeked scrubber that hands it out to everybody and I did not move fast enough. The thought of losing out to Lord Shagnasty is more than I can stand.

I consider wandering down there after them but I can’t see where it is going to get me, apart from outside one of British Railways’ diabolically expensive excuses for the traditional vicar-ridden and clotty.

One hour I have waited before they stumble through the door and it is obvious that the tea has degenerated into a drop of the hard stuff. My tip for the Upper Class Twit of the Year stakes is registering symptoms of an attack of the galloping knee-trembles and Big-Eyes is totally giggly and droopy.

“Awfully funny,” says Shagnasty raking his eyes across my face is if he expects me to break into spontaneous applause. “Oh, yes, capital wheeze, eh wha-a-at?”

Only the lack of a primed twelve-bore materialising in my hands prevents me from turning his mug into scarlet wallpaper.

I sit there pretending to give my all to “Terrible Hard, Says Alice”, whilst my evil cock-orientated little mind seeks a means of reducing the human equation to a simple one plus one equals minus supertwit.

Fortunately, Fate chooses that moment to play into my hands. The train shoves on the anchors and I notice a flurry of activity in the corridor which denotes the fact that disembarkation is imminent.

Whilst my two companions flop out in their seats making fish-pouting noises to each other, I cast a casual eye over Shagnasty’s baggage. This clearly reveals that my rival is bound for Leeds. This is something of a surprise, but I have a better one in store. The sign on the platform describes a place well short of that fair city and is obscured by a trolley-load of mail bags as we grind to a halt. Quick as a flash I dart onto the platform and take up a position behind the mail bags. “Leeds,” I shout. “Change here for Leeds. We are the champions.” Whether my final utterance gives a gloss of truth to the rabbit I do not know, but my erstwhile rival is soon stumbling out of one door as I get in the other. I lean out of the window and can savour with genuine ecstasy the sight of his drunken mincepies colliding with the sign saying “Crewe” as the train begins to pull away. He reaches back as if trying to stay our progress and then is snatched from my sight. Now it is just me and the crumpet in seat number A7.

She looks up as I come through the door and our eyes meet like they are connected by dotted lines.

“Newcastle?”

“Soon,” I say. “Oh my God!” This latter phrase may seem a bit uncalled for but I can vouch for its effectiveness if delivered with sufficient passion. Basically, what it means is: “I find you so paralysingly beautiful that I am temporarily robbed of the power of speech.” Such utterances are usually very well received by the kind of bird who finds it difficult to string five words into a sentence.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“You’re beautiful, aren’t you?” Few women will deny this.

“Oh,” she squeaks. I snatch up her hand and squeeze it passionately.

“When I first saw you—oh, I don’t know, it seems ridiculous saying this because we’ve only just met but I—I felt this strange thing happening to me. Do you know what I mean?”

How can she, but she nods vigorously. That is good because with the breathless approach you have to come to the boil pretty quickly. It’s either there or a quick case of the

South London Magistrates Court.

“I felt as if I had been carrying a picture of someone in my mind without really ever being able to put a face to it. Then, when I saw you—”

I look meltingly into her big blue eyes and her head tilts forward. This last gesture is equivalent to putting your bonce into the mouth of a lion with hiccups and I am not slow to slam my pinkies against hers. As lips go they are softer than underdone liver and generate enough heat to forge spare parts for half the British motor industry. That they smell of whisky I can forgive, especially since Supertwit paid for it.

“Darling,” I murmur, coming up for air. I glide my hands around the back of her head and stroke her ears with my thumbs. This might be the means of operating her tongue because that object starts bashing the inside of my mouth like its trying to find a way out through the back of my head. The arm rest is in the way so I press that up and pull her back to lay along the seat. I am on my hands and knees.

“What about—?” she murmurs, but she need say no more. I am the soul of discretion at moments like this and I spring lightly to my feet and pull down the blinds on the windows giving on to the corridor. Outside the slag heaps and the lights of small spurned stations are kaleidoscoping into the night but I am here pressing the light-switch towards the position marked “dim” and effortlessly releasing the buckle of my belt. The very motion of the train churns the lust round my pelvis until it takes on the consistency of cream and my nerve-ends tingle. I return to my original position and press up the last of the arm rests so my friend can extend her luscious frame without impediment. Our lips return to the position we have practically copy-righted and I allow my fingers to steal down to the fertile pasture land of her thighs. For a second her hand drops protectively on mine but the pressure is so weak that I know it is no more than a hangover from what she learned in the Brownies and I continue to press forward towards my goal. The attainment of same is made more easy by the fact that Big-Eyes is not wearing tights. Fellow stocking-lovers will rejoice with me in a mellow saunter down memory lane as I describe the electric ecstasy of my fingers tip-toeing over the brink of her stocking tops to be met by an expanse of warm, soft thigh. Restraining the impulse to run amok I fondle the faithful suspender and then, responding to the impulsive arch of her eager body slip my fingers under the tight stretch of her knickers. This is a frustrating exercise because the British are nothing if not excellent knicker-makers and it is difficult for my eager fingers to perform up to the standard they can attain when permitted uninhibited access.

Drawing back with reluctance, I tug down the clinging nylon and reveal the fur muff below. Over the unprotesting knees and I lower my mouth to nibble along the thighs. Now it is up to fursville and as I trip her panties over her ankles, so I perform an acrobatic love dive which jerks her heels against my shoulder blades whilst she makes contented moaning noises.

Her needs seem well catered for but mine as yet are only putting a strain on the front of my brushed denim. Guide, philosopher and friend I may soon have to be, but at this moment, Number One is screaming for action and I am not the man to stand in his way. Without discontinuing my labour of love I ease my jeans down over my heels and hope that a status-conscious ticket collector will not choose this moment to improve his promotion prospects. With the departure of my lower garment it is now possible for me to pay Big-Eyes the ultimate compliment and seizing her around the waist, I draw her forward so that she topples gently onto the floor. Beneath us, all is shudder, shake and quiver and my own body could play accompaniment without the aid of a musical instrument. Greedy sod that I am I now peel back her sweater so that I can see the glowing mounds of her breasts encased in heaving pink. Our mouths hold again and I slip my hands beneath her arched back to release the jack-in-the-box catch. My expectations are not disappointed. Her nipples are like dainty gherkins and when sucked pulsate like wire coils on a pin table machine.

With such a creature it is a problem to know where to go next but J.T. Superstar is now taking over my personality and, almost without being conscious of it, I find myself immersed in Big-Eyes right up to the dolly bags.

At this point I would like to try and step back from the narrative and say to you frankly – Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have never had it away on the floor of the 15.00 to Newcastle ring up British Railways tomorrow. You do not know what you have been a missing of. A B.R. Diesel churning it out at 80 m.p.h. beats any theme music put together by Mantovani, I can tell you.

During the next few hours, I learn that my new friend’s name is Janet and that she is training to be a gym mistress. This latter fact would come as no surprise to any of the flies on the carriage walls. She is a very athletic girl, there is no getting away from it, and after a couple of hours, I do want to get away from it. We have been having it away in every position except with me hanging from the communication cord by my big toe and that is only because I have been too terrified to mention it. Now she has me pinned in a corner and is rubbing her hands underneath my shirt and kissing the side of my neck in a manner that is clearly saying “get on with it”. I would like to oblige but my old man has about as much backbone as a boiled leek and I have to change the subject.

“I think we’re nearly there,” I say, intercepting her hands as they start tripping down to complain about the service. “At least, I am. You’re going to Newcastle, aren’t you?”

To my relief she sighs and reaches out for her knickers.

“No, no. I’m off on holiday.”

“Holiday?”

“Yes. I’m going to Melody Bay.”

“The holiday camp?”

“That’s right. Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Melody Bay as well,” I gulp.

“Ooh, that’s nice. We’ll see a lot more of each other, then.”

Bloody marvellous, isn’t it? After everything Sidney told me about fraternising with the customers, I’ve had it away with one of them before we even get through the camp gates. And she doesn’t look the kind of girl who is going to be satisfied with that little session for the next two weeks. Never mind, I will just have to keep out of her way. We don’t want any scandal threatening my new career before it has even started.

Looking back on the whole thing, I have to laugh at my naivete, I really do.

CHAPTER THREE

Melody Bay holiday camp is situated on the edge of town and surrounded by a high wire fence. This is presumably there to keep people out. The first impression is one of a lot of mock-tudor chalets layed out in orderly lines along paths with names like “Laughter Lane” and “Happiness Row”. From the bus I can see tennis courts and putting greens and a couple of large buildings that look like aircraft hangars (I later find out that they were aircraft hangars before their true potential was realised.) The camp is approached by the coast road and a wide expanse of almost empty beach stretches away opposite the main entrance. This entrance is vaguely reminiscent of those Hollywood studios I have seen pictures of. Gold topped wrought iron gates, a commissionaire type bod, and an inscription carved in the stonework. The difference is that this does not say “Ars gratia artis” but “Let good fellowship be your guide, and Laughter your companion”, Sir Giles Slat, founder of Funfrall Enterprises, who, I imagine, has quite a lot to laugh about. There are also some clinically perfect flowerbeds and a bloke made noticeably ridiculous by the jacket he is wearing. This is all-white, trimmed with black ribbon, and bearing a black ace of spades on the breast pocket. I have no sooner decided that he looks a complete berk than I see another one. This time the white blazer has a red trim and an ace of hearts on the pocket. Immediately, it occurs to me that these men must be Holiday Hosts and that I, too, will have to dress up like a refugee from a game of pontoon. The thought is not a cheering one and it is with heavy heart that I present myself before the commissionaire whose face immediately splits into a smile as false as the teeth delivering it. Janet, I should add, is not with me because I have darted away from her at the bus stop shouting “must get some razor blades, see you later” just as the appropriate vehicle pulls into sight. I have not mentioned to her that I am a Holiday Host, in the forlorn belief that my uniform will either make me unrecognisable or unattainable.

No sooner have I stepped over the threshold than what sounds like a Boer War tannoy delivers the following message of tinny cheer:

“Welcome, welcome, welcome to Melody Bay.

We all are here to please you and serve you in every way.”

Hardly have I recoiled from this than the commissionaire regrinds his gnashers and delivers himself of a few words of welcome.

“May I be the first to wish you a happy holiday and inform you that the reception area is directly across the college lawns. There, our Holiday Hosts will show you to your chalet and explain the programme to you.”

“I am a Holiday Host,” I say, “or at least, I soon will be. Where can I find Mr. Francis?”

The news that I am not a paying customer whips the smile from the doorman’s face like it had been secured with sellotape.

“You’ll find him in his office behind the crazy golf,” he grunts. “It’s past the netball court and the children’s zoo.”

With this description, I cannot go wrong, and shielding my eyes against sight of Janet, who I imagine by now has probably unpacked and is roaming the camp in search of prey, I bring myself to a position in which a quick rat-tat-tat on Mr. Francis’s door requires the co-operation of my outstretched arm.

“Come in,” says a voice right out of Father Christmas’s Grotto and I open the door.

The man behind the desk bounces to his feet and an expression of radiant joy burst across his thin features like sunshine.

“Mr. Francis,” I begin. “My name is Timothy Lea. I believe you are expecting me.”

Mr. Francis’s warm smile does not wane, but he shakes his head reproachfully.

“Come, come, laddie,” he intones. “Let’s try that again and this time with a smile. Remember the Holiday Host philosophy: A natural, ready smile for everybody from crack of dawn ’til last thing at night. When you speak, make me believe that the spirit of good cheer pervades your whole personality. —‘Hello, Mr. Francis. My name is Timothy Lea and I’m looking forward to working with you!’ Now, pop outside and let’s try the whole thing again.”

I feel a complete berk but what can I do? Mr. F. obviously calls the shots around here and maybe all the good cheer will come naturally after a while. I stumble outside and notice that beneath his name on the door it says “keep smiling”. I try and put this into effect and etching a grisly grin across my features bound through the door to repeat my introduction. This time I get it right because Francis pumps my hand up and down like he is trying to separate it from my body and the laughter lines round his mouth resemble mongol scar tissue.

“Welcome, laddie, welcome,” he beams. “I don’t know how much you know about our particular operation but you have probably seen some of our Holiday Hosts going about their tasks. Our job is to keep holiday makers amused twenty-four hours a day if need be and for the purpose of organising team games and competitions we divide the camp up into four villages, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds and Spades—” an impression of an encampment. of Zulus flashes across my mind but I keep it to myself— “Each village has its own Holiday Hosts and these are distinguished by the emblems on the pockets of their blazers. I trust that this is clear? Good. You will be joining the Happy Hearts where I am certain you will find an excellent team spirit prevailing. Team spirit is the answer, Timothy. We all work for each other here. Team spirit and. a warm sincere smile for every man, woman and child you come into contact with. Do you play the banjo?”

I shake my head.

“What a pity. We have our ‘Swanee River Ramble’ this evening and a touch of the banjos would have been most appropriate. Not to worry, though, we’ll get by without it. One thing I should warn you about and that is hanky panky. Steer clear of hanky panky, Timothy. There are temptations and some of the ladies do get a bit frisky before the onslaught of the ozone. But resist, always, resist. Remember your obligation to your employers and to the great family unit we are all serving.” Even as he speaks I expect to hear Janet scratching at the door. “I haven’t been here long myself and one of the reasons I was posted here was because moral standards amongst some members of the staff – only some, I hasten to add – had become lax. Abuse of trust is a terrible thing, laddie. Some Hosts had to hand in their blazers—” He pauses so I can register the full horror of what he is saying.

“I would hate to have to live through a day like that again.”

I nod my head solemnly.

“But we don’t want to live in the past, do we, laddie?” Francis slaps me on the shoulder, jarring the smile back on my face. “It’s the future we have to think about. You cut along to the Ocean Restaurant and report to Mr. Hotchkiss who is supervising high tea. He’ll issue you with your blazer and show you the ropes. Alright? Right! Keep smiling and good luck!”

I go out beaming and it takes about fifty yards to get my face back to normal. Really, this smiling bit is going to be the death of me. The Ocean Restaurant looms ahead and as I make my way towards it, I come across a small clearing amongst the chalets in which two teams of women are playing netball. From the emblems on their well endowed chests it seems as if Clubs are playing Diamonds and the game is generating a fair amount of agro not diminished by the crowds of supporters standing around the court, most of whom seem to be drunk.

“Do her, Bertha!”

“Get stuck in, Diamonds.”

“Ooh, you dirty cow!”

“Watch your filthy mouth, you slut!”

“Come on ref. Get a grip.”

The referee is a fair-haired gangling youth wearing a Spades Holiday Host Blazer, who is vainly trying to keep control of the game without resorting to physical force. His smile is a bit frayed at the edge but it is still there.

“Come on,” he pipes. “Well done. Oh dear. I think we’d better have a free throw there, hadn’t we? Remember, it’s only a game, no need to get too excited. And could spectators keep off the court? Thank you very much. Right now, where’s the ball? The ball? Can we have the ball back, please?”

He gets the ball alright – straight in the mush from one of the crowd. There is no doubt about it, they take their games seriously at Melody Bay. I leave the poor sod to it as two women start pulling each other’s hair and the crowd surges on to the pitch and press forward to the Ocean Restaurant. Quite why it has this name it is difficult to know, unless the corrosive effect of the brine on its walls has anything to do with it. From close to it looks like a wet sponge.

Inside, I get my first view of the Melody Bay holidaymakers en masse and it’s obvious that they enjoy exercising their gnashers. Elbows are flying in all directions and there is hardly an H.P. sauce bottle which is not divebombing a plate. It is clear that food is provided on a self-service basis and behind a long counter a bevy of cooks in tall French Chef’s hats are ladling out goodies. The human voice is much in evidence but this is nearly drowned by the tannoy system which is dishing out a medley of “Workers’ Playtime’s greatest hits” interspersed with commercials for the pleasures to come: “Hello campers, we hope you are all enjoying your fine cured ham. We don’t know what went wrong with it but we think we have cured it real fine” – pause for silence – “but seriously folks, we just want to remind you that this evening the Swanee River Ramble will be taking place in the camp theatre at nineteen thirty hours – seven thirty to you old stagers – and that there will be prizes for the best riverboat costumes, gamblers, hustlers, cowpokes, saloon girls, you name it, we’re giving prizes for it, because remember:

“Welcome, welcome, you’re welcome at Melody Bay.

We all are here to please you and serve you in every way.”

Once the strains of the familiar dirge have faded away I approach the nearest Holiday Host and am directed to a thick-set curly-haired man of about thirty-five who is standing by one of the serving hatches and beaming at everyone approaching it in the manner of a vicar shaking hands with the congregation outside a church. As I draw near, he is addressing a neat redhead with a blouse knotted across her plump little tummy.

“O.K. luvvie. I should be through about twelve, I’ll leave the back door open for you.”

Quite how I should interpret these words in the light of my address from Mr. Francis I do not know, but no doubt there is a very simple explanation apart from the one that flashes across my sewer-soaked mind.

“Mr. Hotchkiss?” I say brightly, “my name is Timothy Lea.”

“Call me Ted. Hello Timmy. Yes. I heard you were on the way. Have a good trip, did you?”

He shakes my hand warmly and, although it is difficult to be certain in the presence of such all-pervading good cheer, seems genuinely glad to see me.

“Seen Mr. Hanky Panky, have you?” he continues. “Got the message about putting your Y-Fronts on back to front when you leave your chalet, laddie? Hey – look at the pair on that one. Grind you to death, wouldn’t they? Have you had anything to eat?”

“Er, no. What’s it like here?”

“The food? Diabolical. I don’t know what they do to it. The raw materials are alright, I’ve seen them. I think they play football with it, to tell you the truth. It’s alright if you like chips. You get chips with your cornflakes here.”

“But you never get any complaints?”

“Only medical ones. I’ve known times when it’s been more like sick bay than Melody Bay. No, the only complaints about the food are if it’s not covered in chips. Hello Gladys – she’s a goer, that one. I’ve still got the marks of her nails down the door of my chalet. Like bloody cats they are. She comes every year – and every five mintes, too, if you give her the chance.”

As I examine the plump bint leering at me through a mouthful of chips, it occurs to me to wonder what the Hosts who got sacked were like.

“She looks a big girl,” I observe conversationally.

“Big? She’s big alright. She loses things by sitting on them. And she’s strong with it. She knotted a putter round another bird’s neck on the crazy golf course.”

“You seem to take your sport pretty seriously here. There was quite a struggle going on when I passed the netball court.”

“It’s bloody murder sometimes. Last week a fight broke out during the ping pong tournament and they smashed the table to matchwood – and I mean matchwood. There wasn’t a piece you couldn’t pass through a windowpane. I know because they chucked most of them in here.”

“Why do they get like that?”

“It’s the system, isn’t it? I take it that Aunty Francis told you all about it? The whole idea is to keep people occupied during every waking moment and the best way of doing that is to divide them up into teams and make them play games against each other until they drop dead with exhaustion. That way they all reckon they are having a wonderful time. Of course, you have to allow for the competitive element getting a bit out of hand sometimes. It’s like being at a bleeding boarding school. There’s a cup for the suit that gets the most points in all the events and by the end of the fortnight, some of these buggers have turned into Kamikazi pilots. There’s even some that practise for weeks at home before they get here.”

“I didn’t see many people on the beach.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It’s not an amenity, is it? Who wants to mess about on a stinking old beach when they could be lashing out on rounds of drinks and watching a toddler’s fashion parade. The weather doesn’t help, either. We’ve only had six sunny days since Whitsun. Hello, Helen luv. Is the knee alright? Better? Good. I’ll be round with the Wintergreen like I promised. Ooh, did you hear that? They don’t care some of them, do they?”

“Ted. Mr. Francis was saying—”

“I know what he was saying. ‘No hanky panky.’ Yes, well, he’s got to say that, hasn’t he? I mean you can’t advertise the place as the biggest knocking shop north of The Wash, can you? But how many people would come here if there wasn’t the chance of a spot of slap and tickle. They’re not all bloody refugees from ‘It’s a Knockout’.”

“I realise that, Ted, but we’re not supposed to get mixed up with the customers, are we?”

“Do me a favour! You try telling that to Gladys and the rest of them. Forget what Francis says. You’re not employed as a Holiday Host here. You’re a stud. What do you think all the single birds come here for? They come to get poked rotten, and you, with your snazzy white jacket are the first prize. Being laid by a Host is what it’s all about, and this is a very competitive set-up, remember?”

“But I was warned—”

“O.K. You were warned. I won’t say another word. You put on your white blazer and see what happens. I’ll give you a Saint Timothy medal if you’re not fitting a yale lock on your chalet door before tomorrow night. Look at that bird over there, for instance, she obviously fancies you.”

I glance in the direction of his jerked thumb and there of course, is Janet waggling her fingers at me.

“Bird I met on the train,” I say, like I am describing cold semolina.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind walking the alsatian past her chalet. You could do yourself a bit of alright there.”

“Yeah. Talking of doing things, what do you want me to do now?”

“Well, I’ll show you where you’re going to live if you’ll excuse the exaggeration, and then you can help to get ready for the Swanee River Ramble.”

“What’s that?”

“Bingo in funny hats. Everything in this place revolves around Bingo. It’s the second most popular activity. You just have to keep on thinking up new names for it, that’s all. You know, I fancy that bird. Do you know what her name is?”

“Janet.”

“Right. I think I’ll pop over and introduce myself. That is, if you don’t have any objections?”

“No, of course not.”

In fact, I am very grateful. I fancy that Ted is just what Janet is looking for.

An hour later I have unpacked and been issued with my blazer with a big red heart on the breast pocket. I feel a right ponce but there is no doubt that Ted is right when he talks about the bird-pulling potential. Frippet that was ignoring me in the cafeteria is now giving me the Georgie Best treatment and I begin to wonder how long I can hold out before I hole out.

I am soon to find out because when I report to the Happydrome, the tables in the entertainment hall are littered with birds knocking back rum and cokes and brandy and Babycham like it was water. In fact, I have been led to believe by Ted that a good bit of it is water. The chief steward is apparently known as Nero and waters the booze like it was flowers. “I had a Drambuie the other night that tasted like bloody liquorice, water,” moaned Ted. “I could have mixed myself a stronger drink from a packet of sherbet.”

Neverthless, sheer volume of intake seems to produce the desired effect and by the time the Bingo caller, wearing false moustache, bowler hat and fancy waistcoat gets into his stride, most of those present are, to put it mildly, in a fairly relaxed condition. Attempts to capture the Swanee River mood vary from tennis visors and sleeve garters to low cut frilly dresses and beauty spots – mostly the ones revealed by the low-cut frilly dresses. Only the mums and dads sit there in their sensible cardigans and floral prints, unmoved by the frivolity of dress about them.

I pass amongst the tables asking people if they are having a good time and indulging in what light banter finds its way into my mind. There is no sign of Janet and I imagine that she is grooving in the Stardust Disco or perhaps revelling in the up tempo music of Freddy Newbold and his Startimers.

It is in this way that I come upon Avril who is flashing a lovely pair of knockers that look as if they are trying to climb out of her dress. As I draw near her table, she crosses her legs and reveals a pair of matching thighs, one of which is adorned with a black garter with a rose attached to it.

“Been picking flowers, have you?” I say, which is an indication of the standard of repartee I have been indulging in.

“Yes, do you like it?” Her eyes work over me fast like a farmer weighing up meat at a fat-stock auction.

“I like the whole costume. You stand a good chance of a prize.”

“Ooh, did you hear that, ’Reen?”

’Reen is thin and mousey and the kind of bird you go on holiday with because she makes you look so attractive. She is also giving me an eye-bashing.

“Yeah. Perhaps he can pull a few strings if you make it worth his while.”

“Ooh, you cheeky thing. Did you hear what she said, Timmy?”

Identifying me is no problem because my name has been lettered onto the heart on my breast pocket.

“I’m not a judge, so there’s nothing I can do,” I simper.

“Couldn’t you give her a consolation prize?” says ’Reen.

“What do you suggest?”

“Ooh, well, I don’t know about that. What do you think, Avril?”

They both collapse into fits of giggles and it is all I can do to hold a smile on my mug. Avril is definitely a looker, though, and she has been in the sun because I can see a thin white line across her breasts where they edge over the top of her bra. If it was not for ’Reen and the warnings from Sid and Francis, I would be breaking over her like a tidal wave.

“Well, I’ll come back if I think of something,” I say, showing how persistently unfunny I can be when I really try. I deliver another dollop of warm, friendly smile and move on to the next table where a woman terrifies me by leaping to her feet and shouting “Bingo” just as I am about to open my mouth in greeting. It is obviously the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to her because she flings her arms round my neck and nearly hugs the life out of me to the accompaniment of shouts of “Watch it, Bertha!” “There’s no holding her when she’s had a few” “Save some for me!” and the like.

With so much good cheer about I have obviously got to join the party for a drink and in no time at all I am well on the way to being pissed. In this condition, I applaud loudly when the results of the fancy dress competition are announced and Avril wins a prize. More bingo follows and then Holiday Host Billington entertains us with his accordion, one foot resting sensually on a convenient chair. Such all-time favourites as “Roll Out the Barrel”, “Goodnight Irene” and “My Old Man’s a Dustman” find everyone in good voice and I am perilously near enjoying myself when I feel a light kiss on the cheek. I turn round expecting to discover Janet has devoured Ted and come in search of fresh prey, but instead find my nose wedged between a couple of Bristols that could only belong to Avril – or three other birds packed one on top of the other.

“I just thought I’d give you a little kiss to say thank you,” she says. “I’m so happy. It’s the first time I’ve ever won anything.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with me,” I mumble. “What did you get, anyway, I can’t remember?”

“I got an L.P. voucher. I’m never going to cash it, though. I’ll always keep it.”

“Why not get a record and keep that?”

“No, it wouldn’t be the same. My kid brother would borrow it and I’d never see it again.”

“Yes, you’ve got a point there.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

It’s not the kind of stuff to give Sir Terence Rattigan sleepless nights, is it? But I don’t have to dig any deeper into my fund of small talk because Avril lowers her boobs and starts to tell me her problem.

“Do you know anything about electricity?”

“Not much,” I say, sensing that my powers of self-control are about to be tested.

“I’m certain it’s only a little thing, but the bedside light in our chalet keeps flickering.”

“Probably the wires in the socket have worked loose.”

Avril looks at me as if I have just discovered penicillin.

“Do you think that’s it? Is it difficult to fix?”

“No, it’ll only take a couple of minutes with a screwdriver.”

Avril’s breasts jut out in such a fashion that the pendant she is wearing, thwarted in its attempt to hang beween them, rests on top, much as it would do on the palm of your hand. Little things like that mean a lot to a man.

“Would you like me to take a look at it?” I mean, it can’t do any harm, can it? ’Reen will be there and it is part of my job to cope with this kind of thing. I am certain Mr. Francis would approve. And Sid? Yes, I think I know what Sid would do in this situation.

“Oh, would you? You’re sure it’s not too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all,” I say, turning on to full beam. “Do it right away if you like. I think they’ll be packing up here in a minute.”

This observation is unlikely to be disputed by the lady on my left who is now snoring loudly with her head in a pool of light ale.

“Ooh, lovely. I’ll just get my coat.”

Avril’s chalet is just like every other cardboard doll’s house on the camp with a fair selection of girlish garments littered about the place, none of which I notice contain ’Reen.

“What’s happened to your friend?” I say admiring the pair of sequined panties that Avril is removing from a chair. Avril blushes.

“I think she’s—she’s out with a friend. You know?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t envy the poor bloke whoever he is, but I suppose everybody can’t have my advantages.

“Where’s the light, then?” I say, knowing the answer to that one before I open my mouth.

“It’s on the table by the bed.”

Oh dear. Mr. Francis is not going to like this, I tell myself. I should not have had all that booze at the Happydrome. Then I would be strong, strong, strong.

“That’s a lovely nightdress,” I say. It is black and see-through and plunges at the front like Ted Heath’s popularity curve. Avril picks it off the bed and holds it against herself.

“Do you like it?” she says unnecessarily.

“Very much. You go in for roses, don’t you?”

There is a black rose in the middle of the cleavage.

“Yes. Have you seen this bra?”

She produces one of those novelty efforts that give you a crick in the neck walking down Shaftesbury Avenue. It has two black fur roses set side by side which, I suppose, is where you would expect them to be.

“No. It’s very sexy. I’d like to see you in it some time.” That was unnecessary, Lea. Stop asking for trouble and get on with the job.

I sit down on the bed and switch on the lamp. It works perfectly.

“That’s funny,” says Avril innocently, “it was flickering like anything last night.”

“Perhaps your friend’s friend mended it?”

“No, there’s been nobody else here.”

“Well, if you’ve got a nailfile, I’ll look at it anyway.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“No trouble, no trouble.”

She comes and sits next to me on the bed while I unscrew the plug which, of course, has all the leads perfectly connected.

“Nothing wrong here,” I say. Avril snuggles closer and peers down at the plug like it is some small woodland creature we have found on a country ramble.

“Oh dear. I’ve brought you all this way for nothing. And I can’t even offer you a coffee.”

Well, we all know what I should do now, don’t we?

Stand up and give her the Boy Scout salute and run all the way home without stopping. I know that, too, but when I look down into her guilt-ridden little face resting atop those enormous knockers like a pawnbroker’s sign, it is as if I have been fitted with diver’s boots.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “It’s nice to be here with you.”

A strange force I can only describe as sheer, naked lust, draws my lips towards hers and we topple back on the bed with me underneath. Honestly, it is like having her separated from me by a couple of melons. What a treasure chest. In this relaxing position, we mingle mouths and I let my hand run up and down the back of her thighs flicking against her garter.

“How many more roses have you got?” I murmur.

“Do you really want to see?”

“Very much.”

She sits up and turns her back to me.

“Unhook my dress.”

I kiss the back of her neck and slide down the zip following the passage with more gentle kisses along the route of her spine. She reaches behind her to undo her bra but I brush her fingers aside and releasing the catch, slide my hands round her body so that I feel the full weight of her breasts drop into my hands. What a pair. They damn near need a safety net underneath them. In this happy position, I nuzzle her neck and stroke her nipples till they swell beneath my fingers. She twists round and shakes herself free of her dress which falls to waist level. The bra she was wearing must be guaranteed by Accles and Pollock and is covered in small red roses.

“Is that all?” I murmur as her mouth gets in the way of further conversation and I feel her bristols ruckling against my chest like a faulty life jacket.

“Wait and see,” she purrs and her hand slides down to the front of my trousers creating wild enthusiasm everywhere it goes. My own little bunch of fives is not slow to reciprocate on the appropriate part of her anatomy and her legs spring open like I have pressed a secret button. Up over her tights I go until I can feel the elastic biting into the back of my wrist and my fingers brushing against her pubes. She is not wearing any knickers, which is a surprise in a girl with her obvious enthusiasm for undergarments, so I leave her side for a moment and quickly drop to my knees. In this position I can gently ease the tights over her prime rump and down to the final jerk which clears her heels. She obviously finds this exciting because she starts to twist her head from side to side and fondles the front of my trousers like she is making bread. I swiftly discard my precious blazer and follow with my shoes, socks and pants. I would be quite prepared to follow with my shirt and tie, but once allowed unimpeded access to Percy, Avril seems to lose control. In the manner of someone jacking up a car she raises me from my humble position by the bed and draws herself up so that I can help ease the dress over her shoulders. Now she is naked and it is quite a sight, I can assure you. Like a bird in one of these pictures by that Italian geezer. The ones with fat-cheeked cupids doing their stuff from behind clouds, and gents in tight furry trousers playing harps. Generous is perhaps the best description of her limbs, though some might use the word plump. Not that I am thinking of rushing out and buying her a course of minibisks. Oh dear me no. At this moment Mr. Francis is probably having a nightmare but that is his problem. Ninety nine per cent of my attention is directed towards the flesh palace writhing beneath me. I glance down at the garter enmeshed in her discarded tights and sink into her like a packet of marbles into warm butter.

What a performer! Her legs cross over behind mine, barring my retreat, and she starts a slow grinding motion that would power the mixing vat in a toffee factory. Thus pleasantly occupied, her hands are free to remove my tie, which has the word ‘Funfrall’ repeated on it about three thousand times. Sir Giles certainly knew what he was doing when he named the company. Pop, pop, pop go the buttons of my shirt and she claws it off so that her fingers can roam lightly over the whole length of my back and down to my dangle-bangles.

In the hands of such an exquisite performer it is perhaps as well that my exertions with Janet have taken the edge off my natural inclinations because this girl could boil a saucepan of milk in thirty seconds. Slowly and beautifully we grind on until there is a gradual pick-up in our rhythm and we accelerate ruthlessly over the horizon with me smacking against her belly like a speed boat riding rough water.

Whether Mr. Francis stepped out from behind the curtains and zapped me over the nut with a black jack or whether I was just dead knackered, I don’t know, but the next thing I am fully conscious of is the sunlight streaming through the window and Avril stepping into a pair of rose pink knickers and blowing me a kiss.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she says, brightly. “I thought you were never going to wake up.”

There is a hint of reproach in her voice which wounds me, but she avoids my grasping hand and quickly zips up her skirt.

“No time for that now, naughty,” she says, “I’ve got the semi-finals of the volley ball in twenty minutes and I want some breakfast. Ta ra.”

And so saying, she skips lightly from the chalet leaving me with the unpleasant realisation that another day of non-stop team games demands my attendance. Ted is probably already wondering where I am. Grateful that ’Reen has not appeared, I hop out of bed and start practising my smile in the mirror of the cardboard cupboard. I have completed this exercise and am just knotting my tie when the front door opens. Expecting to see either Avril or ’Reen I turn casually to be faced by a creature who is obviously a chalet maid. The kindest adjective that can be found to describe her is homely, and her suspicious face turns downright malevolent when she sees my blazer lying on the crumpled bed.

“Oh, ho,” she says, “Mr. Francis isn’t going to like this.”

A pang of fear knee trembles down my body and I wind up my smile.

“Just checking one of the lamp sockets,” I breeze. “Nothing to get excited about.”

“I know what socket you were testing,” she leers. “I’ve got my orders about this kind of thing. Rules is rules. Any case of impropriety involving a member of the staff must be reported direct to Mr. Francis. I wouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t.”

Marvellous, isn’t it? Twelve hours, two fucks and I am out of a job again.

“Listen,” I whine, “you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Look. You can see where I was checking the plug.”

I snatch up the dismembered plug triumphantly and suddenly find that slugnipples is standing very close to me.

“Of course,” she says, plonking down her Ajax on the bedside table, “he doesn’t have to know.”

Oh, no! I think. “After all, we’re only human, aren’t we?” Her fingers play with the buttons on the front of my shirt. “A little bit of what you fancy doesn’t do you any harm.” She looks up into my eyes. “I can keep a secret …” My arms obediently steal round her body and she sighs as our mouths meet. “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble.”

Not much chance of that happening very often, madam, I think to myself as I ease my shoes off. Honestly, I have half a mind to tell her to piss off and go and tell Francis anything she likes, but one has to do one’s bit to help keep the unemployment figures down, doesn’t one?

CHAPTER FOUR

“Do you like kids?” says Ted.

“Not particularly,” says I.

“Just as well,” says Ted. “We had a bloke once that did – you probably read about it in the papers.”

It is a few days after my little chalet party and by running like a bloody greyhound every time a bird comes near me I have steered clear of the dreaded ‘hanky panky’. Neither Janet nor Avril has made a direct assault on my person and I am learning that it is quantity, not quality that counts in this place. The more Holiday Hosts a bird lays the happier she is. The way some of them come at you, you would think the old bloke who stokes the boiler would be safer with a padlock on his flies. And it is not only the paying customers who have a case of the galloping hots. Most of the chalet maids make the beds from the inside.

“Get over to the Nipperdrome and give Sam a hand for a couple of hours,” says Ted. The Nipperdrome is where the Funfrall nippers enact a grisly replica of their parents’ games and competitions and is full of screaming kids who would sharpen a used razor blade on your throat if they could be bothered to dig it out of the toe of their bother boots.

“Then you can supervise the quarter finals of the croquet competition.”

“But I don’t know anything about croquet.”

“That doesn’t matter. Just stop them using the mallets on each other. We’ve had to replace a lot of equipment lately. Then there’s the archery. That can be very ticklish. At the first sign of them not using the targets – finito! Some lunatic shot Francis’s cat once; wanted to take it home and stuff it. Can you imagine? Our leader did his tiny nut. If you’ve got any time before trough-bashing you can potter round to the roller-skating rink. Things can get a bit out of hand down there, too.”

“Why don’t we just issue them with machine guns and let them got on with it—”

“Now, now, don’t be like that. You direct your energies to sapping theirs and keep a smile glued on your mug. That’s what you’re paid for. Oh, and by the way, it’s the Holiday Queen contest tonight and we’ve only had six entries. Take a handful of entry forms and dish them out to any half-decent bird you see. If we’re stuck with the bunch of stumers we’ve got at the moment, we might as well turn it into a nobbly knees contest. If it’s any inducement, you can sit on the judging panel.”

So off I trip to the Nipperdrome where Uncle Sam is surrounded by kids blowing up balloons as their contribution to the coming evening’s gaiety. Uncle Sam is a character, which means he is the only Host on the camp who does not smile all the time. In fact, he never smiles. His relationship with the children is based on mutual loathing and seems to work as effectively as any other around the place.

“Don’t do that, son,” he snarls at one of his charges. “It’s not nice, and it’s not good for you. And you, I’ve told you once. Blow them up!! You’ll do yourself an injury messing about like that. Hello, Timmy. What have you done wrong to be sent to this penal settlement?”

“Nothing that I know of. Ted told me to breeze down and give you a hand.”

My attention has been seized by a tall bird, wearing slacks and dark glasses who is standing by one of the kids’ roundabouts. She is also sporting a bikini top and this reveals an outstanding pair of knockers well worthy of a place in the “Holiday Queen” contest.

“Why don’t you take some of these kids off and organise a football match. You’d like that, wouldn’t you boys?”

There is a chorus of enthusiastic “yes’s” and one equally loud raspberry from a child with a complexion that resembles the before part of an acne advertisement.

“Get those balloons out of your pullover!” hisses Uncle Sam. “Hold the fort for a minute, Timmy. I’m just nipping into the office for a quick snifter. I can see it’s going to be one of those days.”

Ten minutes later two teams of tiny tearaways are kicking the stuffing out of each other and I can wander over to the bird by the roundabout.

“Hello there,” I smile warmly, “I expect you’ve heard about the Holiday Queen contest tonight. I wonder if you’ve had time to fill in an entry form.”

“What, me?” She seems genuinely surprised. “I’ve got three kids.”

“Never! I thought you were looking after your kid sisters.” O.K. so it’s pretty corny but have you ever known a married woman unpleasured by such a remark? “Come on, you must have a go. There’s nothing much to beat.” The minute I say it, I realise I could have put it better. “Just pop your monicker down here and be at the stage entrance of the Happydrome with your bathing costume at seven thirty.”

“Well, I don’t know what my husband will say.”

“He’ll be proud of you. And if you win this, you’ll be in the area final and then there’s the chance of a trip to London and possibly a jet flight to Los Angeles for a screen test. Come on, it’s all good fun, isn’t it?”

She takes off her glasses and looks me straight in the eyes. “You don’t think I’d make a fool of myself?”

“Good heavens, no. I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought you were in with a chance.”

She looks across the beach thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t half give Ron a surprise to see me up there. He’s always saying—oh, it doesn’t matter.”

I can see that all she needs is a nudge so I deliver one.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m one of the judges and I can assure you that I don’t think you would be making a fool of yourself.”

“Well, if you really think I have a chance.”

“Definitely.”

“Alright then. Where do I sign?”

An hour later, and heavier by the weight of a flick knife confiscated from the inside right of the Club Cubs, I am listening to the gentle click of croquet balls and keeping my eyes open for future beauty queens. Most of those playing are of the Darby and Joan variety but there is one little raver with competitor written all over her. Emitting a screech of delight, she whangs her opponent’s ball into the roses and lines up a shot which sends her own trundling neatly through the hoops.

“Oh, give over, Else,” whines her consort who obviously hails from the fair city of Birmingham. “I’ve had enoof.”

“Well, I haven’t,” says his partner firmly and lashes her ball another twenty yards up the green. “It takes the satisfaction out of winning if you chicken out.” She is not the loveliest girl I have ever seen, having a very pouty mouth that looks as if it has been developed by picking up ping pong balls with her lips, but she has a tight little body and unusual grey eyes. All in all, a very adequate contender for the title of Miss Melody Bay.

“Talking of winning,” I say with that exquisite sense of timing that has made me the toast of every talent contest in South Clapham. “I take it that you have entered for the Holiday Queen Contest?”

Her partner snorts. “Holiday Queen Contest! You must be joking.”

“Shut your mouth,” snaps spirited Else’. “I was thinking of going in for it anyway. You may not find me attractive, but some people do.”

She looks at me for acknowledgement of this fact which comes with the speed of light.

“Very,” I observed calmly. “I’m going to be one of the judges and I’d say you had a great chance. Of course, I’m only expressing a personal preference. I can’t speak for the others.”

“Did you hear that skinny? It shows all you know. Why don’t you get someone to help you lift your ball out of the flowerbed and give over being so bleeding rude?”

“But Else’.”

“Shut up!” She turns to me and her eyes hold a melting softness which belies her terrier toughness.

“What do I have to do to enter?”

In the next couple of hours I try a number of birds, but though flattered, most of them just giggle and say that they could never do it in front of all those people. Husbands and boyfriends are universally anti and glare at me as if I am recruiting for the white slave trade. It may be possessiveness but I am inclined to believe that the real reason is that they don’t want to bathe in the reflected ridicule that greets their birds’ performances.

It is not until I join up with the archery class that I find another obvious contender. Athletic Janet is unleashing a shaft as if born and bred in Sherwood Forest and the quiver of her titties is a bloody sight more arresting than the one on her back.

“Hello,” I say, dropping my voice to a pitch that would have made George Sanders rush out to buy a course of elocution lessons. “How is it going?”

“Not bad,” she says, “you never told me you were a Holiday Host.”

“You never asked me,” I say. “I didn’t even know you were coming here at first, so there was little point in mentioning it. I expect you’ve entered for the Holiday Queen Contest?”

“Ted was mentioning it.”

“Oh, so you’ve come across Ted?”

She smiles and slams another arrow into the bulls eye.

“You could put it like that.”

I ignore the implications of that remark as being too disgusting and continue: “Yes, well, have you entered?”

“Not yet. I don’t know if it’s my kind of thing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; a beautiful girl like you. You’d be mad not to.”

“Do you think I’ve got a chance?”

“Got a chance? Listen, I’m one of the judges. I wouldn’t be talking about it unless I thought you had a big chance.”

“Oh, alright. I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think about it. Do it now. Look, I’ve got an entry form here.”

Her eyes flash across me and there is a faint smile playing around her lips – not at all a bad place to play, I might add.

“Have you ever thought of selling insurance?” she says. “Look, I’ve told you, I’ll think about it, and if I fancy the idea I’ll pop round to your chalet and fill in a form.”

“Do you know where my chalet is?”

“Yes. It’s three down from Ted’s.”

The way she comes out with that should put me on my guard but I can be amazingly innocent sometimes.

I am not on dinner duty in the Potato’s Revenge so I slope back to my chalet for a spot of Egyptian P.T. before facing up to the rigours of the afternoon. No sooner have I settled on the bed, eased my shoes off and stuck my tongue out at my blazer than there is a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door. Cursing gently, I do what is expected of me and find Janet standing on the dorstep. Before I can say “Raquel Welch has lovely knockers” she is standing behind me.

“I know I’m not supposed to be here, really,” she says, “but I thought I’d enter for your competition after all.”

“It’s not my competition. I’m just helping to run it.”

“Yes, but you’re one of the judges, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“So you’re going to have a say in who wins?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’d like to win a beauty contest.”

There is a firm edge to her voice which brings me up short as I fumble for the entry forms.

“I reckon you stand a very good chance,” I say earnestly. “Ah, here we are. Now if you just fill in your name and …”

I stop talking because Janet has slipped an arm round my neck and is rubbing herself gently against my action man kit.

“It was nice in the train, wasn’t it?” she murmurs.

“Fantastic,” I gulp. “But like you said, you know the rules. I’m a Holiday Host and you shouldn’t be here.”

“What are you going to judge the girls on?” she says, starting to curl the hair at my temples. “Sex appeal?”

Blooming heck! I can feel the sweat beginning to prickle under my armpits. I know I should heave her through the door but at moments like this my resolution seems to go all to cock. A very appropriate choice of words, too, because Percy is perking up like he is trying to peep over the front of my Funfrall issue black worsteds. Trouble with me is that the flesh is weak, but strong at the same time, if you know what I mean.

“I’m supposed to be down at the boating pool in a few moments,” I gibber pathetically. If only my mind and body were under the same management I would not be in this sort of trouble. Even as I speak, my hands are sliding down over Janet’s peach-shaped buttocks and lifting the back of her skirt. The pleasure I get from this act is horrible but I can do nothing to stop myself.

A few minutes later I am examining her naked sun-patterned body and viciously kicking the fag end of the aforementioned Funfrall issue black worsteds over my heels. She draws up her legs and it is like the breach mechanism of a twenty-five pounder issuing in the shell. I am inside her before you can say Eric Robinson.

“You will see I do alright tonight, won’t you?” she breathes, grinding away like one of those pepper pots you never know whether to shake or screw. In her case, the question of an alternative does not present itself and I am taken out of myself, as they say, in less time than I would ever want to boast to my friends about.

“That was marvellous,” I gush before she can say anything. “Now you really must go or I’ll be out of a job. Don’t forget to take your entry form.”

It seems she has only just gone out of the door when there is another knock on it. This time of a more timid variety. I finish knotting my tie, adjust my smile and open the door. It is the bird who was at the Nipperdrome.

“Oh, I’m sorry to trouble you but—”

“Come in,” I say. I mean, why fight it? I am obviously a doomed man.

She is wearing a white dress with frills round the neck and has slapped on a bit of eye makeup which does her no harm at all. I can’t help feeling she has made a special effort before coming round.

“What’s the problem?” I say.

“Well, I’ve been reading the form and I don’t think I can go in for the contest.”

“Why not?”

“I’m over thirty.”

She has very long eyelashes this bird, and one of those soft peaches and cream complexions that I associate with dew-soaked meadows and oast houses – I think it was one of those butter advertisements. She is obviously nervous because she is fiddling with the entry form between her fingers.

I feel I want to help her.

“Look, it doesn’t matter. You go in for the contest and we’ll worry about that afterwards. You want to go in for it, don’t you?”

“Yes, but what am I going to do about this form?”

“Just put down your date of birth. Nobody is going to check it. It’s all a bit of a giggle anyway, isn’t it? Think how chuffed your old man would be if you won, even if you were disqualified later.”

“That’s another thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I told Ron about the contest and he said I was mad – that I didn’t have a chance – that I would make him a laughing stock.”

Tears glisten in her eyes and I reckon that even Mr. Francis would expect me to make with the sympathy. Nasty Ron!

“Now, come on,” I say. “I’ve told you before. You’re a very, very attractive woman. I don’t want to say anything rude about your husband, but maybe he hasn’t taken a good look at you lately.”

“He said I was fat.”

Her lip starts trembling and a big tear forms and topples slowly down her cheek. I am outraged.

“Fat!!? You’re—you’re delicious—”

I offer her my handkerchief and she takes my hand and kisses it. The poor girl is obviously desperate for reassurance and affection. I cannot quite remember what it said in my Holiday Host Manual but I am certain I am supposed to supply both. “There, there, you mustn’t cry,” I say, taking her gently in my arms. “Fat? Your husband doesn’t, realise what a lucky man he is. Curvy, maybe, and soft, certainly, you have the softest skin—” I am stroking her cheek— “—and lips.” I run my fingers along her lower lip and kiss her gently. “You go out there and really show them tonight.” I can feel the tears cool against my cheek as I stroke her spine.

“But—”

“No buts. You’re beautiful. Come on, I’ll show you.”

An alarm bell is clanging in my mind but I silence it with the pressure of my fingers around her waist and steer her over to the mirror. Her dress has buttons all down the front and from behind I gently release them, one by one, allowing my hands to steal in and massage the territory revealed.

“Beautiful breasts—” I reassure her, ”—slim waist—gorgeous thighs—just look at your legs, they’re great. What have you got to worry about?”

I know what I should be worrying about but I have less chance of pulling back now than a piece of fluff at the mouth of a suction cleaner. I turn her round and kiss her warmly on the mouth, pulling the dress down and off her arms so that I can drop it on to a convenient chair.

“You won’t let me come last, will you?” she breathes, as we topple on to the bed.

I think she is referring to the Beauty Contest.

Half an hour later she has been sent on her way rejoicing and I am struggling into my clobber again. I am now late for my next assignment and feeling decidedly knackered. It is therefore with some anxiety that I hear another knock on my door. Thinking that it is my last visitor who has left something behind, or Ted coming to chase me up, I throw it open to be faced with – you’ve guessed it – Else’ wearing enough makeup to kit out a tribe of Red Indians and a T-shirt that is stretched so tight across her tits that you can see the indentations on her nipples.

“I want to have a word with you,” she says.

“Evidently,” I say, wondering whether to slam the door in her face, or try and run for it. “Which one do you want to have?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Why does Gary Grant never have my trouble getting through to birds? “What is it? I’m in a hurry.”

“I want to show you something.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Can I come in?”

“I suppose so.”

I haven’t got the strength to stop her anyway. As she skates through the door, I notice that she has something clasped in her hand which looks like a kid’s handkerchief.

“What is it, then?”

“I wanted to ask you about my costume.”

“What about it?”

She holds up the fragment of material in front of herself and I can see that it is one of those costumes that have bloody great holes everywhere except where there is black mesh.

“In the rules, it says you have to wear a one-piece costume. Will this do? I mean, it doesn’t cover my tummy and it does plunge very low at the back.”

“Well, if it’s all fastened together it should

“Probably better if I showed you.”

Hey, hang on a moment!”

“You can look the other way if you like.” And the shameless little cow starts tugging her T-shirt over her nut.

“I told miseryguts Brian I was going to do this and he said I wouldn’t dare.”

“I would have agreed with him. Do you realise I could be sacked if anybody came in now?”

She is now revealing a neat pair of bristols with bell push nipples, and wastes no time in lowering her shorts to reveal the smallest pair of panties I have seen outside the toddlers’ paddling pool.

“Here,” she says, looking at me without a flicker of embarrassment disturbing her sly little features. “Do you think you could pull a few strings?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Get me amongst the prizewinners. You’re one of the judges, aren’t you? I could make it worth your while.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Go on. I quite fancy you anyway. I’m fed up with old misery guts mauling me.” She is closing with me fast and once again my split personality betrays me. Like a punch drunk boxer hearing the count near ten Percy begins to pull himself up off the canvas. Ferret-fingered Else’ immediately adds to my problems by making a direct frontal assault and in an instant I have stumbled back against the bed and am at her mercy.

“Just somewhere in the first three,” she says, as she slips out of her panties.

“Ooh, you’re lovely, you really are.”

I never ever see her in her bleeding bathing costume and by the time she leaves I am prepared to climb out of a window to get away from the place. My fingers are shaking as I knot my tie for the third time and I nearly bash my head on the ceiling when somebody laughs as they go by outside. By the cringe, but you have to be in peak physical condition if you want to hold down a job in this place.

After the events of the last couple of hours, it is with a feeling of pure horror that I see Mr. “Hanky Panky” Francis himself approaching as I stagger down the pathway that leads from my chalet. No doubt the maid has cracked under interrogation, or one of the informers rumoured to lurk amongst the holidaymakers, has squealed. As he comes nearer I cast down my eyes and cold fear invades my person.

“Afternoon, laddie,” he observes, “keeping your end up?”

I give him a bit of an old fashioned look at that one, but his expression does not suggest any secondary meaning to that normally associated with the phrase.

“Keep smiling,” he observes and, flashing his Ted Heath’s, wanders on his way.

Fortunately, I find two nice kids from Billericay, which I always thought was in Ireland, to row me round the boating lake all afternoon. In this manner I can conserve my energies and consider what I am going to do about the evening. Obviously, Mrs. Married, Janet and Else are going to expect big things from me but they must realise that I am just one of the judges. I can’t make them all first equal, even if I wanted to. On the other hand, being women, they will probably still turn nasty if they end up as also-rans. Janet and Else are the ones I am worried about most. With Mrs. Married it was just a question of giving her confidence a boost, but the other two would lay the whole panel of judges if they thought – wait a minute! – the germ of an idea begins to form in my disgusting little mind.

Telling my little playmates to row me swiftly to the shore, I make my way to the camp office and obtain a list of the judges and contestants. There are four of the former, including the camp chaplain – who may present a bit of a problem, Francis, Ted and myself. Twelve contestants, or finalists as they are now called, have been assembled.

Seizing a spare typewriter, I construct a note stating that the judges will be pleased to interview finalists, before the contest, to obtain an idea of their interests and hobbies, and to form an impression of their personalities in more relaxed surroundings than those that will be pertaining at the contest itself.

This little masterpiece I then stuff under the doors of Janet and Else’s chalets, reckoning that Mrs. Married will take defeat in her stride provided that the audience does not actually pelt her with rocks.

How my little plan succeeds I can only guess but when we assemble in the scrutineer’s office behind the stage, it is obvious that Ted is looking decidedly knackered. Even the chaplain looks a bit pale but that is probably my imagination.

“Very strange,” says Francis, “but when I came back to my bungalow this evening, I found this garment stuffed through the letterbox with a note attached to it.”

The garment he is referring to is the top half of an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini.

“What did the note say?” says Ted.

“Come round to chalet 75 and collect the other half.”

“Surely the expression is ‘the better half,’” says the chaplain.

“Depends which way you look at it,” says Ted.

“My wife is not in the habit of wearing such garments let alone sending me parts of them to suggest meeting places,” says Francis coldly.

“No, of course not,” says the chaplain hurriedly. “It must have been some kind of practical joke.”

“And in very poor taste, too. Who do we have in chalet 75?”

“You didn’t go round, then?” I say, proving what a stupid berk I can be. Francis rounds on me like I have suggested fitting out the Nipperdrome with contraceptive machines.

“Of course I didn’t go,” he hisses. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

This is quite a taxing question but luckily I don’t have time to answer it.

“Number 75 contains a Miss Elsie Worple and a Miss Pearl Barr,” says Ted. “I know Miss Worple—er slightly. She’s in the contest tonight.”

“Really.” The way Francis says it I know Else’s chances have disappeared up the spout.

“Young people today can behave in the most extraordinary fashion,” says the chaplain, “ah well, I suppose we must fortify our nerves for the test ahead.”

He directs his gaze towards the table laid out with sherry and twiglets and we all nod solemnly and start tucking in.

It is obvious that the fortnightly Holiday Queen contest is something of an occasion and this is brought home to me when we file out onto the judges’ rostrum.

The hall is packed and the noise that greets our appearance suggests that most of those attending are, as usual, pretty well oiled. The Holiday Queen contest comes at the end of an evening of dancing, spot prizes, talent contests and what are laughingly called cabaret acts. As we take our seats so Waldo the Unbelievable – with a conviction for perjury to prove it – is chucking flaming carving knives at his wife. What danger there is comes mainly from the risk of one of them igniting his breath – Waldo, it is rumoured, takes a drop of the hard stuff to frighten his nerves away before every performance.

No sooner are we settled than Maestro Freddy Newbold brings his baton down as if executing someone and the orchestra delivers a silencing chord. This is the signal for dapper Holiday Host Henry to spring forward and deliver a few words about the pleasures to come:

“Laydees and Gentlemen, boys and girls, chaps and chapesses, now is the moment you have all been waiting for. The Holiday Queen contest. We have a bevy of outstanding beauties waiting in the wings but before you feast your eyes on them, I’d like to introduce our panel of judges. First—” He rambles on like this for a while and we each stand up and take a bow. Ted gets a big reception, especially from the birds, but I don’t expect this does him any good with Francis. With my glass of water and my “scrutineers” form and pencil in front of me, I feel a bit of a lad and am almost beginning to enjoy myself, when the first bird teeters on to the platform to roars from the crowd.

Each contestant has to walk across the stage, climb a short flight of steps onto a platform, do her bit to electrify the judges and descend the other side. The first bird is obviously terrified out of her tiny mind and you can’t blame her. The noise that greets her must make her feel she is running out on to the pitch at Hampden Park and not all of it is encouragement – inter-suit rivalry dies hard at Melody Bay. Coupled with this, she is a bird who could only have entered the contest when drunk or for a bet. It does not look as if she has ever worn high heels before, because she staggers across the stage like a kid wearing its mum’s shoes for the first time. Her hands, which are supposed to be holding a card with her suit emblem and number on it, are itching for something better to occupy them and she starts tugging down the back of her costume as she walks. The whole effect is almost too painful to watch and I can see that the ascent to the rostrum is going to be a mini-Everest. Biting her lip, she makes it, attempts to do a turn, nearly falls off and sheds one of her heels. The audience roars and the poor chick loses her last drop of self control. Determined to get the hell out of it at a rate of knots, she hobbles down the steps on one and a half shoes, bursts into tears and runs from the stage. “Run” is the wrong word because what she does looks more like an event left over from one of Uncle Sam’s obstacle races. Even compere Henry who could make a commentary on the crucifixion sound like Andy Pandy meets Big Ears is temporarily lost for words. Eventually he calls for a big hand – which is something I have been waiting to give him ever since we met – and the next contestant appears.

This is Mrs. Married who gives a very good account of herself in the circumstances. I note that there appear to be a few bruises around her upper thighs, but I do not hold this against her in my marking, which is generous.

Next comes another couple of bints who deserve marks for their sheer courage in entering and whose embarrassed red flushes are indistinguishable from birthmarks. Then Janet. Her approach resembles one of those gymnastic birds you see on the tele on Saturday afternoon when you are waiting for the 15.30 from Chepstow. All arched back and feet smacking down as if they are pressing in loose divots. She does not jump up on the table or do a handstand but you reckon she could chop up James Bond with one hand tied behind her leotard. It is an impressive display but I prefer my beauty queens a bit more on the soft and stupid side.

This is obviously something that Else has aimed at and she comes on so that you expect to hear Frankie Vaughan crooning “Give Me the Moonlight” in the background. Trouble is, that Else is not really built for the job. She is a game little chick, but not generously endowed for a touch of the sultries. There is a suspicion, too, that the hot lights and her pre-contest activities have sapped some of her natural vitality. Her make-up might have been sprayed on and seems to be prevented from sliding down her face only by the Funfrall type smile, stretching her features into ridges. I look across at Ted and see that he is nervously fingering his collar. Francis leans across to whisper to him and he nearly jumps out of his skin. I reckon that our Else has indulged in a spot of nobbling there. There is no doubt that Ted and myself are being singled out for special attention. Else gets to the top of the steps and, bending her knees, indulges in a rising wriggle calculated to make a trappist monk start sewing lead weights round the hem of his habit. She pouts at Ted and me and turns to reveal that her tight little arse is her best feature. The audience is loving it and I am having another happy stroll down memory lane when she spins round to give us a second butchers at her torso. Once again she bends her knees and starts to thrust upwards, and then – oh dear – the top part of her costume is held to the bottom by a couple of brass rings which choose this moment to suffer from metal fatigue. The strap springs up, smacks her in the eye and she sits down hard on the edge of the platform. The audience erupts like a skin complaint and poor Else limps off leaving Henry to ransack his cask of cliches again.

The next few contestants are worse news than the Festival of Halitosis and I am seriously beginning to consider Mrs. Married as a contender for my first vote when a really knock-out bird arrives on the scene. Where she has been hiding I do not know, but once you have clapped eyes on her, you wish your hands, knees and boomps-a-daisy could enjoy the same experience. Her figure flows through her costume, swelling and diminishing into a number of delicious backwaters, and ends up in as fine a couple of legs as ever pushed through the holes in a pair of knickers. When she smiles it makes you feel that she would get up at three o’clock in the morning to polish the studs on your football boots and her skin looks softer than a kitten’s armpit. Once seen it is just a question of deciding second and third places.

I assign these to Mrs. Married and Else who I feel deserves something for all her trouble, but in the end, after the scrutineers have bustled to and fro, Henry has told a few terrible jokes and Francis described the problem of picking one bloom from a bunch of roses, it is Janet who gets second prize with Mrs. Married third. I am not really cut up about it, being comforted by the fact that the winner was such an obvious knock-out that neither Janet nor the dreaded Else could be surprised at losing out.

I am still thinking about her an hour later as I strip off and contemplate my ruckled bed. It is strange, but though I should be shagged out I am quite chirpy. With me, the more I get, the better I feel equipped to deal with it. Practice makes even more perfect, in fact.

I am just hanging my blazer over the back of a chair when there is a discreet tap on the front door. I wait for a moment and find my mind picturing three different female shapes on the doorstep. Gratitude, or a punch up the bracket? I ask myself, tucking a bath towel round my waist.

On the doorstep is Miss Melody Bay Week Number 26.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hello,” I say, not wanting to argue with her.

“I got your note.” She dangles a piece of paper between her fingers.

“Oh, yes.”

She pushes past me flicking the knot of my towel and I relieve her of the scrap of paper whilst trying to control my surprise.

“‘Dear June, I may be able to do you a bit of good in the contest,’ it says. ‘If I can, and you feel like saying thank you, why not pop round to my chalet for a drink later on? Ted.’”

Trouble with Ted is that his “ones” look very like “sevens” and my chalet is number seven. Tough luck, Ted, I think to myself as I chuck the piece of paper in the wastepaper basket and follow June into the bedroom, you really should do something about your handwriting.

CHAPTER FIVE

June goes home the next day which is just as well because it leaves no time for Ted to find out why he was never called upon to ease the cork out of his Asti Spumante – I saw it standing pathetically in the wash basin when I went round to his chalet. Ted obviously believes in giving a girl a good time. June is no slouch at dishing out the good things of life, either. During the coarse of our night together – and I don’t mean course – I learn quite a bit about how to get on in the beauty business – fascinating! Only my natural sense of reticence and the fact that the paper would probably start curling at the edges, prevents me from putting it all down. But if there was one thing I learned from June, it was that you can never go by a bird’s outward appearance what she is like in the privacy of your own bed. June looked the kind of girl who would have got her biggest kick out of plaiting your kid sister’s pigtails, but I came away from a night with her feeling like a peeled prawn.

I am still thinking about some of the things she did and blushing quietly to myself when I sit in Francis’s office the next morning. Fortunately, I am not there to collect my stamp collection but to be addressed, with a selection of my fellow Hosts, on a matter of great importance and urgency.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” begins Francis – there are female Holiday Hosts who, in the main, look like retired traffic wardens treated with laughing gas – “There is no point in me beating about the bush. The Slat Twins have chosen to descend on us.” A gasp of dismay echoes round the room as mouths pop open like starting gates. “I have, of course, taken all the normal steps, but apart from saying that the camp is in quarantine after a cholera epidemic—” he pauses, waiting for us to acknowledge the joke— “I am powerless to do anything.”

“Who are—?” I begin whispering to Ted.

“For those of you who have not yet been exposed—” Francis winces— “to the Slat Twins, let me tell you that they are the nieces of our Company Chairman and renowned for their ability to disrupt the day to day life that prevails in Funfrall Camps throughout the length and breast – I mean breadth – of the country.” Francis blushes, clears his throat and continues. “Because of their connection with our Chairman, it is virtually impossible to bar them from our camps and we can only work together to try and keep them under control. I believe that if we can fully integrate them into the life of this camp we may well be able to channel their—their energies away from those morally destructive pursuits which have characterised other visits.”

“How long are they staying for?” asks Ted.

“I don’t know,” says Francis. “To my knowledge they have never stayed the full two weeks at any Funfrall camp.”

“It was three weeks when they started that Love-Peace commune at Skilton. You remember, when they barricaded themselves in the dining hall and the police had to storm the place with—”

“Yes, yes, Ted. I do remember.” Francis’s eyelids flicker and his hand jumps to his adam’s apple. “But let us try and think positively. That is not going to happen this time.” A hysterical edge leaps into his voice. “It must not happen this time.” Another pause in which it is clear that he has something more to deliver.

“Sir Giles is paying us a visit.”

“While they’re here? Oh my God!”

“You are quick to read my fears. Any grave disruption of camp life during that visit could prejudice all our futures.” Francis gives that time to sink in.

“Now, as I understand it, the Slat girls will be arriving on Saturday morning and Sir Giles in the afternoon. From the moment they step inside the gates, I want to involve those girls and, hopefully, totally immerse them in preparations for the Camp Concert on Saturday night. I do not want them confronted with Sir Giles because this might tend to inflame their exhibitionist tendencies. If we can put on a good show and Sir Giles afterwards learns that his nieces were behind scenes helping then I think the impression left will be a good one.”

“Yes, but—” begins Ted.

“I have had longer to think about this than any of you,” says Francis firmly. “And that is what we are going to do. Now for details. They will be housed in chalets number 1 and 397 respectively.”

Ten minutes later I am outside with Ted, tugging at his sleeve like a kid wanting to find out where babies come from.

“Have you heard of nymphomaniacs?” says Ted.

“Of course,” I say.

“Well, these two eat ’em for breakfast. They start where most other women reach for the bromide caddy.”

“I don’t get it.”

Ted snorts. “You would with these two. From both barrels. They hunt as a pair.”

He shudders like a man trying to scrape a nightmare off the back of his mind. “‘Screw for Peace’ – that’s their motto. They reckon they can unite the whole world by everybody having it away with each other. ‘Khaki Kidology’ – that’s what Francis calls it.”

“That’s very good.”

“It’s diabolical, mate, when you’re trying to run a holiday camp. Give those two twenty minutes and they’ll have every man in the place jostling to get to the head of the queue. It’s the way they wrap it up in all this peace-love rubbish that terrifies me. They make you feel like Hitler if you’re not spending all your time looking for a bun-hole to tuck your frankfurter in.”

“You know them, then, do you?”

“Know them? Have you seen my back? Most people think I served three years on The Bounty. And that was only one of them.”

“Where was the other one?”

“Kicking the front door in trying to get at me.”

“I thought you said they hunted as a pair.”

“Sometimes they can’t wait for the other one to get there.”

“You’re having me on.”

“You wait, mate. I’ve known Black Belts turn the colour of your grandma’s roll-on when they saw them coming.”

Well, frankly, I still reckon he is pulling my leg and the time passes quite agreeably until Saturday with me pottering about and avoiding trouble. I learn that Sidney is also rolling up with Sir Giles, so I am doubly keen to keep my nose clean. One thing that helps is the constant turnover of customers. You only have to steer clear of a bird for a few days and the chances are that she has gone home. Either that, or pissed off with one of the other forty Hosts as already mentioned. A right lot of kinks some of these geezers are, too. They spend all their time talking about their agents and waiting to audition for “Opportunity Knocks”. The wheezing of accordions from the Hosts’ Lines sounds like a ward full of asthmatics and they must have cornered the market in sun ray lamps.

Saturday morning arrives and it is half way towards being a decent sort of day weatherwise. The sun is beginning to break through a band of clouds stretching to the horizon and I am standing at Pet’s Corner explaining to a child that you do not turn a tortoise into a turtle by dropping it into the goldfish pond. I think the kid understands because when I let go of its ear it kicks me in the shins and runs off saying that its dad is going to smash my face in. This is the kind of unpleasantness I spend my life trying to avoid and I am moving smoothly towards the crazy golf course when two female figures appear through the camp gates.

They are somewhat different from most other guests because they are carrying bedding rolls instead of suitcases and give no indication of having had their hair done twenty minutes before arriving at the camp – not unless the job was handled by a nesting stork. They wear headbands, enough beads to have bought North America from the Indians and are barefoot. Smocks adorn the rest of their bodies and they wear no make-up. This is not to say that they are less than handsome. They cannot be much less than six foot, but if you fancy big birds these are definitely your bucket of tea. For some reason I imagine that they are gypsies and move forward to prevent them lowering the tone of the place still further. I am a bit surprised that they got past the gatekeeper.

“Can I help you?” I say, giving them my cold “please ask your little boy to stop pissing against my trouser leg” smile.

“Sure,” says one of them considering me for a moment. “I fancy a stand-up quickie amongst those gnomes.”

“Two’s up,” says the other one, “or maybe we can share him.”

“No, Nan. You wait your turn. You’re always stealing my ideas.”

“Gnomes?” I say.

“That’s right, cowboy. On the lawn there. Don’t fight it. Let it all hang out. You can park your arse on the grass if you’re bashful.”

“Groovy,” sings out the other one. “I can nibble round the edges.”

Suddenly a veil is snatched from my eyes and I begin to put one and one together with startling results. Nan? Nancy?

“Natasha?” I bleat.

“Good. So you got the postcard,” says the one who wanted to open the batting. “We would have liked a bigger reception committee but you’ll do to start with. Now why don’t we all snuggle up in the privet and get down to the privates?”

The way she looks at me I know what it must be like to be night nurse in an Italian prisoner of war camp.

“I expect you want to see Mr. Francis,” I croak.

“We’ll get round to him,” says Nan. “Now relax. You’re so uptight. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s beautiful. Come on. You’ll like it once we get going. Everybody does.”

And she sticks her hand down the front of my worsteds. Right there under the shadow of the big dipper.

“Yeeow!” I say, or it might have been “Urrh!” I can’t really remember. “Get off me. You must be bonkers.”

“‘Bonkers’, that’s a nice word,” says Natasha. “Bonkers about conkers.”

Well I don’t wait for any more. I’m off and running. I mean they are nearly as big as me and there are two of them. I don’t stop until I get to Ted’s chalet.

“They’ve come,” I shout as I burst into the bedroom.

“They’re dead lucky then, aren’t they?” says Ted, rolling apart from a well-developed lady I remember being runner-up in a slow bicycle race. “They obviously didn’t have you to worry about.”

“I’m sorry, Ted, I mean—” I go outside and shout through the bedroom door. “The Slat Twins have arrived.”

Five minutes later a possee of Hosts with Francis at the head is galloping towards the main gate. We get there just in time. Nat and Nan are attacking the gatekeeper’s hut with a battering ram made from the camp flag pole.

“Welcome, welcome, ladies,” chortles Francis. “Still full of beans, I see.”

“Call this a welcome, dryballs?” snarls Nat. “We’re trying to bring a little joy into the lives of all these sex-starved husks of human beings and all they can do is run away or lock themselves up. What have you done to them? You’ve castrated them! You deny love and you deny the one force that can unite the world. Now stand aside. We’re going to liberate that poor misguided victim of fascist sexual repression.” Looking through the window there is some doubt as to whether Mr. Merriweather wishes to be liberated. He is cowering behind his desk with his stapler in his hand and seems prepared to fight to the last staple.

“Come, come ladies,” purrs Francis. “I am afraid that Mr. Merriweather cannot respond to your blandishments. He is one of our permanently disabled staff.”

“They must have got him last time,” mutters Ted.

“—Now let’s start channelling all that infectious enthusiasm for life into something everybody can participate in.”

“A gang bang?” says Nan hopefully.

“No, no. We’re going to make you honorary Holiday Hosts for the duration of your stay. You can meet people, help organise entertainment. Do something positive.”

“Positive? Screwing is positive, stoat-features.”

“It’s not the only thing. Now, put down that pole.”

“But I like it. It’s so thick and long. It reminds me—”

“Yes, yes, Miss Slat. I’m certain it has many happy associations for you. Now why don’t you pop on your blazers and let’s get down to business. We’ve got a very tight schedule today with the Camp Concert at the end of it.”

“You look as if you’ve got a very tight arse too, fart-face,” sneers Nan. “And you can stuff those blazers for a start. I wouldn’t be seen dead in one.”

“Put one on and find out,” mutters Ted.

It is a funny thing, with these birds, but though they both talk rude they have very posh accents. They sound like upper class little girls trying to shock nanny.

“First stop it’s the Hosts versus Campers marathon swimming race, isn’t it, Ted,” sings out Francis who should get a prize for the job he is doing.

“First stop it’s a liberation grind with any man in this place who hasn’t got a shell-shocked cock,” bawls Nan. “What have all these able-bodied pricks been provided for – elevenses?”

“Now you’re talking,” enthuses Nat. “Move those gnomes out of the way and let’s get down to a lust dust, fellahs. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“These escorts are here as your guides, and team-mates in the pursuance of camp activities,” says Francis firmly. “They will stay with you at all times.”

“‘Camp’ is the right word,” jeers Nan. “I’ve heard of the last resort, but this is ridiculous. It’s a bloody prison.”

“Off we go to the swimming pool,” says Francis, his voice beginning to crack at the edges. “Come on, gentlemen. Show the ladies where to go. We can drop their things off on the way.”

“You can drop mine off right now,” says Nan wearily. “I want sex.”

“Freedom is sex.”

“Sex is freedom.”

“Sex is now.”

“Freedom is now.”

“Sex.”

“Sex!”

“Sex!!”

A small but very interested crowd is beginning to collect as we close in on the girls and start to frog march them away.

“Living Theatre tonight, six thirty by the lifeboat station,” breathes Ted conspiratorially. Everybody nods their heads and makes a mental note to be somewhere else at this time.

What a day we have after that. At the end of it I feel like one of those corks which is attached to a kid’s pop gun. Up and down the swimming pool till skin starts to grow between my toes; then deep sea fishing in which nobody catches anything and the first prize is given to the hook with the biggest worm on it; cross country, weight lifting, gymnastics, volley ball. How the twins survive it I don’t know. But they do. Whilst the rest of us are breathing hard over our spam sandwiches, they are standing there eyeing us with sullen contempt and eating nothing.

Even then I feel that they are biding their time. That at any moment they could suddenly break loose and overwhelm us. How right I am. Halfway through the afternoon, Francis is whisked away and I hear the dreaded words “Sir Giles” mentioned. Tension time is with us. The girls are behaving quite well and only occasionally trying to strike matches on the zips of passing holidaymakers’ flies. I almost begin to believe Nan who says that after a couple of hours without cock all the stuffing goes out of her.

Strictly according to plan, we escort them back to their respective chalets at six o’clock and leave them to prepare for their part in the evening’s entertainment. Needless to say a heavy guard is mounted – fortunately not by the twins – and nothing untoward occurs.

Promptly at seven thirty they are behind the scenes with me at the Happydrome, all tuned up to do their bit to make things go with a swing. At least that is how Francis put it. I am not so sure. Peeping through the curtain I immediately see Sid picking his nose in the third row next to a portly gent with a face the colour of red porridge. This must be Sir Giles or an advert for Alcoholics Anonymous. Either way, he looks about as mean as a piece of wet, knotted string and I can understand Sid’s problem.

“What time does this mind-rotting pap start?” says Nan. “My God! What are they?” She is referring to the Melody Bay Musibelles, Funfrall’s answer to the Tiller Girls, believed to be “eh?” They are lining up on the revolving stage for their opening number like retreating infantry being forced to make a stand – not the first some of them have made, I might add.

“Yer what?” says their leader, registering that she is being subjected to scrutiny.

“You stupid slut,” says Nan in her usual friendly fashion. “You poor pawn.”

“Porn!” says the Musibelle who has heard the word somewhere. “You want to watch your language Gyppo.”

“Note the bourgeois abuse,” sighs Nan turning to Nat. “The knife driven between the shoulder blades of working class solidarity. ‘Gyppo’. It’s weepsville, isn’t it? Can’t you see—?” Now she is addressing the whole chorus line— “You are betraying yourselves as women when you dress up in those sordid costumes, your faces clogged with make-up. What are you? Love objects? Baubles? Giving away your identities to lubricate the wet dreams of male chauvinist pigs.”

“You want to get the birds’ nests out of your hair before you start talking about betraying yourself as a woman.”

“Bloody cheek!”

“Who does she think she is? Scruffy little scrubber.”

“Scratch her eyes out.”

“I’m not going to stand here and be insulted like that.”

“What have we got a union for?”

At any moment I can see a monster punch-up breaking out but luckily Jim the stage manager, acts swiftly and whips up the overture. The stage starts to circle slowly and to the haunting strains – every tune played by Freddy Newbold and his men is a strain and quite capable of haunting you – of “There’s no Business Like Show Business”, the Musibelles stop shaking their fists and start shaking their legs.

“Poor cows,” snorts Nat as they disappear from sight. “Totally exploited. They have now begun to live their roles.”

“Still, the audience loves it,” I say. “Listen to that noise. They’re giving someone pleasure.”

“They would give more pleasure in a state whorehouse,” snaps Nat.

I am certain there must be an answer to that but I don’t have time to think of it because Jim bustles out and shepherds us away so that Mario, Guiseppe and Antonio, three coal miners’ sons from Barnsley, can set up their juggling act. This move is purely for their own protection because the Slat girls’ eyes begin to glaze over the minute they glimpse the bulging white leotards,

“Did you see those skittles?” says Nan.

“They’re Indian clubs,” says Nat.

“They’re heaven,” sighs Nan, “do you think I could borrow one?”

I get them into the stage manager’s office where they snigger when I suggest a sherry and snatching up a bottle of vodka pour half of it into two tumblers. I suppose the sherry is just my acknowledgement of the fact that they are basically upper class bints. I would never think of asking my old man if he wanted a sherry. Whilst I am thus pleasantly engaged in exploring my social hang-ups Nat and Nan are glugging down the vodka like kids having a last glass of water before bed time. It is probably a mark of my naivete but I am glad to see them getting outside it. In my experience birds keel over after two Babychams so I reckon that with that much vodka inside them Pa Slat’s brats will be going bye-byes pretty quickly. I am even stupid enough to start nibbling away at the stuff myself.

All around us fire-eaters, razor blade swallowers, Irish tenors and every no hoper who was ever put out of a job by television, is milling about. Jim pops in from time to time to supervise the gargling and all in all I am beginning to feel pretty relaxed. The mood is obviously catching.

“Another teeny-weeny vodkatini, Nan?” says Nat. “I must say, I’m within a smear test of enjoying myself.”

“A smidgeon,” says Nan extending her glass, and bringing mine along for the ride. “It must be the presence of King Male here.”

“Humpable hunk, isn’t he?” murmurs Nat, beginning to nibble my ear in a way I find a good deal less than objectionable. “Shall we toss for ends?”

“Naughty, naughty. Timmy isn’t like that, are you pet? You don’t want to be sexually emancipated, do you darling? You like sweating it out in your nice bourgeois blazer.”

“He wears his heart on his pocket, not his sleeve,” sighs Nat. “Imagine all those rippling pectorals wasting away under this serge.”

“Dents your heart, doesn’t it?” agrees Nan. “I mean, his whole body could be a glistening chalice of sweat aglow with the rippling ecstasy of sexual congress.”

“At the very least,” nods Nat. “Here, have another sip so you don’t have to think about it, darling,” and she jerks another half pint of vodka down my throat. Now, it occurs to me about this time, that I am just a tiny bit pissed. Nothing serious, mind. I can still feel Nan kneading the front of my worsteds, but I am not as exercised about it as I might have been half an hour before. After all, as long as I can keep the terrible twins occupied I am doing my job, aren’t I? Occupied. That’s the key word. I take Nat’s cheeks between my fluttering fingers and settle greedily on to her mouth like a humming bird alighting on some choice jungle bloom. Why don’t I just let them get on with it? It’s going to keep them out of trouble for a while, and it can’t do anyone else any harm. In fact it can do me a bloody lot of good, I think to myself as somebody’s hands – I know they are not mine – start unzipping my fly.

“Go on,” I gasp, as there is a sudden halt in the proceedings.

“Not enough room, Angel,” murmurs Nan, “we want to do you with justice. Come next door.”

“Next door?”

“The props room.”

“Oh. Ouch!”

Nat zipping my J.T. up in my fly keeps my senses occupied until I find myself collapsing on to some kind of sofa. There is no doubt about it. I am definitely pissed.

“You just punctured my foreskin,” I say reproachfully.

“Don’t worry. Mummy will kiss it better for you.”

I have an impression of one of those long smocks disappearing over its owner’s heads and a great, grabbable expanse of naked flesh. I grab.

“Uh, uh! I never screw men in uniform. Get it off.”

Blazer, tie, shirt, shoes, socks, and pants hit the floor in less time than it takes to write this. Somewhere I think I can hear shouting but maybe it is because I am excited.

“Where’s Nan?” I say.

“I am Nan. Nat is just coming.” Her great, warm body settles on mine like a lamb’s wool overblanket with the lambs still inside it and I let my hand run riot in the moist furrow between her legs.

“Leave some for Nat,” I murmur.

“Don’t worry.”

But, suddenly, I do worry. Whatever we are lying on is moving and somebody is shouting in my left earhole.

“Get off! Get off! Jump!!”

But with Miss Slat on top of you you’d be pushed to wink. Ah, there’s the other one. Naked of course and speeding to share her sister’s ecstacy. But what are those lights doing glaring out of the darkness? And the smell of cigarette smoke? And the band playing? And the shouts and screams? Why do I feel as if I am being taken for a magic carpet ride? Why is it suddenly so draughty?

No!! With horrible certainty I realise that I have been taken for a ride. The deadly duo have lined me up on the revolving stage and I am now flashing my credentials at two thousand holidaymakers. My first reaction is a natural one. Get the hell out of it! But this is easier thought than done. While I am grappling with Nan the immortal couplets of “River Deep, Mountain High” come richocheting over the public address system and Nan snatches up a microphone.

“O.K. Campers,” I hear her yodel. “This is the part of the show where you grab a slice of the action.” Thud, thud, thud go her great boobs as she bounces in time with the music. “Reach over to your neighbour and if you see anything you like – fondle it. Come on now, you know you want to. Don’t dream about it. Do it! Throw out your inhibitions and hang up your hangups.” Ike and Tina are bursting a gusset and the idea sounds pretty good, even to me. I mean, it’s better than breaking up your instrument with an axe, isn’t it? Less painful, too.

“I’m getting hot,” screams Nan. “I want it!! I want it!! I want it!! Do you want it?”

“Yes!” howls the audience.

“I didn’t hear you!”

“Ye-e-e-e-ee-e-e-s!!!”

“Well, grab it! Grab it! Grab it!” Her pelvis starts shuddering like a strip of confetti tied to an electric fan. From the darkness comes the sound of furniture breaking up. It is like New Year’s Eve at the British Legion.

“That’s it, clear the floor and let’s have some action. Oh! Oh! Oh!!!” I lose sight of her for a moment because Nat pulls me off the sofa and starts – well, I don’t really like to say what she starts doing.

“Love thy neighbours!!”

The noise is incredible and the kind of smell that escapes through a grating outside a Turkish bath wells up out of the darkness.

“Suck for peace.”

Nan chucks her microphone into the audience and joins Nat on top of me. I suppose if I am honest with myself, in my heart of hearts I had always wanted to make love to two birds on the stage of a theatre full of people with Ike and Tina Turner singing River Deep, Mountain High in the background.

With my face allowed a moment’s liberty I gaze into the audience. Only one seat in the place seems to remain upright and occupied. On it sits Sir Giles Slat. There is a thoughtful expression on his face.

CHAPTER SIX

“Beautiful,” murmurs Sir Giles.

“Beautiful,” echoes Sid.

“I can’t remember when I was last so moved by a spontaneous outbreak of mass emotion.”

“When England beat Germany in the World Cup?” offers Sid.

Sir Giles frowns. “I was thinking of something rather deeper than that. To me, what we saw that night had an almost mystical, religious significance. It was a celebration of being alive. I believe that many Scandinavian countries observe a similar festival on Midsummer Night. But what was of course remarkable about this happening was that it was not a ritual in the sense of an event given historical credence by dint of annual repetition.” He pauses so that Sid can nod vigorously.

“It was quintessentially the manifestation of an innate, atavastic but primarily unexploited yearning.”

Well, I wouldn’t like to argue with him, would you? Sid certainly wouldn’t.

“Yeah,” he says, “and it backs up that idea I—I mean – we – had, doesn’t it?

It is two days after the Camp Concert and I am back at Funfrall, London, sitting in Sir Giles’ office. After the concert a number of things happened fast, one of them being that I was off the premises before you can say “tear gas”. And Francis didn’t smile once as he handed me back my stamp collection. I remember him standing there in his underpants with his sock suspenders round his neck and his shirt hanging in shreds. Poor devil. God knows what he had been through – or how many. Dad’s expression wasn’t much of an improvement when he found me standing on the doorstep. “Look, mum,” he calls out. “It’s the return of the proditall son.” Knowing Dad, he must have been working on that one for weeks. I only get them to take me in on condition that I buy a season ticket to the labour exchange and the atmosphere is, as they say, fraught.

The call to present myself at Funfrall House does nothing to raise my spirits. Sidney presumably wants to tear me limb from limb in the seclusion of his own office or perhaps there has been an official complaint laid against me – and I don’t mean a dose of the clap caught from the probation officer’s loo.

But when I get to the upright tray of ice cubes which pretends to be Funfrall House, Sidney is tight-lipped but cool, and says that Sir Giles wants to talk to me. Immediately I get another taste of the terrors. Could he possibly imagine that I was responsible for the behaviour of his nieces? Stranger things have happened. I knew a fellow once who used to punch blokes rotten every time they looked at his old lady while she used to hang it out for every lad in the neighbourhood. He must have known, but he just couldn’t face up to it. But, as I soon find out, it does seem as if Sir Giles has got other things on his mind. Quite what they are it is difficult, for me at least, to understand. Nevertheless, I continue to cock my lugholes attentively.

“Yes, Noggett,” goes on Sir Giles. “One aspect of our job is to interpret trends. To find out what people are wanting and to give it to them. It would be impossible for anybody attending that—that—”

“Rave-up?”

“Again, not quite the words I would have chosen, Noggett – that spontaneous outpouring of communal affection, not to have formed the impression that it was answering a deep and heartfelt need. I think with you, that the time has come for Funfrall to take another momentous step forward.”

He looks me straight between the eyes and I swallow hard and peer up at the ceiling. Very nice it is too.

“Let me spell it out for the sake of our young friend here,” continues Sir Giles. “The progenitor of our simplistic bacchanalia.” I am not certain I like that, but it doesn’t matter, S.G. is already grinding on. “Holiday Camps were developed to cater for a simple basic need: that of providing an affordable escape from the dark satanic mills for those who had not previously envisaged a bucket and spade as other than implements required to wrest combustibles from an open cast mine. With increasing affluence and greater freedom of movement between the classes, so the seaside holiday became the rule rather than the exception and horizons extended even beyond the three mile limit which borders these shores.”

I try and match Sidney’s expression of dogged interest.

“What so far we seem to have ignored, in this country at least, is the changing moral climate. The expression of love and affection between adult human beings is no longer solely the prerogative of those united by bonds of marriage. Whilst not wishing to undermine the bedrock – I use the word advisedly – upon which such strong family-orientated enterprises as Melody Bay were built, we believe that there exists the opportunity to create a new kind of pleasure resort for the emancipated seventies.”

“They’re getting a bit old, aren’t they?” I interject.

“I referred,” grits Sir Giles, “to the nineteen-seventies. We envisage a holiday village where responsible adults can celebrate the new found sexual freedom of the age in which we live, without blanching before the cold cynosure of antedeluvian morals.”

“A sort of legalised knocking shop,” says Sidney helpfully.

“Please let me finish, Noggett,” says Sir Giles wearily.

“I think I’ve got the idea,” I pant earnestly. “You think that with everybody going on coach tours of the Balkans, Holiday Camps are on the way out. Therefore you want to introduce somewhere like those frog places where they all live in each other’s mud huts and run around in grass skirts with strings of cocoa beans round their necks.” A long silence follows my remarks.

“I believe you are related to Mr. Noggett?” says Sir G. eventually.

“That’s right. He’s my brother-in-law.”

Sir G. nods resignedly. “I would have suspected that might be the case.”

I smile my “throw a stick in the pond and I’ll bring it back and lay it at your feet” smile but it takes a few moments before Sir G. gets into his stride again.

“We have already purchased a site and the events of the other night were sufficient to persuade me that the time is now ripe to pursue the enterprise.”

“It’s going to be a bit parky frisking about like that in our climate, isn’t it?” I ask.

“The property comprises a small island off the north-east coast of Spain. The Costa Brava. Perhaps you have heard of it?”

Heard of it! Some of my best friends have got food poisoning there. All this is very interesting but why are they telling me?

“I expect you are wondering why we are telling you all this?” observes Sir G. I shrug my shoulders; Tonto, he let the Lone Ranger do all the talking.

“I was impressed by the part you played in the proceedings of the other night. There was about you a natural unaffected joyfulness that seemed to place you apart from the more conventional Holiday Host which is our norm.”

I rack my brains, but for the life of me I cannot remember anybody called Norm. I must have been pissed.

“I have talked to Mr. Noggett who, of course, knows you far better than I, and he confirms my impression that you would be an ideal representative for us on ‘Isla de Amor’.”

“What?” I say.

“Love Island, Funfrall’s new Mediterranean experience for the mature holidaymaker,” chirps in Sidney. “Are you interested?”

Blimey! I think to myself. What a carve up!

Two weeks later I have been fitted out in my new lightweight blazer and assorted togs and am entering the embarkation lounge at Gatwick like it is a bridal suite. I still cannot believe my luck. Sun, travel, and the thumbs up to give Percy his head. What more could a red-blooded young Englishman want?

“Well, if it isn’t Melody Bay’s answer to the death of vaudeville.” I turn round and there is Ted clapping me on the shoulder. “Come to see me off, have you?”

“I’ll see you off any day,” I say enthusiastically. I suppose I should have reckoned that Ted might show up. Sidney had told me that a selection of Hosts were being recruited from Funfrall Camps throughout the country, and Ted would be on anyone’s shortlist if they were forming the export division of Rentapoke.

“Any birds on this jaunt?” I ask casually. “Oh, no!” The latter exclamation is sparked off by seeing Nat and Nan bearing down on us clad in white see-through muslin which a great many people are seeing through.

“What the hell are they doing here?” I ask bitterly.

“Haven’t you heard?” demands Ted. “They’re on the payroll.”

“They’re what!!!”

“They are now employed as Fiesta Bunnies. They are going to help make things go. That’s what your friend Mr. Noggett said.”

“He’s not a friend. He’s my perishing brother-in-law!”

“Hi there, Captain Thrust,” sings out Nan. “How about a quick injection against air-sickness?”

I make a move to step behind Ted but he is already taking shelter behind me.

“No skulking, stud farm,” hollers Nat who has an even louder voice than Nan. “Look, everybody, it’s Teddy and Tim, the toast of the quim!”

“Knock it off, girls,” I hiss.

“I thought you’d never ask. Where? Here, or against the passport counter?” What can you do with them? A fiver for the best answer sent to me on the back of a ten quid note.

“Fiesta Bunnies’. Whoever thought of that bloody silly name?” I say, eager to change the subject.

“The same chap who thought of calling you two Sun Senors. It has the smack of Uncle’s eminent greasie, that Noggett man.”

She’s right too. Sun Senors is just about Sidney’s mark.

“There’s no sign of either of them is there?” I mumble.

“No, they’re putting down a revolution in Littlehampton or re-organising the white slave trade,” says Nat. “We’ll have to get this place jumping all by our little selves.”

The very thought of it makes me lock myself in the gents until our flight is called. We have two weeks to make sure that everything is tickety boo on Love Island before the first swingers arrive. With the terrible twins about, you could spend all that time picking hairpins out of your codpiece and never get around to checking a single bath plug. That is, if we ever get to the place.

“B.E.A. wish to announce the departure of flight 1147 to Gerona …”

I cross myself a couple of times and sneak out to join the others. I have never flown before but I know I am going to be terrified. I had intended to get pissed to the point of insensibility but Nan and Nat have put the kibosh on that.

Fortunately there is something to take my mind off the rigours to come. She is about five foot eight and wearing a uniform about two sizes too small for her so that the seam down the middle of her arse grins at you like sharks’ teeth. Her makeup looks as if it has been put on by a Chinese miniaturist and then lacquered and the expression of contempt with which she greets my gaze makes me feel like something that has crawled out from under one of her gardening shoes. As is my wont, in such circumstances, I immediately fall in love with her. Upper class disdain has always turned me on.

“This we-a, plis,” she says in a voice that sounds like Christmas Eve in Harrods. “Dee-ont fair-get your board-ink carts.” Oh, the sheer ecstasy of it. Listening to her I can understand why Mum keeps a photo of Winston Churchill in the kasi. Some are born great, and others should have been. I trip through the glass doors and she actually smiles at me. It is not so much a smile, more a flutter of the lip endings but it is all mine. Fear is temporarily abandoned and I skip down the long corridor following the image of my B.E.A.uty Queen until the boarding card is drawn gently from my unthinking fingers and I venture out into the cool evening air.

Then I become frightened. The minute I see the studded patchwork quilt of metal I wonder how many of those panels have had to be replaced. What are all those men in white overalls standing about for? They look like surgeons. Is the plane dying? Up the steps and inside and I think it is the final of the all Ireland Hurling Championships. In fact it is only everybody taking their coats off in a very limited amount of space and punching each other in the face at the same time.

“On the reeack, plis,” says my dream girl as I struggle to follow suit. “Nee-o, hee-and baggage on the flea-or.”

I manage to wedge my knees against the seat in front which is a bad move because the occupant presses the release button and nearly forces them through my chest. By the cringe, but they don’t lash out with the space in these things. I feel like I have been hung up in Shirley Bassey’s wardrobe.

I am sitting on the end of the row because that way I am nearer the exit doors and I have a quick flit through the reading matter provided. That doesn’t cheer me up much either. It is full of diagrams about how to protect your head when the plane crashes or what you have to do to inflate your life jacket. There is also a strong paper bag which I don’t reckon is there to hold your bullseyes. Miss Love at First Flight does not improve matters by popping up and explaining how to use the oxygen mask in “the unlikely event” of the cabin becoming depressurised. They don’t have to tell me about that. I saw the movie: Kersplat! – and the whole bloody lot of us sucked out through a hole in the fuselage. All this and we haven’t even taxied to the take-off point.

I look out of the window to see if the engines are on fire yet and turn my attention to my fellow passengers. Nan and Nat are five rows behind and sitting on either side of a big rugged bloke with a face like canned sunshine. He is looking pleased with himself as if he reckons he is no end of a fellow for having secured the attention of two such knock-out birds. Even in my agony I can summon up a smile. Ted is beside me, and most of the other passengers are “Fiesta Bunny” or “Sun Senor” fodder. “Men and women of the age we live in” as Sir Giles put it. I suspect that he could make two weeks in a concentration camp sound like it was good for waking up your liver.

“Fee-arson your sate belts,” says my sky angel. “Nee-o smoking until the see-ine stops flea-ashing.”

She flops down into an empty seat at the front of the plane and crosses her legs with a crackle of nylon that gets my old man airborne comfortably before the rest of the plane. I sit there looking at my white knuckles and listening to the engines’ roar getting louder and louder until the whole plane is shuddering like my Aunt’s collie when it sees the poodle from number 47.

“Made your will?” says Ted with that wry, gritty sense of humour that so characterises the British at moments of stress or adversity.

“Fuck off,” I tell him.

As if taking offence the plane suddenly leaps forward and begins to career down the runway. It soon becomes obvious to me that the pilot is gambling on picking up enough speed to get us airborne before we hit the barrier fence. On and on we go and I am pressing my nails through the palms of my hands and beginning to wonder whether we are supposed to motor the first ten miles when suddenly we are airborne. I can tell that because my stomach feels as if it is floating in formaldehyde and the ground starts disappearing at an angle of 45 degrees. This might be alright but I then hear unmistakeable sounds of the plane breaking up. A groaning, rumbling noise from directly beneath my feet. I knew this would happen. Most of them crash on takeoff.

“It’s the wheels,” says Ted who is watching my face.

“They’ve fallen off?”

“No, you berk, that’s the undercarriage being retracted.”

“Oh.”

Well that is alright, but the next thing I know we are in the middle of a great bank of cloud, where there is obviously a very good chance of bashing into another plane; and then the engines start to fail. I detect the change in tone immediately and the loss of power makes me feel that we must start plummeting towards the earth any second. “Just settling down to our cruising speed,” soothes Ted who is beginning to get on my nerves with all his well-informed chat. “They always cut back a bit after take-off.” He must be right because the “no smoking” sign goes off and the air hostess gets up and goes into the pilot’s cabin. I stop listening to every note of the engine and begin to relax. But not for long. When I look up, my genteel beauty is pushing an iron lung down the plane. I might have guessed. The pilot has had a heart attack. Oh well, it couldn’t last for ever.

“Good,” says Ted. “I feel a bit peckish.” To my surprise the air hostess then opens a door in the side of the iron lung and starts dishing out trays of grub.

“Don’t eat the knives and forks,” says Ted. I soon find out what he means. Everything is plastic, including the food. If you were both hungry and short sighted you could crunch up the whole lot.

“Tia coffee?” say the apple of my thigh, dangling her pots in front of me.

“Coffee,” I say, showing her what a smooth cosmopolitan man of the world I am. If she is impressed she goes to great pains to conceal it.

“I’d like a large brandy, please,” says Ted.

“Sartanly, Sar. I’ll sarve you as soon as I khan.”

I wish I had thought of that. Very impressive. Ted obviously knows the form.

“Same for me, please,” I chip in. I mean, it will help to soothe my nerves, won’t it?

In the course of the next hour quite a lot of nerve tonic goes down and I am beginning to feel very soothed indeed. Angela, as I discover she is called, zooms up and down like the weight on a try your strength machine and I am becoming hornier than a herd of Aberdeen Angus. You would think that after my last little encounter with the demon drink I would be on my mettle, but not a bit of it. Pausing only to down my fifth brandy and consider that the clouds outside the window look like downy pillows on a large and crumpled bed I stand up, bounce back, release my safety belt and pad down the aisle, Angela-bound. In such situations, I never know what I am going to say, or do. I just hope that something will turn up and that it won’t only be the end of my nose.

Around me my fellow passengers are beginning to lie back in their seats and nod off and the atmosphere is beginning to match the drowsy drone of the plane’s engines. I approach the toilet and glancing around observe that Angela is engaged in a room of similar dimensions across the aisle. Through the half-open door I can see that she is adjusting her bra. This kind of unexpected glimpse always turns me on far more than a three-hour German sex instruction film; a good-looking bird flashing thigh as she got out of a car being one of my greatest treats of the fondly remembered pre-tight era.

I suck in a few quick eye-fulls of Ange repairing the ravages of flight 1147 and lurch into the toilet. This looks as if a drunken Irishman has tried to wash a sheep dog in it and I don’t particularly fancy doing anything more than washing my hands. Unfortunately, even this task is not as easy as it looks, because the tap is no sooner depressed than it jams. I could live with this but the plug hole appears to be blocked with sheep dog hairs and as I watch helplessly, water begins to flow over the floor. Immediately I begin to panic. The mess doesn’t bother me but I have an unreasonable fear that the plane might fill with water and we all be drowned. Drowned at thirty thousand feet! What a way to go. I can see the pilot holding his breath as he dives for the nearest landing strip. Too late! The plane explodes as a sudden shower over East Tooting. Don’t write and tell me that planes are not plumbed into the mains, I know that now. Then, I was rushing across the aisle and tugging Ange by the skirt. “The tap has jammed,” I gulp, “in the toilet.”

She looks at me with an expression of contemptuous disappointment like I am some kind of nasty insect, and she has left her D.D.T. spray at home.

“The tee-ap hes jemmed?”

“In the toilet.”

She winces when I say the word and adjusting her stupid hat sweeps across the passage-way. The tap has stopped of its own accord and the basin is now nearly empty. I push in after her and depress the tap.

“It was jammed,” I say. “Look.”

I take my hand away and the tap stops. I can see that Ange is about to say something very unkind when suddenly the plane drops two thousand feet. Maybe I exaggerate but it felt like that at the time. I grab Ange and she can see from the look in my eyes that this is not a clumsy pass.

“Turbulence,” she says like somebody has just burped. “Absolutely knee-uthing to worry about.”

It is very cramped in that toilet but I have a feeling that if I open the door I will step straight into space.

“You’re not free-heightened, are you?”

“Terrified.”

“See-it down. I’ll be be-ack in a me-oment.”

The plane gives another lurch and she has to prise my fingers off her one by one before I will let go. I sit down on the lav and look for the safety belt. There is no safety belt. What a diabolical way to go, I think to myself: bouncing round the inside of the kasi. You don’t meet a nice class of person that way.

“He-ear you are, drink this.” Ange pops round the door and hands me a glass of water with something fizzing in it.

“What is it?”

“It should he-elp to key-arm you dee-own a bit.”

“Great. Ta.”

The stuff slides down like Enos fruit salts and I slip on my grateful smile No. 143B.

“Captea-urn Barclay will tea-ache us up above the we-eather, I expect,” she murmurs and her voice is almost soothing. “Everybody has their see-it belt on knee-ow so you me-ite as we-ell stay he-ear. Knee-owe-body will key-um bar-gin in.”

“Seat belts!?” My hand sneaks out again, just in case she should be about to leave me.

“I repee-it knee-uthing to we-ury abee-out. You we-ont feel a thing in a mee-oment.”

That is what is worrying me.

“I’m terrified,” I mutter.

“Stand e-up.”

I do as I am told and she picks up a bottle of Eau-de-cologne and starts dabbing my forehead with it – I mean with what is inside the bottle.

“Be-etter?”

I nod slowly and find my arms slipping round her waist. Honestly they might belong to somebody else sometimes, the way they go on. I rest my head against her shoulder and let my hooter soak up her upper class pong. There is always something a bit sharp and bracing about the stuff birds like her wear – a whiff of the Young Conservative Pony Club outing to “Salad Days”.

Luckily the plane wobbles about a bit more and I can snuggle closer.

“You are free-heightened, aren’t you?”

“Not when you’re here.”

I hold her so tight that I expect to see her makeup cracking and she gives a little gasp like one of those squeeze-me dolls.

“Relax.”

To my amazement her hand drops to the front of my trousers and she starts to ruffle the hair at the back of my neck.

“De-ont be disturbed.”

A pretty stupid thing to say in the circumstances, but I am not complaining. With a practised ease that surprises me she flips open my fly and feels inside like she is taking her pet bunny out of its hutch.

“There, the-at’s be-etter, isn’t it?”

She is dead right it is. I don’t know whether they teach them that at air hostess school or whether it is just a personal service but what she is doing sure takes your mind off the horrors of flying.

“Dee-ont kiss me,” she says. “I can’t afford to get my me-ache-up smudged. Key-an you reach one of those peeaper tiles?”

A few minutes later I am making my way back down the aisle towards Ted feeling a pleasant glow fanning out through my thighs. Most of the passengers are asleep but the bloke who was sitting between Nan and Nat is hanging on to the seat in front with both hands and biting his tongue. There is a wild staring look in his eyes. I can’t see Nat or Nan, although there are a pair of female legs sticking out into the aisle. I sit down next to Ted who smiles at me a trifle contemptuously.

“You came over a little queer, did you?” he says.

“No,” I say. “Over a paper towel, actually.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Isla de Amor sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Like a beautiful woman’s name. Can you imagine the deep blue ocean softly stroking the sinuous sandy shores? The warm Mediterranean sun embracing you in its lover’s caress? The tasty tipple in a small discreet taverna before an evening of self-revealing sensual exploration? Chances are that, if you can, you have read the Funfrall Continental Brochure. That is where it says all that stuff. In reality, Love Island is a little different.

You approach it from the airport in one of Funfrall Continental’s fleet of luxury coaches (i.e. two, one of which is always out of service). “Luxury” is pitching it a bit high, too, though I suppose they offer marginally more room for stowing thirty people’s baggage than the Wells Fargo jobs. Through the fly-splattered windows you can see dust, small children making very common market-type gestures, Coca Cola signs and the kind of crumbling villages that Clint Eastwood would be ashamed to book for a lynching. The sun is there alright, and the roof of the coach feels like the lid of a pressure cooker. In fact, there is almost too much sun. It glares out of the sky as if determined to reduce you to a blob of fat before you can get your swimming costume on.

There are mountains in the background but the coach takes you away from them, through land which is pretty flat – or, more exactly, flat and not very pretty. The scenery may be drab, but at least this prepares you for your first glimpse of “the pleasure dome of liberated sensuality” – no prizes for guessing where that came from.

At the fag end of a small fishing village, on a driftwood strewn beach, stands a ramshackle wooden jetty pointing like an accusing finger at a low-lying island separated from the grateful shore by about five hundred yards of water. It is difficult to get an exact idea of its size because it appears to run away at right angles to the beach but it is certainly not going to give Australia an inferiority complex.

“Is that it?” I say the first time I see it, hoping that someone is going to disagree with me.

“That’s what the sign says.”

“How do we get there?”

“You take a running jump from the end of the pier. What do you think they built it for?”

It is true that there appears to be no boat to speed us to to our new home and this is causing Manuel, who met us at the airport, and who we have discovered to be unofficial leader of the Spanish anti-deoderant movement, great anxiety.

“Fission, fission!” he keeps muttering angrily.

“He means it’s the world’s first nuclear slag heap.”

“No he doesn’t. He means that the ferry boat has gone fishing.”

An hour later we find the latter explanation to be correct and cross to the island with fourteen sardines and a small octopus. All the way, Manuel shakes his head and shrugs apologetically whilst occasionally excusing himself to tear a strip off the boat’s skipper who ignores him and continues to gaze resignedly into space. In the next few weeks we meet a great many Manuels, all of them bearing a responsibility that ends just short of the job you want doing. In fact, we come to say that when a job is done “manuelly” it means it is not done at all.

Another expression we adapt is “traditionally Spanish”. This is much used in the Funfrall brochure and can be employed to describe everything from plumbing – taps that spring from the plaster when touched and wave in front of you like angry snakes – to the electrical fittings which don’t.

At close range, Isla de Amor looks like the abandoned set of a low-budget Spanish western. This is not totally surprising because in fact it is the abandoned set of a large number of low-budget Spanish westerns. Unfortunately they were also low-profit which accounts for Sir Giles having been able to snap up the whole place for the price of a couple of tons of Entero Viaform.

Sir Giles, who would be able to pluck swallows out of the air if they had five pound notes strapped to their backs, was not slow to realise that the “Last Chance Saloon” could be converted into the “Candlelight Casino” and that the “Wagonwheel Hotel” and stables would make an ace dining hall if you bothered to put a wall on the back of them. This, that matchless servant of the British shareholder has done, and as I sit in the Passion Fooderama and nosh my Paella and chips – “Fish, food of love since times immoral” it says on the menu, though I reckon there must be a misprint – I am thinking what a clever old basket Sir Giles is. A couple of ancient aircraft hangers at Melody Bay and this load of traditional Spanish set-building, and he must be making millions. I can’t see any difference between the food either, apart from what is written on the menu. I mean, paella does not have batter round it, does it? “Every attempt is made to combine exotic local foods with the good wholesome English fare that Funfrall’s holiday guests come back for year after year” it says, “you won’t find greasy, garlic-ridden, spicey, indigestible local oddities at Funfralls Continental”. True, and if you do you can always beat them to death with one of the three hundred tomato ketchup bottles handy. “Many of our chefs have been trained in England so they know the high standard we expect”, the menu goes on to say. Looking at the hands of the bloke picking his nose behind the counter, I reckon his training must have been as a mechanic.

Still, one does not want to be too critical, does one? I think, as I sit there on that first night. It is early days yet and we have all had a long, tiring journey. Even Nan, I find as I look underneath the table on my left, is having a struggle to pull down Ted’s fly. Try and look on the bright side, I tell myself. Fortunately, this task is made easier for me by the presence of a dark sad-eyed girl with big tits who is mopping down one of the tables nearby. She is obviously Spanish which I find exciting, and looks tired and bored like me. I smile at her. She immediately puts down her cloth and approaches me with a ketchup bottle in her hand.

“Tomato?” she says helpfully.

“No. No thanks.”

“Brown sauce? Mustard? Thees one?” she holds up the Worcester Sauce bottle which I suppose must cause some pronunciation problems to the average Spaniard. Her desire to help is touching and it occurs to me that she has probably served the needs of the British holidaymaker before.

“You speak very good English,” I murmur, working on the basis that birds anywhere lap up flattery.

“Thank you,” says the girl. “So do you.”

Isn’t she nice? Nobody has ever told me that before.

“What is your name?”

“Carmen.”

I should have guessed, shouldn’t I?

“My name is Timmy.”

“Timmee.”

“That’s right. What time do you finish working in here? I was wondering whether you might show me round the island. Perhaps I could buy you a drink?”

“I think that is possible. They are not very expenseeve.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant—oh well, it doesn’t matter. Do you live on the island?”

Half an hour later I have discovered that, like most of the local staff, she lives on the mainland and is ferried backwards and forwards every morning and evening – “except when I help with big entertainment” she says rolling her eyes at me. She has also worked on one of the American air bases nearby and this raises her availability rating a few notches, especially in connection with the previous remark. I mean we all know what those yanks are like once they get a couple of pounds of T-bone steak and a gallon of ice-cream inside them, don’t we?

Acting on this information I try to touch her up beneath the hacienda but she wriggles away and waggles her finger at me enticingly.

“No, no. You say you want to see Isla de Moscas – I mean Isla de Amor. I am going to reveal it to you.”

“What does Isla de Moscas mean?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she says quickly. “It is an old name for the island. I do not know what it means. Come.”

And before I can ask any more questions, she is moving off towards the higher ground behind the Ghost Town, as Ted calls it.

There we find a shallow, sloping depression in which are situated scores of straw huts looking like stooks of corn in a field. Amongst them is the occasional thatched drinking trough and under the trees are two rows of pig sties – no, wait a minute; they must be traditional Spanish toilets.

“Happy Campers,” exclaims Carmen, rolling her eyes skywards. Happy indeed. I am glad I am tucked away in a little bungalow behind the Candlelight Casino. This place looks like a deserted Red Indian camp, only without the amenities. You don’t have to be promiscuous to sleep in a different bed every night, you just have to be bad at telling the difference between identical straw huts.

We follow a sign which points to “Lover’s Beach” and I discover that this must refer to those who love climbing up and down three hundred steps. That number of feet below us is a strip of sand the size of a cricket square surrounded by towering rocks which must shut out most of the sunshine.

“Where are the other beaches?” I ask.

She points towards the mainland shore.

“Below the sewer works.”

I nod understandingly. “This is the best beach.”

“This is the best beach.”

I throw a stone into the sea, because I never go near the sea without throwing a stone at it, and square my enormous shoulders.

“Time for that drink I promised you,” I say taking her arm firmly but gently. “I know” I try and make it sound as if the idea has just occurred to me “I have a bottle of whisky in my room. Why don’t we have a drop of that?”

“Bourbon,” she says.

“Just like bourbon,” I say, grateful to our American cousins for having corrupted her.

“Let’s go.”

“O.K. buddy,” she says.

Back in my room half a million assorted insects are circling the light bulb which must work on a wattage low enough to ripen green tomatoes. I pour us a couple of shots of whisky and advance towards the tap. This, when turned, yields half a tumbler full of liquid rust and then dries up. Carmen shakes her head.

“Water no good,” she says and grasping her throat with both hands, sticks out her tongue and shows me the whites of her eyes. This is a gesture I have no difficulty in interpreting and I hand her the glass of neat whisky.

“Better,” she says.

“Better,” I echo.

“Skin off your arse.”

“Skin off your arse.”

Really, those Americans! She knocks back the Scotch like it is wrapped round an aspirin and extends her glass for another shot. I give her one and she marches into the bathroom jerking her arm at me to follow. To amuse myself, I try the bath tap which gurgles reproachfully.

“Bath?” I say.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” she says. “Maybe the day after. Water bad.”

I nod and she opens the bathroom cabinet – or rather she removes the door of the bathroom cabinet which comes away with the knob. Inside are five bottles which she holds up proudly. They all seem to be for stomach disorders.

“Good?” she says, asking for praise.

“Very good,” I say. “I use mucho, I think.”

“You bet your sweet life.”

“You, beautiful girl,” I say, feeling that it is time to dispense with the medicine chest and get a lot closer to the one that is heaving temptingly before me. “You have beautiful body.”

“Built like concrete shit-house,” she says proudly, “everybody say so.”

“I wouldn’t dream of arguing with them. And beautiful hair.”

“And here, too,” she says pointing to her bristols. “You see?”

“Smashing.”

I slip my arms round her waist and her mouth comes up to meet mine like it is late for an appointment. She tastes of peppermints. I wonder what the rest of her tastes like. I run my hand over her comfortable arse and she starts probing the small of my back with her fingers.

“I like you,” she says.

I think she means it, too, because she keeps trying to bite little pieces off me as souvenirs. This is something I am not very partial to but I don’t say anything; mainly because both my lips are being nibbled like lettuce leaves in the mouth of a highly-strung rabbit. I advance my tongue but this is thrust back firmly in its place by an organ of greater power.

“Bed,” she says firmly and walks me backwards in a clumsy tango step. I am about to topple on to it gratefully when she releases her grip and seizing the bedstead, rattles it viciously until two bolts and a large cockroach zig-zag across the room.

“Squeakee too much,” she says, and before the dust has settled she has torn off the mattress and thrown it on to the floor. By the cringe! Talk about ripping telephone directories in half. This bird would make Joan Rhodes trade in her chest expanders. And she looked so bloody docile in the Fooderama, too. Appearances can be deceiving, I think to myself as she smiles encouragingly and starts tugging her jumper over her head. Underneath she is wearing a bra that might have been made out of two U.S.A.F. parachutes – and brother, there could not have been enough material left over to knit your kid sister a thimble cosy. What a pair! Spain’s answer to the world melon shortage. Just to be in their presence is an honour but to actually touch them! My greedy hand stretches out and disappears into the cleavage up to the wrist. Caramba! Or whatever they say in these parts, this girl is a flesh avalanche!

Maybe avalanche is the wrong word, because they are usually cold, aren’t they? Little Carmen is not cold, oh dear me, no. I have hardly closed with her before she chucks me on the mattress like it is the final of the Spanish Open Judo championships and I have been lucky to get this far. Queen Kong isn’t in it as she stands over me and starts gyrating her tits like a lady gorilla trying to tell you something. Her skirt is dignified calf-length but it soon drops a damn sight lower than that as she pulls the ripcord and reveals a minute pair of silk panties adorned with an American Sergeant’s stripes pointing to her you-know-what. I would like to be able to whistle “God Bless America” but I am getting a bit short of breath.

“Now: Lovefock,” she says, and she drops on me demonstrating a technique that would turn Mick McManus Hughie Greene with envy. Her hand dives down the front of my jeans like she has left her pet ferret there, and all the lights go out. At first, I think I have fainted, or that ten years as the slave of the five fingered widow have caught up with me, but Carmen is quick to offer reassurance.

“Crappy generator pack up again. We do it in dark.”

I don’t know where she gets the “we” from. Every time I try and get in on the act, I am slapped down like a cheeky puppy. I don’t know whether it is intentional, but she starts to pull my jeans off over my suedes, and you don’t run a hundred yards in that condition, I can tell you. Maybe she thinks I am going to try and sneak off under cover of darkness. Her fears are groundless because, though wary, I can still think of five million other things I would less like to be doing – or being done by as is more nearly the case.

“Aah,” she breathes, drawing forth the fruits of my jockey briefs. “Now we have fun.” Before I can tell her where I packed the paper hats she clambers aboard and snuffs out Percy with a flick of her hips. Where her panties have gone I don’t know. Maybe she has a release mechanism.

“Hold tight, cookee,” she breathes. “It ees going to be a bumpee ride.”

She is not kidding and I can understand why she did not reckon the bedstead was up to it. Have you ever seen one of those electric do-das that workmen use for pounding down road surfaces? Well, imagine two of those side by side, and you have some idea of the punishment her big end is dishing out. In the moonlight I can see her tits swinging dangerously near my head and it is getting so I am terrified to move. God knows what they must be thinking next door because the noise is terrific, even without the bed. Carmen is not a silent lover and her voice, well lubricated by my Scotch, is belting out a few traditional Spanish chants. They have a very persistent beat which is soon more than can be said for me as the minutes tick by and the mighty pelvis continues to batter down on my sensitive body. Even the realisation that I am poking for England is insufficient to make me hold back. Patriotism is not enough, as I remember reading somewhere. A few more ferocious wriggles and I am adding my own delighted gurgles to the general uproar. Bang! Bang! Bang! The noise of somebody bashing against the wall ripples over our gasping bodies and I run my finger down Carmen’s sweat-slippering backbone and whisper self-protectingly in her ear.

“That was wonderful but you must not miss the ferry.”

“Ferry gone,” says my love comfortingly. “I stay here with you tonight. Where is the whisky?”

Blimey! Talk about “A Night on the Bare Mountain”! That composer bloke had obviously never tangled with our Carmen. What an appetite! By the time dawn breaks I feel like I have been run through a combine harvester a couple of times.

Somehow I break away from her and, mumbling that I am going for a swim, make for the door.

“When you come back, I bring you breakfast in bed – Spaneesh style,” she calls after me. That is all I need and I am practically running as I approach the beach. A nice swim is just what I require to pull myself together and prepare for the day ahead. It looks as if it is going to be hot, too.

Just how hot I have not realised. I have no sooner discarded my shorts and am prepared to dunk sizzling Percy in the briny when I hear a sound calculated to strike terror into the bravest heart.

“Well, if it isn’t my favourite male chauvinist pig posing for the cover of Health and Efficiency. Fancy making it a tableau?”

I whip round to see Nan and Nat advancing on me from behind a rock. They are, inevitably, starkers, and looking mean with it. You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to know what they are thinking – just dirty-minded and good at jumping to conclusions.

“Listen, girls,” I whine. “I’m not feeling so good. I hardly slept a wink last night. I think I’ve got a fever.”

“We have the cure for all your ills.”

“Not this one,” I yelp, “now step aside, please. I want to swim.”

“Back to the foetal fluid, huh? I always reckoned you were a mother’s boy at heart, Timmy.”

“Leave my feet and my mother out of this,” I tell them sharply – you can take so much, can’t you? – “I’m a sick man.”

“Only because you are burdened by so many bourgeois hang-ups. You want to make love with us, don’t you?”

“No, no!” I howl.

“Of course you do. Don’t fight it. Let it all hang out.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. Look, I’ve told you once, I had a bad night, I’m tired, I’m ill. I just want to swim. Now, please! Be good girls and let me get on with it in peace.”

They consider me for a moment.

“Maybe he’s a repressed homosexual.”

“I’m not repressed,” I say, taking umbrage immediately.

“But you are a homosexual.”

“No. No!” I shriek.

“Come on, admit it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You can have relationships with girls as well, you know. Just try and imagine that we’re a couple of fellahs.”

“I could never do that, even if I wanted to. Honestly, please believe me. I am not bent. I am just tired, knackered, bushed, whacked!”

“Why do you hate women so much?”

“Me, hate women? Don’t make me laugh. Some of my best friends are women. My mother for instance.”

“Did you hear that, Nan? Back to the womb again.”

“Oh, forget it.”

I start walking into the sea. Maybe if I walk far enough I can end it all.

“Don’t worry, Timmy.” Nat’s hand slips through my arm.

“We’re going to help you.” Nan has grabbed the other one.

“Now listen girls—”

“Chicks aren’t so bad, Timmy.”

I am now sandwiched between them in two feet of water. You may have seen something like it on the front cover of Funfrall Continental’s brochure. Something. “Once you get used to them.” They are beginning to nibble me and do indescribably naughty things with their hands. They must have been swimming already because there are small drops of water glistening along their firm brown shoulders.

“Look, Nat,” says Nan. “He’s crying.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“You pull the knob behind the seat,” says Ted.

“Oh, I thought you pushed it,” I say.

“Yeah, so did the last eight blokes who were in my place, I reckon. Blimey! Talk about pong.”

We are discussing the toilet arrangements which are decidedly “traditional”.

“They ought to print some instructions in English.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference if they did. My inheritance still hasn’t moved and the flies are standing three abreast on each other’s shoulders. What time does the water go on?”

“I dunno. I just work here.”

“You must be the only thing that does. What a carve-up. God knows what it’s going to be like when the paying customers arrive.”

We are sitting on the verandah of the Candelight Casino to which I have fled after the Deadly Duo have finished “liberating” me. That was their word for it, anyway.

“You alright?” says Ted. “You’re looking a bit pale.”

I laugh hollowly and continue to flick through my cornflakes in case there are any more ants lurking there. The tinned milk failed to drown the first three hundred.

“I didn’t sleep very well,” I say.

“Hot, wasn’t it?”

“Very.”

“Still, I suppose we’re going to get used to it.”

“I hope so. Oh, by the way, Ted, what does Isla de Moscas mean?”

“‘The Island of Flies’. Why?”

“That’s what they used to call this place.”

“What do you mean ‘used to’? Have you seen my bathroom? Blooming heck. I’ve heard of Spanish Fly – this place ought to be called Spanish Flies.”

“That’s very good, Ted.”

“Thank you, Timmy. Flattery will get you anywhere with me. Incidentally, who’s been filling you in on the local history? I heard you were giving a Tupperware party in your room last night. Was it one of your guests?”

“There was only one.”

“That’s not what I heard. They reckoned you were breaking in wild horses later on. Don’t tell me you’ve started indulging in the dreaded hanky panky already?”

“No, Ted, I was moving the furniture around.”

“Sounds an interesting way of doing it.”

“Yes. Look, Ted, talking of ‘hanky panky’. Who’s the Francis figure round here?”

“A bloke called Grunwald.”

“I haven’t seen him since we got here.”

“You won’t, either. Not until he’s finished the three bottles of brandy he took with him when he locked himself in his bungalow.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Nothing. Nobody else is going to do anything. I’ve checked the kitchen and we’re alright for potatoes and tinned milk. There’ll be no shortage of tea and chips. I’m not a plumber or a can of fly spray so there’s bugger all else I can do.”

“But hadn’t we better do something to get the place organised?”

“Organised!? Listen, mate. This is Isla de Amor: Love Island. You don’t have to organise anything here. Just let ’em get on with it; it sounds as if you were setting a very good example last night—oops! Talk of the diablo. Look who’s coming.”

I follow his eyes and there is Carmen padding towards us carrying a piece of paper in her hand. “You sweem long way,” she says to me reproachfully. “I have flushed out toilets and got more stomach powder for you.”

“Very kind of you, but I don’t have a stomach ache.”

“Soon,” she says, nodding wisely. “Soon.”

“Cheerful little darling, isn’t she,” says Ted. “What have you got there, love?”

“Telegram for Senor Grun—Grun—you look.” She hands the paper to Ted.

“Telegram! My goodness, what next? I thought a bloke ran out of the rocks with a message in a forked stick. Now, let’s see. ‘Arriving Island 14.30 hours. 7–7–72. Noggett’.”

‘I give telegram to Grun, Grun …” Carmen extends her hand.

“Don’t bother, darling. I think we’d better call his room the Sick Bay from now on. Take him some chicken broth about dinner time.”

“I no understand.”

“It doesn’t matter. Man come from England in flying bird. He sort everything out.”

In fact, man and woman arrive by flying bird. About four hours later than expected, a very damp and bedraggled Sidney and secretary limp on to the Island. We refrain from asking if he had a good trip but he tells us about it anyway.

“Poxy plane wouldn’t start and then the bloody bus breaks down. You buggers didn’t go out of your way to meet us, did you?”

“Your telegram didn’t arrive until this morning.”

“Bloody marvellous. When did we send that, Marcia?”

I check over Miss Trimbody for signs of mauling but it looks as if she has had a fairly Sid-free trip. No obvious bruises or torn garments.

“Mid-day last Tuesday,” she says primly, flicking aside a damp curl.

“Looks as if someone made a cock-up. Where’s Grunwald?”

‘Ill.”

“Sick.”

“You mean pissed as usual, I suppose. Where’s his chalet?”

“Oh—er. I think—no—where …?”

“Don’t mess about. I want to talk to someone about this place. We’ve got the public arriving in a few days you know. Now where is he?”

So a small procession forms up and we all march round to Grunwald’s bungalow. The sun is sinking behind the corrugated iron roof and the only sound to be heard is that of a dog working over one of the dustbins behind the Passion Fooderama. It is very peaceful.

“That one?” says Sid.

We nod and Marcia sucks in her breath. Sid steps forward and taps on the door. Nothing happens. Sid knocks on the door. Still nothing happens. Sid bangs on the—“Shurrup!! Shurrup! Shurr-u-u-p!!!” The voice goes off like an explosion and the bungalow shudders as waves of abuse break through the wall. Grunwald is obviously well into the brandy. As if to prove the point, two empty bottles leave in quick succession via one of the windows, narrowly missing Marcia’s head. They are followed by a burst of drunken laughter accompanied by hysterical female giggles. Sid puts his shoulder to the door and we all crane forward to peer inside. Lying naked across the bed is Grunwald, his fat belly glistening with sweat and his limp cluster shaking in time with his laughter. Nan is lying starkers with her head on his hairy belly and Nat is standing up trying to pour herself a slug of brandy. Unfortunately, she is laughing so much that she cannot hold the glass steady. She tries to concentrate, bites her lip, screws up her eyes, then drops the bottle which shatters on the concrete floor. Now all three of them start laughing twice as loud. I glance at Marcia who is standing at my elbow. She is also biting her lip and I suspect she is getting a quiet kick from the proceedings. Interesting girl, Marcia.

The back of Sid’s neck turns red and when he swings round we all fall down the steps of the bungalow. He chokes a couple of times, shuts the door as an afterthought and fixes Ted with his eye.

“Right, Hotchkiss,” he says. “You’re in charge and your first job is going to be to get that bloody maniac off the island. Put him on an aeroplane. It doesn’t matter where it’s going. Anywhere. And as for those two—those—”

“You mean Sir Giles’ nieces?” I say hurriedly. Sidney wilts. “You’ll have to watch them,” he says weakly.

In the next few days we watch the Deadly Duo systematically work their way through every male on the Island. This is not bad going when you consider that these are the days on which we interview waiters and barmen, and an extra sixty Spaniards come over from the mainland. Poor devils. It is pathetic to see them change from arrogant males glorying in their Latin sensuality to shivering substitutes for men skulking behind rocks in order to avoid the merciless attentions of the flesh fiends.

“Poor sods,” said Ted. “They started off as bull-fighters and ended up fighting for their balls.”

You may think I exaggerate but you have never experienced those birds at first hand – at least I imagine you haven’t. Maybe by the time I write this—hey, why don’t you run down to the village store and buy a padlock, just to be on the safe side?

Sidney watches what is happening and tries to be philosophical – at least I think that was the word he meant to use. You never quite know with Sidney.

“Let ’em get on with it,” he says. “They’ll be shagged out by the time the paying customers get here.”

Us old hands shake our heads at that one. We know our girls. When you screw for peace you screw with the strength of ten. Not that Sid is less than smack on the ball in many ways. He gets all the huts repaired, stops the locals using the piss houses as goat pens and even gets some of the toilets working. I can vouch for this latter success because one of the workmen manages to flush his plastic false teeth down the loo and they bob up beside Ted off Palm Beach two minutes later.

“Bloody terrifying, it was,” he says. “I thought they were one of those tropical fish with nothing but teeth.”

This incident underlines one of the fundamental weaknesses of Love Island’s plumbing arrangements and you soon learn to swim a fair distance from the shore unless you want to meet a few old friends.

One disappointment is the failure to get Grunwald off the island. The sun must have affected him because when Ted goes to fetch him for the plane he tears all his clothes off and runs naked into the trees. He has only been seen occasionally since. At first, it was reckoned that hunger would drive him out, but now with only a couple of days left to the first guests arriving, Sid has ordered that pairs of shorts be left around the island in the hope that he will slip a pair on and not let down the tone of the place. It is much in Sid’s mind that some old Funfrall customers might wonder why their former Holiday Host is now frisking about in the altogether.

Ted is running around like a blue-arsed fly – of which there are still a great many to pick up hints from – and I am improving my sun tan and doing what I can to keep away from Carmen. The bloody woman won’t leave me alone and is always slipping another bottle into the medicine cabinet or her hand down the front of my trousers. Health and sex are the only two things she seems to think about. Not that I can complain too much because I have given up smoking and never said no to a spot of the other in my life.

Somebody else who seems to be getting his share is Sid. Our leader’s quarters are across the road from Marcia’s and Carmen informs me that the cobble stones between the two front doors are getting decidedly worn. What Sid gets up to is of course his own business and, despite the fact that he is married to my sister, I have never thought of questioning his behaviour. What makes me change my mind is when he calls me in to his office – the first thing Sid does when he gets onto the island is fix himself up with an office – and informs me that Mum, Dad and Rosie are going to be amongst the first batch of swingers to set foot on our fair shores. This news is nothing if not a bombshell and I stagger back temporarily stunned by its multiple implications.

“Blimey!” I gasp. “How did they get out here?”

“I paid for ’em. Of course, I managed to fiddle a pretty hefty reduction. It’s not going to bankrupt me.”

“But why, Sid?”

“Well, I thought your Mum and Dad – poor old sods – could do with a bit of a knees-up before they snuff it. I mean, you’re never going to send them anywhere, are you? A day trip to Southend on their Golden Wedding Anniversary would be about your mark.”

“But why here, Sid? I mean, Love Island. They’re a bit past it, aren’t they? Have you sent them a course of Phyllosan as well?”

“They don’t have to get involved in anything. They can just sit about in the sun and relax. Marcia can look after them.”

“Yeah, and what about Marcia? Rosie isn’t going to take too warmly to her being out here, is she?”

“Don’t be stupid. Rosie knows all about Marcia. She’s met her.”

“There’s a difference to meeting her in England, and finding her shacked up with you out here.”

“What do you mean ‘shacked up’? Are you suggesting I’m having it away with her?”

“The idea had flashed across my mind, Sid. Quite a few others too. Look, I don’t mind what you do, but I think you ought to be a bit careful about upsetting Rosie. Don’t make it too obvious. You know what I mean?”

Sidney does not like that because he starts tugging at his moustache as if he wants to tear it out of his mush and his face turns an ugly red colour.

“You’ve got a bloody cheek talking to me like that. You’re still an employee of Funfrall Enterprises, you know, not a bleeding marriage guidance counsellor. I know how to handle Rosie, don’t you worry about that.”

“I just think it’s bloody stupid having both of them out here.”

“I don’t see why I should deny Rosie a holiday just because Marcia’s here. She’s been on at me long enough about it. Look, Timmy. We’re in the nineteen seventies. Rosie and I have a modern marriage. If I fancy a quick fling with some bird, Rosie doesn’t mind. She knows I’ll still be mending the kid’s bike on Saturday morning. We’re grown-up people. All that faithfulness bit isn’t the B.O. and end-all, you know.”

“Supposing Rosie fancied a bit on the side?”

Sid swallows hard.

“Well, of course it’s not very likely to happen, is it? She’s got the house and the kid and—and me.”

“And supposing she did?”

“Well, it would be just the same. What’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander. The sex thing is pretty unimportant. We put too much emphasis on it. It’s what happens up here that keeps marriage alive.” Sid taps his nut.

“That’s very broad-minded, Sid.”

“Well, like I said. You’ve got to move with the times. Attitudes change. Now, don’t worry about Mum and Dad or Rosie. Everything is going to be alright. You leave it to me. If you want to do something useful, get out there and find that bleeder Grunwald.”

So I pad off with my mind full of the new Sidney and thinking how he has changed. When Sid used to live with us in Scraggs Road he and Dad were after each other’s guts, twenty four hours a day. Now he is giving the miserable old bleeder a free holiday. And as for all this free love stuff, I just don’t get it. I always thought Sid was the possessive type.

The sun is battering down out of a cloudless sky and, as the alternative is painting a white line round the edge of the ping pong table, I decide to take Sid at his word and go and look for Grunwald. Somebody has broken into the camp kitchen which, as Ted observes, is a clear indication of desperation, and it is generally reckoned to have been Grunwald. This notion is supported by the fact that all the pairs of shorts left out have been put through the mincing machine.

I wander amongst the pines and find a path which winds down towards the sea. It is cool and dark under the trees with only occasional shafts of sunlight breaking through the thick foliage. Soon I can see patches of blue dodging behind the trunks and when I emerge it is to gaze down on an endless jumble of rocks looking like an upturned box of kids’ building bricks. Half the height of a house some of them are, and they start piling up right at the water’s edge. At first this leads me to think that there can’t be any beach, but as I walk along I can see the occasional tiny cove – and I don’t mean Wee Georgie Wood – nestling amongst the rocks with its own private beach, empty and inviting.

But not always empty. In the middle of one patch of sand a young woman wearing a bikini is lying on her stomach and reaching behind her back to release the catch of her bra. I hate to see her risking pulling a muscle when I would be only too ready to offer my services. Especially as the young lady in question is the lovely Marcia. She unhooks her bra, arranges each strap neatly on either side of her and rests her head on her hands. Very methodical girl, Miss Trimbody. I find her cool, self-contained style very appealing after some of the ravers I have been struggling with lately. I continue to watch her slim, lithe body dozing in the sunshine and ponder my next move. Any bloke with a spark of decency in him would of course tiptoe quietly away and go home to catalogue his stamp collection.

Unfortunately, though I can on occasions strike sparks, not one of them has ever had decency stamped on it. My first reaction is the one that is still with me ten minutes and a fair dose of eye-strain later: how can I get the rest of her costume off? I could ask her to take it off nicely, or bash her over the nut with a rock, but neither of these methods seems quite right. In the end, I settle for my normal approach: the one foot in front of the other, followed by the nervous pause while I wait to hear what I am going to say.

In this case it is “sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you” because just as I am drawing up beside her and about to cough discreetly, she suddenly sits up and starts to wriggle out of her bikini bottom. She has got it down to the knees when for some reason she turns and sees me gawping at her. Quick as a flash, she crosses her legs and drops her hands over her pubes.

“What do you want? What do you want?” she shrills.

Of course, I could tell her, but again, I don’t think it is the right moment.

“I’ll look the other way,” I say, turning my back on her and holding before me like a photograph the memory of her shapely little breasts and upturned nipples. “I am sorry.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for Grunwald and doing a bit of exploring at the same time. It’s nice here, isn’t it?”

“Not if you’re being spied on when you’re sunbathing.”

“I wasn’t spying. I saw you from up there and you were lying so still I thought something might be wrong. Can I turn round now?”

I whip round but she has everything on again and is flicking the sand off her bra. Grrrh!

“You could have shouted.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“It was a jolly sight more frightening turning round and suddenly seeing you standing there.”

“Yes—er—do you mind if I sit down?”

“Be my guest. It’s a free beach. What there is of it.”

“There’s not a lot of sand, is there?”

“For what is supposed to be a Mediterranean holiday island, I think it’s incredible.”

“Sidney wouldn’t like to hear you say that.”

“I’ve already said it to him. I told him that the whole place was a disaster. I don’t see how any sane person could disagree with me.”

“Well, I hope it goes alright for Sidney’s sake.”

“Don’t worry about Sidney. He’s one of nature’s survivors. He’ll be alright.”

“How long have you worked for him?”

“About six months, I think. The length of time he’s been Promotions Manager.”

“What’s he like to work for?”

“We have our ups and downs—” she sees me looking at her when she says that, and blushes. “He’s a very volatile man. Lots of drive, impatient, reckless, his assessment of situations can be terribly wrong sometimes – but I don’t have to tell you all this. You’re his brother-in-law, aren’t you?”

“Yes. You sound as if you like him.”

“I do. I like brash, aggressive men. Maybe I want to be dominated. It’s probably all very Freudian.”

She looks out to sea and lets a handful of sand trickle through her fingers. This is quite a class bird, I think to myself.

“Are you lobbying on behalf of your sister? I haven’t got anything big going with Sidney.”

I pick up some sand and pour it gently on to her pile.

“I wasn’t thinking about that. I was concentrating on number one, as usual.”

Our hands brush against each other and she makes no great effort to snatch hers away. I am lying on my back and she looks down at me and smiles.

“How long were you watching from up there?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Wondering if I was dead?”

“That kind of thing.”

“You’re a liar.”

“That’s right.”

She looks out to sea again and slowly releases a hand full of sand on to my stomach.

“It’s a pity,” she says slowly.

“What is?”

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

“Go on.”

“I have a favourite fantasy in which I’m lying on a small, secluded beach and the sun is shining and the sea is sparkling and—”

“And what?”

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

“Go on.”

“And a beautiful man appears from nowhere and …”

“And?”

The sky is very blue above me and there is a solitary seagull circling lazily as if keeping a watchful eye on us. Marcia’s face appearing above mine blocks it out and I refocus on her blue eyes.

“—we make love.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“You’ll do.”

I raise my head as if her mouth is the lowest of a bunch of grapes dangling above me and we kiss gently. It is very pleasant that kiss, so we do it again, putting a little more feeling into it. Her back is warm and I dust the sand from it, pulling her down so that we are lying side by side and I can smell her hair and run my tongue along her eyelids. She tugs at my T-shirt and starts to knead the flesh around my waist.

“Ouch,” I say. “That hurts.”

“You look as if you can take it.”

Her hand moves smoothly down to my thigh and she pushes it up the leg of my shorts.

She is biting her lip just as she was when we were watching Grunwald and the girls.

“That’s nice,” she says. “Oh, that is nice.”

And quick as a flash she rolls away, arches her back and slips down her bikini bottom. I don’t have time to help, she does it so fast. I kick off my sandals and do the same and her hand comes back immediately, inquisitive and greedy.

“Take off your shirt,” she hisses. “I want to look at all of you.”

By the time I have pulled it over my head, she has shaken off her bra and starts running her fingers over me and darting her mouth down so that her kisses fall on me like isolated drops of rain heralding a storm. Her head taxis down my body and—o-o-o-o-o-h! I dig my hands into the sand and screw up my eyes against the sunlight and the ecstasy.

Far above me through the haze I can see a man standing on the rocks watching us. He has a beard and a hairy chest and a fat hairy belly and he is naked. The expression on his face could be a smile. Grunwald. O-o-o-o-h!! Good luck to him. I close my eyes momentarily and draw Marcia’s quivering body underneath my own.

“Go on! Please, please, please!!” The muscles on her face are twitching and quivering and her mouth hangs open as if about to bite into an apple.

“Go on.”

I don’t look up at the rocks. I rise up above Marcia’s shuddering body, shrug off her unnecessary fingers and dive into her as if from ten thousand feet. At a moment like this, I wouldn’t care if Grunwald was up there selling tickets.

CHAPTER NINE

When I next look up, Grunwald has disappeared. I don’t mention him to Marcia because she might get all up-tight about it. You know how funny women can be. We have a little swim and I am all ready for another bout of belly-bashing but unfortunately Marcia says she has to be getting back in case Sid wants her for something. Probably the same as what I want her for, I think to myself, but I don’t say anything. Marcia takes my hand as we walk back, which is very nice and romantic – until we bump into Sid coming round the side of the Candlelight Casino.

“Where have you been?” he snarls.

“Looking for Grunwald,” I say. “I think I—”

“Get round to the office—” he is talking to Marcia. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon to give you some letters. You—” he rounds on me, “I want a word with you.”

Marcia looks at him real cool for a couple of long seconds then turns and pats my cheek.

“Don’t let him bully you,” she says, and leaves me with a wink as incriminating as your dabs on the crown jewels. Sidney waits till she has disappeared round the corner and starts bristling like a turkey’s cock.

“If you’ve laid a finger on her—” he starts.

“Hey, wait a minute, Sidney,” I interrupt. “What about all that stuff we were talking about this morning? You know ‘living in the nineteen seventies’. ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ – I definitely remember you saying that, when you were talking about Rosie. ‘The sex thing is pretty unimportant’. Those were your very—”

“Shut up you slimy little rat. You’ve never forgotten Liz and me, have you? You’ve been waiting to get your own back ever since.” (Liz was a bird Sid once did the nasty on me with – way back in our old window cleaning days.)

“But Sid! You said yourself—”

“Shut your mouth! Only a snivelling little fink would behave like that. After all I’ve done for you, too. You dirty little bastard!”

Well, that’s it! The old dukes are up and we are about to start belting the sh—you know what, out of each other, when Ted saves a nasty situation by lightfooting it round the corner.

“Bit out of line with the camp image, isn’t it?” he observes. “I mean, Love Island—”

“You can shut your mouth, too,” snaps Sid, and he strides away to make life hell for Marcia.

I don’t know what he does to her, but next morning she is looking like a ruckled marshmallow. Maybe he is just getting it which he still can because the first in-take – meaning those who have been taken-in by the advertisement, as Ted puts it – is arriving that afternoon and Mum, Dad and Rosie are going to be amongst them. Sid gets stroppy and says that his presence is required on the Island, so Muggins is despatched to the airport to meet them. Also, to ferry back Ricci Volare and his Angelos del Sole, some crummy Italian group Sidney is importing to boost the atmosphere in the Candlelight Casino. Poor sods I think to myself; little do they know what they are letting themselves in for.

Luckily I manage to prise myself out from under Carmen in time to slip on my Sun Senor kit and scramble aboard the ferry. I am feeling a right berk because Sidney has decreed that we all wear those flat, black hats sported by Spanish dancers and poufdahs; and strips of scarlet blanket draped round our shoulders. The ferry has been renamed “The Love Chariot” and also painted scarlet – presumably about five minutes before I sat down on it as I find when I examine the seat of my trousers. To my relief, the bus has not been painted “passionate pink” and I settle down beside the driver just in case he drops off to sleep or goes mad. He does neither but after ten minutes and four dead chickens, I am so scared I retreat to a seat halfway down the bus and pick my nails until we get to the airport. Here I skulk in a corner and endure insults about Sandemans Port from home-going English holidaymakers until, at last, the aircraft I am waiting for bounces down the runway like a horizontal pogo stick.

I am secretly hoping that the family has missed the plane, but not a chance. I can recognise Dad a hundred yards away across the tarmac. He is wearing a tweed suit and a Homburg which he must have got especially for the trip because I have never seen either of them before. Mum, too, is wearing a bloody stupid hat and only Rosie looks relatively inconspicuous in a yellow trouser suit with scarlet stars all over it – she would be a wow in Red China. Trust my bleeding family to turn up looking like a circus act.

I wave to them through the sheet glass but they don’t take any notice because they are watching the conveyor belt for their luggage as if they reckon they are never going to see it again. Dad practically ruptures himself when his case appears and Mum starts running in all directions shouting and pointing. You don’t have to be an expert lip reader to know what Dad is saying to her. What a pantomime!

When they come through the door Dad is already bathed in sweat – about the only bath he ever gets – and Mum and Rosie have got unflattering damp patches under the armpits.

“Sir Anthony Eden, I presume,” I say approaching Dad. “Would you care to step into the Embassy Rolls?”

“Oh, Timmy. Thank Gawd you’re here,” says Dad, dropping both cases on my foot. “Cop hold of these, will you? I wasn’t going to let any of those dagos get their hands on them. Never see them again. Cost a bloody fortune, those cases did.”

“Very nice,” I say.

“They were until the wogs got hold of them. I reckon they played bloody football with them. Still smarting about the World Cup, they are.”

“But Brazil won the World Cup, Dad.”

“Not that one. The World Cup. In 1966.”

“Oh, give over, Dad,” says Mum giving me a big wet kiss. “How are you, Timmy love? You’re looking well.”

“Smashing colour,” chimes in Rosie. “I’d lose that hat, though.”

“I’ve got to wear that. It’s part of the uniform. You lot wrapped up well, didn’t you?”

“You never know what to expect in these places,” moans Dad. “Floods, tycoons, you might find anything.”

“I didn’t want to crease my things by packing them,” says Mum defensively, “this brocade wrinkles something terrible.”

“Well, I hope you don’t evaporate on the way there,” I say. “It’s going to be very warm in the coach.”

“Is Sidney coming?” says Rosie.

Very probably, I think to myself. “No,” I say. “He’s rather tied up at the moment. He’s looking forward to seeing you, though. Now let’s get hold of these cases. I’ve got to make sure everybody gets on the coaches.”

But I don’t have to worry about the cases, because a big dark geezer with hair sprouting out of his cuffs and sideburns that meet under the chin hoves into view. I suppose he is quite good looking if you fancy that kind of thing. Rosie obviously does because her knees start to wobble the moment she claps eyes on him. Ignoring Dad’s suitcases he snatches up Rosie’s vanity case and starts wrapping his lips round a slice of the Marcello Masturbani’s.

“Permitta me to carry your kice, bella signorina,” he purrs. “I do not like to see a beautiful woman strangling.”

“You mean ‘struggling’, don’t you, mate?” says Dad. “Look, if you want some exercise, slap your mits on this lot. And she ain’t no ‘signorina’ either, she’s a ‘senora’. She is married to our Sid. Elle est parleyed for. Comprenny?”

“Don’t be so rude, Dad,” minces Rosie. “The gentleman is only trying to help.”

“Yes, help,” beams Hairy.

I notice that he has the letters R.V. and a semi-quaver embroidered on the breast pocket of his blazer and that a number of similarly clothed swarthy blokes are loading musical instruments on to the back of one of the coaches.

“Ricci Volare?” I say.

“And his Angels of the Sun,” says the man himself, waving his hand expansively towards the other geezers. “You have come from the Island of Love, and you—” he turns to Rosie “—are going there. It is very right. I will sing many boughtiful songs only for you.”

“Oh,” says Rosie. “That will be nice.”

“First of all you can help us get these bleeding cases on the bus,” says Dad. “Plenty of time for singing later.”

So Ricci staggers off with Dad’s cases and I get the rest of the party aboard the two coaches. I am a bit surprised, because most of those sitting tired and weary before me are typical “Funfrall Folk” as Francis would say. One or two honeymoon couples but very few obvious “hanky panky” addicts. Still, you never can tell, can you?

I travel in the same coach as the family and it is no surprise to find Ricci sitting next to, and virtually on top of Rosie. He is whispering in her lughole the whole bleeding way, and the stupid cow sits there with a glazed look in her eyes, beaming up at him. How Sid is going to react to this little lot I don’t know.

Luckily the ferry is at the Jetty, the paintwork seems to have dried, and, since neither of the coaches broke down, the trip to the island has been an unparalleled success. Our luck can’t hold, I tell myself, but we get across to the Island without being torpedoed and there is Sidney and the welcoming Committee with their wreaths of plastic flowers. This is another great Funfrall idea stolen from those Polynesian birds who stick garlands of flowers round your neck. Of course, their flowers are real but, as Sidney says, it is cheaper and more hygienic to use plastic wreaths which can be washed and used again and again. Also, no flowers will grow on the island. Also, as Ted says, the wreaths will come in very handy if anyone dies of food poisoning.

Dad, who has been very niggly ever since Mum would not let him take off his stiff collar in the coach, does not take kindly to having a wreath hung round his neck.

“Bring me all this bloody way to play hoop-la with me,” he says. “I’d be better off at home in front of the tele.”

“I wish you were,” says Rosie. “You’ve never stopped bloody moaning since you got off the plane.”

I was looking forward to seeing Sidney and Ricci weighing each other up but Mr. Volare and his merry men melt away the minute we get off the boat. Maybe Rosie has said something to him.

“Good to see you, Rosie, love,” says Sid with convincing enthusiasm. “That’s a nice little number you’re wearing. I bet that cost me a few bob.”

“You’re looking tired, Sid,” says Rosie tenderly. “You haven’t been overdoing it, have you?”

“Oh, he’s been going at it really hard,” I say, fixing Sidney with my beady eye, “he hasn’t spared himself. Twenty four hours a day, he’s been—”

“Alright, alright, Timmy,” says Sid firmly. “Rosie’s got the idea. Don’t make me out to be some kind of martyr. There was a job of work to be done and I got on with it, that’s all.”

“Sidney got on the job alright,” I say. “Nobody could argue with that.”

“Right. Let’s show everybody to their quarters, shall we?” says Sid through clenched teeth. “Then they can change their money to the island currency.”

This money-changing is another Funfrall dodge to rake in the ackers. The island currency is Tokens – Love Tokens, get it? – and these have to be used to buy anything that is sold on the island. Of course the exchange rate is fiddled so that a bottle of Coke costs twice as much as if you were paying for it in real money. It is a beautiful racket because no one understands the exchange rate and no one likes to worry about money on holiday anyway. You just find yourself spending twice as much of the stuff as you intended to. Your Tokens are worn round your neck like beads, and this too, encourages you to have millions of them so you can impress the other poor jerks.

Dad does not like having to change his money into “pistaccios” as he calls them and is even less enthusiastic about Tokens: “like a bloody Co-op divi” he says, “I wouldn’t use ’em for washers.”

Neither does the living accommodation appeal: “I’ve heard about rude mud huts,” he says, “but this is past a bleeding joke. You don’t expect your mother and me to sleep in that, do you? I’d need to shove a bone through my hooter first. It may be alright for your darkies, but not for me.”

“What did I tell you?” I say to Sidney. “You tied a millstone round your neck when you brought him out here.”

“Ungrateful old sod,” rants Sidney. “Doesn’t he realise he’s getting everything for free. You lot are all the same. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. You swallow the whole bleeding arm.”

Poor old Sid is obviously under pressure and in the next few days it does not get any better.

First of all there are the little things that go wrong. The shit house that collapses with the quantity surveyor from Penge inside it – jokes about the quantity he surveyed are considered in very bad taste. The discovery of ravenous insectlife lurking in the walls of the huts. The lady from Chippenham Sodbury who is horrified to discover that what she thought was a shoal of basking fish is in fact evidence of the extra strain being put on the plumbing arrangements. All these things are problems but they are not as disturbing as the failure of people to “inter-act” as Sidney calls it. Despite all the mood muzack being relayed over the loud speaker system, the efforts of the Fiesta Bunnies and Sun Senors, and the fact that everything in the place has a name that shouts sex, nobody seems to want to know. It is as if, when it is so easily available, nobody needs it, or maybe we have all underestimated how long it will take people to thaw out.

With nearly all the love-bites on the island coming from insects, Sidney is a worried man and his state of mind is not made any easier by the fact that the one blossoming romance involves his wife and Senor Volare. Every night Rosie can be found in the Candlelight Casino whilst Hairy belts out a stream of tuneless dirges that all sound the same and contain more groaning and sobbing than you’ve heard since Johnny Ray hung his handkerchief in the airing cupboard. Rosie gazes at him like his mush is the tele screen back home and it is obvious that she isn’t thinking about what to buy little Jason as a going home present.

The rest of Volare’s group are also settling in nicely and I have noticed that Carmen has not been hanging around so much since they got here. I should be pleased but of course I am not. Bloody wops! I mutter to myself, what can she see in that bunch of dagos? Whatever it is, Nan and Nat see it too, because they are also never far away from the Candlelight Casino when Ricci is delivering the goods. All very nice for the staff but what about the paying customers? A few of them gamble a bit, but their number does not include Dad.

“Blackjack and Craps,” he says. “They’re bleeding nice names, aren’t they? Very refined. You won’t catch me getting mixed up with that lot.” And so he joins the silent majority who just sit around and peel the skin off their sunburn. Of course Dad does not go so far as to take his clothes off. He rolls his trousers up to the knee, unbuttons his shirt to the level of the top of his vest and plonks a knotted handkerchief over his bonce. Very trendy. He makes Norman Wisdom look like Cecil Beaton. Mum isn’t much better. She sticks a piece of newspaper under her sunglasses to protect her nose and keeps slapping suntan cream all over her mush until she looks like a greasy penguin. Anyhow, she is definitely enjoying the holiday which is more than can be said for Dad. She even likes the food.

“I thought those little hoops of gristle were delicious,” she says practically ecstatic.

“Give over, Ethel,” says Dad. “That was bleeding octopus cooked in the fat of the last five meals we’ve had. Jesus wept, if you think that’s good, no wonder we eat the way we do at home.”

There is no doubt that Dad’s reaction is more common than Mum’s in every sense of the word and most of the guests are soon either complaining about the food, suffering from it, or both. It is a great disappointment to find that as they become more acclimatised, most of the customers’ energies are devoted to grumbling about conditions rather than getting on the job with each other as they are supposed to be doing.

“I’m not surprised this place is such a bleeding dump, what with Sidney in charge and all those dagos touching the food. They only wash their hands before they go to the toilet, you know,” says Dad.

“They want to get it all done by English people if they want to make it a success,” agrees Mum.

By the second week two more in-takes have arrived, one of the urinals has become blocked and flowed back downhill through the door of the Passion Fooderama in time to greet those sitting down for breakfast, and “Franco’s Revenge” is rife throughout the camp. Romance is nonexistent and morale amongst the camp staff lower than a toad’s testicles. It is not surprising in the circumstances that Sid decides to hold a Francis type meeting which is attended by all members of the staff, with the chief cook translating for the benefit of the Spaniards. This geezer is a real grease ball and, when first seen, appears to be blowing his nose on a dead mole. Closer inspection reveals that it is in fact a handkerchief.

“Right,” says Sid. “I’ve brought you all together because we have problems and I think it best if they are aired in public. Every new enterprise has its teething troubles and ours is proving no exception.”

“Here, here,” says Ted loyally. Sid glares at him and continues.

“Of course, there are special areas such as the lousy foo—,” Sid remembers who is translating, “—Such as the difficulty some of our guests have of adjusting to the rich fare provided by maestro Miguel here, and we are attending to this. In future our menu, which as you know attempts to embrace the best of English and Continental cuisine, will cater entirely for British tastes. But, this is incidental to the main thing I wanted to say to you. Please – you two – do you mind not doing that?” He is referring to Nat and one of the Angelos de Sole who are beginning to slide down towards the floor together. “That illustrates exactly what I am on about. This place is supposed to be run for the benefit of the customers – not you bleeders. You—” He rounds on Ricci Volare, who, in the absence of Rosie, is beginning to nibble one of the chalet maid’s shoulders. “You and your lot should be lashing out all that Latin lover rubbish on the daft sods who paid ninety quid to come out here. Not on my—,” Sid checks himself.

“Nelly?” says Ted helpfully.

“Not on the management’s families. You two! Get out there and start making like Fiesta Bunnies. Why do you think your uncle sent you out here? You’ve driven one man mad and laid most of the staff. Now try arousing some of the poor bastards who’ve paid for it. And you waiters. Why do you think you were selected? Get cracking. They won’t bite you – not very hard, most of them, anyway. All of you. Let’s put the love back into Love Island. We want a lot more amor. And you! for Christ sake put that candle down.”

“I was just scratching myself,” says Nat reproachfully.

“Well get out there and start scratching someone else,” shouts Sid. “That’s what you’re paid for.”

It is easy to detect that Sid has the needle with Ricci but this is obviously not his sole inspiration for the address. It is very true that we have not been getting amongst the customers in the same way that we did at Melody Bay, but this is because the two places are run so differently. There, everything was planned from dawn till dusk. Here, nobody chases you to do anything. Maybe that is the trouble. If there was a bit more organisation, it would be easier to jolly people along. But, as usual, this thought only occurs to me as we are bundling out into the sunshine so I don’t say anything about it.

Next to me Marcia is looking slim as a whippet and just a shade faster.

“Fancy a swim?” I say.

She flutters her eyelashes and for a moment I think I am in with a chance.

“You heard what the man said,” she says. “Ask one of the customers. Anyway, you only live a fantasy once.”

And so saying, she trips off to Sid’s bungalow to take dictation or, more likely, her knickers down. Bloody unfair, isn’t it? I will never understand that bloke who said “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I reckon that once you have had it you know what you are missing and it is ten times worse than never having been there in the first place. Anyway I swallow my disappointment and toddle off to see if they have finished spraying the huts with bug-killer.

It is mid-morning and so the whole of the living area is pretty much deserted. Carefully avoiding the hut in which I know Dad is staked out with a mixture of Torremolinos tummy and the sulks, I make my way to where the smell of disinfectant is strongest. There is no one about which I assume means that the bloke doing the job is having his elevenses. Since these can last till about four o’clock, I am about to go away when I notice a shapely bird hanging out washing on a line strung between two huts. She is wearing a pair of hot pants and a see-thru blouse with only the bottom couple of buttons done up. You therefore have two chances to see that she is not wearing a bra. Her hair is fastened in a loose bun and she has a mouth full of clothes pegs.

“Hello,” I say, “a woman’s work is never done, eh?”

Marvellous with the chat, aren’t I? I can almost hear you taking notes. She does not answer because of the pegs but nods agreeably.

“Can I do anything to help?”

“No thanks,” she says removing the last clothes peg. “It’s all done now.”

“Where’s the rest of the family?”

“My husband has gone down to the beach with his friends.”

“You look as if you’re about to join them.”

“I think I might stay here and read a book. It gets awfully crowded down there.”

“Do you read a lot?”

“I read a bit on holiday.”

I am now following her unasked into her hut.

“I’m reading this at the moment.”

“‘Kiss Off’. Oh, Christopher Wood. I read one of his: ‘Terrible Hard says Alice’. It’s very good. Have you read it? It’s all about the army in Cyprus.”

“Is it sexy like this one?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read that one – it’s pretty sexy, I suppose.”

“You need something a bit sexy around here.”

Oh yes? I think to myself.

“Not living up to expectations, is it?” I say innocently.

“The first thing my husband did when he got here was unpack his paternoster.”

“Religious, is he?”

“His fishing tackle. That’s all he’s interested in. I thought coming here might bring him out of himself. Inject a little excitement into our lives.” I wouldn’t mind injecting a little excitement into your life, darling, I think. Those lovely curvy tits peeping round the curtains of her blouse.

“I think most blokes would chuck their fishing rods in the dust bin if they saw you looking like that.”

“You’re being very kind.”

“I’m not doing you a favour. It’s the honest truth.”

“He doesn’t spare me a second glance. He spends all his time grumbling because he can’t find any lug worms.”

“Lug worms!”

“I want to go dancing.”

“Of course you do.”

“I’m not unattractive.”

“Unattractive? You’re beautiful.”

“I only want a little fun.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“I’m a woman.”

“You wouldn’t find a man in the world who would disagree with you.”

“Oh! What are you doing?”

“I’m kissing you.”

“I thought that was what you were doing. It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten.”

“Stand by for a refresher course.”

“Oh-o-oh. Supposing somebody comes?”

“They won’t. You’re beautiful.”

“Oh. But they’ll hear us.”

“There isn’t anyone to hear.”

“Oh, that’s heaven. Oh. Oh-o-oh.”

“Judy! Judy!!”

The last words are, unfortunately, not spoken by me, but by someone approaching the hut fast.

“It’s him,” she squeals. “It’s my husband. Get out!”

But I don’t have time to get out. All I can do is dive under one of the low rush beds – and in my condition it is a pretty uncomfortable dive, I can tell you.

“Judy! Darling where are you? I’ve got something to show you—oh, there you are. Look, have you ever seen anything like that before?”

“No. What is it?”

“I think it’s some kind of sea bream. Fantastic, isn’t it? I got it off those rocks by the bathing beach. Hey, wait a minute. Why haven’t you got any clothes on? Supposing somebody came round?”

“Who’s likely to do that?”

“I don’t know. But I must say, you’re looking awfully attractive, darling. Very attractive indeed.”

“I’m surprised you noticed.”

“Don’t be like that, darling. I’m sorry I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately, but I just knew there was a big one holed up somewhere.”

“Your fishing is more important than me.”

“Not any more, darling. Not any more.”

“Ooh, your hands are cold. And they smell of that fish. Can’t you wait ’til tonight?”

“Not with you looking like that, I can’t. Oh, darling.”

“George.”

“Darling.”

“Oh, George.”

And the next thing I know this bloody ugly fish drops down beside me so it is staring me straight in the eye. George and Judy collapse on to the bed and I am pinned underneath it while they bang away like a couple of vibrating springboards. What a way to spend your lunch hour!

At least I think, as I gaze into the cold, dead eye beside me, and try and massage the crick in my neck, I have helped to bring a little romance into two of our customers’ lives.

CHAPTER TEN

I can never look at a fish without wincing after that and I wish I could say that the fruits of my sacrifice were reflected in an upsurge in the sex life of the camp as a whole.

Unfortunately this is not the case and when I next see Sid he is sitting in his office clutching an airmail letter in the hand that is not clapped to his forehead.

“Look at this,” he says. “We’re in the shit now.”

When he says “we” I realise that things must be serious. “We” is a clear sign that Sid is preparing to spread the load.

I read the letter which is from Sir Giles and says that he is planning to visit the island in the next few days and “personally solicit a reaction to the standard and extent of the amenities provided”.

“You have got a problem, Sid,” I say, “but don’t worry, we’ve killed most of the lice.”

“Mosquitoes, not lice, you twit!” screeches Sid. “How many times do I have to tell you? There are no lice, bed bugs or ticks on this island, except those brought by the customers. Now don’t forget it.”

“Sorry, Sid. Well, the food then. The cases of food poisoning have dropped dramatically in the last few days.”

“There you go again,” rants Sid. “Sunstroke, that’s what it is. People stay out in the sun too long and then they blame the food when they don’t feel well. You eat the food and you’re alright.”

“Yeah, but after Mum’s cooking I’ve built up an immunity to anything. Alright, so everything’s perfect, so what are you worrying about?”

“I’m worried because they are not inter-acting. If they are not inter-acting, they are not having a good time. And if they are not having a good time they are going to start whining about everything when Slat gets here.”

“I don’t reckon the British are ready for a place like this. They’re such bloody hypocrites they can only enjoy it if they’re doing it on the quiet. Tell ’em to come out in the open and get on with it and they don’t want to know.”

“What about that monster gang-bang at Melody Bay?”

“They were all pissed and they were being told what to do. It was like bingo or community singing. Give ’em a lead and they’re alright. That’s what I’ve been meaning to say to you for a long time now. This place is too free and easy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if we organised some kind of game or activity which gave them a chance to get on the job even though that wasn’t the main purpose of it, I reckon they’d be more likely to respond.”

“Yeah, you might have a point there. ‘Hide and seek’ through the huts, that kind of thing?”

“Exactly. Bit talking of huts reminds me. You’ll have to keep Dad away from Sir Giles. You’ll never get him to play ball.”

“No. The miserable old sod will shop the lot of us. And then there’s that bleeder Grunwald – running about somewhere. Oh my Gawd, we might as well knot ourselves.”

“You mean you might as well knot yourself, and Ted maybe. I’m just a humble employee remember.”

“That’s right. Wait till I’m down then start putting the boot in.”

“Pull yourself together, Sid, we’re—I mean you’re not done for yet. If we give Dad enough booze we can keep him in his hut till his post war credits come up. As for Grunwald, I reckon he’s probably tried to swim back home to Blighty. Nobody’s seen him for weeks.”

“Bloody kraut. We should never have employed him in the first place. They’re all the same, you can’t trust one of them. That bleeding wop yodler is another one. I’ll swing for him before I’m much older.”

It is obvious that poor old Sid is cracking up fast and I seek to introduce a more positive note into the conversation.

“Let’s try something tonight,” I say. “While they’re all at supper, I’ll hide a piece of paper with a letter of the alphabet on it in each of the huts. The person that can produce the longest word by collecting the most pieces of paper will be the winner. We can announce it during supper.”

“It sounds bloody complicated to me. Supposing they just had to bring back a pair of knickers?”

“No, Sid! That’s too obvious. I’ve been trying to tell you. What we want to do is slip it in casually – that’s what they want to do, too.”

“Oh, have it your own way. I can’t think straight any more. If your idea gets them whizzing round the huts it might get us somewhere I suppose.”

In fact the idea is a success beyond my weirdest dreams. The customers all perk up when they are told there is going to be fun and games, and they charge off up the hill to a man, many of them without waiting for their coffee. This is a disappointment because coffee is an “extra” but you can’t have everything. The winning word “squelch” comes up three hours later from a very dishevelled blonde and the dance floor of the Candlelight Casino is full for the first time I can remember. I organise a couple of spot waltzes and a hokey cokey and the customers are practically sobbing their gratitude.

Sidney slides off early saying that he must get some sleep, and maybe it is as well that he does because Rosie’s demented passion for Italy’s answer to Tom Jones is horrible to see. She sits there in her turquoise crimplene, hugging her rum and coke to her not insignificant bosom and sending him messages with her eyes which need to be read through dark glasses.

“She’s got the hots for him alright, hasn’t she?” says Ted at my elbow. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Mind your language,” I say, “that’s my sister, remember. I’m not certain I want to do anything. She’s a big girl now.”

“Yeah, but remember what Sidney said.”

“Oh stop flapping. Just because you’re senior cringer it doesn’t mean you have to run along behind Sid with a roll of bog paper. You’ve been a real pain ever since you tasted power.”

“It’s alright for you to go on like that. You’re his brother-in-law. You’re fireproof, whatever happens.”

Pathetic, isn’t it? You can see we are all on edge. The entertainments business is murder on your nerves, I can tell you.

“Belt up, will you? Look, they’re dancing.”

“Blimey! He’s holding her close isn’t he? She’s practically out the other side of him.”

“I want to hear what they’re saying. We’d better dance.”

“It’s going to look a bit conspicuous, isn’t it?”

“Not with each other, you berk!”

I grab some grateful bird and steer her out into the middle of the sweaty darkness to where Ricci and Rosie are locked in each other’s arms and totally unaware of the existence of anyone else. Ricci’s liver lips are an inch away from Rosie’s lughole and he is making with the honeyed words as usual.

“Cara mia,” he yuks. “I toucha you and I am inflatable. My body bursts with love. I wanta to kiss your little pink toes, to nobble your finger tips, to do everything to you that a man can do to the body of the woman he loves.”

And he dives on her mouth so that for a moment I think he is trying to swallow her head. Blimey but it is torrid – horrid too.

Eventually he has to come up for air and they separate with a noise like someone unstopping a blocked up sink.

“My darleeng,” he breathes. “I am very much enamelled with you. I musta maka lova to you. Eeza impossible to wait. I am a volcano. I pour all over you.”

He is pawing all over her alright. Good job Sid is not a finger-print expert.

“But my husband,” says Rosie unconvincingly.

“Where eeza he? He does not lova you like me. He cannot lova you like me. I am fire and he is water. Come to my hut. You must. You must.”

“But—”

“No! Do not but me. Come, say nothing. Come.”

And before you can say “Anthony Cheetham” he has taken her by the hand and is pounding towards the sign marked “Egxit”.

Without quite knowing what I am doing I dump my surprised partner and spring after them. I don’t really give a monkey about Sidney’s feelings but on the other hand I don’t trust Hairy further than I can throw him, and after all, he is a wop, isn’t he? I mean, it is not as if he was one of our blokes.

I follow about twenty yards behind and have to stop every few minutes while they go into another clinch. They just don’t care do they? God help them if Sidney pops out to water the cactus.

I have a vague idea of where Ricci’s hut is from when I left the pieces of paper for the game. As I recall it, the pong of the muck he uses on his hair was stronger than that of the disinfectant.

Love’s young nightmare has just moved through the first row of huts and I am about to follow when suddenly there is a terrible scream from just beside me and a fat woman wearing curlers and nothing else shoots out of a hut.

“Ooh, you pig,” she yells. “You filthy, dirty old man.”

Somehow, I know what I am going to see even before I look into the hut. Dad standing there in his socks and his plastic mac, looking confused.

“I thought it was the piss-house,” he says in a slightly narky voice. “They all look the same to me. I said I was sorry. That ugly old slag doesn’t think I was trying to come it with her, does she? I’m not that bleeding desperate.”

The ugly old slag starts to scream twice as loud after that and I can see that I have another problem on my hands. Dad’s breath smells strongly of the medicine we have been giving him and he is well pissed.

“I know this old man,” I say. “He’s quite harmless, really. I think he’s a bit overtired and made a genuine mistake.”

“Dirty old devil. Do you know what he did?”

“He hasn’t been very well lately. Now, please try and calm yourself. Shouting won’t do any good. I’ll get him to bed and come back to help tidy up.”

“You want to watch it if you do, son,” says Dad. “There’s a merry widow there, mark my words. You’re just what she’s looking for. A young, fit man to gratify her disgusting old body.”

“I’m not standing for that,” shouts Lady Shagnasty. “I’m going to report this whole incident to the camp authorities.”

“You do and I’ll say you invited me in to your hut,” leers Dad. “I’ll say you begged me to do a tinkle so you could watch.”

“O-o-oh!!”

Somehow, I manage to drag the dirty old sod away and I am half wondering whether it really was an accident by the time I get him back to his hut. There is no sign of Mum and I am about to ask where she is when she comes through the door opening.

“Thank God you’re back, Mum—” I begin, and then I stop. Mum is looking quite incredible. About ten years younger and with an “over the hills and faraway” expression in her eyes. She is wearing no make-up and seems to be in some kind of trance.

“Mum,” I say quietly. “Mum, are you alright?”

“What dear?” She looks at Dad and me as if she has only just seen us. “Yes, dear. What is it?”

“You’d better be prepared for a few cold looks tomorrow morning. Dad went out to the toilet and blundered into some woman’s hut by mistake.”

I wait for the explosion but Mum just smiles and pats Dad absentmindedly on the head.

“That’s alright, dear,” she says calmly. “We all make mistakes. You’re back now.” And that is all. I go out into the night wondering what has happened to Mum. What a pity Norman and Henry Bones the boy detectives are not with us.

But, fascinated as I am by Mum, I now have to turn my attention back to Ricci and Rosie, the star-crossed lovers of Isla de Amor. I pad through the huts hearing the occasional naughty noise seeping out of the thatch until I come to a hut with an Eyetie pennant hung over the doorway. Am I too late to save a fair English rose from a fate worse than National Health glasses?

“Oh, Ricci, angel, that was fantastic,” gasps an exhausted and familiar voice. “Do it again, pl-e-e-ase!”

By the cringe, I think, as I stride swiftly away into the darkness. The Leas are really getting amongst it tonight.

The next morning finds me in Sidney’s office, but I am listening not squealing. An unhealthy shade of grey is breaking through our leader’s sun tan and he is brandishing a telegram.

“This afternoon,” he groans, “he’s coming this afternoon with the next intake. In the coach. He says he wants to be treated like an ordinary holidaymaker.”

“Taking his life in his hands, isn’t he?” I say in my normal jokey fashion.

“Piss off,” says Sidney wearily. “Don’t start being funny at this time of the morning. What are we going to do?”

“I thought you’d never ask. We’re going to have a Fasching.”

“A what?”

“A Fasching. It’s a kraut idea Ted told me about. They have a big carnival just before they give everything up for Lent. They all get pissed and have it away with each other’s wives.”

“You mean like New Year’s Eve?”

“Yeah. Only on a much bigger scale.”

“I didn’t know the Germans went in for that kind of thing.”

“Oh yes. They’re very hot on it. They like getting pissed and the rest comes naturally.”

“But is it going to work here?”

“I reckon we’ve got a good chance. You see it’s all very organised. Everybody dresses up and they have parades and beauty queens and all that kind of palava. Just like the Funfrall Camps back home. You saw how well it went last night when we got ’em a bit organised – well, you didn’t see all of it.”

“No, I slept really well last night. Out like a light when my head touched the pillow.”

“Good. I’m glad about that. Now, you see, I believe, if we lay on the booze and get back to basic principles, we could get ’em all going a treat. They were beginning to warm up last night.”

“What are we going to do for fancy dress?”

“I’ve thought about that. We’ll turn it into a South Sea Island caper. That way, they can all wear grass skirts. That should give them a few ideas. You remember that party at Maisie Simpson’s?”

“Oh yes. When her grass skirt got caught in the electric fan? That started things off alright, didn’t it?”

“Not half! I reckon if we call it a Polynesian Carnival Barbecue and elect a Carnival Queen—”

“What are we going to barbecue?”

“Some of those bloody goats.”

“Marvellous! I really think you’ve got something there, Timmo. So we’re not going to call it a Flushing?”

“Fasching! No, it doesn’t sound right, does it? And if they think it’s anything to do with the Krauts they won’t fancy it, either. It’s just the general idea we’re borrowing.”

“Great, Timmo, great. We’ll tidy up the details this morning and announce it at dinner time. Then, when Slat gets here, they’ll all be running about happily getting ready for the big night. I won’t forget this, Timmy.”

“Don’t thank me, too soon. It may not be a success.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Timmo, I can smell this one. It’s going to go like a bleeding forest fire.”

I remember those words later on, but at the time I just shuffle my feet and look modest.

When I eventually get back to my room it is to find one of the Angelos del Sole pressing my trousers. He is doing this with the help of Carmen who is lying beneath him and on top of the mattress which covers my trousers. The bloke snatches up his clobber and dives out of the window with a speed that suggests he gets a lot of practice. Too bad about that cactus, I think as I listen to the screams.

“You, very naughty girl,” I say wiggling my finger at Carmen who is now wearing her sulky expression. “My room no knocking shoppe.”

“He take me by surprise,” pouts Carmen. “You too. Why you worry? You no want me. I no more your little buddy. Once you say you take me to England with you.”

The subject had indeed been aired on one occasion when I was desperate to escape from her crippling embraces. “I make very good au pair girl.”

“More like an ‘oh, what a pair’ girl,” I say, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

“I no understand.”

“It doesn’t matter.” An idea had suddenly occurred to me: supposing—

“Hang on a minute,” I trill.

I go over to the traditional Spanish chest of drawers and kick it until I am in a position to rummage inside. Somewhere I have the Funfrall Continental Brochure. Ah yes.

“Look,” I say taking it over to Carmen. “You see this man. Sir Giles Slat. Him very important man. Him come to island today. If Carmen nice to him, maybe he fix up trip to England.”

“You theenk?” She looks at the mugshot of Sir Giles trying to appear benevolent and trustworthy and licks her lips.

“Oh definitely.”

“How do I do?”

“Well, Carmen,” I say, sitting down on the bed beside her and taking her hand in mine.

“I think you should wait until the carnival this evening and …”

After our little chat Carmen wants to thank me in traditional Spanish style but I don’t really fancy it so soon after spaghetti features and, telling her that there will be plenty of time later, I skate round to the Fooderama. Here Ted is belting out details of the evening’s goodies in true Melody Bay fashion and I can almost hear the adrenalin starting to slurp round the flabby veins. They wolf down their baked jam roll and jet off to make grass skirts as if they were on piece-work. Sidney is exultant and almost back to his old cocky self.

“I think I’ve got everything lined up,” he says. “If everybody does their bit there shouldn’t be any slip-ups.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” I say. “Don’t forget the whole thing was my idea.”

“There’s a lot of difference between having an idea and being able to carry it out,” says Sid haughtily. Jesus, but he can be an ungrateful sod sometimes.

There is the usual doubt as to exactly when Sir G. is arriving so Sid goes across to the mainland and I get the reception committee dusting their plastic wreaths. Nat and Nan have entered into the spirit of things and gone topless with a few paper chains dangling over their boobs whilst Carmen has done the total Spanish bit: long frilly dress, hair in a bun, a rose behind her lughole and tits lined up like grapeshot. If you like knockers this is the island for you.

About four o’clock I see the first bus rolling up at the jetty and get everybody fell in. Chug, chug, chug and there is porridge puss standing up the sharp end with Sidney. There has been some doubt in our minds as to just how incognito Sir G.’s visit is going to be and this is resolved when he steps out of the boat wearing an immaculate tropical suit while a bloke in uniform struggles ashore behind him with about five pigskin suitcases.

“Ah, my dears,” says the great man spotting Nat and Nan. “Looking ravishing as always.”

“We’d rather look ravished,” says Nat bitterly.

“Here, have a lei, and good luck to all who sail in you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what they call them. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I know the kind of lay I like.”

“Yes, my dear, your mother has told me but—ooh!”

He says this because, smelling trouble, I have pushed Carmen out there fast and as usual she has overdone things. I told her to put the wreath round his neck sensually – not tweak his balls.

“What kind of mood is he in?” I say to Sid who has slid over to my side.

“Difficult to say. I’ll tell you later after a few drinks.”

Sid steers Sir G. towards a few soothing beakers of passion fruit punch – a lethal concoction made to a centuries old Hawaiian recipe Ted and I invented that morning – while I tell the newcomers about the great time we’ve got lined up for them that evening. I can see one or two of them moistening their lips apprehensively at the sight of Nat and Nan but they will just have to learn to live with it. The rest of us have, and nobody has come to any harm yet, except Grunwald. Grunwald. Whatever happened to him?

Thinking about hairy tum reminds me of Dad and I pad round to his hut. He is exactly as I would wish to find him. Snoozing on his bed with a half empty bottle of Scotch cradled in his arms. I replace it with a full one, drawn from stock on Sidney’s authority, and creep away.

I meet Sid later when Sir G. has departed for a couple of hours’ kip before the festivities start.

“How was he?”

“Pretty good, really,” says Sid. “There was a nasty moment when he stood on one of the rat traps in the kitchen, but apart from that, it’s been alright.”

“He hasn’t started talking to any of the customers yet?”

“No. We’re alright there. He says he’s going to do that tonight.”

“Good. How about the punch?”

“He had two glasses. Not bad, eh? I topped them up with brandy to be on the safe side. He should be well away when he wakes up.”

“If he wakes up. We should never have put that liqueur in the punch.”

“What do you mean? Lots of those Spanish liqueurs have trees growing inside the bottle.”

“Yeah, but not mushrooms.”

“Oh well, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Have you checked on Dad?”

“I’ve just come from his hut. He’s well away. No sign of Mum though. Have you noticed how funny she’s been lately?”

“No. She always seems pretty strange to me.”

“Yeah, but she’s definitely very peculiar at the moment.”

“Maybe it’s the change of life?”

“I think she changed that years ago, but you could be right.”

“Anyway, she’s no problem tonight, so don’t worry about it. You concentrate on making sure that the paying customers have a great time.”

“O.K. Sid. I’m off to slip in to my grass skirt. You got one for Sir Giles, didn’t you?”

“It’s laid out at the foot of his bed and I’ve hidden all his other clobber so he’s got to wear it.”

“What time are you calling him?”

“Seven. I’m going to try and force a couple more drinks past his gums and then it’s the torchlight procession down to the beach, light the fires, get a couple of gallons of jungle juice inside everybody, a spot of dancing, Nat and Nan doing their stuff—”

“—Carmen doing her stuff.”

“—and all our troubles will be over.”

“All your troubles will be over, Sid.”

“Just as you like, Timmy boy. Just as you like. I can’t see how it can go wrong tonight.”

That’s the trouble with Sidney. He’s such a boody optimist. Of course, maybe that’s why he always comes up smelling of roses. I am a cautious realist who always takes his raincoat with him, and it doesn’t get me anywhere.

By seven thirty there is a big crowd milling about outside the Candlelight Casino and Ted is compering the Carnival Queen Contest while we wait for it to get dark enough to light the torches. A fair amount of liquor is also swilling about so that by the time Miss Maureen Dribble of Tring is blushing unnoticeably at the prospect of receiving her prize most people are already pleasantly smashed.

Sir Giles is going to do the honours and I note with interest that he stumbles as he comes down the steps of Sid’s bungalow. With his red face and bloated white body he looks like a half-painted skittle. The grass skirt doesn’t do much for him either.

“Very well done, my dear. Your mother must be proud of you,” he chortles, and slipping the winner’s wreath over both their necks he delivers a right plonker smack on the lips. Miss Dribble who has been specially selected for her goer potential takes this in good part and the crowd cheers enthusiastically and offers advice of the “Get stuck in, dad!” variety. It is obvious that Sir G. is prepared to let his hair down when beyond the shores of Blighty, and this cannot be bad. The grass skirts are also a good idea because they give people something to talk about, and I hear a couple of blokes telling birds that they intend to mow the grass later.

The next move is to light the torches and this is effected with only minor damage to one geezer’s grass skirt and marriage prospects. Swift action with a fire bucket preventing any really serious damage being caused.

Two chairs have been mounted on a framework of poles and Sir Giles and Miss Dribble climb into them and are lifted on to the shoulders of six Spanish waiters. In this manner it is intended to bear them down to the beach but our plans are nearly disrupted when some joker pulls down the grass skirt of one of the waiters, revealing that he is uncircumcised and a bloke who does not believe in lashing out on underwear. The waiter lets out a squeal of rage and releases his hold on the litter so that Miss D. and Sir Giles are nearly toppled from their perches and only saved by the prompt intervention of the crowd.

This catastrophe averted, the procession gets under way and we march down to the beach with much cheering and shouting. Miss Dribble dismounts and is handed a torch with which to ceremonially ignite the barbecue pit. I should have realised that something was wrong when I smelt the petrol, but you know what it is like when you have had a few. I am as slow as anybody and we only wake up to the danger when the flames have soared to cliff height. Luckily, Maureen’s duties are nearly over so it does not matter too much about her eyebrows and eyelashes, and I personally think she looks much better without the fringe. Anyway it is a nasty moment and it is just as well that we have the Hawaiian punch standing by. I am a spot disturbed when the ladle we had left standing in it comes out steaming and without the spoon bit on the end, but, once again, it is too late to do anything about it because the customers are getting very thirsty.

Frisky, too. Quite a few grass skirts are rustling without any help from the wind and when Ted turns the music on they start grappling with each other like they are trying to press transfers on to each other’s bodies. The whole thing is going even better than expected and I see Sir G. desperately looking round for someone to start rabbiting to.

“O.K. darling,” I murmur to Carmen, who is panting for action beside me, “get out there and do your stuff. And remember, this could be your ticket to Hapstead Garden Suburb.” Without another word the Great Spanish Breasts plunge into the scrum of bodies and the next thing I see, Carmen has tucked her rose down the front of Sir G.’s grass skirt and is leading him on to the dance area. Who says romance is dead?

Certainly not Nat and Nan. As the light from the barbecue pit flickers over their well-stacked bodies they begin to shed their garlands and caress their bodies to the music as if they are appearing in a new toilet soap commercial. Nat is first to strip to the Plimsoll line but then Nan loosens the band at her waist and the grass skirt flutters to the floor. Soon they are both completely starkers and swaying gently before each other with arms outstretched and fingers beckoning.

“The goat is as tough as old boots,” says Ted, appearing beside me. “Hello! That’s a bit of alright, isn’t it?”

Some people seem to think so because a couple of the Spanish waiters start to do their thing in front of the girls.

“Hey, they’re for the paying customers,” says Ted. “How many times do we have to tell those bleeders?”

“It doesn’t matter, Ted. Let them get on with it. It’ll help get things going.”

Not half it won’t. The girls are beginning to shudder like a couple of three-ply shit house doors in a hurricane and their eager little fingers stretch out to explore the grasslands before them. Almost simultaneously the waiters’ skirts hit the deck and there are two naked couples gyrating before a responsive crowd.

“Look!” I say. “Look at that!!” I refer to a bare-breasted Carmen leading Sir Giles away towards the rocks but there is no one there to hear me. Ted is being taken in tow by a bird I have never seen before and who I imagine must come from the new intake. It doesn’t take them long to get the idea when you give them a little guidance, does it?

In no time at all I am alone with the music, the spluttering fire and a beach full of shadowy objects which might just be large turtles with a dose of hiccups.

“Hello there.”

Well, almost alone. It is Judy, the girl who helped to make me a fish hater.

“Hi,” I say. “Having a good time?”

“It could be better,” she says wistfully. I prick up my ears.

“Has your old man gone fishing again?”

“No, I don’t know where he is. Out there on the beach, I expect. There’s been no holding him since that afternoon.”

“Amazing. Can I get you a drink?”

“No. I feel tiddly enough as it is.”

So do I, actually. I also feel that Judy has appeared as a reward for all the good work I have done lately: happy holidaymakers, satisfied Sir Giles. Now it’s time for Timmy to have a little fun.

“You’re looking gorgeous,” I murmur.

“I hoped you’d say that.”

“That perfume you’re wearing. Marvellous!”

“I’m not wearing any.”

“It must be you, then. Even better.”

“You say fantastic things.”

I do, don’t I? Oh well, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. For those who haven’t: tough. Very tough.

“It’s easy when there’s someone like you about.”

I slide my hands inside the grass skirt and the naughty girl isn’t wearing any knicks. Some of them really ask for trouble, don’t they?

“Don’t you find this scratches?” I murmur.

“It wouldn’t if you cut your fingernails.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant—oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s go and make love.”

“Let’s.”

Feeling good like a Timmy Lea should I lead her towards the rocks and a patch of sand which has not been claimed by other Funfrall clients. We kiss again and she slides out of my arms and stretches full length on the beach.

“Take me,” she says.

I am glad she has got over her inhibitions and I drop on my hands and knees to show her how I feel about it. The lower part of her body flexes temptingly and I part the curtain of grass at her waist and lower my friendly mouth—

“Ouch!” she screams.

“I haven’t touched you yet.”

“Something burned me.”

“It must be some sparks from the barbecue.”

“Ouch! There’s another one. Look!!”

I look up and see what she is on about. A cloud of sparks drifting down from the cliff top and a great glow illuminating the sky beyond.

“Christ! The camp must be on fire.”

“Fire! Fire!” hollers Judy, springing to her feet. “Help! Fire! Help! Help!”

All around us couples start breaking up like horses getting to their knees but I don’t stop to watch. I lead the rush to the cliff path and find myself shoulder to shoulder with Sid.

“Have you seen Dad?”

“I haven’t seen anybody!”

“Jesus Christ!”

We sprint to the top of the rocks and before us the whole centre of the island seems to be ablaze. Flames are leapfrogging from hut to hut and clouds of burning thatch are being snatched away by the night breeze.

I rush forward, putting together a jigsaw puzzle of Dad with every step. I remember all the little acts of human kindness which characterised the man: the time he gave me his old tobacco tin to keep my earwigs in, the space helmet he brought me back from the Lost Property Office – of course it was a gold fish bowl, but Dad believed in teaching a kid to be imaginative.

Suddenly, he is there before me; an unforgettable figure in his Steptoe-issue long underpants and blackened face.

“Dad, Dad,” I scream. “Are you alright?”

“No thanks to you two bleeders,” he rasps. “Bloody place is a bleeding death trap. Knock out your pipe and the whole lot goes up like tinder.”

“You what!” screeches Sid.

“You heard. I said try knocking your pipe out around here. It’s bloody murder. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

“You mean—!”

“Don’t get all worked up about it. It could have happened to anyone. It’s you who want to feel responsible. Leaving your poor old father to fry while you pander to your unnatural tendencies. Look at those skirts. I always said you two was poufdahs.”

“You take his legs,” says Sid. “We’re going to chuck him into a burning hut.”

“No wonder Rosie fancies that Eyetie geezer,” goes on Dad. “You don’t expect nothing better from their lot.”

“Whadya mean?” snarls Sid, an edge in his voice you could cut your fingers on.

“I thought you hadn’t noticed. Oh, yes, they were creeping through here hand in hand about half an hour ago. Very nice goings on I said to myself. Our Rosie canoodling with some singing wop. Here! Where are you going? What about all the things I lost in the fire? I want retribution.”

But he doesn’t get it. Not then, anyway. Sid’s mug assumes the expression of one of those things you see sticking out of church walls and he plunges on through the burning huts with me trying to keep up with him.

“Where is that bastard’s hut?” he shouts.

“I don’t know,” I lie. “Over there, I think.”

I let Sid get out of sight and then belt across to Hairy’s hut. The fire has not reached it yet but clouds of smoke are swirling round the walls. Holding my breath, for a number of reasons, I peer through the doorway and see Ricci and Rosie stretched out naked on two beds that have been dragged together. Oh my gawd! They are obviously taking a post-poke nap and, while I watch, Ricci’s nostrils begin to twitch as wisps of smoke drift through the thatch.

“Get out!” I scream. “The camp’s on fire and Sidney’s looking for you!”

I thought the bloke who dived through my window into the cactus was a fast mover, but this Ricci must have been in the Italian team at the Rome Olympics. He has snatched up his skirt and is past me before you can say “Jesse Owens”. He doesn’t stop to say “goodbye” or “thank you” either.

It doesn’t get him anywhere because I hear a noise like somebody chopping up pork cutlets and turn to see Sid delivering a bunch of cinques up the wop’s bracketo with sufficient force to send him spinning through the wall of a nearby hut. Sid plunges in after him and a succession of unpleasant thumps and yelps rise above the noise of the approaching flames.

“Get out of it,” I hiss at Rosie who is desperately trying to hook up her grass skirt, “piss off back to the bungalow.”

I make an opening in one of the walls and she slips though it seconds before Sidney comes in stroking his knuckles. I follow his searching eyes round the room and am relieved to find that Rosie seems to have left no evidence of her visit.

“Taught him a bleeding lesson,” says Sid with grim satisfaction. “Come on, let’s go and find the others.”

It has been an evening crowded with incident hasn’t it? But more is still to come. When we leave the huts we see that the Candlelight Casino is ablaze, presumably ignited by the burning straw that is drifting everywhere.

“You stay here and stop anyone going near those huts,” shouts Sid.

“I’ll see if I can do anything about the casino.”

I don’t have a lot to do because in no time at all the whole area of the huts is only fit to roast chestnuts in and there are not a lot of those about. I extend what sympathy and reassurance I can and start to walk back towards the Casino. From the glow in the sky it looks as if the Passion Fooderama has gone up as well. Suddenly, looking into the pines that border the path, I see two figures picking their way through the trees. One of them I immediately recognise as Mum, but the other – blimey, it can’t be! Naked, bearded, pot-bellied – Grunwald!!!

“Mum!” I shout and start racing towards her, my mind reeling with the horror of it all. When I reach her, Grunwald has disappeared and Mum is crying.

“Mum, Mum!” I pant. “What happened? What did he do to you? I’ll kill him.”

Through the tears Mum blinks up at me like she has trouble recognising who I am.

“It was beautiful,” she says, “beautiful.”

“Beautiful!? What do you mean, Mum?”

“—and now it’s over.”

Once again her face has that dreamy look and an expression I can only describe as radiant.

“Mum—”

“I was frightened when I first saw him, but then he took me by the hand and showed me his temple in the rocks.”

“Mum!”

“His Temple of Love, he called it. He’d made it ever so comfy and nice. Really snug it was. He wanted me to stay there with him for ever.”

“Mum. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Such a nice man. He was so kind. And he had such a lovely furry tummy.”

“Mum, please!” I mean, it’s disgusting, isn’t it? Your own mother!

“I’ve considered it quite seriously in the last few days.”

“You couldn’t, Mum.”

“And then I thought about you and your father.”

“Yes, Mum?”

“And it seemed an even better idea.”

“Mum!”

“I suppose you think it’s ridiculous at my age?”

“Exactly, Mum. You’re old enough to be my mother.”

“But then I thought: after a while the magic will wear off; there will be all the unpleasantness with your father, and nobody will remember to feed the goldfish.”

“True, Mum.”

“So I told him I couldn’t go through with it.”

She starts crying again and I put my arm round her shoulder. I mean, when you think about it, it’s rather lovely, isn’t it?

“There, there, Mum,” I say. “You did the right thing. I believe it gets quite parky here in the winter. Now come and warm your hands on the Candlelight Casino and – take my advice – don’t say anything to Dad about it all!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I can’t remember when I was last so moved,” says Sir Giles.

It is the next afternoon and we are sitting under a shady rock not far from the scorched site of Sid’s office. Sir Giles, Sid, Ted and me, listening to the last party of holidaymakers whistle Colonel Bogie as they march down to the beach.

“Tears pricked my eyes when they linked arms and sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ in front of the burning food hall,” sighs Sir G. “It brought back so many memories.” Ted nods his interested “what is the stupid old basket rabbiting on about” nod, and I do likewise.

“I was unfortunately detained on business in America at the time but I remember the newsreel shots clearly. ‘Dig for victory’, ‘Careless talk costs lives’, The Blitz, rationing, austerity, the tremendous team spirit of the people – and above all, Winnie at the helm.”

Sir G. takes another pull at his enormous cigar. What is he on about?

“Gentlemen, I have had a monumental idea sparked off,” he beams at us as if the joke was intentional, “—sparked off by the events of last night. On reflection I believe that we – that you—” he looks at Sidney – “misjudged the temperament of the British people when you advocated setting up Isla de Amor. I do not think that the British will ever take to sex with the same enthusiasm that they will respond to deprivation and hardship. It may be alright for the continentals but the island race requires sterner challenges before they can be genuinely amused. You have spoken to me honestly about some of the problems you faced in trying to engender the right romantic climate on the island, and frankly I think that these are insurmountable. Love Island was not merely ahead of its time but basically not what the British public wanted.”

“What do they want, then?” says Sidney sulkily.

“World War Two Holiday Camps.”

“World War Two Holiday Camps!?”

“Exactly. It came to me as I observed those people’s response to the fire. They lost everything – your father for instance, his priceless miniature collection destroyed – but they laughed in the face of adversity. They brewed cups of tea on the ashes of their holiday hopes. They sang, they joked. They were British doing what the British do best – suffering. It occurred to me that there are whole generations of young Britons who have never experienced the right conditions in which to indulge our national predeliction. Generations too young to even remember World War II let alone to have enjoyed it. For them and their nostalgic parents we are going to create Funfrall Austerity.”

“Mum was always saying how good it was during the war,” muses crawler Ted.

“Of course she was. Listen, I have it all worked out. We take over an obsolete tube station, or perhaps the giant underground shelter at Clapham South. Bunk beds on the platforms. Piped Vera Lynn records and air-raid sirens, ration cards and queuing for everything. Tinned snook.”

“Why the underground?” I say.

“Because that’s where people used to go to get away from the bombing,” says Sid.

“They used to sleep down there like Sir Giles says.”

“We can have special wireless programmes, they can tune in to ‘ITMA’, ‘Much Binding in the Marsh’, ‘Alva Liddell’.”

“The overheads will be low,” says Sidney.

“Non-existent,” says Sir G. “The food will have to be poor to be authentic and enemy action can frequently disrupt power supplies. Remember, there’s a war on.”

“Do you think it will catch on?” I ask.

“Catch on!?” snorts Sir Giles. “It’s what the British public have been waiting for. They’re sick to death of all this affluence. It’s like sex. It makes them feel shifty.” He looks at the three of us searchingly. “Of course, it may need an older man with experience of the period to capitalise on all the opportunities. We’ll have to see. Think about it.”

“Yes Sir Giles. I think it’s a wonderful idea,” gushes tedious Ted.

“Good. Now Hotchkiss, I want you to come with me. Noggett, you can stay here and tell Lea about his duties. I’m going to say a few words to the men – I mean I’m going to bid our clients farewell.”

“Boobed again, eh Sid?” I say as Sir G. disappears towards the beach. “You’ll have to watch that Hotchkiss. You’ll find him sitting behind your secretary soon.”

“Shut your mouth,” snarls Sid. “By the cringe but Slat is a crafty old sod. I reckon it was him who set fire to the Fooderama. He was wandering round with a burning torch saying ‘half a fire is no good to man nor insurance company’.”

“This place is well insured, is it?”

“‘Well insured!’ It was never worth more than it is at the moment. Don’t you worry about that.”

“What are these duties the old man was talking about?” I say suspiciously.

“Yes, well,” Sid clears his throat. “Fancy a little sea trip, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve got to make sure that all the customers get back quickly before the weather turns nasty, and there’s a lot of detail work to be done at head office.”

“So?”

“So we’re going to fly back this afternoon and you’re going to stay here to tidy up and settle up with the local labour.”

“But, Sid—”

“Then Sir Giles has organised a berth for you on a boat going back to Blighty. It’ll be a sort of Mediterranean cruise.”

“I don’t want to be stuck here on my tod.”

“Oh, you won’t be alone. Nat and Nan will be staying with you.”

“What!!!”

“Yeah. I suppose the old man doesn’t reckon they have a lot of Vera Lynn potential. I think he wants to give them a couple of weeks to cool off.”

“Cool off!’ What about me? They’ll kill me.”

“Don’t get hysterical, for gawd’s sake. And by the way, talking about killing people, you can drop Ricci Wop and his lads off at Naples.”

“Naples!”

“Yes. I said it was a bit of a cruise, didn’t I? I had a talk with Rosie about that geezer you know.”

“Oh, yes.” I can tell from Sid’s tone that he wants to impart reassurance.

“The dirty bastard got her tiddly, and then tried to ram his nasty up her. Took her back to his hut and got very unpleasant. She slapped his face and that was that.”

“So there was nothing to worry about?”

“No – well, I was never worried. You know me.”

“Yes, Sid.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the principle we were talking about. I still feel the same about that. I just didn’t fancy the bloke. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, Sid.”

A week later I am standing with my suitcase on the deck of a small dirty steamer watching the crew leap around like excited monkeys while Nat and Nan casually decide which one they are going to screw first. The poor nautical sods don’t know what they are letting themselves in for. Ricci Volare is already hawking over the rail and the Isla de Amor is slipping beneath the ocean behind us – though I realise sadly, that this is only an optical illusion.

Mum has sent me a post card of a large tabby cat saying that they all got home safely and that Dad is in bed with a cold and has not been back to work yet. There is no word from Sid or Ted which does not surprise me.

Taking a last unloving look at the disappearing land mass I go below to check the lock on my cabin door. It won’t be long before the girls have exhausted the crew and you can’t be too careful.

A pity about Carmen. I would have liked to say goodbye to the girl. She probably could not face up to the sight of me leaving, or maybe she still has the needle because Sir Giles sloped off without her.

I open the door of my cabin, and check the bolt. Seems secure enough. Wedge a chair under the handle and I should be alright – for the first few days, anyway.

“Hello, buddy.”

I whip round and there, emerging stark naked from beneath my bunk is—

“Carmen!”

“Yes. We come together to Ingland. I will serveese you, no?”

“No!” I scream.

“You make promeese to your Carmen buddy. Now, you stop trying to unlock door and we make love mucho, mucho.”

“No, no,” I plead but it is hopeless. Her strong arms are already pulling me remorselessly towards the bunk. How long is this trip supposed to last? Ten days? Oh my God! Nat and Nan outside. Carmen inside. I might as well dive straight through a porthole and have done with it.

“Oh, buddy,” sighs Carmen enthusiastically, as she rips open my fly. “This eez going to be voyage to remember.”

THE END

Confessions from a Hotel
BY TIMOTHY LEA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER ONE

I don’t know how you would handle four weeks on a tramp steamer with a couple of nymphomaniacs, but I was right knackered at the end of it, I can tell you. The second mate was carried off the boat on a stretcher, and he managed to barricade himself in his cabin after the first week. By the cringe, it was a voyage and a half. Now I know what they mean when they say ‘see Naples and die’. Nat and Nan found me skulking in an empty lifeboat the night before we docked and I nearly kicked the bucket with my first glimpse of Mount Vesuvius. Talk about insatiable–I can now, because I looked it up in the dictionary–if those two birds were rabbits it would not have needed myxomatosis to kill off half the male bunny population. I am not unpartial to a bit of the other but–blimey! There is a limit. After the first couple of hours it is becoming more a penance than a penis, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, for the sake of those of you who missed my capers as a Holiday Host with Funfrall Enterprises, I had better explain what I am on about. My period of service on an island off the Costa Brava had come to an end for a number of reasons–not the least of them being that my Dad had burned down the camp. Accidentally, of course. Everything Dad does is an accident, which accounts for how I happen to be about to write this. Anyway, that is another story and I would be the last person to put anybody off their cornflakes by telling it.

My presence on the boat with Nat and Nan–my pen starts shaking uncontrollably every time I write their names–is occasioned by me being left to clear up after the blaze. Once I have sifted all the dentures out of the ashes and paid off the local labour, I am expected to make my way home on a battered tramp steamer calling at every port in the Mediterranean. I would not normally be the first person to start whining about such treatment, were it not for the presence of the deadly duo already alluded to. Also, another lively bird called Carmen who fortunately gets homesick after a couple of days and dives overboard to join a passing fishing boat. Nat and Nan have the same attitude towards sex as those small birds that eat ten times their own weight every day, only in their case, forget small birds and substitute bleeding great vultures. Not that they are unattractive, oh, dear me, no. They are beautiful girls and living tributes to the efficacy of National Health Milk and free dental care. The only trouble is that they do have this disconcerting habit of tearing the trousers off every bloke they meet. And on a few thousand square feet of tramp steamer it gets so it is not worth putting your trousers on again. Your turn is going to come up in another few minutes, buster, so lie back and enjoy it.

Luckily, I have had experience of these girls (I laugh hollowly as I write that) and for the first few days I manage to keep out of the way while the crew run amok. By the end of the first week they are running a mile. Every time the Terrible Twins come round a corner, the sleek smiles slide off their greasy faces faster than blobs of fat off a hot plate. By the end of the second week they are threatening mutiny and by the end of the third week they have twice tried to abandon ship in a lifeboat. One bloke dives overboard the minute we get into the Bay of Naples. How he finds the strength to reach shore, I will never know.

My attempts to avoid being pressed into service–a not altogether happy, but very accurate description of what takes place–founder on my natural desire for food. I am intercepted on a sneaky trip to the galley and from that moment on I am making progress towards a frayed tonk like every other male on board.

By the time we get to Liverpool I never want to see another woman as long as I live–or at least two weeks–and the crew have burned all their pin-ups. The captain has not been seen for four days. Every time anybody taps on the door of his cabin a feeble voice keeps repeating–‘Don’t let them get me. Remember the RNVR.’ The poor basket has obviously gone round the twist.

When we get to Scouseland and can actually see the Liver Building the crew fall on their knees like pilgrims getting their first eyeful of Mecca. There is hardly an Englishman amongst them but they all know that this is where the girls get off. The expression of unspeakable joy on their faces as we go down the gangplank is something I will always remember.

My own feelings are typical of those of any son of Albion returning to the land of his birth–bitter disappointment. When I was on the Isla de Amor I could not wait to feel the native sod under my feet but now as I see some of the native sods in person I wish I was back in the land of the antique plumbing. At least there was sunshine there and I could not understand the newspaper headlines. My tan has been fading since the Bay of Biscay and Mum and Dad and Scraggs Lane seem about as tempting as two weeks in a leper colony.

But that is not my immediate problem. Having seen Nat and Nan closing fast with a group of unsuspecting dockers, I have legged it off in the opposite direction and made my way swiftly to Lime Street station. This being the point of departure for The Smoke, and the bosom of my family. It is mid-morning and British Rail’s excellent inter-city service is decidedly under-patronised. I buy a copy of a book called John Adam–Samurai, which looks as if it has a few juicy moments, and settle down to a couple of hours of peace and quiet. Outside the compartment the sun is breaking through and my spirits begin to lift. Maybe dear old England is not so bad after all.

‘Ah, so there you are! Creeping off without saying goodbye. That wasn’t very kind to your little playmates, was it?’

‘Decidedly unkind, I should say. Not the sort of behaviour Uncle Giles would like, eh Sis?’

Yes, folks; it is Nat and Nan, the girls who gave up the idea of group marriage because they could not find a group large enough. I should mention that the Uncle Giles they refer to is Sir Giles Slattery, Chairman of Funfrall Enterprises, the grave concern that is employing me–and hopefully paying me some much needed moola for my heroic efforts during the last few weeks.

‘After all, we’ve been through,’ says Nat reproachfully.

‘Speak for yourself,’ I snarl. ‘Now for God’s sake leave me alone. You lay one finger on me and I’ll pull the communication cord.’

‘It won’t do any good, darling. The train isn’t moving yet. I’m very disappointed in you, Timmy. I thought we had a chance of liberating you but you’re still very uptight, aren’t you?’ That is another thing about these nutty birds. They believe that if everybody sublimated their aggressions in sexual activity there would be no more wars. That is their excuse, anyway.

‘Take your hand out of my trousers,’ I say. ‘Uptight? After what I’ve had to endure in the last four weeks? I’m slacker than a four-inch nut on a toothpick.’ Nat draws away from me reproachfully and the train jerks into motion.

‘I was hoping we were going to be able to put in a glowing report about you to Uncle Gilesy,’ she says. ‘But if you persist in continuing to be a reactionary slave to bourgeois convention…’ She shakes her head sadly.

‘What do you mean?’ I say nervously.

‘I mean, Timmykins, we may have to tell Nunky that you were very naughty on the boat. That you forced us to cohabit with the crew.’

‘Forced! Those poor bastards are paddling that boat out to sea with their bare hands in order to get away from you.’

‘They did have problems,’ says Nat sadly.

‘They did have. But they don’t any longer. When are you two birds going to wise up to the fact that everybody doesn’t want to get laid all the time?’

‘We could say he confessed to burning down the camp,’ says Nan.

‘Hey, wait a minute!’

‘That’s a good idea. Uncle Gilesy won’t like that, will he?’

‘Timmy will go to prison for arson. Poor Timmy.’

‘You do that and I’ll–’ I rack my brains for something I will do.

‘You’ll do what?’ says Nan. ‘There’s nothing you can tell Uncle Giles about us that he doesn’t know already.’

‘On the other hand, we might suggest some form of bonus as being in order. Nunky is very hot on rewarding loyal staff.’

‘And I’m just very hot,’ says Nat, beginning to pull down the blinds.

‘Just for Auld Lang Syne,’ says Nan, as she starts to undo my shirt buttons. ‘We may never see each other again.’

‘You’re dead right there,’ I say. ‘Once this bleeding thing stops, you’ll need running shoes to keep up with me.’

‘He’s beautiful when he’s mad, isn’t he?’ says Nat.

‘Beautiful. Come on, give us a little kiss.’

Outside the landscape is flashing past at about eighty miles an hour, otherwise I might try to throw myself through the window.

‘Somebody’s going to come,’ I gulp.

‘You never know your luck.’

‘I mean a ticket collector or somebody.’

‘Well, we’ve all got tickets, haven’t we? It just says don’t lean out of the window. And we’re not going to do it hanging out of the window, are we?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Nat thoughtfully. ‘It sounds rather fun. Supposing–’

‘No!’ I scream. ‘Oh my God. What am I going to do?’

‘We know you know the answer to that one,’ soothes Nan. ‘Remember how much fun it was on the beach?’

‘Yes. But there weren’t millions of people wandering about there.’

‘The train is empty, darling.’

‘We could go in one of the loos,’ says Nan, ‘but I hate stand-up quickies and it would be awfully cramping.’

I look at the pictures of some Scottish river on the wall and wish I could be there. The cool water closing over my head–

‘So, you’re going to say something good about me, are you?’ I say. I mean if there is going to be no escape, I might as well get the best deal I can.

‘I hope so, love-bunny,’ murmurs Nat into my half-nibbled ear. ‘Now, let’s see if you’re going to be a good boy.’

Her hand fondles the region of my thigh and finds what it is looking for. ‘Oh yes, I like that.’

‘Me too.’ Nan pops open the buttons of my jeans and slips her hand into the one-way system of my Y-fronts. ‘You shouldn’t wear these,’ she scolds. ‘You should let him breathe.’

‘He seems to be coming up for air now,’ says Nat with interest, as she starts yanking down my pants.

That’s the amazing thing about my John Thomas. It seems to lead an existence totally independent of the rest of me. My brain may be saying run for the hills but my J.T. never seems to hear it. Given the presence of a friendly lady it will lumber fitfully into an upright position and stand there waiting for the best to happen. At moments like this its touching eagerness to please is beyond price.

‘I’m on a bonus, then, am I?’

‘You should be doing this for love, not money,’ says Nat as she helps my jeans over my heels. ‘We really have failed with you, haven’t we?’

‘You’re blackmailing me, so you can’t talk.’

‘I don’t want to talk, angel. I want you to start probing me with your lovely instrument.’

‘You always go first,’ sniffs Nat.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Alright. We’ll toss for it. Which ball have I got in my hand?’

‘The left one.’

‘You looked.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Do you mind!’ I interrupt. ‘I’m not a bloody bumper car, you know.’

‘You give a much smoother ride, don’t you Timmy?–oh look!’

She is referring to the way my J.T. leaps into the air in sympathy when one of the blinds suddenly whips up. I am more engrossed by the faces of the two old ladies who are trotting down the corridor at the time. By the cringe! There are only about half a dozen people on the train and two of them have to be passing at a moment like this. One of them turns away so fast I think her nut is going to twist off. That must be it. A quick trip to the guard and I will be spending the next four months in the chokey for indecent exposure. What a bleeding marvellous way to arrive in the old country. Sir Giles is going to be really chuffed and I can just see the welcome I will get from Mum and Dad–not that their behaviour on the Isla de Amor was anything to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury about.

‘Pull it down!’ I yelp.

‘I’m moving as fast as I can, darling.’

‘I mean the blind!’

‘Look, no panties.’

‘I did notice.’

‘Isn’t Timmy lovely, Nat?’

‘Gollumptious, Nan.’

‘He looks good enough to eat.’

‘You took the words right out of my fevered imagination.’

‘Oh no,’ I gasp as they press me down under the combined weight of their bodies.

‘For God’s sake pull down the blind.’

At last one of them reaches behind her and does as I ask and I must confess that there are worse ways to travel. With those two birds browsing over my flesh I feel like an aniseed ball that has been chucked over the wall of Battersea Dog’s Home. Two hands are better than one–and four! Well, I will let your imagination develop muscles thinking of the merry tricks we get up to in that compartment. Would you believe that one girl could hang from the rack while the other–no, it sounds too far-fetched, doesn’t it? Not the kind of thing that a couple of refined tarts who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College would get up to. But believe me, mateys, not every bird you meet with calluses on her hand got them from digging her old man’s vegetable patch.

‘Now do it to me, Timmy. Oh, Timmy, Timmy, Timmy. That’s heaven. I’d like to have my own private chuffer train so we could do this all the time.’

Do that and I will pray for a bleeding rail strike every week, I think to myself. I don’t know how I keep pace with them, really I don’t. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I don’t really fancy them. I mean, they are fantastic birds looks-wise, but there is something so brazen about them that it can never be anything more than a straightforward up and downer. I find it very easy to poke birds when I give my old man his head and let him get on with it–as I have said, he does that most of the time anyway. It is when my mind starts to reckon a bird as well that it begins to foul up my natural impulses. It happened with a bird called Liz I used to go with when I was cleaning windows. I was on the point of marrying her when my poxy brother-in-law Sid introduced her to his nasty and put the kibosh on everything. You know, I was really stretched to get anywhere with that bird. And all because I fancied her too much. Beats anything you read in the Reader’s Digest doesn’t it? Oh well, please yourself.

Anyway, there I am putting up a fantastic fight on the floor of the 10.42 when suddenly the ticket collector lights upon the scene–as they say in the teenage romances. To be honest, I regard him as an angel of mercy because I am on the point of surrender. A man can take so much, but giving it is another matter.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he says, all taken aback and disgusted.

The two miserable old crones are craning over his shoulder photographing every inch of flesh for their memory banks.

I feel like telling the bloke that if he does not know what we are doing he would do well to consult one of the many manuals available from reputable bookshops or consider entering a monastery. Either that or find out what his old woman gets up to when she tells him she is going out to tree-felling classes.

But I don’t. Mainly because I am in a position which makes speech rather difficult.

‘We’re screwing, you prick,’ says Nan. ‘Why don’t you get back to your cell and take those two leering slag heaps with you?’

‘You want to watch your tongue, young lady,’ says the stalwart servant of British Rail sternly. I was about to say the same thing, but for a different reason.

‘Throw off your serge and live,’ says Nat whose principles go a bit deeper than Nan’s (eg more than the standard six inches). ‘Liberate yourself! Remove your serf rags! This is the only union worth joining.’

I don’t fancy this joker joining us because he is definitely not the type of person I would invite to any gang bang I was thinking of attending. That is the thing about group sex. It is not the birds I worry about. It is the other blokes. Very nasty!

But luckily I don’t have to worry. Our new friend is definitely not interested in participating.

‘I am going to have to ask you for your names and addresses,’ he says haughtily.

Blimey! Here we go. Hardly an hour in the country and I’m halfway to the nick already.

In the background the old birds are twittering away about how they knew this would happen once the socialists nationalised the railways and it is obvious they have not had such a good time since they poked an Empire Loyalist in the goolies with an umbrella at the Conservative Conference of 1952.

‘If you don’t piss off,’ says Nan, ‘I’ll go and do something unmentionable in the First Class dining car.’

I must say that they are a remarkable couple of birds because they actually get the poor sod to push off on condition that we will give him our addresses when we have got our clothes on. The old birds don’t like this at all but nothing short of instant birching would really satisfy them. I hope I don’t get quite so vicious when I am that age. Still, with a few more like Nat and Nan about I don’t reckon I stand a chance of getting past thirty.

Having a teeny-weeny criminal record for lead-nicking when I was an easily contaminated youth I am not keen to give my name and address to anyone, and have been known to fill in a false monicker on the stubs of raffle tickets. I am therefore relieved that I get my trousers on just as the chuffer pulls into Rugby. Wasting no time I zip up my credentials and grab my suitcase.

‘Well, girls,’ I say. ‘Nice knowing you. Give my regards to Sir Giles. I’ll come round and collect my bonus. Do me a favour and don’t mention Funfrall to Punchy, will you?’

‘You’re not running away?’

‘Living to fight another day. It sounds better.’

‘But Uncle Gilesy will take care of everything. We won’t drop you in it. Honestly we won’t.’

‘I know you mean well, girls, but I also know how things can go wrong. That was how I landed in the nick last time.’

‘You have a criminal record. How super!’

‘Yeah. Longer than Ravel’s Bolero. Now, I must be off.’

The thought of me being Public Enemy Number One obviously turns them on like a fire hose and I have a real job to get out of the door before the train pulls out.

‘We’ll see you, Timmy!’ they holler. ‘Remember! Screw for peace!’

I wish they had not said that because I get a few very old-fashioned glances from the rest of the people on the platform. This is bad enough but worse is to come. On the way to the buffet, I bump into the two old harpies who were having a butcher’s at our love fest. I am surprised that they can recognise my face but there is no doubt that it is firmly emblazened on their memories. They both turn the colour of pillar boxes and grab each other’s arms. Never slow to give total offence, I plunge my hand into my trouser pocket and wait for their eyes to roll across the platform.

‘Have you got a two-penny piece for two pennies?’ I say, eventually withdrawing my pandy, and watch their faces relax into apoplexy. I hop off sharpish before they start any aggro and get the next train with a cup of char and a wad inside me. By the cringe, but it is exotic fare that British Rail dish up for you these days. The bloke in front of me complains because the sultanas in his bun are dead flies. ‘Dey was fresh in today, man,’ says the loyal servant of the Raj who provides for him. I still don’t know if he is referring to the flies.

I get back to Paddington about four o’clock and then it is the last stage of my journey back to Scraggs Lane. I had considered going straight to my penthouse flat in Park Lane but decided that it would break mother’s heart if she did not see me right away. England, home and duty.

I am a bit uneasy about seeing Mum again after her behaviour with that bearded old nut in the Isla de Amor. I mean, this permissive society bit is all right for people of our age, but your own mother! Frankly, I find it disgusting. I mean, I would not set Dad up on a pederast but he is her husband. Gallivanting about in the woods with some naked geezer is not my idea of how my Mum should behave–even if she is on holiday. Of course, I blame the papers myself. All these stupid old berks read about the things young people are supposed to be doing and decide to grab themselves a slice of the action before it is too late.

Dad, I can understand. It was no surprise to find him in that woman’s hut and I was amazed it took him so long to burn the camp down. I would have thought that he would have packed a can of kerosene with his knotted handkerchief, poured it over the first building he came to and woof! The whole bleeding thing over in one quick, simple gesture. But Mum, she was a surprise. I don’t think I will ever get over that.

‘Hello, Timmie love!’

It is my sister Rosie who opens the door which is another surprise. Rosie behaved with the lack of restraint that characterises the normal English rose on holiday and her relationship with the singing wop, one Ricci Volare–and you don’t want more than one, believe me–was hardly what you might call platonic–even if you knew what it meant.

In other words, the two Lea ladies had let the side down something rotten. Like justice they had not only been done but seen to be done.

Rosie is married to my brother-in-law, Sidney Noggett, once my partner in a humble window-cleaning business, now an aspiring and perspiring business tycoon–or maybe it should be typhoon if that means a big wind–with Funfrall Enterprises who you know about.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask.

‘Standing on her head against the wall.’

‘She’s what?’

‘She’s taken up yoga.’

‘Oh blimey.’

‘Yes. She wants to find herself. Reveal the complete woman.’

‘I’ve just left two like that. She’s all right, is she?’ I tap my nut.

‘Oh yeah. She says some bloke on the island put her on to it.’

‘Oh my gawd. He hasn’t shown up has he?’

‘No, of course not. What is the matter with you?’

‘Nothing, nothing. It just doesn’t seem like Mum, that’s all.’

‘I think the holiday really did something for her. They say travel broadens the mind, you know.’

‘Yeah. You can say that again. I think I’m going to stay at home for a bit.’

As she talks, Rosie’s eyes begin to glaze over and I reckon she is thinking of Mr Nausea.

‘I thought it was marvellous out there. The heat, the different people you met–’

‘How’s Sid?’ I say hurriedly. I mean, I am not president of his fan club, but I do reckon you have got to stick up for your own flesh and blood. Once Clapham’s answer to Paul Newman starts getting two-timed, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Into the Common Market and–boom! boom!–hordes of blooming dagos leaving wine glass stains all over your old lady. That is not nice, is it? On the evidence of Mum and Rosie you might as well forget about birds and start carving models of the Blackpool Tower out of chicken bones. Of course, it may just have been the weather. Get your average Eyetie or Spaniard over here and his charms probably shrivel up before he has half-filled his hot water bottle.

‘He’s upstairs,’ she says. ‘Recovering.’

‘Recovering?’

From what? I ask myself. I knew he was having a big Thing with this bird on the island, but she looked a very hygienic lady to me. I mean, I cannot believe that she had–

‘You can see him in a minute.’

‘Oh God. What’s he doing here? Why isn’t he lording it back at your country house in Streatham?’

‘We’ve sold it.’

‘Sold it?’

‘Yeah, you can talk to him about that an’ all. Do you want to see Mum?’

‘Naturally.’

I follow Rosie through to the front room–which has not changed, right down to my knee marks on the fireside rug–and there is Mum. I would have had difficulty recognising tier because she is indeed standing on her head with her feet resting against the wall. Her dentures are on the carpet in front of her head like some kind of name plate.

‘Hello Ma,’ I say. ‘It’s me, Timmy. Glad to see you get your knickers from Marks and Sparks. How’s it going then?’

Quite a warm greeting from an only son, locked from his mother’s eyes through five long weeks, I am certain you will agree. I look down at the carpet for signs of tear stains beginning to appear but I am disappointed.

‘Timmy love, never interrupt me when I’m meditating. There are some fish fingers in the fridge.’

And that is all I get. Talk about the younger generation. It is the older generation I am worrying about.

‘I’d better see Sid then, I suppose. What’s the matter with him?’

‘He was shot trying to escape from a prisoner of war camp.’

‘Oh yeah, very funny.’ You have to hand it to Rosie, she is getting a whole new sense of humour. Very satirical.

‘I was shot trying to escape from a prisoner of war camp,’ says Sid when I ask him. ‘It was one of Slat’s ideas. You know he was mad keen on the Blitz and starting holiday camps in deserted tube stations with sirens and muzac by courtesy of World War II?’

‘I remember something about it.’

‘Well, that was just the beginning. When he really thought about it, he came up with Prisoner of War Camps. When you settled up for your holiday you were issued with a rank according to how much you had paid. For two hundred quid you could be C.O. It didn’t make any bloody difference to the food you got but people are crazy about status, aren’t they? Instead of Holiday Hosts you had guards and that cut down on the organisation because they didn’t organise games. They just tried to stop you escaping. Every intake was given a spade and a pair of wire clippers and there was a prize at the end of the fortnight for who got farthest.’

‘How did you get shot?’

‘To get a bit of publicity at the beginning, they got a real German prison camp guard. Well, you know what the Krauts are like. Very thorough. They like to give value for money. I was trying to whip up a bit of enthusiasm for an assault on the electrified fence and he shot me.’

‘He might have killed you!’

‘He said he was doing it for my own good. You see, the fence really was electrified. Slattery reckoned that some dodgy bugger could take advantage and get his two weeks for nothing if you didn’t deincentivise him.’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘It’s a word I learnt on one of Funfrall’s bleeding courses. You can have it. I’m not going to need it any more.’

‘Have you been invalided out?’

‘I’ve resigned with honour.’

‘Why, Sid? You were doing so well.’

‘Breathing is what I do best, Timmo, and I want to make a career of it. My next posting was going to be Kew Gardens.’

‘Kew Gardens!’

‘Yes. They wanted to get Malaysia but Eye Twang Knickers, or whatever his name is, wouldn’t play ball. You see, Timmo, when my number nearly came up they got more applications from people who wanted to be guards than prisoners. It’s understandable when you think about it, you know what I mean? Much more fun machine-gunning people and setting guard dogs on them than it is digging bleeding tunnels. Sir Giles saw that straight away. First of all, he tried to get the Japs to start another Death Railway and promised them cheap labour–but they thought it would be bad for their car exports so in the end he had to settle for the Hot House at Kew. Two bananas and a survival pack is four hundred guineas with cremation at the crematorium of your choice thrown in for nothing. Up on the cat walk with your Hirohito forage cap and a Nippon issue rifle is six hundred guineas or you can have the intermediate, “Jungle Boy” holiday, Dyak blow pipe and a plastic shrunken head for every camper you knock off. Personally, I thought it was going a bit too far. Specially when they said I was going to be umpire. I mean, get a few light ales in that lot and they’d open up on anything. So I said bugger it and handed in my armband.’

‘So you’ve jacked it in, Sid?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Going to leave you a bit short, isn’t it?’

‘Well, I thought of that, didn’t I? I told Sir Giles straight. I said “you can’t go around having your senior executives shot by blood-crazed Krauts and expect to leave a nice taste in everybody’s mouth.”’

‘Right, Sid.’

‘Especially if they are reading about it in the News of the People. I mean, it gets around.’

‘You were approached were you, Sid?’

‘Not exactly approached, Timmy. But I have a few contacts. Know what I mean?’

‘Oh yeah. So Sir Giles paid up, did he?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes, Timmo. What he really did was to indemnify me against the enormity of the mental and physical suffering I had endured in the course of pursuing my duties in a manner calculated to further enhance the unbesmirched reputation of Funfrall Enterprises.’

‘Blimey Sid, did you say all that?’

‘No, Timmy, my solicitor did. Very good bloke he is and all. I’ll give you an introduction if you ever need one.’

Solicitors? Sidney is really beginning to motor. Another couple of weeks and he’ll be tearing crumpets with the Queen Mother.

‘So you grabbed a nice helping of moola, did you, Sid?’

‘Nosey basket, aren’t you? Yes, if you must know. I did accept a settlement. But not in cash, mind.’

‘What, then?’

‘I bought a hotel.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘You done what?’

‘I’ve bought a hotel, Timmo. Very nice article. Down on the south coast. Hoverton, do you know it?’

‘Mum took me there for the day once when I was a nipper. Haven’t Funfrall got a place near there?’

‘Yeah, just outside the town.’

‘Sid, what I don’t understand is why you’re buying it. I thought Old Man Slat was going to give you some mazuma.’

‘Well, he has really. The price is dirt cheap when you think what I’m getting. It’s one of these big old Regency places. Funfrall are selling off a lot of their stuff as part of a rationalisation programme. Mind you, it’s still costing me a bomb. That’s why I sold El Nido.’

‘And Rosie and the kid are going to live there with you?’

‘Not to start with. I want to get the place sorted out first.’

‘Sounds fantastic, Sid. What kind of shape is it in?’

Sid begins to look uncomfortable. ‘Quite good, I think. I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘Haven’t seen it?’

‘Well, you know what Sir Giles is like. He came up with the idea so fast; and he was so enthusiastic, I thought it would sound rude if I started humming and haing.’

‘You didn’t worry about humming and haing when he suggested that you got your head shot off in the Hot House at Kew. I bet he came up with that idea pretty fast, too.’

‘I’ve seen some photographs,’ says Sid pathetically. ‘It looks very nice.’ He pulls open a bedside drawer and thrusts a couple of crumpled prints into my hand.

‘Blimey, that bird is wearing a crinoline, isn’t she? I didn’t know they had invented cameras in those days. Haven’t you got anything a bit more recent?’

The photographs Sid has given me are khaki coloured and have horse-drawn bathing cabins in the foreground. Sometimes I think that Sid has more luck than judgement.

‘Anything that is bricks and mortar is worth its weight in gold these days,’ says Sid sulkily. ‘I’ve got the freehold, you know.’

‘What does that mean?’

Sid is relieved to find that he can assert himself again. ‘It means, you prick, that I own it. I am not renting it.’

‘Well, good luck, Sid. I’m certain you’ll do very well. Not exactly your line, though, is it?’

‘No really new opportunity is ever likely to be, is it?’

‘True, Sid. What am I going to do at Funfrall, now that you’re gone?’

Sid takes a sip at his Robinson’s Lemon Barley Water and gives me his ‘I don’t really know what it means but I am trying to appear inscrutable’ look.

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he says. In the old days, I would have thrown myself full length and kissed the end of his pyjama cord saying: ‘Oh, Sid am I deceiving myself when I think that you might actually be offering me the chance of employment in your new passport to easy riches–?’ the last few words being drowned in grateful sobs. Now I am older and wiser.

‘What did you have in mind?’ I say coolly.

Sidney selects a grape and, attempting to peel it nonchalantly, manages to crush it between finger and thumb so that the gunge runs down the front of his pyjamas. With typical Lea restraint I pretend that I have not noticed this distasteful incident.

‘I was thinking,’ says Sid, scraping the remains of the grape off his chest with a dirty teaspoon, ‘that you might be able to do yourself a bit of good by coming in with me.’

He leans back against the bed like a satisfied dog owner who has just given his pet a new brand of worm powder.

‘I remember you saying something like that to me before,’ I say. ‘On a couple of occasions. First time I ended up losing the bird I was thinking of getting spliced to and the second–well, I’m not exactly loaded down with gelt, am I?’

‘Money isn’t everything, Timmo,’ says my crafty old brother-in-law. ‘You got some wonderful experience on both occasions–wonderful experiences too. You mustn’t try and rush at things. You can’t get rich overnight, you know.’

‘You haven’t done too bad, Sid.’

‘I’ve had the rub of the green, mate. I’d be the first to admit it. But hard graft has played its part.’

‘Well graft, anyway.’

‘I’ll pretend I don’t understand you. Look, Timmo, I respect you; you’ve got talent, I need you. Let me put it like that. I’ve got a feeling the Cromby–’

‘The what?!’

‘The Cromby–that’s the name of the hotel–could be a real bonanza.’

‘Not with a name like that, it can’t.’

‘I agree. How about the Hoverton Country Club?’

‘I thought it was on the sea front?’

‘Yeah, well it is, but the public gardens are just round the corner.’

‘Come off it, Sid. That isn’t going to fool anybody twice.’

‘How about the Ritz-Carlton?’

‘No, Sid.’

‘The Hoverton Hilton?’

‘Sid!’

‘The Noggett?’

‘Do me a favour. I prefer the Cromby to that.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s not really important. We can worry about the name later. What I want to find out is whether you’re interested or not.’

‘I thought I had a wonderful future mapped out for me with Funfrall?’

‘You did as long as I was there. I’d have seen you alright, Timmo. Like I always try to do. But I have to take the broader view. I weighed everything up and I reckoned that this was the right time to make a move. With a hotel we can concentrate on the right section of the holiday trade–the bleeders with money. You could get old before your time running round those chalets all day.’

‘You’re right there, Sid.’

‘Of course I’m right. Look, I tell you what, Timmo. If you help me make a go of this place, I’ll put you in as manager when we buy another one. How about that? That’s handsome, isn’t it?’

‘Very handsome, Sid. Alright, I’m on.’

‘Good thinking, Timmo, you won’t regret it.’

‘I’ll remember you saying that, Sid.’

‘You do that, you do that. Well, I suppose I’d better try and get a little rest now. Tell Mum I fancy a spot of that chicken broth, will you?’

‘She’s standing on her head in the front room.’

‘Oh, well, Rosie then.’

‘Was it serious, Sid?’

‘What? Oh, my injury you mean? No, Timmo, none of my moving parts. Nothing that Rosie has missed yet. I reckon a spot of sea air is just what I need to convalesce.’ The way he winks at me makes me think that Sid is becoming more like his old self again.

I pad downstairs to find Dad standing in the hall. As he sees me, his face splits into a broad scowl.

‘You back then, are you?’ he grunts.

‘Right in one, Dad. Nothing wrong with your eyes.’

‘Don’t take the micky out of me, sonny Jim. How long are you staying for? This place isn’t a bleeding hotel, you know.’

‘I would never have noticed if it hadn’t been for the length of time it took me to get room service. Come off it Dad, this is my home, you know. I’m entitled to a few days in the bosom of my family.’

‘Don’t talk dirty. Your mother’s in the next room.’

‘Still standing on her head, is she? You want to watch it. If all the blood runs out of her feet she’ll have to walk on her knees.’

‘Bleeding Sidney as well. I thought we’d got rid of you lot when the window cleaning business broke up.’

‘Well, you never know your luck do you? I’m surprised to hear you say that about Sidney after that smashing holiday he organised for you.’

‘Smashing holiday? I don’t call that no smashing holiday. I’ve only just got my stomach straight again.’

‘That must have been very difficult, Dad.’

‘Don’t take the piss. You always did have too much lip. All that wog food. Dirty bastards they are. I had enough of that during the war. Nearly killed me.’

‘Well, Mum enjoyed it, Dad.’

‘Don’t talk to me about that, neither. It turned your mother crackers. It was the sun done that. Melted her brain. Bloody Yogi.’

‘Yoga, Dad.’

‘I don’t care what it is. It’s not right. Woman of her age. Disgusting.’

‘Everyody needs an interest in life, Dad.’

‘She’s got me. I’m her interest in life.’

‘Maybe she’s meditating about you now, Dad.’

‘I want my supper, not bleeding meditation.’

That reminds me that Sid wants his chicken broth so I push into the kitchen where Rosie is helping little Jason to feed himself. The sight of all those little tins of vomit being smeared round his cakehole is so disgusting that it even surpasses the horror of Mum’s scarlet mush when she staggers through the door. She looks like a hollowed-out turnip with a two-hundred watt bulb inside it.

All in all, I am more than relieved when a few days later, I find myself sitting in the passenger seat of Sidney’s Rover 2000 as we purr along the seafront of Hoverton. As ardent fans will know, I am no stranger to seaside resorts, but definitely not used to speeding about in expensive motor cars. The fact that Sid has been allowed to hang on to his company car really impresses me. We must be on to something good this time.

It is only when we have sped along the sea front for about two miles that I begin to have second thoughts.

‘We haven’t passed it, have we?’ says Sid anxiously.

‘Looks as if somebody else has.’ Sid follows my gaze and his jaw drops faster than a pair of lead knickers.

‘Blimey. I see what you mean. Looks more like the Zomby than the Cromby.’

Most of the buildings along the front have been tarted up and painted fashionable shades of pink, lemon and blue but the Cromby is peeling like an eight-hour suntan and looks as if it was last painted in order to camouflage it during Zeppelin raids. Even the glass sign is cracked.

‘Nice going, Sid,’ I say. ‘You struck a shrewd bargain there. He didn’t throw in London Bridge as well, did he? If he did you were done because we’ve sold it to the Yanks.’

‘Shut up!’

‘I like the situation, too. I didn’t know they had bomb sites down here. Maybe it’s part of a slum clearance scheme.’

‘I said “shut up”. I’m thinking.’

‘Thinking about how long it will take us to get back to London, I hope. If you rang up Sir Giles from the News of the People offices he might give you your money back.’

‘Don’t be so blooming hasty. It’s right on the beach.’

‘On the shingle, Sid. Looks like they get a lot of oil tankers around here, too. And what’s that big culvert coming out in the middle of the beach? Niffs a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh, belt up, you’re always moaning. You never take a chance, that’s your trouble. If it wasn’t for me you’d be working on a bloody building site.’

‘If I nicked a few bricks we might be able to do something with this place.’

‘Very funny. You’re a right little ray of sunshine, aren’t you? Come on, let’s take a look at it. We’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Don’t talk too soon. Do they know you’re coming?’

‘No, I thought it would be favourite to turn up as if we were ordinary guests. That way we’ll get the real feel of the place.’

‘Good thinking, Sid. Trouble is I reckon I’ve got the feeling of the place without even going through the doors.’

Sid does not say anything but puts his foot down so hard that I am practically on the back seat as we skid to a halt outside the hotel. Sid waits for a moment, presumably to see if anybody comes out to greet us, and then opens the door of the car.

‘Right. That’s one thing you’re going to be able to do something about,’ he says.

‘Whadyermean, Sid? You reckon me for a blooming commissionaire or something?’

‘We’ve all got to play a part,’ he says. ‘No skiving about at the beginning.’

Marvellous, isn’t it? And I thought I was going to start moving up a few rungs. We go through the swing doors and I practically have to hang on to Sid’s coat tails it is so dark. Like the Chamber of Horrors only with less character.

‘Very restrained, isn’t it?’ I say.

‘Shut up.’

The reception area is deserted and I will swear there are cobwebs on the register. Pinned above the desk is a poster stating the films that are on at the Roxie. I remember passing the Roxie on the way to the hotel. It is now a Bingo Hall.

‘Perhaps we could take a leaf out of Sir Giles’s book and run holidays for those in love with the past,’ I say. ‘How about starting off with the Norman invasion?’

‘One of the first things I’m going to miss about you is your marvellous sense of humour,’ says Sid. ‘Now get some service around here before I do my nut.’

I have bashed the bell about three times and am wondering whether the grey stuff on top of the elk’s head is dust or dandruff, when an oldish bird with a black dress and matching cardigan comes up some stairs beside the reception. She has thin wispy hair and a twisted jaw that looks as if it has been left out in the rain and got warped. Round her neck is a gold chain to which are attached a pair of specs.

‘I’m not deaf,’ she says irritably. ‘I’m not deaf.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘We would like to book a room.’

‘You what?’

‘We would like to book a room!’ The tone of Sid’s voice betrays the fact that the Cromby is appearing less of a gold mine than it did a few hours previously. The old bag shuts her book.

‘I’ve told you once,’ she says. ‘I’m not deaf. There’s no need to shout like that.’

Sidney makes a big effort and controls himself. ‘Is it possible for my friend and myself to book a double room–with single beds?’

‘What? You’ll have to speak up. You’re whispering. What is it you want?’

‘I’d like an axe,’ grits Sid.

‘What do you want an axe for? Have you come to chop wood? You should have gone round the back.’

‘Give me strength,’ says Sid, turning away.

‘What does he want strength for?’ says the elderly nut. ‘Has he come to chop wood or not? I can’t stand temperament. Especially about a little thing like that. Young people today have no staying power.’

‘We would like to book a room.’

‘You what?’

‘Forget it,’ says Sid. ‘I can’t understand why I ever thought it was a good idea in the first place. Let’s have a bash at the pier and go home.’

‘You want some rooms,’ says the old bag. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘It never occurred to me to ask,’ I say, revealing once again my aptitude for the lowest form of humour.

‘We would like our room with two single beds,’ says Sid, pronouncing each word like one of those birds on Parlez-vous francais?.

‘Oh?’ Madam looks us up and down and it suddenly occurs to me that she thinks we are a couple of poofters. The very idea!

‘He’s my brother,’ says Sid.

‘Oh, well I suppose that’s alright.’ She does not sound very convinced. ‘Do you want a bathroom?’

‘No thanks,’ says Sid. ‘The sight of him naked might inflame my fevered imagination to the point where the floodgates burst and I be carried away in a maelstrom of primitive lust.’

‘Just a basin, then?’

‘That should prove very adequate. What time is supper?’

‘Dinner,’ she stresses the word, ‘is from six forty-five to seven thirty.’

‘Very continental,’ I observe to Sid. ‘Gives you all of fifteen minutes to get the sand out of your plimsoles.’

‘We find that most of our guests like to be finished in time for Coronation Street.’

‘I can imagine,’ says Sid. ‘The solid chomp of gnashers battling against the clock–’

‘The best seats in the telly lounge filling up from seven fifteen onwards.’

‘The latecomers wiping the blancmange from their tuxedos as they struggle for the last two chairs.’

‘It’s not like that at all,’ says the Lady in Black coldly as she settles her specs on the end of her nose. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to sign the register.’

‘What about our cases?’ Sid indicates the door.

‘I’m afraid Mr Martin is recovering from a hernia operation.’ She raises her eyes towards the ceiling on the word ‘hernia’ as if averting them from a blue photograph.

‘He’s the hall porter, I suppose?’

‘That is correct.’

‘And may I inquire what your name is?’

‘Miss Primstone.’

‘I should have guessed. Well, if we get our cases perhaps you can show us where our room is.’

I wish Sid had not said that because the minute the words have passed his lips, a much better guide appears, patting her jet black curls into place.

‘Sorry I’m late, Miss Primstone,’ says the newcomer, not sounding at all sorry. ‘But we lost a couple of balls in the long grass and I stayed behind to look for them.’ I can see a piece of straw sticking out of her hair so I have no reason to disbelieve her. She has big tits and big eyes which roll all over Sid and me while she is talking. I decide that I have fallen desperately in love with her body.

‘You should have left them there,’ snaps Miss P. ‘Five o’clock is when you’re supposed to come on duty.’

‘Yes, Miss Primstone.’ Miss P. turns to select a key and the bird sticks her tongue out at her and winks at us.

‘We must have a game some time,’ says Sid. ‘Golf, is it?’

‘No, tennis. Are you any good?’

‘I’m a bit rusty at the moment. Haven’t played seriously for years.’

I have never heard such a load of balls. If you gave Sid a tennis racket he would think it was for straining chips.

‘Oh, that’s alright. I’m only just starting.’

‘I’m Sidney Noggett, and this is my brother-in-law Timothy Lea.’

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Sandra.’

‘Hello, Sandra.’

This bird is definitely one of those who carries an invisible banner which has ‘I like sex’ written all over it. She moves as if she is very conscious of her body and she keeps licking her lips and patting her hair. I find that highly strung birds of that type really lap up the sack work. My thoughts are interrupted by Sidney coming the senior partner.

‘Get the cases in, Timmy, will you?’ he says, sliding out his cigarette case and resting his elbow nonchalantly on the counter.

‘Yas sah, Massa Noggett,’ I say in my best Brixton accent. ‘To hear is to obey.’

When I come in again, Sandra is behind the counter and Miss Primstone is drawing her cardigan around herself protectively. ‘We’re having a little trouble with the heating,’ she says. ‘You may find it takes a few moments for the hot water to come through.’

In practice, it takes three days but that is not the first thought that occurs to me when we are shown to our room. It looks like the inside of a mahogany packing case, and it is only possible to stand upright just inside the door.

‘People must have been a lot smaller when this place was built,’ I say.

‘We have never had any complaints.’

‘Probably because people bash their heads on the ceiling and get their mouths jammed shut,’ murmurs Sid.

‘If you don’t like the room, I am certain there are other hotels in Hoverton which would be capable of providing accommodation.’

It is amazing how the old bag can hear when you don’t want her to. I reckon I am going to like the place a lot more when she has left.

‘No offence intended,’ says Sid. ‘Just my little joke.’

Miss Primstone gives Sid a look that suggests she does not like jokes in any size and goes out, slamming the door behind her.

‘What did you say you were going to call this place? The Ritz-Carlton? It’s more like the blitzed Carlton.’

I sit down on one of the beds and the springs make a disastrous creaking sound like someone biting through thirty wafers in one go.

‘Is that a damp patch on the wall or haircream?’

I don’t get a chance to answer because the door suddenly opens and the second bit of good news that day bundles over the threshold. She is small and blonde and wearing a little black dress and a cap like an upturned tennis visor.

‘Oh, sorry ever so,’ she says in a squeaky cockney voice. ‘I just popped in to turn down the beds.’

She looks as if she has never turned down beds in her life and I can see Sidney’s mind travelling down the same well-worn route as my own.

‘Be my guest,’ he purrs. ‘Have you worked here long?’

‘It seems like a long time,’ says the girl, ‘but I suppose it’s only been about five weeks.’

‘Business good?’

‘Not very. There’s one or two old people who live here all the time. Retired, you know. Then there’s the commercials and the other old people who come here because they can’t afford anything better.’

‘No young people?’

‘Young people? You must be joking, dear. There’s the odd bit of stolen lust, I suppose, but most young people wouldn’t touch this place with a barge pole. You and your–your friend are the youngest we’ve got at the moment.’

‘He’s my brother-in-law.’

The maid looks relieved. ‘Oh good. We get a few of those as well, you know.’

‘You live on the premises?’

‘What do you want to know for?’ There is more hope than irritation in her voice.

‘Oh, I just thought if I wanted a sleeping pill or something, you might be able to help me.’

‘Cheeky devil!’ She puts her hand to her mouth and giggles.

‘I hope your bed doesn’t creak like this one?’ I throw in.

‘Oh, you are awful!’

‘I wasn’t suggesting anything.’

‘Not half, you weren’t.’

‘We both have a bit of trouble sleeping, don’t we, Timmy?’

‘You know what I reckon might be good for that, Sidney?’

‘No, Timmo?’

‘Ooh! I’m not going to listen to another word. Wait ’til I tell my friend Audrey about you two.’

‘Does she work here, too?’

‘She shares a room with me.’

‘Oh!’

‘Now don’t you start getting any ideas. It may be our evening off but we don’t go flaunting ourselves with just anybody, you know.’

‘I didn’t know you knew anybody we know.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter. What does Audrey look like? Is she pretty like you?’

‘Flattery will get you anywhere–within reason.’

‘Why don’t we all go out and have a little drink later? I’d suggest supper but we’ve got a bloke who may be joining us here about seven-fifteen, so we’ll be eating in.’

‘Shall I see if I can find someone for him?’

‘No, no, that won’t be necessary. We’re doing a bit of business with him, that’s all. I’m not even certain he’s going to show up.’

I am bloody certain he is not going to show up. Sid can be a cunning bastard sometimes especially when it is a question of keeping his wallet shut. I have known oncers to crumble with age when they eventually emerge into the light.

‘I hope you’re going to like Audrey,’ I say when we have sent our little squeaking friend on her way.

‘What do you mean? I’m having that one. June, or whatever her name was.’

‘Sidney, really. It was obvious that the girl was insane about me. She couldn’t keep her eyes off me.’

‘Don’t be daft. She felt sorry for you, that’s all. She was humouring you. She prefers the older, more sophisticated type. I can tell. You latch on to her mate and cross your fingers that she doesn’t fancy me as well.’

It occurs to me that this is not like the Sidney Noggett who was warning me off the frippet when I was applying for a job as a Holiday Host, and I find it impossible not to comment on this fact.

‘You’re changing your tune a bit, aren’t you, Sid? You didn’t used to approve of fraternising with the staff. And what about Rosie?’

‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ says Sid, tapping one of his mince pies. ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t worry about.’ You are dead right there, I think to myself, wondering how much Sid’s vanity will allow him to imagine of what was going on between Rosie and Ricci Volare–precious little, I should think. ‘It was different when I was at Funfrall anyway. I had more of a position to keep up. I feel I’ve shed a few of my cares. Know what I mean?’

‘Yes, Sid.’

‘After all, I am supposed to be convalescing down here. It’s in Rosie’s interest if I can check that the equipment is up to scratch.’

‘Very thoughtful of you, Sid.’

‘I thought you’d see it that way. And don’t get any ideas about putting the screws on me with Rosie, will you? You do and your prospects go straight up the creek. And I don’t just mean your job ones, either.’

Sid is no doubt remembering how I applied pressure when I discovered him having a flutter in the tool shed with the bird I was about to offer a wedding ring for the same services. Still, that was a couple of years ago, before moral values had been completely eroded, and when there was no prospect of a hotel management to seal my outraged lips. I assure Sid that I have a complete understanding of his meaning, and we go down to the cocktail lounge for a quick snifter before supper.

The bloke behind the bar has receding hair flattened against his head as if by a great, greasy wind and his forehead is corrugated like a perished rubber mask. Behind bushy eyebrows lurk evil darting eyes and his teeth look like a job lot rummaged from a vet’s dustbin. Just to gaze at his mush is to wonder whether the bar sells Rennies.

‘You gave me a start, gentlemen,’ he says pushing something under the counter hurriedly. I would like to give him three miles’ start and then piss off in the opposite direction, but one must not be too unkind.

‘Large Scotch, please,’ says Sid. ‘And what are you going to have, Timmo? Half of bitter? Half of bitter, please.’

I was about to say that a large Scotch would slide down very nicely but you have to move fast when Sid is in the chair.

‘Fairly quiet, is it?’ says Sid, adding a dash of water to his Scotch. I am pleased to see that he also gets two dead flies, a mosquito and an insect I have not seen before. Whatever it is, the barman looks up at the ceiling as he retrieves it, so it seems to have been a resident.

‘Sorry about that, Sir. The boy must have forgotten to change it. You can’t get the staff now, you know. Yes, it is very quiet but this isn’t our busy time. We do a lot of business in the autumn. It’s amazing how many hotel people come here for a holiday when their own season is over.’

‘Must give them a tremendous feeling of confidence,’ says Sid, holding up his glass to the light. ‘Have you got one with a more neutral shade of lipstick on it? This is a bit overpowering for me.’

‘Sorry about that, Sir. The girl should have seen to that.’

I can see that Sid is dying to get his hands round the little jerk’s neck and tell him who is the new lord and master but he manages to control himself.

‘You are the barman, though, aren’t you?’

‘Head Barman.’

‘How many more are there?’

‘I’m the only one at the moment. We will be taking some more on, later in the summer. Students, probably.’

‘Good,’ says Sid. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘Eighteen years. Only the receptionist, Miss Primstone, has been here longer than that. Oh, and of course, the cook.’

‘Why did you say “of course”?’

‘Oh, well, Mrs Caitley is something of an institution around here. She is practically part of the hotel.’

‘I hope she is nothing like this part,’ says Sid, fishing something else out of his glass.

Before weasel-features can apportion the blame there is an ear-piercing shriek from the vestibule which makes me choke on my beer.

‘Talk of the devil,’ mutters the barman under his breath.

I am about to ask for further details when the room is filled by a large, red lady holding her clenched fists before her in the manner of someone doing one of the exercises from the Charles Atlas Course. Not that this baby looks as if anybody is going to kick sand in her face. She pushes her way to the bar and pours a generous slug of brandy into a tumbler.

‘That’s it,’ she hollers at a pitch that would make Maria Callas rush out for a throat spray. ‘I can’t go on! Either he goes or I go. I don’t mind the nig nogs. I don’t mind the equipment–though it’s rotten!’ She bangs her glass down and half its contents jump across the bar; a loss which is speedily made good–‘it’s him!’

‘It’s the head waiter she’s on about,’ whispers the barman. ‘They don’t see eye to eye.’

‘Nobody tells me how to cook,’ snarls Big Red, giving me a hint that she is not the Phantom of the Opera in drag. ‘Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will.’

While she is looking at the ceiling over the rim of her glass, a thin, effeminate man wearing a dinner jacket rushes in. He is wringing his hands as if he hopes to extract water from them.

‘Calm yourself, Mrs Caitley,’ he squeals. ‘Calm yourself. Think of the guests.’ The last sentence causes an enormous shudder to run through Mrs Caitley like an earth tremor in a raspberry jelly.

‘I would beg to inform you,’ she says icily, ‘that thinking about the guests has been my one pre-occupation throughout twenty years in the hotel business.’

‘And I can assure you, dear lady, that I have no less a desire to serve the best interests of our patrons.’

‘Don’t you “dear lady” me, you odious pipsqueak.’

As heads begin to pop round the door, Mrs Caitley picks up a bowl of mildewed peanuts that Sidney has already rejected and begins to hurl them one by one at the head waiter. She is a lousy shot as Sid is quick to find out when he cops one in the eye, but it is an impressive sight, reminding me of one of those big Russian ladies warming up for the discus.

‘Good–wholesome–English–fare,’ she pants as she empties the bowl. ‘I-will-not-cook-continental-garbage.’

‘Cor, love-a-duck,’ says Sid as we cower towards the dining room. ‘What a blooming carve-up.’

‘Are they at it again?’ says Sandra breezily as she bounces past. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

She does something with her mouth which makes me think of juicy strawberries and I fight an immediate impulse to pull her down behind the reception desk.

‘Let’s nip out for a cup of cha and a wad,’ I say as I peer into the dining room.

‘No,’ says Sid firmly. ‘We’re going to see this through.’

The dining room is the darkest room yet and I expect to see a coffin lying on a couple of trestles in the middle of it. One reason for the gloom is probably the state of the table cloths which look like the ones that were not washed in New Wonder Sudso. The menu holders are curling at the edges and mine has a dead fly behind its acetate sleeve. The Cromby is very hot on flies.

The main thing that strikes you about the menu is that although all the dishes are printed in French, this has been crudely crossed out in Biro, and an English equivalent put beside each entry. Thus ‘Potage Creme Royale’ becomes ‘Brown Windsor Soup’ and ‘Petit poissons au style Portugaise sur pain grillé’ appears as ‘Sardines on Toast!’ In this it is not difficult to see the hand of the dreaded Mrs Caitley. You don’t have to be good at doing crosswords to know that she likes the frog-loving head waiter less than wire-wool knickers.

That creature comes across the floor at a fast mince like a ballet dancer about to launch himself into full flutter. He is patting his hair and throwing his head back and has obviously been through an ab-so-lute-ly ghast-ly experience in the cocktail lounge.

‘So sorry about that aw-ful scene,’ he squeals. ‘Now, have you decided what you’d like? The veal is a dream today. I made the sauce myself and it is quite, quite delicious–though I say it as shouldn’t.’

He gives us the kind of smile which immediately makes you look out of the window and Sid and I order the soup and mixed grill.

‘This place gives me the creeps, Sid,’ I say when Superpoof has pushed off. ‘You want to turn it into a sanatorium or get rid of everybody and start from scratch.’

‘Dodgy, Timmy. I don’t have the training for your first caper, and if I bring a quack in I’ll have to surrender some of my control. Also, there’s too much capital investment in equipment. Your second alternative appeals to me but I can’t chuck the whole bleeding lot of them out in one go. The place has got to keep functioning. It’s going to be my livelihood, remember. Yours too. No. What we’ve got to do is winkle them out one by one and replace them with reliable people. Also, we want it to be their idea that they should go. Redundancy payments would cripple me with some of these buggers. They were practically born in the broom closets.’

‘You really think about it, don’t you, Sid?’ I say admiringly. I mean, he is a shit-heap, but you have to hand it to him for applied villainy.

‘Got to, Timmo,’ says Sid smugly. ‘That’s one thing my experience with Slat taught me. You’ve got to cover all the angles.’

I consider asking if having a butcher’s at the property he was considering buying could be considered as one of the angles but decided against it. There is no point in sullying our relationship with verbal aggro at this stage.

The food, when it comes, is not as bad as I had expected. Bad, but no worse than my Mum dishes out. When you have tasted my Mum’s grub then you have tasted nothing. The only seasoning she knows about is the three after spring. Rosie gave her a cookery book one Christmas and she used it to prop up the wonky leg on the dresser. That is probably why I am so generous about Mrs Caitley’s efforts. You could float a pepper pot on the brown Windsor soup and the peas should have been served with a blow-pipe, but the mixed grill is quite tasty once you put the Worcester sauce to work on it and I have no complaint about the chips.

‘Do you fancy the Bombe Surprise?’ I say to Sid who is looking around for the drinks we ordered at the beginning of the meal.

‘I’d like to drop one on that bloody wine waiter,’ he says. ‘The service in this place is diabolical.’

By the time the bloke does come we are into the coffee and Sid tells him to piss off and bring us a couple of brandies.

‘That’s going to be one of the good things about this job. We should be able to get stuck into some very nice nosh once we get the place sorted out.’

‘Amongst other things,’ I say as I watch June and what is presumably Audrey, tripping past for our little rendezvous. ‘I’m glad you decided you wanted June.’

Sid looks up and his face when he sees Audrey is a real study. This bird is a knockout and she gives us both a long, cool look which demonstrates real interest. She has long shoulder-length black hair and a sultry expression which makes me think she probably scratches. I down my brandy so quickly that I get prickles up my nose.

‘Don’t want to keep them waiting, do we?’ I say, starting to get up.

‘Timmo. Please! I thought you were beginning to understand what it’s all about. Never appear too eager. Surely you know that?’

‘Yeah, Sid. Sorry. I just wanted to get out of this place, that’s all.’

As if overhearing me, Superpoof zooms to our side and fixes me with an engaging smile. This bloke really has it all. Head cocked on one side, hand dangling limply from the wrist.

‘Can I have your room number, please. You are together, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but we’re just good friends,’ says Sid brusquely. ‘One two seven.’

‘If you’ve bought the bleeding hotel I don’t know why we didn’t have separate rooms,’ I say, as the Nancy with the laughing eyes trips off to wield his ballpoint.

‘We should have done but I just didn’t think of it. I’m so used to being skint that I forget sometimes.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘Don’t be cheeky. Remember who’s the gaffer round here. Right, now let’s go and sort out those birds. You take what you can get, all right? And don’t let on who we are. Say we’re sales reps, OK?’

‘What are we flogging?’

‘Cars. That sounds as if it’s got some money in it. Now, come on.’

Three hours later we are standing outside the back door of the hotel in a fine drizzle and trying to decide on our next move. Both the girls are hopelessly pissed and my judgement is not exactly faultless. Amongst other things, we have been ten-pin bowling, in which Sid got his finger stuck in the ball and nearly said goodbye to it. I will always remember him doing this great wind-up and then following the ball for the first ten yards down the alley. For a wonderful moment I thought he was going to overtake it and be the first man to make a strike with his own body.

We have also lost a fortune in small change–all mine, of course–on the pin-table machines on the pier. Very few of them seem to be working although they have no problem in gobbling up 5p pieces.

We have also done a great deal of boozing and I now think I know the inside of every pub in Hoverton. Sid has taken me out to the kasi and we have agreed that he can have first crack in our room while I nip upstairs. The bird situation is no problem because neither of us has any preference. June does seem to fancy Sid and Audrey has only drawn the line when I tried to stroke her tits in the public bar of The Three Jolly Matelots. That was when I decided I must take the water cure. Swill down as much as you can and it dilutes the alcohol. I don’t want to fall down on the job with an acute attack of brewer’s droop.

‘Where’s your key, June? Can’t you get it out?’

This salty sally reduces both girls to parrot schisms of mirth and I am soaked to the skin before the door is eventually unlocked.

‘Bloody marvellous hotels where they lock the front door at eleven,’ moans Sid.

‘You should be grateful. Saves you a lot of embarrassment. It isn’t going to do your reputation much good if the new owner is seen testing his tonk on every skivvy in the place.’

‘You’re a silver-tongued bastard, aren’t you?’ Sid slips his arm round June’s waist and we all stand there making ‘sshhssh’ noises at each other. There is hardly a light on in the place and only the horrible smell tells me that we must be near the kitchens.

I take Audrey in my arms for a warm-up snog near the foot of the stairs and press her back against the door of what turns out to be a broom cupboard. I learn this fact when we slowly topple into a welter of vacuum cleaners and tins of floor polish. Maybe I should have had some more water. When we struggle out, Sidney and June have disappeared and all I can hear is the hall clock ticking. God knows where the night porter is; not that I particularly want to meet him in my present situation.

‘Oh, you’re fantastic,’ I murmur into Audrey’s lughole. ‘Absolutely fantastic.’ This is Lea’s standard Mark I gambit and seldom needs to be followed up with anything more imaginative before the bedsprings start playing ‘Love’s Old Sweet Melody’. All birds lap up a diet of non-stop flattery if delivered with sufficient enthusiasm because it backs up their own judgement. They feel both reassured and impressed by your good taste. I know I have said this before but you can’t repeat the golden rule too often.

‘Go on with you,’ whispers Audrey. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘I wish I could,’ I murmur passionately. ‘But the words would stick in my throat.’

Diabolical, isn’t it? But Audrey grabs my hand and practically drags me up the stairs. We get up to the third landing just as Sid is gently shutting the door of our room with June inside it. He gives a little wave and a thumbs-up sign and I hear the bedsprings creaking before I get to the turn in the stairs.

‘Are you going to make me a cup of Ovaltine?’ I murmur to my sultry companion.

‘Something better than that,’ she says, squeezing my thigh. At least, I think she means to squeeze my thigh but the light on the stairs is practically non-existent.

‘Don’t scream like that!’ she hisses. ‘You’ll wake everyone up.’

‘Watch what you’re doing with your hands then,’ I howl in my anguish. ‘Otherwise we’ll be making this journey for nothing.’

By the cringe, but it is big, this hotel. Another couple of flights and I am looking for Sherpa Tensing to hand me an oxygen mask. The only thing that keeps me going is the outline of Audrey’s delicious little body before me. Funny how a few days before, I was thinking that I never wanted to see another woman. Now I can hardly wait to get inside that bedroom. I stretch out my hand and run it lightly over her tulip bulb backside. This is the life. Free bed and never bored. She pauses outside a door and presses a finger to her lips. I remove it and we dissolve into a deep kiss. She puts a hand behind my thigh and pulls me towards her savagely. She does not say much, this girl, but her heart is in the right place. The rest of her is not badly situated, either. Just to make sure, I slip my hand up underneath the back of her skirt and am browsing happily as she reaches behind her and turns the knob–the doorknob, I hasten to add, though you could be excused for asking!

I press forward and imagine us doing a slow motion shuffle towards the bed as the door swings open. This is a very beautiful thought and it is therefore doubly choking when I glance inside and see that one of the two beds in the large dog’s kennel is already occupied. Occupied is perhaps the wrong word. It has a large naked man lying in it with his tonk flopped on one side, like a boiled leek. He seems to be asleep. Audrey is apparently unaware that she has a guest because she hooks her hand into the waist band of my trousers and starts to pull me into the room.

‘Hem, hem,’ I murmur with the discretion that has made the name Lea synonymous with upper crust gentility (you wouldn’t believe I only got ‘O’ level woodwork, would you?). ‘Did you know you had company?’

That bird spins round and says a few words I have not heard since Nat and Nan were last on the rampage. ‘Filthy bastard’ is the most repeatable phrase she utters.

‘A friend of yours?’

‘We finished a long time ago. He’s taking a terrible liberty.’

‘Do you want me to throw him out?’

‘No. You’d better not. I know! We’ll go round to his room. It will serve him right. He can have a nice sleep here.’

Phew! Thank goodness for that. For a moment I could see that lovely piece of nookey slipping through my fingers.

‘Wait a minute.’ There is a piece of pink ribbon lying on the dresser and I carefully slip it under the uninvited guest’s tonk and tie a floppy bow in it. Call me a romantic if you like, but it is little gestures like that that make the world a happier place to live in.

Audrey grabs my hand and leads me along the corridor and down a small flight of stairs. I bet she could find her way there blindfold if she had to.

‘Who was that?’ I whisper to her.

‘The night porter,’ she says. ‘Petheridge.’

No wonder there was no sign of anybody when we blundered into the broom cupboard. Petheridge obviously confines his activities to the upper floors.

‘He doesn’t share, does he?’ I ask nervously.

As I have said before, I am not a great one for unveiling my nasty in the presence of others than those who have been invited to witness the experience.

‘Not on Thursdays,’ she says comfortingly and pushes the door open on a small room smelling of Boots After Shave lotion. There, to my relief, is a tiny cot, empty as the day it left the great bed maker. I do not wait to look under it for burglars but pull Audrey to me and slip my hands under her skirt as if picking a mushroom. Her tongue nearly beats mine to the draw and we fondle each other like a couple of kids with their first wad of plasticine. Normally, on such occasions, I expect to play some part in removing my partner’s clothes, but this chick is such an enthusiast that she is pulling down her tights before I have unzipped a boot. In less time than it takes to sign for a registered envelope from ERNIE she is lying back on the bed with only a small heart-shaped necklet in danger of being crushed out of shape between her boobs.

‘You look lovely,’ I tell her.

‘Shut up with all that flannel,’ she says. ‘I’m not putting up a fight.’

She is right, of course. It is just that I am so used to saying it that it has become a habit with me.

I strip down to my pink candy-striped underpants–everybody is wearing them in Clapham this year–and climb on to the bed. It is not that I am modest. Just that I don’t see why the bird should not do a little work for it. Her greedy little hand slides down over my belly and I close in on her mouth. She has the most fantastic skin. Like a slightly bruised peach. I slide one hand beneath her shoulders and send the other down to do a recce for J.T. Everything seems more than ready so with a quick nibble around the bits that give baby his elevenses, I climb aboard and we motor round the bay a couple of times. She is quite a girl, this Audrey. Very strong in the pelvis and capable of opening Tizer bottles with her belly button, I should reckon. I can see why Petheridge hangs around her bedroom. It must be better than sorting out the early calls. I am trying to control myself but with this girl thudding away underneath you it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a can of petrol. She suddenly starts groaning hoarsely and then squealing so loud that everyone in the hotel must be able to hear her. Nothing turns me on faster than a woman’s moans and in no time at all I am ebbing away between her thighs, beautifully taken out of myself.

‘I can hear your heart beating,’ she murmurs.

‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘I was worried there, for a minute.’

Maybe I am getting old or perhaps it is just that I have had a busy day. Anyway, I immediately begin to feel sleepy and climb gratefully between the sheets as Audrey looks about her wistfully.

‘I think I’ll go and see if that man is still sleeping in our room,’ she says. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

I Mumble something and close my eyes as I listen to the sea hissing against the shingle–we don’t have much sand on our part of the beach. There is a shaded lamp on the table beside the bed and this bathes the room in a soft, warm glow. Lucky Timmy. The door opens and I hear Audrey come in. I do not change my position but nuzzle deeper into the pillow and make ‘I am almost asleep, please do not disturb’ noises. I will catch up with her again in the morning, Petheridge willing.

Strange that I can hear the delicious sound of nylon being peeled away from flesh. Why should Audrey have put on her tights to go up one flight of stairs? I turn my head to take a quick butcher’s and–blimey oh Riley! There, bending forward to shed her bra is the receptionist bird Sandra. The one I took an instant fancy to. She must have an understanding with Petheridge as well. No wonder the bloke sleeps so much!

Without looking towards the bed she slips out of her panties, gives a delicious little shiver that makes her tits wobble invitingly and pulls back the sheets. It is in this far-from-unattractive pose that our eyes meet for the first time that evening.

‘Oh.’ she says. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

‘Me neither.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Come inside and we’ll talk about it’

She gives a little shrug and begins to climb into the bed.

‘Oh well,’ she says. ‘Life’s so short, isn’t it?’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Quite like old times, it was,’ says Sid wolfing down half a kipper in one mouthful. ‘Good to know that the old unquenchable magnetism is still coming on like the Chinese cavalry.’

‘Very reassuring, Sid,’ I say, trying to keep my eyes open. By the cringe, but that Sandra is a goer. Maybe it is something to do with the sea air. I reckon someone like her must have had a go at Nelson. He lost his eye and his arm and then he said ‘Right! That’s it!’ and hopped up on his column. Female spiders are supposed to nosh up their mates after having it away, aren’t they?

‘I didn’t tell you what happened, did I?’ continues Sid, who is clearly going to. ‘It was amazing, really. I’ve been in some funny situations in my time, but–hey, wake up! Your rice krispies are going all soggy. What’s the matter with you?–anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I’d just finished driving her into a fit of uncontrollable ecstasy for about the seventeenth time when suddenly the door opens and in pops your one. Before I can say “half-time, change ends”, she’s hopped into bed with us! How about that then? I have to admire her taste but, blimey! It’s brazen, isn’t it? Doesn’t say much for your performance either–stop yawning!’

‘Sorry, Sid. I did have a few problems myself last night.’

‘Sounds like it.’ Sid is obviously dead chuffed with himself and in such moods is considerably less than lovable.

‘Yeah, that receptionist bird Sandra nobbled me–nibbled me a bit as well.’

‘What!’ Sid’s toast quivers outside his mush.

‘Some kind of strange magnetism I exude must have drawn her to me. It was funny, really, just like you say. I had just finished driving my bird into a fit of uncontrollable ecstasy for–oh, I suppose it must have been about the twenty-fifth time–when Sandra springs through the door like a female tigress–’

‘As opposed to a male tigress,’ says Sid.

‘Precisely. “Leave him,” she cries, “that man is mine,” and she picks up Audrey and chucks her through the door like she is a sack of feathers. After that, well I don’t really know how to describe it. She just tears the bedclothes off and has her ruthless way with me until cockcrow–or in my case, cockcroak.’

‘Go on! You’re kidding.’

‘Straight up, Sid–or at least it was to start with.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Please yourself.’

At that moment Sandra comes into the dining room, throwing out more curves than a Scalextric track.

‘Hello tiger,’ she says, raping me with a warm smile as she goes past our table.

‘More toast, Sidney?’ I say politely.

Half an hour later we are outside leaning against the sea wall and admiring the patterns the oil slicks make on the water.

‘One thing I don’t understand, Sid,’ I say. ‘Who is supposed to be running this place at the moment?’

‘A woman called Miss Ruperts. She used to own it once and then sold out to Funfrall. She’s an alcoholic apparently. Goes off to be dried out occasionally.’

‘I can imagine this place driving you to drink. Blimey, what with her and Mrs Caitley, it’s going to be a nice little set-up, isn’t it? Does Miss Ruperts know you’re taking over?’

‘She should have heard this morning. Sir Giles wrote to her at the sanatorium.’

‘So she’s away on a cure at the moment?’

‘Yeah. She should be in peak form at the moment.’

As he says the words, an ancient Armstrong Siddeley can be seen belting down the promenade towards us. Its course is, to put it mildly, erratic, and it forces a milk float off the road before squealing to a halt outside the Cromby. Hardly have the wheels stopped turning than the driver’s door flies open and a big woman of about fifty gets out. She is carrying a bulging suitcase and has only taken two steps before the case bursts open and about half a dozen spirit bottles shatter on the paving stones.

‘What did you say her name was?’ I ask Sid.

‘Miss Ruperts,’ he says grimly.

‘ “In peak form”, that’s what you said, isn’t it, Sid? Looks as if she’s heard the news all right.’

‘Shut up,’ says Sid.

‘I expect you want to go and introduce yourself. I think I’ll take a turn round the pier.’

I watch Miss R. lurch through the front entrance of the hotel.

‘You come with me,’ hisses Sid. ‘You’re my Personal Assistant. This is what you get paid for.’

‘When, Sid?’ I ask, but he does not seem to hear me. I follow him across the road and we bump into Miss Primstone just outside the hotel.

‘Was–er–that Miss Ruperts?’ says Sidney casually.

‘Yes,’ says Miss Primstone hurriedly. ‘But she seems rather overtired. I think she wants to be alone.’

‘Very understandable,’ says Sid. ‘But could you tell her that Mr Noggett would like a word with her? It is important.’

‘Have you ever thought about changing your name?’ I say as Miss P. hurries away shaking her head.

‘Shut up.’

‘But Sidney Noggett. I mean, it’s not like Gaylord Mandeville, is it?’

‘No, thank God. Now belt up! Unless you want to start sketching the insides of Labour Exchanges for a living.’

‘That’s very funny, Sid,’ I say as we are shown into a small dark office behind the reception. ‘Have you ever thought about doing it professionally?’

‘I’ve thought about doing you, hundreds of times. Ah, Miss Ruperts? How nice to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. I am Sidney Noggett and this is my Personal Assistant Mr Lea.’

‘A bauble,’ says Miss R. as she pours a jumbo shot of Scotch into a shaking tumbler.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘To be a bauble passed from hand to hand is not the future I would have envisaged for myself in those halcyon days of yore.’ I don’t really understand what she is on about because I have edited out the slurs so it reads understandably. But ‘passed from hand to hand’? With her frame you would need a fork lift truck. She has a mug like a professional wrestler–only most of them shave these days–and hair like Wild Bill Hitchcock–feminine but masculine, if you know what I mean. Her shoulders would not be out of place on a second row forward. And, how often does Raquel Welch wear a Norfolk jacket and jodhpurs with a bootlace tie? You can count the times on the notches of your riding crop. All in all, a very distinctive lady, not much prone to flower arrangement, or anything else, I would wager.

‘Have no fear, madam,’ says Sidney who picked up most of his manners from old movies starring the likes of Ronald Colman. ‘You have no cause for alarm.’

‘Casting an eye over the register used to be like glancing through Debrett. Half the crowned heads of Europe stayed here. Their servants used to put up at the Grand. And now, now–’ Miss Ruperts chokes with emotion, or maybe it is the booze. ‘I am on my way to the gutter.’ She knocks back the contents of her glass and belches loudly. Now you would not think that DDT. ‘No flies on me’ Noggett would be taken in by that load of cobblers, would you? No? Well, you would be wrong. Very wrong. Sidney–and I am not so different myself, really–has a respect for anything uppercrust that is positively terrifying. If some bloke had rolled up flashing his greasy braces and with half a Woodbine glued to his lower lip, Sidney would have taken him apart soon as look at him, but this drunken old slagbag is getting the Queen Mother treatment because she talks very refained and does not remind Sid of anything he has seen in Scraggs Lane–ancestral home of the Leas.

‘Miss Ruperts, allow me to assure you–’

But Miss R. has not finished yet.

‘It is not me that I am thinking of,’ she says, reaching out for the Scotch bottle, ‘but those faithful retainers who have rendered yeoman service all these years. Treat me as you will, I have my memories to live on, but I beseech you, do not cast them into the wilderness. This place has been a home to them. To you it may only be a realisable asset but–please! I beseech you. Temper expediency with mercy.’

You don’t read speeches like that in Shakespeare, do you? Certainly not, if it’s a choice between that and Coronation Street.

‘Miss Ruperts,’ says Sid, while I wonder if I am hearing right. ‘I am certain that your experience will be invaluable. I hope that we will be able to work together to restore the hotel to its former position of immenseness. Do not fear that I have any plans to destroy your life work.’

Miss Ruperts is visibly moved by these stirring words and has to take more liquid comfort to calm herself.

‘Call me a stupid old woman if you will,’ she begins.

‘You’re a–’

‘Shut up, Timmy! Forgive me, Miss Ruperts. You were saying.’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I was only attempting an expression of gratitude for your noble gesture and generous sentiments. Now, if you will forgive me, I would like to be left alone. The events of the last few hours have taken toll of my strength–my heart, you know.’ She taps the region of her enormous chest which looks like a kitbag worn on the wrong side of the body.

‘Of course, of course,’ Sid is backing out of the office. ‘We can discuss details later. I hope you will soon be perfectly recovered.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ I say as we return to the cocktail bar. ‘You weren’t really swallowing all that rubbish were you?’

‘One of the old school,’ says Sid. ‘You don’t often meet them like that these days.’

‘If you’re lucky you don’t. Come off it, Sid. She’s a piss artist. If you don’t get rid of her, she’ll drink the place dry within a couple of weeks.’

‘She does have a drink problem, I’ll grant you that, but she must be worth a lot of goodwill in a place like this. Think of the contacts she’s got.’

‘I’d rather not, though I suppose she might be able to fix us up with an Alcoholics Anonymous Convention. I thought you were going to weed out all the layabouts? She’d be top of my list.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, and make sure you don’t start creeping up the charts. If we can keep her under control, I’m certain she can do us some good. I don’t want to start off with any unpleasantness.’

‘It’s because she’s got a posh voice, that’s what it is. You’re just like Dad when there’s a whiff of the nobility about’

I can see that Sid is getting the needle and this impression is confirmed by his next remarks.

‘Let’s forget about Miss Ruperts for a minute,’ he says, ‘and let’s talk about what you’re going to do.’

‘Your Personal Assistant,’ I say brightly.

‘That kind of thing,’ Sid nods his head slowly. ‘But first of all you’ve got to learn the ropes. I’ve already mentioned that this place needs a commissionaire.’

‘You don’t expect me to hang about outside all day in some poncy uniform, do you?’

‘Not all day, Timmy, no. You are going to have so many other things to do, there won’t be time–waiting, working in the kitchens, portering–’

‘Hey, wait a minute!’

‘No “heys”, Timothy. I want you to undertake a thorough apprenticeship in the hotel business. I only wish I could join you myself.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Lazy majesty. It’s a French expression meaning that if you are the boss you are expected to ponce about all day doing nothing, otherwise it upsets people.’

‘It wouldn’t upset me, Sid.’

‘You are not people, Timmo.’

‘But they’re going to think I’m some kind of nark, Sid.’

‘Of course they won’t. They won’t realise you are reporting back everything you hear to me, unless you choose to tell them. This experience is going to be vital, Timmy, because you’ll be able to learn about every fiddle the staff are pulling, from the inside.’

‘I don’t like it, Sid.’

‘Well, you know what you can do then. What did you think you would be doing? Sitting in a little office in a pinstripe suit?’

‘It would make a change from some of the things I’ve been doing lately.’

But, of course, Sid has me firmly under his thumb and when I appear at the meeting at which he addresses the staff, I don’t even get a place on the platform. Miss Ruperts introduces him and it would make you sick to hear the way she goes on. She must have sworn off the stuff for a couple of hours beforehand because her hands are not shaking and every word comes over crystal clear. ‘Better days ahead’, ‘Exciting new prospects’, ‘Marching forward into the seventies’, are some of the golden oldies that come tripping off her tongue and these are only bettered by Sid who bounds to his feet and gives his all in true Funfrall manner. I am quite pleased to find that nobody registers any enthusiasm at all except Mrs Caitley who says ‘Hear! hear!’ periodically through Miss Ruperts’ address. I later learn that they were land girls together during the war and have been in tandem ever since. What a diabolical thought! Milk production must have dropped off something awful when the cows saw those two flexing their pinkies.

Sid eventually draws to a close, one of the hall porters farts and there is a ripple of applause. I personally think it is for the fart, which is quite an effective one. What is interesting is to observe the reaction of Sandra, June and Audrey now that they know who we are. The last two seem to think that they have been conned while Sandra is clearly impressed. All through Sid’s speech she gazes at him like he has just discovered how to make gold bars from fag ends and her contribution is a sizeable slice of the ripple of applause that greets the end of his ramble through cliché land.

On the other hand, she looks through me like an empty goldfish bowl and I feel it is going to be some time before I get another piece of nooky from that quarter. The fact that I am posted to the kitchens on the first part of my training course does not help matters. In my greasy clobber I hardly look likely to give Smoothiechops a run for his money.

Make no mistake about it. The people who work in the kitchens of large hotels are not likely to crop up in the Vogue social column very often. Some of them are rough. Very rough. If it was not for the frying pans I would have thought I was in the engine room of an Albanian minesweeper lent to the Irish navy. One bloke is tattooed from head to toe and keeps gulping down swigs of meths whilst there are two Spaniards who cannot understand a word of English and spend most of the time holding hands behind the chip slicer.

The female presence, apart from Mrs Caitley, is virtually non-existent and I, for one, am grateful. When you look around you it is easy to see why chefs are usually men–big, strong men. It is a tribute to Mrs Caitley’s muscle power that she can wield any authority at all and still have enough strength left for her marathon hassle with Mr ‘Superpoof’ Bentley–that is the name of the maitre d’hotel, or head waiter to you and me. Normally, the chef de cuisine has total authority over the choice and preparation of meals and Mr B. is pushing his luck in trying to get in on the act.

That is another thing you soon learn when you work in a hotel. Everybody is ‘Mr This’ and ‘Mr That’. There is none of the informality that used to prevail at the holiday camp. This is presumably because everybody in the business seems to have worked their way up from the bottom and is very jealous of preserving their status.

And talking of working your way up from the bottom, I have never seen so many concrete parachutes in my life. I have nothing against queers, except the toe of my boot if they become too persistent, but really! After peeling millions of potatoes and scraping blackened cooking pots in a temperature of over a hundred degrees, and in an atmosphere so steamy that you can hardly see the dripping walls, the last thing you fancy is being touched up by some joker as you bend over to sluice your greens.

My dismissal to the kitchen does at least help my relationship with June and Audrey. Like everyone else on the staff, they trust me less than a Vietnamese threepenny bit but at least when they see me crawling along the corridors towards my new room–yes, Sid has moved into the management suite and I have been relegated to the ‘Penthouse Club’ or attic, as it is also known–they realise that being a nark is not all easy sailing.

‘Trying a bit of work for a change, are you?’ says June, as we bump into each other on my first evening.

‘Don’t be like that. I’m knackered.’

She is all tarted up and obviously about to grab a bit of the gay night life that Hoverton has to offer before it closes down at half past nine.

‘Why aren’t you downstairs with your mate?’

‘You ask him that. He wants me to learn the ropes. At the moment I feel like hanging myself with one of them.’

‘It’s not nice down there, is it?’ says June with a hint of sympathy creeping into her voice. ‘You have to be careful when you come out into the cold. It’s easy to catch a chill.’

‘I’ll remember that. Where are you going?’

‘They have a dance down at the Pier on Fridays. Do you fancy coming?’

‘I’m not much of a dancer at the best of times and tonight I couldn’t stand up for the national anthem. Thanks anyway. Another time.’

‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘Oh yes. Just fagged out, that’s all.’

I let myself into my room and notice her registering its number.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she says. ‘Bring you a little surprise. Who are you sharing with?’

‘Nobody at the moment. I think the bloke is on holiday or evaporated.’

‘Oh.’ Her face lights up. ‘See you.’

She trips off down the corridor and I peel off my clobber, have a sluice down in the washbasin and climb on to the bed to listen to the plumbing. It is just like being back at home with the sloping rafters inches from my nose.

I must have drifted off because the next thing I am aware of is a burst of laughter in the corridor and the sound of whispering and giggling right outside my door. I open my eyes as the door knob turns and June and Audrey come in wearing long nightdresses with frills at neck and hem. Very nice too. What is an additional peeper-bonus is the playmate they have brought with them. A coloured girl I have been quietly eyeing since I crossed the threshold. She is wearing a black shortie nightdress and carrying a bottle of brown ale.

‘Have you got an opener?’ she says and all three of them burst into fits of giggles.

‘You had a good evening, did you?’ I say, waking up fast and slipping my hand under the sheets to adjust periscope.

‘We brought you a present,’ says the coloured chick.

‘Which one?’ I say, looking from one to the other of them. More giggles.

‘This is Carmen,’ says Audrey. ‘She said she’d like to meet you.’

‘I never did.’

‘You did.’

‘I never.’

I imagine that Carmen is blushing but it is difficult to tell.

‘Anyhow,’ I say gallantly to cover her embarrassment, ‘the brown ale is for me, is it?’

‘Yes. We thought you needed building up.’ More giggles. If the sheets were transparent, they might change their minds.

‘I’ll have to open it, won’t I? Look the other way, girls.’

I grab a handy towel and drape it around my shapely loins as I slide out of bed. I don’t have an opener but I reckon I can knock the top off on the edge of the table–that and a few other things.

‘Hold this penny, luv.’

Carmen leans forward and I get an eyeful of lovely dusky knocker. Colour problem? You must be joking! It would be no problem for me, I can tell you. I hook the bottle top over the edge of the coin and give it a hard bash with my fist. Hard enough, anyway, to drive it down on to my bare toe. I scream loudly and drop the towel whereupon it is the girls’ turn to scream loudly. I don’t know what they are making all the fuss about. They have probably seen better and they must have seen worse.

‘Press down on the coin this time. OK, luv?’

Carmen nods and her face is a study in concentration as the mighty Lea fist is raised again. This time I give it a right belt and the top flies off–no trouble. Unfortunately it has become resentful of the treatment dished out to it and promptly discharges its contents over Carmen’s shorty nightdress. The poor bird is soaked to her lovely skin and when the flimsy material sticks to her it becomes transparent. No wonder that in all the excitement my towel falls off again. Hey ho, some things were clearly meant to be, eh? I slip my arm around Carmen’s waist and raise one and a half inches of brown froth to my lips.

‘Cheers, girls, thanks a lot. That was a very nice gesture. Now, what can I do for you?’

A diabolically stupid question you may well say, but I am a great one for observing the niceties. A tidal wave of female flesh bears me back on to the bed which promptly collapses under the strain. I don’t know what these birds have been drinking but it sure beats the hell out of diluted yogurt. None of them are slow starters but this jungle bunny Carmen climbs over me like I am a commando training course closely followed by the other two in flying T formation. I am fighting for sexual survival as I try to work out what I should be doing to which. In the end I give up and have a stab at anything that is moving. And, dear readers, there is a lot moving. Luckily my experiences with Nat and Nan have taught me the basic rudiments–and I do mean rudeiments! If there was going to be an action replay you would need about fourteen cameras to capture all the detail. And the noise. Oh, my God, the noise! That must be what attracts Miss Primstone. I get my head up just in time to see her turning into a great black prune in the doorway.

‘Urgh!’ she says. ‘Urgh!’ The noise is rather like a dog growling through a bone it is worrying. ‘I am going to report this disgusting behaviour to the management.’

She is just like the two old bags on the train because she shows no sign of going away but stands there drinking in the monstrous depravity and loving every moment.

‘I’m going to get on top of him now,’ says Carmen. ‘Do you want to watch that?’

Only then does the door close and Carmen makes good her threat–or promise, depending on which way you look at it. It is all good, clean, healthy fun in the modern tradition but I don’t think that Miss Primstone has nipped off to tell her diary about it. As Carmen gently rises and falls across my hips I can imagine the tales that are now being borne along the corridors of power. Reinforcements will soon be on their way.

‘Girls, girls!’ I bleat pathetically. ‘Don’t you think we’d better stop? We’ll all get the sack.’

‘I’d like to see them try. We can do what we like in our spare time.’

‘ “Spare” is right,’ I wheeze. ‘Now, get off me before something terrible happens.’

But it is like King Canute telling the waves to put a sock in it. The girls come at me as if they are trying to find pieces to keep as souvenirs. I struggle gamely, of course, but ten hours in the Cromby kitchen takes a lot out of you. It is becoming more like careless rupture than rapture.

Just when I can take no more, and give even less, the door flies open, and there, wearing curlers and a nightdress that looks like a dust sheet borrowed from a grand piano, is Miss Ruperts. She is carrying a shooting stick and this she promptly applies to June’s shapely rear portions.

‘Out, hussies! Out!’ she barks. ‘Disgusting little animals. Back to your lair, Jezebel.’ With that remark, Carmen cops a sharp prod on the sit-me-down. Miss Ruperts is obviously a very rustic lady and she lashes out with her shooting stick like she is making hay with it. In no time at all the birds have grabbed their nighties and scuttled out into the corridor and I am left to bear the full brunt of Miss Ruperts’ wrath.

‘And what have you got to say for yourself, you mongrel?’ she scolds. The shooting stick is hovering dangerously near my Action Man Kit and for a moment I have a nasty feeling that Miss R. may be contemplating doing a park keeper with it.

‘I didn’t invite them,’ I whine. ‘I was trying to sleep.’

‘You’re Mr Noggett’s protégé, aren’t you?’ she says suddenly, peering down at me. ‘I wonder what he’ll have to say about this.’

‘I don’t know. I should think–’

‘Put your pyjamas on and we will find out.’

‘What! Hey, wait a minute. We don’t want to disturb him now, surely. The whole thing was a joke that got out of hand. We weren’t really doing anything.’

‘Come,’ Miss R. waves her shooting stick as if she means business.

‘But–’

‘Get up! Don’t try and hide your pathetic body. I’ve mated horses.’

There seems to be nothing for it but to do as she says. So I pull on my pyjama bottoms and give her my pleading look. It does no good.

‘Come on. We will go and see Mr Noggett.’

Sidney is not going to like this, I think to myself as I am marched down the corridor sandwiched between Miss Ruperts and Miss Primstone. Now he has become Conrad Hilton he has rediscovered many of the little ways that made him such a prize tit when he was with Funfrall.

Knock, knock! Miss R. turns the handle before the sound has died away and I stumble into Sidney’s suite. Very nice, very nice indeed. Large settees, candelabra, a tray of drinks–Sandra is looking nice, too. She pops up from the sofa as the door flies open. Too bad she appears to be naked. Sidney, too, as we see when his red face and ruffled hair appear a couple of seconds later.

‘Sorry to trouble you, Sid,’ I say evenly. ‘But Miss Ruperts wants a word with you.’

‘Oh.’

I say ‘oh’ because I turn round to find that Miss Ruperts and Miss Primstone are leaving the room like it might start sinking at any moment. I guess that is the end of them for the evening.

‘Carry on, Sid,’ I say. ‘I expect she’ll take it up with you in the morning.’

I leave the room quickly, before he can throw anything at me.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sidney is very upset the next morning, when he calls me into his office, and it takes a long time before I can make him believe that coming round to his room was not my idea.

‘She said I was your protégé,’ I tell him.

‘Dirty old faggot. She should mind what she says,’ explodes Sid. ‘You can end up in court saying things like that. I’ve never fancied a fellow in my life.’

‘She probably realised that when she saw you with Sandra,’ I comfort him.

‘Yeah. What were you up to, then?’

I tell him about June, Audrey and Carmen and I can see his face cloud over immediately. Sort of a green cloud, it is.

‘You want to watch out,’ he says finally. ‘Two last night. Three tonight. Where’s it all going to end? How long before you’re dragging your mattress down to the telly lounge?’

‘Give over, Sid. Most of them are old enough to be my grandmother. And what about you, anyway?’

‘I’m cutting back. Only one last night. Anyway, it’s different in my case. In my position it’s practically staff relations.’

‘Any truth in the rumour that you’ve got Miss Ruperts lined up for tonight?’

Sid shudders. ‘Do me a favour, I’ve never fancied myself in jodhpurs. Still, I’d better do something to sweeten her up, hadn’t I?’

‘Why bother? Give her, the riding boot, Sid.’

‘No, I can’t do that. I still think she could be useful.’

‘You’re barmy, Sid.’

‘Watch it, Timothy–’

Whenever he calls me Timothy, I know he is rattled.

‘–remember who’s in charge. About time you were down in the kitchen, isn’t it?’

‘How much longer do I have to stay there, Sid? The heat is sapping my strength.’

‘Not enough, by all accounts. You give it another two days, and we’ll see if you’re nearly ready for waiter service.’

‘But, Sid–’

‘No buts. Now push off. I’ve got to see Miss Ruperts.’

So I go down to the basement to find that one of the sous chefs has resigned and the Chef Tournant–he turns his hand to anything, see?–gone to hospital. The two occurrences are not unconnected because the Sous Chef has resigned by pouring a pot of coffee down the front of the Chef Tournant’s baggy trousers. Very nasty! Passions do run high in the kitchens and with the heat and the foreigners you feel you are working in the middle of a jungle clearing sometimes. Only ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ holds us all together.

For some strange reason Mrs Caitley seems to take a fancy to me and gives me a friendly bash on the shoulder once we have provided the Chef Tournant with half a pound of lard to slide down the front of his pants.

‘I hear you were a naughty boy last night,’ she says gruffly. ‘Take my advice. Don’t get mixed up with any of the fillies in this place. Rotten little scrubbers most of them. Find yourself reporting to the vet in no time.’

She is putting it a bit strongly but there is no doubt that the staff in the Cromby–both male and female–have considerably more sex-drive than your grandma’s tabby. To wander about the upper floor of the hotel after ten o’clock at night you need to be fitted with bumpers. Luckily my room mate comes back from holiday and he is so repulsive that not even the randiest bird in the place wants to get through the door.

It is not until I progress from the kitchens to becoming a waiter that I have what you might call my first brush with one of the paying customers. To be exact, I become a commis waiter. This is the humblest form of life in the dining room and is the bloke who brings the grub from the kitchen and puts it down on the table for the Chef du Rang to slap down in front of the customers. After a few days of doing this you may be allowed to serve a portion of vegetables as a special treat. A Chef du Rang is a senior waiter who looks after a few tables, and aspires to eventually become a maitre d’hotel. Fascinating, isn’t it? No? Oh, well, please yourself.

One morning, as I go into the dining room, I get an elbow in the ribs from Petheridge the night porter, who is just going to turn in after his labours. He, you may remember, is the gentleman who was spread out starkers on Audrey’s bed and is no stranger to a spot of the other.

‘Couple of right little love birds flew in last night,’ he says with a leer. ‘Table Six.’

‘They up already?’

‘About half a dozen times, I should reckon.’ He gives me another nudge. ‘No. I expect they couldn’t sleep for the excitement. Hey, that Carmen’s a one, isn’t she? I’ve heard of Carmen Rollers, but she’s ridiculous. Damn near broke up my set.’

Petheridge is a big, strapping bloke with a jaw line that makes Charlton Heston look like a nancy boy. The thought of him and Carmen on the job is enough to keep the blue movie industry in ideas for years.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Very nice. Sleep tight, Peth.’

He ambles off scratching the front of his trousers and I go into the dining room. Table Six. Oh yes! At first I can hardly see them because they are so small but there sit this teeny couple with honeymoon written all over them. The bloke is wearing his short-sleeved multi-patterned holiday shirt with matching scarf and has a camera on the table in front of him so he can rush out and start snapping everything that moves and the girl is all scrubbed and virginal with her hair pulled back from her face and her skin glowing with health and expectation. She blushes like fury when the bloke asks her whether she would prefer tea or coffee and goes berserk pouring it out for him. Not like the other married couples in the room who just stretch out their hands for pieces of toast from behind spread newspapers.

‘Do you know what the weather forecast is?’ says the bird brightly when I bring them some more marmalade. The bloke loves his marmalade.

‘I think they said we were in for a fine spell.’

‘Oh, goody. Did you hear that, Roger? Lots of lovely Dickies.’

She turns to me. ‘My, my–husband is very keen on photography.’

‘Not very good, though,’ says hubby bashfully.

‘Oh, darling! You’ve won the club trophy two years running. And what about that photograph you had published in Camera News? “The Old Forge by Moonlight”.’

‘It was very dark.’

‘That was the way they printed it, darling.’

She turns to me again. ‘Don’t you listen to him. He’s awfully good, really.’

What a nice kid! I think to myself. Ain’t love grand? Nice to know that there are still a few pleasant, uncomplicated people about. I avoid Carmen’s glance as she sneaks into the dining room. One thing you can never tell about her is whether she has dark rings under her eyes.

In the days that follow, I begin to take a special interest in love’s young dream and it is therefore a surprise when, one morning, only Roger appears at the breakfast table. He is looking strained–a condition which does not totally surprise me–and fiddling uneasily with the cord of his Leica.

‘Shall I wait for modom?’ I say thoughtfully.

‘No. She’s having breakfast in her room today. Just a cup of coffee for me, thanks.’

A cup of coffee? That is hardly the stuff to give Wee Georgie Wood the strength to blow up a couple of balloons for a kid’s birthday party. What ails our boy? Whilst others bosh back their sausage and egg, Roger gazes glumly out of the windows towards the oil tankers which are leaking slowly across the horizon. When he eventually departs, his coffee is cold and untouched and there is no sign of wifey. I watch carefully and he does not go upstairs but leaves the hotel and walks slowly along the promenade. He is not heading for civilisation, but open country. For the first time that I can remember he has not taken a picture of anything before he disappears from sight.

What is up? A lover’s tiff? I wonder what wifey’s mood is at this moment. To find out I ask the waiter who has taken her breakfast up. Tear-stained and without appetite, are his comments and he has an untouched tray to prove it. Mrs Richards does not come down until eleven o’clock and sits by herself writing postcards until lunch time when Mr R. returns and they go silently in to lunch. After lunch they go up to their room and then it is Mrs R. who emerges, her eyes wet with tears, and goes off by herself.

The next day they are down to breakfast together but there is an air of crushing silence about them that makes me clear my throat every time I decide to speak. They spend the day together but in the evening it is Mr Richards who eats alone in the dining room while his wife takes her meal upstairs.

On the third day I become elevated to floor service and see neither of them but the fourth I am told that there is a breakfast to be taken up to Number Six. One breakfast! I tap discreetly on the door and a voice so low I can hardly hear it tells me to come in. Mrs Richards is propped up on a couple of pillows and, as far as I can see, is alone. Again, she looks red-eyed with crying.

‘Are you going to have it in bed, modom?’

She looks at me for a long moment and then her lower lip starts trembling.

‘Now come on,’ I say. ‘Don’t–’

But it is no good. She bursts into floods of tears and throws herself face down on the bed.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she moans.

‘Come on, cheer up,’ I say. ‘Look, I’ve brought you a nice kipper.’

I feel a right berk saying that, but what can you do in the circumstances? ‘Shall I fetch the doctor; I think he’s sobered up–I mean up and about.’ Stupid slip, that, but like everyone else in the place, Dr McDonald seems partial to his ‘wee drappy’.

‘No. I don’t need a doctor. No, I’m sorry. Leave the tray. I’ll see if I can face something later.’

‘Shall I find your husband?’

At the mention of the word ‘husband’ she starts sobbing twice as violently and buries her face in the pillow. I try and comfort her but she waves me away and in the end I find myself shaking my head in the corridor.

I see neither her nor her husband for the rest of that day and imagine that they must have checked out. It is therefore a surprise when, next morning, I am told to take breakfast to Room Six. Again, just one breakfast.

This time there is a more cheerful response to my knock on the door and I notice that Mrs Richards is wearing a frilly nightdress and a trace of make-up.

‘Morning,’ she says brightly, before I can open my mouth. The sparkle in her eyes may be the remnant of a tear or a return to the mood she was in when I first saw her.

‘Morning.’

‘I’m sorry about yesterday. I was very down in the dumps. I don’t know what came over me.’ While she is talking her hands are gripping the edge of the counterpane and she looks into my eyes as if trying to find something.

‘Don’t worry. I expect you felt a bit strange, being married and all that.’ I know Peter O’Toole would have put it better, but he had the education.

‘You’re very understanding. Do you often get women who burst into tears all over you?’

‘Not so far. I’ve only been doing this job for a week.’

I give her a quick rundown on my curriculum vitae–no madam, it does not mean what you think it does–and she nods understandingly.

‘So you’re new at it, too?’

I am not quite certain what she means, so I give her a sympathetic smile–at least, I hope it is sympathetic–and keep my mouth shut.

‘I’ve brought you some nice grapefruit segments,’ I say eventually, as her eyes continue to follow the passage of the blood round my body.

‘You’re so kind, you always try and bring me something nice, don’t you?’

‘It’s all part of the service.’

She is a very appealing bird, this one, and I can feel myself getting my guinea-pig stroking syndrome (I got that word from ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power’. Thank you, Reader’s Digest.)

‘Roger said you were kind.’ Her lip starts to tremble. Oh, no! I can’t stand this again.

‘Shall I open the windows?’ I say hurriedly. ‘It’s a lovely day again.’

‘It’s all right. I’m not going to cry. I’m sorry.’ She puts down the bedclothes and smiles up at me. ‘Are you married?’

‘Blimey no. I mean, I’ve nothing against marriage of course. It’s just that I don’t think I’m ready for it.’

‘I should think you’re more married than I am.’ I don’t know what she means and my expression telegraphs it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she continues, ‘I wasn’t trying to be abstruse.’

Just as well, I think, because I don’t know what it means.

‘I mean,’ and then she pauses.

‘Yes?’ I say helpfully.

‘My marriage hasn’t worked out quite the way I thought it would.’

‘Oh well, it’s early days yet. I’ve heard it takes a little getting used to. They say the first ten years are the worst.’ Her lip starts to tremble again. ‘I was only joking, of course.’

‘Sex.’ The word comes out of her mouth like a bullet.

‘Would you like it on your lap?’ I swallow hard. ‘I mean, the tray, of course.’

‘I haven’t. We’ve not–’

‘I’ll pour you some coffee, shall I?’

‘He’s always taking photographs.’

‘I’ve noticed. Careful, you’re spilling your grapefruit.’

‘He said he respected me.’

‘That’s very nice.’

‘I’ve never–’

‘That’s not so unusual. I mean–’

‘Neither has he.’

‘Oh.’

The juice from her grapefruit segments has leaked on to the toast and she is looking out of the window as she talks as if speaking into a tape recorder.

‘I’d better take that before you spill everything.’

‘Oh, sorry. I don’t really feel hungry anyway.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Roger?’

‘Yes.’

‘It sounds stupid but I think he’s gone home to mother.’

‘He’s left you?’

‘Not permanently. No, he was upset. We were both upset. I am upset. He’s coming back, I think. Oh, I don’t know.’ She looks as if she is about to burst into tears again.

‘Because you can’t–er–I mean, because you–er–haven’t got it together yet?’

‘ “Is there something wrong with us?” I’ve read books about it. Every magazine you pick up is full of articles about it.’ She suddenly looks me straight in the eyes. ‘I’m sorry. You must think I’m mad talking to you like this.’

‘No, no. That’s fine. It must be very trying for you.’

‘I feel that if I don’t tell somebody about it, I’ll go mad. I can’t talk to my mother. She wouldn’t understand and it would make her unhappy.’

‘You’ve talked to your husband about it?’

‘I’ve tried to, but you see, it’s difficult, because–he can’t, he hasn’t been able to.’ She blushes furiously.

‘It’s probably nerves,’ I say. ‘There have been times when I was all tensed up and I couldn’t–er–you know–’

‘Get it together?’ She manages a smile.

‘That’s right.’

‘But–forgive me asking this. You can tell me to mind my own business if you like–the first time you made love, was it so difficult? I’m assuming that you’re not a virgin.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I say looking at the ceiling. ‘Well, let me see. It was a bit different for me because the bird I was–I mean, the lady in question was what you might call experienced.’ You might also have called her a raving nympho but I don’t want to labour the point. I can still remember us writhing amongst the potato peelings, the rain bashing down outside the kitchen window, my squeegee propped against the broom cupboard–happy days! ‘I don’t imagine,’ I go on, ‘that you have ever? No, of course, you said you hadn’t. And probably not, how shall I put it, fiddled about much either?’

‘My hymen has never been ruptured.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ I say. I mean, it does sound nasty, doesn’t it? My Uncle Harry had a lot of trouble when his–’

What I’m trying to say is that I am still a complete virgin,’ says the bird.

‘Oh. Yes. Well that can be a problem. I don’t think I’ve ever–er–had the pleasure with a virgin, if you know what I mean.’

‘Never?’

‘No, not never. Your husband is one, too, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very ticklish. Like you say. You get the idea there aren’t many around these days. I know that’s wrong, of course. I’ve read those surveys in the Sundays. Most girls are still virgins when they get married, aren’t they? It must be the circles I move in, I suppose.’

‘So you can’t help me?’ Her face goes even redder. ‘I mean, with advice.’

‘Not speaking from experience, no.’

Suddenly, I get an idea which would have occurred to any sane bloke about ten minutes before. I sit down on the bed and put my foot in her saucer of marmalade. That was not the idea, I hasten to add. Just a typical bit of Lea misfortune. I push the tray under the bed with my heel and rub the gunge off against the side of the bedside table.

‘I would like to help you, though,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it would be very difficult, really I don’t.’

I look into her soft, brown eyes and she turns her head away.

‘If you mean what I think you mean, I couldn’t. It would be adultery. I couldn’t commit adultery on my honeymoon.’

‘Don’t look at it like that,’ I say hurriedly. ‘What I’m suggesting is a step towards a complete marriage. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it seems so underhand.’

‘There’s nothing underhand about it. You’d be doing it for him, really.’

The more I think about it, the more I am convincing myself that it is a marvellous idea. She is a very cute little chick and there is only one of her. Sidney is right. I am getting a bit brassed off with all this group activity. Also, I would be performing a public service–in a manner of speaking. That’s always a nice way to wrap up a bit of in and out.

‘But me being a virgin. That’s not all the trouble. He doesn’t seem to be able to–’

‘First things first,’ I say comfortingly. ‘Let’s get you sorted out then we can think about him. I’m certain that once you know what it’s all about, you’ll be able to help him.’

It sounds such good sense doesn’t it? I wonder if I could volunteer to give it away on the National Health?

‘But I don’t know you. I mean you’ve been very kind and nice but–’

‘What could be better? You don’t want to know me. Just look on me like some kind of doctor who’s about to give you an examination.’

I squeeze her hand tenderly and pull her towards me. ‘You make it sound so convincing,’ she says apologetically. ‘Oh, I did look forward to it so much before we got married.’

‘It’s not always easy at first,’ I say, kissing her gently on the cheek. ‘It’s like learning to ride a bike. You have to be prepared to fall off a few times.’ On reflection that does not seem the best way I could have put it but it is too late to rephrase it now.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You’ve got a hairy chest. Just like Roger.’

‘Just think of me as Roger,’ I purr, sliding my arm round her waist. ‘Close your eyes and imagine that he’s come back and is sliding into bed beside you.’

‘Do you mind drawing the curtains a bit?’

‘Nobody can see.’

‘I know but I feel happier when it’s a bit dark. I’m shy, you see.’

She is sitting there obediently with her eyes closed so I half draw the curtains, turn the key in the lock, and whip my clothes off so quickly that one of my fly buttons rolls under the wardrobe.

‘That’s a very pretty nightdress,’ I murmur as I slide in beside her. ‘Very pretty.’

‘I made it myself. Can I open my eyes now?’

‘Of course. How do you feel?’

‘Frightened.’

‘That’s nothing new, is it?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Well, I’m not frightened, I’m excited.’ I take her hand and guide it down the front of my body. ‘Feel.’

She touches me gingerly as if trying to remove a piece of cheese from a mousetrap.

‘It’s huge,’ she says.

I shake my head sadly. ‘I wish you were right. It just feels like that because you’re not used to it and you can’t see it.’

‘I could never get that inside me.’

‘Let me worry about that,’ I kiss her gently on the lips and slip my hand under her nightie.

‘Relax. Don’t stiffen up. Come on, you’re very pretty.’

Slowly but surely her tongue darts out and stays pinned between her teeth. Her small breasts seem to grow beneath my hands and her hard nipples quiver expectantly.

‘You like that, don’t you?’

‘Um. Lovely! You have very gentle hands. Are you going to touch me there?’

‘In a minute. There’s no hurry.’

This is not strictly true but I have left the key in the lock in case somebody comes to see what’s happened to me.

‘Oh, that’s heaven.’

I run my fingers over her belly and lightly brush against the soft hairs that nestle below it. Tiptoe to the two lips, in fact. Very gently I plough the moist furrow and–

‘Oh, be careful.’

‘This doesn’t hurt, does it?’

‘A little.’

‘I’m going to move my finger about a bit. How’s that?’

‘Alright. In fact it’s quite nice, really.’

We go on like this for a bit and I am beginning to feel fruitier than Covent Garden. There is a nice pink flush in her cheeks and her eyes are closed contentedly. It must be chronic, if you can’t get your end away, mustn’t it? You forget what some poor devils have to go through–or not go through as seems more the case.

‘I’m going to try it with two, now,’ says kindly Doctor Lea .’Try and grin and bear it. Remember it’s in a good cause.’

‘Think of Roger.’

‘That’s right. Think of Roger.’

‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’

‘Positive. Anyway, it’s a bit late to worry about it now, isn’t it? Now, we’ve got this far.’

‘Ouch!’ Her hands close around my wrists. ‘This is the bit that always hurts.’

‘I know. But we’ve got to do it. Come on. Think how nice it’s going to be later on.’

‘I hope you’re right. Ouch!’

I pull her close to me and make her move her legs around while I offer encouraging noises. It is all a bit clinical for a bloke of my tastes and I can feel J.T. Superstar beginning to get perplexed. It would be a disaster to do a Roger, wouldn’t it? The very thought sends cold shivers down my spine. Luckily, the bird is far from passive as far as the old moaning and groaning goes and this helps to keep me on the boil. I can’t stand the ones who lie there as if they are wondering what shade of brown to paint the ceiling.

At last I reckon the time has come to do some real plumbing and I gently lever myself between her legs. Such a tiny bird, she is. Her nose is practically pressing against my belly button.

‘Here we go,’ I say. ‘Stand by for blast off.’

For some reason I think of one of those old-fashioned costume movies with a battering ram being positioned outside the gates of the castle. At least nobody is pouring boiling oil down my neck.

‘Ouch! Oh, no! Oh!’

‘Hang on, we’re nearly there. There!’

‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Her voice rises in a series of shouts progressing from the pained to the triumphant. ‘Hurrah!’

‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’

‘Wasn’t too good, either, but thank you very much. You don’t know what this means to me.’

She puts her little hands around my big end and hugs me to her.

‘It’s nothing. All part of the room service.’

She kisses me warmly on the mouth and together we engage full revs and rocket off into the stratosphere–well, would you believe the bed hopped six inches from the wall?

Yes folks, another satisfied patient learns to live again. Just whistle the Dr Kildare theme while I put on my Y-fronts.

Despite the fact that I only did it out of sheer goodness of heart, I am a bit choked when her old man rolls up around tea-time. I had anticipated that the patient might need a bit more treatment that evening. I see them sitting there in the lounge with half a plate of digestives, and their little hands creeping into each other, and I think: that’s it, Lea, close your casebook, zip up your fly, it’s ten bob to a tin of Vaseline that things are going to be alright from now on. Just sit back and wait for your Duke of Edinburgh award.

But, not for the first time in my life, I am wrong. Mrs R. has a strained expression by supper time and at the breakfast table next morning, there are definite signs of tears. Roger is fiddling with his camera strap. Oh dear. It looks as if all my hard work has gone by the board–or bored maybe. No? You’re probably right. Anyway, later that morning Mrs R. approaches me as I am subjecting the silver to a spot of spit and polish in the deserted dining room.

‘No good, huh?’ I say, reading her face.

She shakes her head. ‘If you’re like other men, he’s not like you. Do you think there’s something wrong with him? Maybe he should see a doctor?’

‘Don’t suggest that to him. That’ll turn him right off. No, he just needs a bit of a boost somehow.’

As I speak my eyes wander down to the end of the room to where Carmen is bending over to adjust a table leg. Yeah. That chick could defrost your refrigerator by brushing against it. At the back of my horrible little mind an idea begins to lurch forward.

‘Banging away with his camera, is he?’ I ask.

‘Yes, it’s the–’ she bites back what she was going to say and gives a resigned little shrug. ‘How long is this likely to go on for?’

‘It’s only temporary. I’m sure of that, but–’

‘But what?’

‘Well, just to be on the safe side, we ought to give him a feel-up, or whatever it’s called.’

‘A fillip?’

‘Precisely. I mean, you’re only here for two weeks, I suppose. You don’t want to hang about any longer than you have to.’

‘But surely you can’t do anything to him–I mean physical?’

‘Blimey no. What kind of bloke do you think I am? No, there are pills and stuff like that but I don’t recommend them. They can get a bit out of control if you know what I mean.’ I think of the Shermer Rugby Club and my blood runs colder than an Eskimo’s chuff.

‘So, what then?’

‘I haven’t quite worked out the details yet, but I think he needs a bit of mental stimulation. He’s concentrating on you so much he gets uptight every time he lays a finger on you. If we can broaden his horizons a bit–’

Later that day I get Carmen, June and Audrey on one side and fill them in on my plan of campaign. Being the kind of gay, fun-loving girls they are, they express themselves as being only too glad to oblige. My real stroke of luck is when I find that the apartment next to the Richards’ bedroom is falling vacant the following morning. Not only that but there is a connecting door between the two suites and it opens into the Richards’ bedroom. My cup over-runneth!

A spot more organisation and next morning finds me gliding up behind Mr Richards as he makes for the front entrance clasping his Leica as if it is the only thing left in the world.

‘Oh, Mr Richards. Sorry to trouble you but I wonder if I could ask you something?’ He shrinks away from me as if the only thing I could be asking him is ‘Why can’t you get it up your old lady?’ But luckily my up-bringing has protected me against such crudity.

‘I remember your wife talking about your success as a photographer, and I wondered if I could ask you to give us a few tips. When I say “us” I mean the Cromby Photographic Club. There’s one or two of us very interested in still lives.’

‘Well, that’s very flattering. I don’t see how I can refuse.’ Richards looks happy for the first time in days. ‘Don’t get any ideas about me being a great performer, though. Daphne is inclined to exaggerate.’

‘Daphne?’

‘My wife.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s lighting that is the trouble with us. Use of flash. All that kind of thing. If you could give us a few hints on positioning models. I’ll get one or two of our members along.’

‘Delighted. What time would you like me?’

‘Let’s say midday. Then you can join us for a little drink.’

‘Delighted. Absolutely delighted.’

At five minutes to twelve I have June, Audrey and Carmen draped around the semi-darkened apartment. Audrey is wearing a bikini that looks like two elastic bands with three knots in them and heels so high you could use them for planting potatoes. June is sporting a sheet–cot-size so it does not conceal the fact that she is starkers–and Carmen is wearing a dab of Chanel No. 5 behind the knee caps–nothing else to distract you from her manifold charms. I get her standing in the darkest part of the room and pour half a bottle of brandy into the half bottle of sherry I have nicked from Dennis the barman. If this lot does not get him going, nothing will. Tap, tap! ‘Come in, Mr Richards. Very kind of you to come. Is Mrs Richards joining you?’

‘In a minute, I hope. She’s suddenly decided she wants to change her dress. Very dark in here, isn’t it–Oh, my God!’

I bend down and give June her towel back. ‘Don’t overdo it, dear,’ I hiss. ‘Let’s get a few drinks inside him first.’ I turn to Richards. ‘We’re very keen on life work as you can see. I did mention that, didn’t I?’

‘I can’t really remember,’ says Richards, who is now grabbing an eyeful of Audrey’s knockers.

‘Drink?’

‘Yes please.’ His hand shoots out and he downs a mixture of sherry and brandy–randy shandy I call it–before you can say Cecil Beaton.

‘My goodness me.’ He gives a little laugh and shakes his head like a boxer trying not to let on that he has been hurt. ‘Interested in flash work, are you?’

June is giving him a flash already and it is obvious that she has been at the booze while my back was turned. I will have to watch them because they are quite capable of taking what is meant for another.

‘Get the flash bulbs out, will you, Audrey?’ I say nonchalantly. ‘I’ll start oiling Carmen.’

‘You’ll what?’ Richards is clearly interested and I give him another slug of randy shandy.

‘It brings the body tones up a treat. We’ve had some wonderful results. This is Carmen, by the way.’

The noise made by Richards is like air being sucked into a jet engine. I pick up a bottle of olive oil and pour a little between Carmen’s massive knockers. Richards is now making choking noises.

‘Do you think I’m standing the right way?’ asks Carmen. I think she comes from Walsall and she has a very flat voice–the only thing about her that is.

‘Well, I-er-um-er think it’s er-um, really a-um a question of um-er-lighting.’

‘You get on with this,’ I say pushing the bottle into Richards’ hand. ‘I’ll go and check the equipment.’

This is not going to take long, because we only have one Instamatic and a roll of black and white film, but I don’t tell him that. He is dabbing at Carmen’s body like he is varnishing a butterfly’s wing.

‘Let me fill up your glass,’ Audrey closes to his side and June brings up the rear–one of the best in Hoverton, I might add.

‘I don’t know if I should.’

‘Oh, go on, be a devil. Can you put some on me? No, the oil, I mean.’

Richards is starting to pour his drink down the front of Audrey’s bikini. He is going even faster than I had expected. Too fast, maybe. We want to leave something for his missus. I try and gently remove his drink, but he avoids my hand and takes another giant slug.

‘Remarkable brew, quite remarkable.’ He empties his glass and slams it down on the table so hard that the stem breaks. But does he notice? Does he fucia! ‘Let’s get on with it, then,’ he yodels. I think he might mean photography but my worries are groundless. He swills olive oil on his mitts and goes at Carmen’s knockers like he is trying to smooth out her chest to plant radishes.

A few moments later he is looking around for more customers. ‘Next!’ he hollers. Audrey’s bikini is torn away as if by a great hurricane and all the girls start giggling and closing in for the kill.

‘You’ve got to get your exposures right, eh?’ Roger nudges me in the ribs and obviously reckons it is the funniest thing anybody has ever said. ‘Who cares about the ball, let’s get on with the game. To think, that for all those years I was concentrating on my camera.’

June has taken umbrage at being left out of the action for so long and presses forward, her mouth an inviting inch from Mr Instamatic. But not for long! Like a lost piglet catching up with its milk supply, he launches himself on to her lips and I can see that in a couple of seconds the whole point of my carefully laid plans will be blunted in another gang bang. Carmen is already beginning to undo Richards’ belt and dear, loyal Audrey is fiddling with mine. Get orf! ‘What about Mrs Richards?’ I pipe above the uproar, pulling her old man off June before they can get any closer involved.

‘I thought she was joining us?’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, so she was.’

He tries to turn back to June but I grab her by the shoulder. ‘You’d better find out what has happened to her,’ I say, dragging him towards the door that joins the two apartments. Before he can say any more I have flung it open and bundled him through. There, strictly according to instructions sits Mrs R. filing her nails on the edge of the bed. She is wearing a black bra and panties set with suspender belt and black silk stockings. Gor!! I am on the point of throwing back Mr R. and going myself. Luckily, my native sense of decency gets the better of me and closing the door on my impulses I drop to my knees and peer through the keyhole. Well, I want to see that everything is alright, don’t I? I need have no fears. Mr R. falters for a moment, and then his eyes light upon the goodies spread out for him. In three strides, he has swept wifey back on to the bed and is fighting his way out of his trousers like an angry ferret escaping from a paper bag. Mrs R’s panties whip over her heels and like a bee late for an appointment with its queen he whips into the hive before you can say honeypot.

I would like to watch more, but you have to draw the line somewhere, don’t you? I wish someone would tell that to Carmen, Audrey and June. Regretfully, I turn away from the keyhole to see Carmen tilting the Randy Shandy bottle to her lips. Oh, no! If they have that lot inside them–I spring to my feet and sprint for the door.

‘Oh no you don’t!’

‘But girls–’

‘Getting us all excited and then ratting on us.’

‘Yes, but. Put me down! Stop doing that!’

‘If you’re not a good boy, we’ll go next door. We’ve got a fan there.’

That was the argument that clinched it. I mean. I could not allow my scheme to be spoilt at the last moment, could I? Let Mr R. get used to one bird first of all. Then he can build up later.

‘Is there anything left in that bottle?’ I say, as my jeans hit the carpet.

CHAPTER FIVE

I don’t see the Richards again until they leave the hotel. Nine days and they never leave their room once! When Mrs R. sails through the front entrance on her way out, she looks a changed woman. I mean, she looks like a woman! Her old man slips me a fiver and gives me a big wink. ‘Buy the camera club a drink on me,’ he says, ‘they’re doing a grand job.’

I watch the two of them snuggle down in the back of a taxi and I feel almost moist-eyed with pleasure. Almost, I hasten to add. The last time I cried was when England got beaten by West Germany in Mexico. Oh, that one’s good deeds could always be so pleasurably accomplished. I exclude from that statement the last part of the exercise. Exercise! By the cringe. When I finally escape from the Terrible Trio, my willy wonker feels like a tassel that has been in a hassle with an electric fan.

In the next few days I steer clear of the birds and concentrate on my duties. As a waiter I learn how to order up courses that people don’t want and put them on one side for consumption later. You would think that in a large hotel there would be plenty of spare grub about but often the stall’s food is diabolical and the chefs watch for nicking like hawks. If anybody is going to have a bit of spare, it is going to be them.

My most instructive period is that which I spend with Dennis the barman, or head barman as he prefers to be called. He is a grade one tealeaf and I am certain I only get wise to a fraction of his little dodges. For example: he leaves the spirit measure to soak in a bowl of water. Very hygienic, but every time he picks one up to dish out a drink he makes sure he scoops up some of the water in the bowl so that the booze is diluted and he is getting extra mileage out of every bottle. The number of shots per bottle is an established figure so every tot over the top is money in the barman’s pocket. It is also fairly easy to take the odd bottle from the stock room without signing for it. Provided the books usually balance, nobody is going to get too fussed about the occasional discrepancy. And, if you are catering for a party, why not buy a few bottles of booze from the local cash and carry and sell them as well as the hotel’s stuff? You make a much bigger profit that way. Again, if you have got a bar going at a private party, and you have to do the accounts afterwards, you have to be dozy not to be able to top up a few bottles with what people have left lying about. This way you don’t have to account for so much money and the surplus goes into your own pocket.

The softest touch of all is short-changing people. After a while you can tell at a glance the people who count their change. Any business man buying a large round of drinks for his superiors or potential clients is only going to look at the change in order to select a tip twice the size of the one he normally gives. Some poor jerk taking out a girl he wants to impress is also unlikely to start making a fuss. Whether you add a bit to the cost of a round, or indulge in a spot of short-changing, the chances are that you will rarely be challenged. Dennis’s speciality, I observed, was to serve a round of drinks and keep some of the change back under the bill which he held out on the tray for the customer to see. Like as not the customer would push some more change over for a tip and if he did notice a discrepancy, the missing change would appear from under the bill where it had ‘accidentally’ got lodged. Jumbo-sized grovelling from Dennis and a temporary drop in his fringe benefits.

Quite how much Dennis made out of his fiddles I don’t know but he was rumoured to own a house in the South of Spain, and keep an expensive flat in London. Working with him made me realise that you can never put a stop to all the fiddles but, at least, you can get a bloody good idea of what to look out for if you ever have the misfortune to try and control some of the fly boys who hang out in the hotel business. The trouble is that if you sack one, you stand a good chance of getting someone even worse next time. And it could take you months to get to know all his fiddles! That is what Sid decides anyway, and I reckon he is probably right.

Incidentally, one last word while I am on the subject of fiddles. If you order a gin and tonic or a whisky and dry ginger and it arrives with half the mixer slopped into it, send it back and tell the barman you would rather mix your own drink. Chances are that he has given you a half measure of spirit and topped up with tonic.

Although Sid has fallen for Miss Ruperts’ upper crust charms and is prepared to tolerate Mrs Caitley because of her, he has definitely got the needle with Superpoof, the head waiter, and it is fortunate that the spaghetti bolognese incident brings matters to a head–literally as it turns out.

As already reported, Mrs Caitley takes umbrage whenever Bentley tries to step into her sphere of influence and he is taking his life in his hands when he decides that it will be easier to serve the spaghetti bolognese if it is premixed in the kitchen. Mrs Caitley says no. Ladle the spaghetti out on to the plate, then add the meat sauce from a gravy boat. I would not be fussed either way, but when Superpoof waits until Mrs C. has been called to Miss Ruperts’ office and invades the kitchen it is like asking for his stamp collection.

I sense something unpleasant is going to happen when he comes staggering out of the kitchen with a great tureen of gunge in his hands. His face is pink and it is obvious that the kitchen staff have said a few nasty things to him.

I tighten my grip on my parmesan as he slaps the bowl down on a serving table and waves at one of the chefs du rang to get on with it. The dining room is pretty crowded by Cromby standards and in view of what is about to happen this is bad luck for everybody. As the chef du rang is about to start serving, the swing doors to the kitchen burst open. It might be a water buffalo but–even more terrifying–it is Mrs Caitley. The expression on her face makes me shrink back against the wall. Always a close contender with Miss Ruperts for the world’s ugliest woman title she is now threatening to break clear of the field. One glance at her mush and I feel like I am standing at the mouth of a cave with a tiger cub under my arm just as Mummy gets back from the butchers. Her eye falls on Bentley like a factory chimney collapsing and she eats up the distance between them in half a dozen giant paces.

‘Return to your province, Mrs Caitley,’ squeals Superpoof, retreating from the table.

‘Odious toad,’ hisses Mrs C. ‘To set foot in my kingdom is to declare war. How dare you interfere with my arrangements!’

These words are delivered in what I believe is called a stentorian bellow and every bod in the dining room freezes with his fork half way to his cakehole.

‘I am responsible for how the food is served,’ sniffs Bentley. ‘Return at once or I will have my staff eject you.’ If I am supposed to be one of his staff he can count me out. I would not back Joe Frazier against Mrs C. Current form proves me right as she feints to jab and then throws a left hook which explodes on the point of Bentley’s jaw.

‘Seize her,’ he howls, staggering backwards. There is a half-hearted shuffle from those more courageous than myself, but before any action can be taken Mrs C. has snatched up the tureen of pre-mixed spaghetti bolognese.

‘If this is what you want, you can have it,’ she howls. Whoosh! Everybody within twenty feet gets a helping and if they want seconds then Bentley is the man to come to. He is covered in the stuff and his eyes blink out like he is trapped in a cage of spaghetti.

You have to laugh but before I can get into my stride the swing doors to the kitchen burst open and reinforcements arrive. As I have said before Caitley’s Corps tend to be on the rough side and this lot do not look as if they are on their way to the Badminton Horse Trials. Crunch! Biff! Wallop! Before further words can be spoken they wade into the waiters and the guests have to fend for themselves. The bright ones scarper while others cower at their tables and two effeminate coves, trapped in a corner, slide under the table cloth at floor level.

There is never much love lost between waiters and kitchen staff and anybody who does not believe me should be standing in the dining room of the Cromby at this moment–preferably behind a sheet metal screen. Spaghetti bolognese–mixed and separate–is flying in all directions, usually still in a container, and the walls look like the site of an action painting contest. Tables collapse under the weight of the bodies struggling on them and shouts and screams of pain and fury fill the air. Many old scores are being settled and when I see Superpoof staggering past with a soup tureen wedged down over his lugholes, I reckon it must be game, set and match to Mrs Caitley. Surely this little lot will spell finito for both of them. What a wonderful opportunity for Sidney to start swinging his axe.

Crunch! The table in the corner goes and the two lank coves scuttle out holding hands. One of them is clasping a yellow wig to his chest like a woman clinging to her jewels as she leaves a burning house. Yes, it must be goodbye Bentley, goodbye Mrs C.

But, not a bit of it. Superpoof gets marching orders or resigns–there is some doubt as to which–but Mrs Caitley remains firmly in command of the kitchen.

‘She’s done a good job,’ says Sid when I complain. ‘We won’t get anyone better. Also, she has this special relationship with Miss Ruperts.’

‘You mean they’re a couple of old–’

‘No need for any of that, Timmo,’ says Sid reproachfully. ‘I am referring to their working relationship.’

‘Get rid of both of them. They’re useless.’

‘They know the business, Timmo.’

‘They’ve been giving you the business ever since we got here, Sid! What do you need them for? Anyone could make a better job of running this place. With all your Funfrall experience you could do it standing on your head.’

Sid looks haughty. ‘I am not trying to run a Funfrall operation. Something classier than that. I think Miss Ruperts has the contacts to help me. I’ve been discussing an idea with her.’

‘Selling up?’ I say, hopefully.

‘Don’t take the piss, Timmo. No, I was considering the possibility of catering for specialist groups. Conventions, clubs, conferences. That kind of thing. That way we could guarantee filling the hotel and making a few bob on fringe activities, dances, cocktail parties. See what I mean?’

I hate to admit it but Sid does seem to have the germ of an idea there. He interprets my silence correctly.

‘Not bad, is it? We could make quite a name for ourselves.’

‘Anything would be better than the Cromby. When are we going to change that?’

Sid looks shifty. ‘Well, Miss Ruperts has a great sentimental attachment to the name and–’

‘Oh, forget it, Sid. She’s got you completely under her thumb. When are you going to tell Rosie about it?’

Sid does not care for that remark and, before I can ask him more about his plans, we engage in a swift verbal punch-up which leads to me being banished to assist Martin the hall porter, commissionaire and octogenarian. This man is so past it he has to get the guests to help him carry the room keys up two flights of stairs and has been known to sit on their bed for five minutes to recover.

I am pacing up and down trying to keep out of the draught when a car squeals to a halt outside and three smartly-dressed middle-aged men sporting red carnations in their buttonholes leap out. One of them is carrying a large bunch of flowers. They ignore me and press forward to Miss Primstone.

‘I believe you have a suite reserved for Mr and Mrs Beecham?’ says one of them.

Miss Primstone never has any problem hearing upper class voices and checks her register.

‘Yes. The Pallgrave Suite.’

‘Excellent,’ purrs Smoothie-Chops. ‘They should be here any minute. From the registry office.’

He winks conspiratorially and Miss Primstone switches on her ‘Oh, young love’ expression.

‘We’ve got a few flowers we’d like to decorate their rooms with.’

‘Well, I don’t know. If you leave them with me–’

‘I know you’d do it quite beautifully.’ Smoothie-Chops’ smile would melt concrete. ‘But it’s the messages. We haven’t got much time. They’re going to be here any minute.’

I don’t like the way the tall gangling one is giggling through his stained teeth but Miss Primstone does not seem to notice that.

‘Oh, all right then. I shouldn’t really be doing this.’ She reaches behind her for the key.

‘You’re too kind.’

They brush past her, look for the lift like so many before them, and disappear up the stairs.

‘Second floor, turn right,’ calls Miss Primstone after them. She turns to me and shakes her head. ‘That’s the class of person we used to have all the time in the old days.’ She says the words as if she blames me for the fact that they don’t come any more.

I shrug my shoulders and walk away, because they don’t do anything for me and I don’t want to be drawn into any aggrochat. Five minutes later they rush past us again and Stained-Teeth is splitting his sides. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

‘I think I’ll go up and have a look,’ I say, heading for the stairs.

‘You’re a fine one to be suspicious,’ sniffs Miss Primstone. I consider pushing her into one of the pigeon holes but eventually decide against it.

‘It’s a change to have a couple staying here you know are married,’ she continues.

Poor old Miss P. I am certain she is dying for a bit and will die before she gets it. I wish I was man enough to put her out of her misery. Maybe I could get Martin pissed one night. No, the stupid old sod is past it, too.

Before I can set foot on the stairs, there is a commotion in the hall and a distinguished grey-haired bloke enters, labouring under the weight of a suitcase. He is accompanied by a well-developed lady of mature charms wearing a too-tight two-piece. She has what I think is an orchid in her buttonhole and he sports another red carnation.

‘Leave it, Henry. Leave it,’ she drawls in a strong American accent. ‘The boy will handle it. What are you trying to prove? You won’t have the strength to carry me over the threshold if you go on like this.’ No prizes for guessing who they are.

The woman walks over to the reception and writes something in the dust. ‘Gee,’ she says, her eyes probing the gloom. ‘They said this was a delightful small watering place. I wouldn’t water a mule here.’

Miss Primstone pretends she does not hear and pushes forward the register.

‘Mr and Mrs Beecham?’

‘Jesus!’ exclaims Mrs B. ‘Did they see the label on your plasma bottle?’

Mr B. grinds out a grin. ‘Can’t keep anything a secret, can you?’ When you get him in the light he looks a lot older than her and the dark bags under his eyes have dark bags under them. Mrs B. may not be joking about the plasma.

‘Are you going to help my husband to carry those cases?’ she says. ‘I don’t think he’s going to be much use to me if he has to drag them over to the elevator.’

I decide that this is a bad moment to tell her we don’t have an elevator and bring the rest of the cases in. It is noticeable that she has about six spanking new leather jobs and he one battered ‘I saw Port Harcourt and lived’ type. I imagine that he must have some kind of appeal that is not immediately noticeable to the eye.

‘I wish you’d told me we were coming to this place, doll,’ says Mrs B. wearily as we toil up the stairs. ‘And I’d have told you we weren’t. Did Queen Elizabeth sleep here? Or was it your first wife?’

‘Place has changed a bit,’ pants hubby. ‘It’s very difficult to find anywhere at this time of year.’

‘It must be difficult to find a place like this, twice.’ Mrs B. looks me up and down, checking my physique. ‘Don’t go too far, boy. I may need you. I haven’t climbed so many stairs since I visited the Great Boulder Dam.’

We get to the door of the apartment and I fling it open–or rather, I try and fling it open, the hinges are a bit rusty.

‘Gee,’ says Mrs B. sarcastically. ‘What a pretty shade of brown. Who told you it was my favourite colour?’ She collects some more dust on the fingers of her white glove. ‘And, do you know, Henry. I think they’ve left everything just as it was from the time Queen Elizabeth slept here.’

She turns to me. ‘Have you got a telephone? I think I’ll try and ring the Grand.’

I am busy looking round the room to see if the three jokers have been up to anything, but nothing seems to have been tampered with. The flowers must be in the bedroom.

‘The telephone is in the bedroom, modom,’ I say and open the door.

Mrs B. peers inside. ‘The bed is more like it,’ she says, perking up. ‘Room for Henry the Eighth and all his wives, huh?’ The bed is indeed built on the grand scale and I am relieved to find it flanked by two vases of flowers.

Hubby is also relieved. ‘There we are, my dear. I knew you wouldn’t be disappointed.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ says the new Mrs B. pointedly. ‘Where did those flowers come from? I think somebody thought we were getting buried, not married.’

Now she comes to mention it, there do seem to be a lot of lilies and other funereal blooms.

‘It’s the thought that counts,’ murmurs Mr B.

‘That’s what worries me. I bet they came from your first wife.’

I am about to explain about the three gentlemen when Mr Beecham decides to sit on the bed. He tests its softness with his hand, gives it a pat, then turns and sits down. I remember the smile of premature satisfaction on his face as he sinks down–and down. The jokers have unscrewed the bedstead and the poor old geezer lands up on the floor with his legs in the air. There is the sound of a chamber pot shattering and a cloud of dust fills the room.

‘My God,’ says Mrs B springing back. ‘What did I tell you? It folds into an instant coffin.’

Before she can say any more, Mr B.’s groans alert us to the fact that he really has hurt himself and, eventually, when we have prised Dr McDonald away from his bottle of Scotch, we discover that the poor bloke has a badly slipped disc and must go to hospital. On his wedding night, too. What a tragedy!

At first Mrs B. threatens to sue everybody up to the Duke of Edinburgh but we quieten her down and explain what happened and she decides to concentrate her wrath on the three blokes concerned, one of whom, of course, turns out to be the bridegroom’s best man. They nicked the flowers from a local graveyard. Oh well, I expect it seemed a good idea at the time.

On her return from the hospital Mrs B., or Sadie as I learn she is called, tries to book in at the Grand and the Imperial but they are both full. Thwarted in her attempt to escape, she retires to her apartment and orders a bottle of Bourbon to be sent up.

‘And send the cute one,’ she says, meaning me.

When I get there she has taken her jacket off and is revealing a shapely pair of bristols lunging against a halter neck jumper.

‘Put it down there,’ she says meaning the tray. ‘Boy, I wasn’t expecting too much, but I was hoping for better than this.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I say. ‘The bed is all right now, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think we should check it? No, don’t look so alarmed. I was only joking. Tell me, what’s a good-looking boy like you doing in a place like this?’

‘It belongs to my brother-in-law. He’s just taken it over.’

‘He should try taking it over the side of a cliff. I wouldn’t put up my last husband in a dump like this.’

I don’t have an answer for that and she pulls a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag.

‘I expect you’re asking yourself what a beautiful dame like me is doing getting hitched to Beecham when I could have my pick of any man in the world.’ She watches my adam’s apple as I swallow. ‘You’re right. I’m lonely. Nobody wants to marry people of my age. Take them out, sleep with them, sure. But I want someone to talk to in the long winter evenings. In a few years I’m going to have problems finding three clean old ladies to play bridge with. Do you know how many times I’ve been married?’

I shake my head.

‘This is the fourth. Four times. The only one I loved gave me one night of heaven and the next morning there was just a hole in the bed where he had been. I never saw him again. He took everything I had–even my clothes–I loved that bastard.’ She glugs some more Bourbon into her tumbler. ‘You don’t know what to say, do you? Have a drink, it’ll loosen your tongue.’

‘No thanks. I think I’d better be getting along.’

‘You’re a shy boy, aren’t you?’ The truth is that with her I am. Give me some innocent little scrubber who says ‘Oh, Timmy you’re smashing. I don’t half fancy you’ and I am all over her. But this bird has had four husbands–well, three and a half, anyway–and talks as if she could eat three of me for breakfast. I feel Percy slinking away with his tail between my legs, and make for the door.

‘I’ll take dinner in the apartment,’ she says grandly. ‘And you’d better bring it up.’

Just as long as you don’t, I think to myself as I go downstairs. It is Mrs Caitley’s night off and the bloke who stands in would be pushed to win a cooking contest against my Mum. I have seen him turning over an egg in his hand as if looking for the instructions.

That afternoon I have a swim and report back to the hotel about six-thirty. Sure enough, Sadie has phoned down her order and asked for it to be brought to her room by me at eight o’clock sharp.

‘I theenk mybe I shoulda handle theez one myself,’ says the new Head Waiter who is (would you believe?) Italian and obviously very hot on the frippet.

‘No, no, Senor Luigi,’ I lie. ‘I promised her old man I would see she was all right. I’d better do as she says.’

‘But I have much experience of American ladies.’

I bet you do, mate, I think to myself. Three coins in the fountain–and about forty-eight pairs of knickers.

In the end I practically have to wrench the tray away from him. I mean, I don’t reckon anything is going to happen, but if by chance it does, I want it to happen to me and not to some blooming Eyetie.

I run a moist finger along my eyebrows and tap on the door. I have a feeling that Sadie will be spread out on the bed wearing a long frilly negligee, but I am wrong. She is standing by the repaired bed and gazing down at a long frilly negligee that is lying on top of it.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she says as I cough discreetly in the doorway. ‘Too bad he isn’t going to see it for a few days. I suppose I could wear it round to the hospital under a long coat. Whip it open and whee! They don’t have lady flashers, do they?’

I shake my head. ‘I’ve never seen one. Where are you going to eat?’

‘Oh, put it down over there. It’s not going to get cold, is it?’ She is right there because everything she has ordered is from the cold plate. A wise choice as I have already indicated. ‘Now–what’s your name?’

‘Lea–Timothy Lea.’

‘Well, Tim … I’d like you to join me in a drink. You do have a few moments, don’t you? It’s my wedding night and I want to have a good time!’ She looks away and bites her lip and for a moment I think I am going to have to whip out the handkerchief again. Blimey, but you need to be a man of many parts in this game. Guide, philosopher and fiend, as Ted Hotchkiss used to say at Melody Bay.

‘That’s very kind of you. Thanks.’

A glance at the liquid left in the bourbon bottle tells me that it has been sinking faster than the country’s gold reserves. Mrs Beecham has obviously been drinking to forget her sorrows. Not that I blame her. A wedding night with Mr B. would not be my idea of the first prize on the back of a cornflakes packet, but it is better than being on your tod.

‘He was all right, was he?’ I say conversationally.

‘Henry? Do you mean in the sack or when I saw him in hospital? Oh, sorry. You’re blushing again. Yes, he seemed OK He couldn’t move much but his stiff upper lip was still bend-proof. I suppose that’s one of the things that appealed to me about the guy when I first met him. That and his background. He’s very well connected, you know.’ She smiles. ‘I mean, family-wise. Practically an aristocrat. That’s what I need, a touch of class.’ She runs a finger lightly down my nose. ‘Have you got class?’

‘Not that kind.’

‘No, you’re more the noble savage type, aren’t you? Do you get pestered by lots of ladies?’

‘Not as far as the paying customers are concerned. Most of them have to be lifted into their bath chairs.’

‘What a shame. You want to get a job in a cruise boat–or somewhere in the south of France. That way your talents could be really exploited.’

‘I don’t have any trouble being exploited. My brother-in-law is an expert at it.’

Mrs B. looks as if she is about to say something, and then changes her mind.

‘He drives you hard, huh?’

‘Yes. He’s going to make a million before he’s finished.’

Mrs B. helps herself to another shot and, as an afterthought, tosses the remainder of the bottle into my glass.

‘Do you know what I’d like to do now?’

There is a faint flush about her throat which may have something to do with the twenty-six fluid ounces of booze inside her and her not inconsiderable tits are jostling each other to get at me. Yes, I do know what she would like to do now.

‘No,’ I say innocently.

‘I’d like to lay you,’ she says fervently. ‘I’d like to take your firm young body and give it the fruits of my years of experience.’

I should be jumping up and down and clapping my hands together but the minute she starts talking about years of experience I begin to get nervous again. What was nice about Mrs Daphne Richards was that I was in control. I was giving her the fruits of my years of experience. Too often these days, I am being used as a sort of dildo on legs. I must write to my MP about it when I get a moment.

‘Take off that ridiculous little jacket,’ says Mrs Beecham. ‘It’s too tight for you across the shoulders.’

‘Thanks for the drink,’ I say. ‘Ring when you want the tray picked up.’

Mrs B.’s eyes open wide. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you want me?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Are you queer, or something?’

‘No, of course I’m not. I just don’t like being taken for granted, that’s all.’

‘But baby–’ She comes towards me and slides her arms round my neck.

‘Mrs Beecham. You’re drunk and you’d be better off in bed–alone.’ I don’t mean to sound so pious but once I get into my stride there is no holding me. It is as if I am getting the satisfaction I might have got in bed from being unkind to her. Vere interesting eh, Herr Doctor?

I remove her hands and turning on my heel, make for the door. Immediately, Mrs B. bursts into tears. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she sobs. ‘Not now, I couldn’t stand it. I’m sorry if I offended you. I just need to be with someone. I don’t want to be alone.’ She collapses on to a sofa and the whole upper part of her body is shaking in time with her sobs. Very impressive it is, too. The minute she starts doing that my whole attitude changes. My frustrated desire to dominate is unlumbered and a happy urge to rip her knickers off flows through my system. Any bird who starts crying when I am around stands a good chance of making an appointment with Percy. Nasty, aren’t I? Careful! I heard that.

‘Why don’t you have something to eat?’ I say not unkindly. ‘I looked out a nice piece of turkey for you.’ I extend an arm and take her hand but she does not move; just squeezes my fingers tight. I sit down beside her and tilt her head up.

‘Come on, cheer up. I’m sorry, too. I know how you must feel. I came over a bit narky, that’s all.’ I take out my handkerchief–there’s posh for you–which by some miracle is fairly clean and start dabbing at the make-up smudges under her eyes.

‘You look as if you work in a coal mine.’ It is not the funniest joke ever made, but it raises a smile.

‘Stop crying, I can’t keep up with you.’

She is beginning to relax a bit now. Still quivering, but blinking fast to stop the flow of tears. Women in such a condition give off a very back-to-nature pong which turns me on like the Blackpool Illuminations. I can feel myself wilting. No, not wilting. That is completely the wrong word. I can feel my determination to push off disappearing faster than Ted Heath’s re-election prospects. The rest of me is coming on strong.

‘There, that’s better.’ Suddenly, I am doing all the talking.

‘Thank you.’

We sit in silence for a moment and then something not entirely unrelated to nooky-craving makes me kiss her gently on the lips. Oh, the taste of tears and the smell of booze. A very stirring combination.

‘Are you going to go?’

‘I’ll think about it’.

Slowly I slide my arm about her and draw her into the hollow of my shoulder. Our mouths get better acquainted and my greedy fingers plunder her bristols. She slips her hand inside my shirt and grabs hold of any spare flesh she can find. Luckily there is some, otherwise I would not be able to bend down and tie up my shoe laces. We continue like this for a few happy minutes and then my restless fingers are on the move again. Five stubby soldiers of fortune heading into the great known. Under cover of her skirt they set to with a will while Sadie responds to their advances with delighted moans. You have to work long hours in this job, but it does have its fringe benefits. Mrs B. sighs and sends down a pandy to check on my own movements.

‘Aren’t those pants a bit tight for you?’ she observes.

She is dead right and they are getting tighter every minute.

‘Let’s go next door. It’s more comfortable.’

We uncouple and, when I throw open the bedroom door, the bed is illuminated in a pool of light. Standing beside it, we help each other off with our clothes, smacking our lips at the thought of what is to come. Sadie wriggles against my chest and gently tugs down my pants while I unhook her bra.

‘Don’t put the light on,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m an old woman. I don’t want you to see my body.’

‘An older woman,’ I reassure her. ‘There’s a lot of difference.’

She falls back across the bed and I lie down beside her feeling the cool satin counterpane against my back. She is a very curvy lady.

‘Can we get inside the bed?’ she says. ‘Please. It’s cold.’

She is right. The central heating which makes a noise like a tank regiment advancing through wooded country has been turned off from just before the cold spell in May. One thing about the Cromby, they do a very nice bed. Eiderdowns, counterpanes, the lot. Very snug you feel with that on top of you. That and Mrs Beecham pressing in on you like an inspirational new hot water bottle design.

‘Oh, baby,’ she breathes. ‘Baby, baby, baby!’

I think I have mentioned before that some of my happiest moments have been spent in the company of those ladies who have taken advantage of the advancing years to gather a rich harvest of experience and Mrs B. is no exception. She also has a great deal of typical Yank enthusiasm. A high-spirited ‘get up and go’ approach which I have to prevent matching with a ‘get up and come’. I am also conscious that I am performing for England and to a lesser extent, Mr Beecham. Also that this is Mrs B.’s wedding night. Quite a weight of responsibility for young shoulders to bear but fortunately I find myself more than equal to the task.

‘Oh baby,’ she breathes. ‘I feel beautiful.’

‘You’re right, you’re right,’ I echo. We thunder on, forging Anglo-American relations with every hammer blow, until Mrs B. starts fizzing like a catherine wheel and we both break out into what seems like the end piece of a Fourth of July firework display.

It is while I am gulping in mouthfuls of air and listening to my heart thumping as if it is being played in stereo with the bass turned up that I become aware that someone is banging on the door of the apartment. Mrs Beecham has also heard, because her giant knockers loom above me as she sits up in bed.

‘Oh, F-f-fuxbridge.’

‘Don’t worry,’ says Mrs B., sliding out of bed and grabbing a robe. ‘I’ll see who it is.’

‘Tell them I nipped out to buy some aspirins,’ I call after her. I snuggle back in the sheets, pleasantly exhausted and look forward to Sadie’s return. It is very satisfying to turn someone on like that. Not bad on the strictly personal level, either. I hear Mrs B. drawling away to someone and then the door closing. Good. Then a male voice approaching. Bad! I am halfway under the sheets when the bedroom door is pushed open.

‘Henry,’ calls Mrs B. ‘Oh, Henry, I’ve got a surprise for you.’ Whoever she means, she can’t be kidding. Before I can do anything, a big guy with a crewcut is walking towards the bed with his hand outstretched. I examine it closely to see if there is a gun nestling in it. Luckily it is empty.

‘You could probably kill me for bursting in at a moment like this.’ He is right. ‘But I was passing through on my way back to the States and I bumped into one of Sadie’s buddies at the airport. You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ I would prefer to use a sledgehammer and do the job properly. ‘I put my flight back a few hours, hired a car and here I am. Couldn’t miss the opportunity to pay my respects to dear old Sadie and her new Mr Right. Put it there, pardner.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Ouch!’ I say as the Yank crushes my knuckles in his giant mitt.

‘I hear you’re some kind of noble?’

‘Um, well in a manner of speaking I–er,’ I Mumble trying to move my accent up three social classes. Sadie comes to the rescue swiftly.

‘Hiram! You just don’t ask questions like that over here. It’s bad enough pushing me out of the way and rushing into the bedroom on our wedding night.’

‘I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean no offence. It’s just that I feel I have some special rights as far as you’re concerned. After all, we were married.’

‘But only for five weeks, Hiram. It doesn’t give you the right to rush in here like it’s a press show.’

‘Don’t get mad at me, honey. And, you sir, please forgive me. I only wanted to say howdy do and bring you your present.’ He dives into his pocket and produces what looks like a handful of silver fire.

‘Hiram! It’s beautiful.’

‘I got it back from my fifth wife last week and I don’t really want it. I’d like you to have it. You were my favourite, Sadie. Too bad we married too young.’

‘But you were forty-two, Hiram.’

‘I was slow maturing. Anyhow, I’m glad you like it.’ He turns back to me. ‘Delighted to have made your acquaintance, sir. I hope I weather half as well as you. I was expecting you to be much older.’

‘I’m working at it.’

‘Very amusing, sir. Well, I must be off. I’m still living in the old place, Sadie. So when you’re both in New York you must look me up.’

‘That’s real nice of you, Hiram.’

‘Absolutely topping,’ I say, deciding he deserves a slice of genuine upper class lingo,

‘So long.’

‘ ’Bye.’

‘Toodle pip!’

The great toilet brush goes out and gives an Oliver Hardy wave as he closes the door gently behind him.

‘Blimey, I hope he doesn’t bump into your Henry.’

‘It’s very unlikely, sweetheart. If he does, he’ll think you were another husband.’

She fastens the necklace round her neck and studies herself in the wardrobe mirror. It hangs down in layers like chain mail.

‘Do you think it suits me?’

I come up behind her and ease the robe off her shoulder so that she is naked again. ‘I think you set it off a treat.’

She turns and her big, warm body presses against mine. Her hands start to go up to her neck but I pull them down again.

‘Keep it on,’ I say. ‘And get on to that bed.’

‘Alright, Henry. Anything you say.’

CHAPTER SIX

‘Hey, you. Where can I find Noggett?’

It is a week after the Beechams have left–he looking a bit worse than when he went into hospital; God knows what she was doing to the poor old sod–and I am standing in for Sandra who is having a bash on the tennis court–or more likely–in the long grass behind it! Every time she comes back she is covered in burrs. Everywhere but on her knickers, as I found out once when she bent down. Funny, that.

The bloke who is addressing me is about my age and has shoulder-length hair worn over the collar of his smart suit. He is carrying a pig-skin attaché case. Apart from his manner I don’t like his shifty eyes which are darting round the foyer as if trying to memorise every feature.

‘Do you mean “Mr Noggett”?’ I say primly.

‘There’s only one, isn’t there?’ The tone is only slightly less than a snarl.

‘I’ll see if he is available. Who shall I say wants to see him?’

‘Edward Rigby.’ The bloke is now tapping the walls. ‘And hurry up, will you? I’m a busy man. I haven’t got time to hang around this morgue.’

When I find Sidney he is in Miss Ruperts’ office cocking his little finger over a cup of tea.

‘Miss Ruperts has surpassed herself,’ he pipes. ‘The Pendulum Society are going to hold their convention here. Every room in the hotel booked Friday to Sunday. Isn’t she a clever girl?’

Sidney coming the smarmer makes me want to puke, but I manage to control myself. ‘Great,’ I say. ‘There’s a nasty looking Herbert in the foyer who wants to speak to you. He didn’t say what it was about.’

‘Oh, well, better see him, I suppose.’

I notice, as we leave, that Miss Ruperts has a bottle of brandy under the tea cosy. She does not change.

When we get into the foyer, Rigby looks Sid up and down like he is measuring him for a coffin.

‘Mr Noggett?’

‘That’s right. What can I do for you?’

‘I’d like to have a few words with you–in private.’

He looks at me like I came off the bottom of his shoe after a walk around Battersea Dogs’ Home.

‘Mr Lea is my personal assistant. You can speak freely in front of him.’

Blimey! It is a long time since Sidney referred to me like that. He must obviously find this cove as unlovable as I do.

Rigby shrugs and we go into Sid’s office.

‘Let me come to the point at once,’ says Rigby, hardly waiting till his arse has hit the chair before he starts speaking. ‘I’ve come round here to offer you a fair price for this place. I’m in property and I want to develop this site. I’ve bought the freeholds on either side of you and I hope we can come to a sensible arrangement.’

‘What if we can’t?’ says Sid.

‘I don’t think there’s a lot of alternative. I’m going to start demolishing both the buildings on either side of you in a few weeks and I’ll be surprised if that does anything for your business–if you have any.’ This guy’s money obviously ran out half way through charm school.

‘What kind of figure were you thinking of?’

Rigby mentions a figure which makes me want to scream ‘Grab it and run!’ but Sid does not bat an eyelid.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ he says. ‘It cost me more than that.’

‘Take it or leave it.’

‘I’ll leave it.’

Rigby produces a card and drops it on the table in front of Sid. ‘When you’ve had time to reconsider, or talked it over with someone who knows the business, get in touch with me.’

‘The council won’t let you start pulling down the buildings next door.’

‘They’re all in favour of it. This end of town is going downhill so fast they’d like to put it on wheels and push it along the coast.’ He stands up. ‘Don’t leave it too long. I’ll start reducing my offer at the end of the week.’

‘Piss off.’ Sid’s words may be less than eloquent, but they sum up our feelings more than adequately.

‘No need to take that tone. I–’

‘PISS OFF!’ Sid jumps out of his chair and Rigby has his hand on the door knob quicker than Mary Whitehouse adjusting the picture control on her telly when a naughty bit comes along.

‘Jumped up little basket,’ snarls Sid when Rigby has disappeared.

‘Do you think he was bluffing, Sid?’

Sid walks over to the window and pulls back the curtain. Outside we can see Rigby climbing into a chauffeur-driven Rolls.

‘No,’ he says. He picks up Rigby’s card. ‘ “Rigram Property Company”. I’ve heard of them. I think Sir Giles had something to do with them at Funfrall.’

‘He’s done all right for himself, that bloke, hasn’t he? He didn’t look any older than me.’

‘Yeah. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?’

‘What are we going to do, Sid?’

Sid takes a deep breath. ‘I’m going to make a few enquiries at the Town Hall. And then I’m going to concentrate on getting things ready for the Pendulum Society. We must not be diverted from our purpose, Timmo. Rigby or no Rigby, I intend to make this place posh and profitable.’

‘Did you really pay more than he offered for this place?’

‘I exaggerated a bit, but it was still a pitiful price he came up with. You don’t know how much I put myself in hock to get this lot. Considering that we crept in just before the boom, he should have given me a much better deal. Anyhow,’ his face brightens, ‘don’t let’s look on the gloomy side any more. I’m really chuffed about this Pendulum scene. The family is coming down next weekend and I want them to see the place looking as if it’s got a bit of life about it.’

‘You mean Rosie and Jason?’

‘Your Mum and Dad, and all. I couldn’t leave them out, could I?’

I know what answer I would have given. Mum and Dad always spell trouble. I would have thought that Sid would have sussed that after his experiences on the Isla de Amor.

Sid is well pleased because the Pendulum mob want to have a dance on the Saturday night and he reckons that we stand to make a few bob from the catering. About half as much as Dennis, I reckon.

As Friday gets nearer, Sidney burns around the hotel getting up everybody’s bracket in a big effort to make the staff respond like Funfrall employees. In this endeavour he is wasting his time. All their get up and go got up and went years ago and only highly strung Sandra buckles to with a will–or, as I personally suspect, a willy. One afternoon, I notice a lot of burrs around Sid’s turnups and I reckon it is he who has been giving her a quick in and out behind the tennis courts. Better keep that lot under control when the family gets here.

Friday afternoon comes and the first delegates–as Sidney chooses to call them–begin to roll up. I notice that they all seem to be married couples, or sign in as married couples, and are a bit smarter and younger than our normal guests. Early middle-aged trendy with a fair sprinkling of love beads and the like on the men.

‘What is this Pendulum Club?’ I ask Miss Primstone who is watching the new arrivals disapprovingly.

‘I have no idea,’ she says coldly. ‘They are certainly not the kind of people I would have expected to find here in the old days. I don’t know what has come over Miss Ruperts. It must be the influence of your Mr Noggett.’ I would have thought it was the other way round myself, but I don’t say anything.

One thing I do notice about the Pendulum mob is that they seem very affectionate with each other. Lots of hugging and kissing on the cheek and long burning glances. It does not look like the Labour Party conference at all.

‘Sid, what is this Pendulum Club?’ I ask later on.

‘Dunno. Some kind of friendly society, I think.’

‘They’re friendly all right. They can hardly keep their hands off each other.’

This is nowhere truer than in relation to a bloke called Sam–Sam the Ram soon becomes our name for him. This geezer is about six and a half foot tall and has a silver goatee beard, enormous hooter and hands like seal’s flippers. He is constantly rubbing birds into his chest like embrocation and threatening to explode out of the front of his too-tight pink and white toreador pants. If he turned round quickly the weight of junk hanging round his neck could take your head off, and hair sprouts from the top of his open-necked shirt like black foam.

The birds seem to lap all this up and I notice that June and Audrey are not slow to show their appreciation.

‘Smashing,’ says June.

‘Smashing,’ says Audrey. ‘I bet he’s got a big one.’

By the time the gong goes for dinner, it takes a performance like the opening of a J. Arthur Rank film to break through the noise coming from the cocktail lounge. I have never seen the place so full.

‘What time are the family getting here?’ I ask Sid, thinking how impressed they would be to see the place jammed with gay fun-lovers.

Sid looks glum. ‘I’ve just had a telephone call from Rosie. Jason has been sick and they won’t be coming until tomorrow.’

‘That’s a pity. Still, they’ll be here for the dance won’t they?’

‘Yeah. That should be quite an affair if it goes anything like this.’ Never has Sidney spoken a truer word.

When we eventually get them in to supper I notice that a good many of the husbands and wives have split up and are not sitting together. I suppose they must have known each other before they got here. I notice, too, that they all have a gong-like medal strung round their necks. It must have something to do with the pendulum bit. At the end of the meal Sam the Ram scrapes back his chair and addresses the throng.

‘Get in tune with your surroundings, people,’ he intones. ‘The Mellow Mingle will begin at two hours before tomorrow. Keys please, to the ballroom where nightcaps will be served and friendships cemented.’ He flicks the gong round his neck so that it swings from side to side, and sits down as an interested murmur spreads around the room. Swings. Pendulum. Swings. Swingers! By the cringe! I take another good look around the nuzzling diners and there can be no doubt about it. They are wife-swappers to a man. Husband-swappers to a woman. Does Sidney know what he has let himself in for? Surely Miss Ruperts cannot have been party to this unsavoury flesh-trading. The diners began to drift away and I flee to Sidney’s side.

‘They’re all bleeding wife-swappers,’ I gasp. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Funny you should say that. The same thought was going through my mind.’ Sid does not sound very concerned.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What do you expect me to do about it? Tell them all to leave? I don’t care what they get up to as long as it doesn’t frighten the staff.’

‘Or the residents.’

‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about them, well, they’re all so gaga they wouldn’t notice if Mrs Caitley started doing a striptease.’

‘Don’t be so disgusting! I bet the whale bone in her corsets was turning yellow when Moby Dick was a tadpole.’

‘Be your age, Timmo. You’re so old fashioned sometimes. Having a bit on the side isn’t the sin it used to be. A very nice class of person indulges these days, you know.’

‘That makes it all right then doesn’t it? Blimey, Sidney Noggett, you’re the biggest snob I know. Anything is all right if you read about it in Nova.’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about. All I know is that the hotel is full and that none of them signed the register with X’s. That’s good enough for me.’

‘Well, I hope Rosie sees it like that.’ Then, at last, Sidney’s face registers a trace of disquiet.

I have a few hours off that evening so I slip into my dudes and nip out for a drink; I can’t afford the prices at the Cromby. As I sit in the snug at the Fisherman’s Arms and consider the design on the beer mats, it occurs to me that Sidney’s attitude may well be the right one. It also occurs to me that there is a lot of spare back at the hotel and that I do not have an old lady to worry about. I mean, I am all in favour of free love, but I can’t imagine my wife ever being ready for it. They take things so much more seriously than us, don’t they? Look at Rosie with Ricci Volare on the Isla de Amor. She still stiffens every time Jimmy Young plays Come Prima.

I knock back my drink and whip round to the hotel. It is five to ten and I just have time to squirt some after-shave down the front of my Y-fronts before joining the crowd pushing into the ballroom. None of the older generation of Cromby employees are on view but Dennis is firmly entrenched behind the bar, no doubt fiddling a small fortune for himself. He registers surprise when he sees me.

‘Mr Noggett asked me to mingle and see that everything was under control,’ I say reassuringly.

‘Funny. That’s what he told me he was doing.’ Dennis points across the room and there is Sidney with a large scotch in his hand chatting up a tall bird with butterfly glasses. Dirty old sod! You can’t trust anybody these days, can you? He looks up and sees me before I can duck into the crowd and the expression on his mug is not akin to delight. However, he is obviously making headway with the chick because he turns his back and leaves me to it.

‘Oh, I am sorry!’ The willowy redhead must have made a detour of about five yards to bump into me and is smelling like a fire in a perfume factory that has been put out with liquid supplied by the local brewery.

‘That’s all right.’ My smile would make Warren Beatty rush round to his dentist for a check-up. ‘It was my fault. Let me get you another drink.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but are you sure?’

‘What’s your pleasure?’

‘Now you’re asking.’ She rolls her eyes and gives her pendulum a swing. ‘Just a teeny gin and tonic. A small one. Really.’

Dennis looks up at the ceiling as I approach him and flaps his wrist. ‘All right for some, isn’t it?’

‘Keep watering the drinks.’

I return to my fair companion who is now chewing her gong temptingly.

‘Where’s your thing?’

‘I beg your pardon!’

‘Your pendulum, silly!’

‘Oh, that!’ I pat my chest absent-mindedly. ‘Must have left it in my room.’

‘Did you leave your wife in your room too?’

‘She wasn’t feeling so well. It must have been someone she ate.’ She does not seem to find that very funny. Maybe she’s right.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Er, Clapham.’ I hesitate because Mum has always taught us to say Wandsworth Common because she thinks it sounds better and I am only just breaking myself of the habit.

‘Oh, it’s lovely, isn’t it? We’ve got lots of friends who have just moved there. The Common is bliss.’

I don’t know if I would call Scraggs Lane lovely, and when I was a kid the tarts’ minders on the common used to keep warm by turning you over for your pocket money Still, I suppose it has changed a bit in the last few years.

‘It’s not bad.’

‘Have you lived there long?’

‘Quite a long time, yes.’ Like all my bleeding life, actually. It is obviously time I changed the subject.

‘What’s your name?’ She holds up her gong and I see that it has Penelope Brown engraved on it.

‘Call me Penny. What’s yours?’

‘Timothy Lea.’

‘Do you mind being called Tim?’

‘I don’t mind at all. How’s your glass?’

‘Fine. I don’t think I should have any more. I’m feeling a bit squiffy as it is. Tell me’–she tugs my sleeve, ‘are you fixed up yet?’ She looks around the assembled swingers and I follow her eyes.

‘You mean–?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Well,’–her hand slips into mine and she rests her head against my chest–’how about you and me …? I don’t want to put the key in.’ I should think not, it sounds dead uncomfortable. ‘The last time I ended up with a pervert–there’s no other word for it–a pervert who put. “These Boots are Made For Walking” on the record player and started unpacking a pair of Wellingtons. I mean, you can imagine how I felt.’ I nod sympathetically. ‘I don’t want to have to go through that again.’

‘No, of course not.’ I begin to see what she is talking about and my impression is confirmed when Sam the Ram makes with the vocal again.

‘Greetings, dream-fodder,’ he murmurs, swaying from side to side in such a way that his pendulum seems not to be moving. ‘I’m interrupting the Mellow Mingle because it is time for the Ceremony of the Keys. Gather round, those of you with a burning yearning for nude feels and postures new.’

‘He’s so cool,’ breathes Penny.

‘Who, Sam?’

‘Big Sam,’ she gives an ecstatic little wriggle and I wince. ‘Come on, I want to watch this.’

We press forward to where a circle has formed in front of the Ram and what looks like a black velvet pillow case is lying on the ground. About twenty birds step forward and put their room keys into the bag and there is a feeling of excitement in the air. Quite a lot of straightforward feeling too.

‘Everybody done? Then let’s start swinging!’ Big S. whirls the bag about his head and a bunch of blokes press forward when he stops. Like kids with a lucky dip, they dive their hands into the bag and draw out a key. ‘Forty-seven’, ‘twenty-eight’, ‘sixty-nine’–that one gets a laugh. As the numbers are called out so the blokes pair off with the bird whose room key they have got. All except one man whose voice rises in cheated outrage:

‘Oih!’ he shouts, ‘I’ve got my wife.’ The unhappy accident is quickly remedied and couples drift back to the bar and off to amuse each other. Disgusting, isn’t it? Yeah, but a bit of all right as well, eh? I wonder what my Mum and Dad would have been like if they had gone in for this caper? They could not have been much worse off, I will wager that.

‘I didn’t think much of Christopher’s,’ says Penny as she takes my arm.

‘Christopher’s what–oh, you mean his bird.’ I don’t really want to know which one is Christopher. I am old fashioned like that. If I am knocking off the missus I don’t fancy a game of darts with hubby afterwards. I am more interested in seeing what has happened to Sid. Oh, dear! Sam the Ram is leading off Butterfly Specs, and Sid is looking like a kid who hid his lolly ice in a warm oven. I consider issuing a few words of good cheer, but decide against it. Sid can turn a bit funny sometimes. With this thought in mind I quicken my pace as we leave the ballroom, and study the key that Penny has thoughtfully pushed into my mitt.

‘It’s fantastic to meet someone new,’ she murmurs. ‘You get tired of all the old faces.’

At the very least, I think to myself. Blimey, how many couples in the hotel? Two hundred? She should write a book about it. Perhaps she has.

We pad along the corridor and there it is. Room number one-eight-two. I take a deep breath as I unlock it because I have a nasty feeling that Christopher is going to be on the other side with a shot gun. Sometimes I think I belong to another age. Every time I get my end away I think I am doing something naughty. Does make it more exciting though.

‘Nobody here,’ I say, my voice sounding a bit strained.

‘Of course not, darling. You weren’t expecting a gangers, were you?’

‘A what?’

‘Gangers bangers, darling.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course not.’

‘Tomorrow night. Now, that’s another story. You weren’t with us at Bournemouth, were you? We united with a working sub-committee of the British Foundrymen’s Association–and I mean united.’

‘Sounds a great scene,’ I say, trying to appear as if I experience it every day of the week before the Epilogue. ‘Christopher won’t come barging in, will he?’

‘Good heavens, no. We won’t see him till kipper-time. We have eight hours to amuse each other.’ She sways towards me and I wonder if eight hours is going to be long enough. I have always been partial to a bit of tit myself and this bird is not particularly well favoured in that direction, but she has a slinky quality that more than makes up for it. Her body ripples like a flag in a hurricane and she plants herself against my body like she is trying to turn herself into a laminate. I push the door shut with my foot and immediately feel able to deal with the situation. At least I think I do. I allow Penny the access to my lips she so obviously demands and rub my hands gently over her curvy hind-quarters. No need to hurry things. Mrs Brown has other ideas. Her fingernails dig into me like she is probing for a 50p piece that has slipped down the lining of my jacket and her mouth performs as if it is trying to douse a forest fire. ‘Come on, oh no, baby! Please! No, yes. Oh–o-o-o-h! Do it to me. Please! Ple-e-e-ase!’ Well, you don’t have to be a boy scout to respond to a plea like that and I set to unzipping her like a starving cannibal welcoming a new missionary. Her own hands are not idle and her assault on the front of my trousers would qualify for the finals of the World Turnip-Picking Championships. Once again, I wish I had the services of Ejecta pants as I try and struggle free from the clinging embrace of my jealous underwear. These fits of passion can be murder on a young trendy’s wardrobe for the modern satins and velvets are not well-equipped for displays of sexual violence. Sit down a bit sudden and you could rip the seat out of seven quids worth of flare-bottomed invitation to sensual mayhem. Get down to a real bit of sweaty slap and tickle and you might as well resign yourself to five quids worth of invisible mending or a quick conversion to faded denim.

‘Gr-r-r-h!’ Mrs B. is now making growling noises. Her bra and panties set is really something. Midnight blue with little red flowers scattered everywhere. You can see she has chosen her wardrobe with real care. I am now naked except for my socks and so look like a refugee from a dirty photograph. I always feel a right berk in this condition and attempt to cater for Mrs B.’s increasingly excited demands while hopping from one leg to another trying to hook off my Wolsey grip-tops. Only a mountain goat–and I have seen very few of them about tonight–could achieve the necessary standard of footwork and it is seconds before I crash back across the bed with Penny on top of me. Luckily my equipment is wangy enough to withstand the impact and I lie back as my excitable friend struggles to her feet and whips off her bra and panties.

‘Don’t move, Lancelot,’ she yodels, giving a long ecstatic wriggle that makes me think she is trying to shed her skin. ‘That’s just the way I want you.’ I have no plans to cross-index my stamp collection, so I continue to lie back and wait for her to vault into the saddle. But not a bit of it.

While I watch in amazement she gets a large cardboard box and starts emptying some white powder into the washbasin. What is this? Is she going to rinse out her smalls or is it some kind of Ajax demonstration? Is a fast-talker with a microphone and forty-two Birmingham housewives going to appear from behind the curtains?

‘I’m going to add you to my collection,’ she says, turning on the cold tap. ‘Did you see W.R. Mysteries of the Orgasm?’

‘No!’ I say indignantly. I mean, it does not sound very nice does it? What is she on about?

‘You should do. It’s a marvellous movie.’ She is clearly mixing something in the washbasin. What is it? Bread? She wipes her hands on a towel and comes over to the bed.

‘Now,’ she says gently, ‘let’s get him ready.’ She sits down on the edge of the bed and starts running her fingers gently along my hampton. My friend laps this up and I stretch out my finger to perform a similar service.

‘Later,’ she murmurs, crossing one leg over the other, ‘let me do this first.’ It occurs to me that her tone has changed a bit from the first moments of careless rapture–and near rupture, and that her efforts were directed towards achieving the fine specimen her fingers are now feasting on. I do not like being manipulated in this way, but on the other hand–or perhaps in the other hand–I do, if you know what I mean.

‘Like a sword, isn’t it?’ she observes cheerfully. ‘Now, just a little–’ Her mouth drops and I have to hold onto the edge of the bed. Oh, my goodness me! All part of life’s rich varied tapestry, as my old school master used to say–though not about what Mrs Brown is doing to me. There must be worse ways of spending Friday night.

‘Right,’ says Mrs B., climbing to her feet. ‘He’s ready.’ She can say that again. You could fire my hampton through the side of a Centurion tank without denting it. ‘No, don’t move.’

Before I can grab her she has nipped over to the washbasin and return with two handfuls of white gunge which she slaps on top of my throbbing J.T.! Talk about surprised! I am speechless.

‘Hey! What the–’

‘Plaster of paris, Lancelot. I’m taking a cast of your virility.’ She slaps some more gunk over puzzled Percy and smiles down at me. ‘It won’t take a second. This stuff dries very fast.’

‘But, why? What are you going to use it for?’

‘Just a souvenir. I’m not going to turn it into a dildo. Though that’s quite a good idea, isn’t it? Dildos of the famous. You could sign up all the sexiest showbiz personalities and even royalty. Comfort yourself with the Duke of–’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I croak. ‘Are you sure this isn’t going to damage my equipment?’

‘Darlingest, would I perform such a disservice to my baser interests?’ She squeezes the plaster of paris tightly round my hampton and kisses me lightly on the lips. ‘I’ll send you one if you like. You can use it as a paper weight.’

‘Thanks. My Mum would like that.’

‘You don’t have to show it to her. I keep my collection in the bureau.’

The bureau of missing persons, I think to myself. Blimey. What a carry on. There are a lot of funny people about, aren’t there?’

‘It’s hardened up nicely,’ she says. ‘Now, where’s my hammer?’

‘Good evening!’ Those of you who have ever tried to leap off a bed with half a pound of plaster of paris round your chopper will sympathise with my predicament.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘It’s only a little tap.’

‘I know, but I’ve grown fond of it over the years.’

‘I mean it’s only a little tap with the hammer. You won’t feel a thing.’

‘That’s what my dentist used to say.’

She produces a small hammer, like the ones you get in a kid’s carpentry set and advances towards the bed,

‘You’d better know what you’re doing with that thing.’

‘Darling, it’s easy as breaking an egg.’ My balls don’t go for that much, I can tell you. Tap, tap. ‘There you are.’ I make a ‘let’s wait and see’ noise and watch my happy hampton burst out into the light again like a friendly moggy that has been locked up in a dark room. Mrs B. takes the two halves of the cast and puts them together carefully.

‘I’ll deal with these later,’ she says, popping them into the top drawers of the dressing table.

‘Yeah, now you can start dealing with this.’ I grab her by the arm and yank her onto the bed.

‘Darling, I really ought to put something on it first.’

‘I’ll tell you what to put on it!’ I am not interested in garnish. I am interested in action. I have waited a long time and my equipment has been sorely misused. ‘Come on top of me.’ Mrs B. straddles me on her knees and I plunge Percy into darkness again–this time in surroundings to which he is more accustomed. ‘Come here.’ I am not usually rough with ladies but at this moment I need a little agro to rekindle my lapsed enthusiasm. I pull Penny down so that her breasts rub against my chest and her hair tickles my cheeks. I brush it aside and feast on her mouth, stroking her cheeks as if coaxing out her tongue from a hiding place. Her body begins to rise and fall across my hips and I time the flexing of my muscles to coincide with hers. Beautiful! And such good exercise too. I am certain this must be better for you than all those bloody stupid exercises they print in women’s magazines.

‘Put your knees up,’ she says, ‘I want to lean back.’ I let her go and watch the expression on her face as she settles herself in the position to achieve maxiMum satisfaction. Her eyes are half-closed and she breathes in little pockets of air almost as if she is in pain. Slowly her tongue extends to be held gingerly between her teeth and her mouth broadens into the beginnings of a smile.

‘Go on,’ she whispers, ‘go on, go on!’ Pressing her hands down against the bed she pushes her body up and down in time with the flexing of my hips. ‘Oh, darling, that’s heaven.’ I read somewhere–I don’t think it was in the Women’s Institute Year Book–that birds have been known to faint with ecstasy in such a position. I don’t blame them. I am feeling a bit giddy myself.

‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Is it her or me calling out? I close my eyes and open my mouth and what happens after that is Ike and Tina Turner destroying the volume control on the greatest stereo set on earth. That and some miserable old git banging on the ceiling with an artificial limb. You can’t please everybody, I suppose.

I don’t know what the time is when we eventually get to sleep but I feel as though I have been run through a combine harvester a couple of times. Talk about knackered! I close my eyes and when I open them the sunlight is streaming through the windows. Blimey! I should be somewhere else fast. I leap out of bed and land on something soft. Something soft that groans. It is a man stretched out on the bedside rug.

‘Sorry,’ says the creature, still half asleep but sounding genuinely apologetic. ‘I couldn’t stand the woman’s snoring.’ I presume he means the bird he was shacked up with. This must be Christopher. I don’t wait to introduce myself but pull on my trousers and leave him clambering wearily into bed to take my place beside Mrs B. who is still out for the count.

So endeth the first night that the Pendulum Society spend at the Cromby. It is a taste of things to come.

CHAPTER SEVEN

As luck would have it, Sidney is standing just inside the dining room as I try and sneak to my place and the expression on his face could not be interpreted as welcoming even by an Icelandic Trade Delegation.

‘Where have you been?’ he says.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ I say, trying to swallow a yawn.

‘You look bloody awful.’

‘I got a bit plastered last night,’ I say wittily.

‘Well, you’d better get on with it. I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Yes, Sidney.’

I am hoping that Christopher and Penny will be too knackered to come down to breakfast but, of course, they are the first couple I see, staring at their packet of Rice Krispies as if it has the meaning of life scrawled on the back.

‘Morning!’ I say brightly. Mrs Brown’s face registers surprise but this is soon replaced by an expression not far distant from outrage.

‘You’re a waiter!’ she says.

‘That’s right.’ I could explain that I stand on the right hand side of Sid the All-nighty, but what is the point?

‘You’re not one of us?’

‘An imposter.’

‘How dare you! You took advantage of me.’

‘Get stuffed.’ The last words are mine. I mean, it’s a bit much isn’t it? Ruthlessly exploited all night and then rejected because my credentials do not come up to par. How middle class. I wonder she did not ask for a blood sample.

My little outburst raises a few eyebrows around us but most of these are drooping like they have lead weights sewed at the corners. The night was obviously one of nonstop pelvic-bashing. I change tables with one of the other waiters and leave the Browns to splutter over their kipper fillets. My cock-cast is never going to see the inside of Mrs B.’s bureau. Too bad. I was thinking there might be a few bob in flogging them as alternatives to garden gnomes.

Out in the vestibule a sign directs club members to an address by one Professor Mordecai Hucklejohn entitled ‘Marriage–Whither or Wither?’ and quite a few of them troop into the ballroom after breakfast. They must regret it because no sooner has Professor Hucklejohn asked for a glass of iced water than a gang of micks roll up and start tearing down the building next door. They have obviously been concentrating on the Liffywater or given orders to make as much noise as possible because the Prof’s instructive words are soon drowned by the din of falling masonry and language that would make a Billingsgate fish porter blush. Added to that clouds of dust drift in through every window in the place. Rigby’s war has begun.

‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it?’ says Sid, ‘but there’s nothing I can do about it, short of dumping him out to sea with a weighing machine tied to his ankles. I’ve been to the Town Hall but, like he said, they don’t want to know. We’ll just have to plough on regardless. I’m not giving in.’

‘Has he been in touch with you?’

‘Yes, he rang up last night. Cocky bastard. I told him what he could do with himself. Oh dear, here comes trouble.’ He refers to Sam the Ram who is approaching, shaking his head ruefully.

‘Nobody can hear a word in there, man,’ he says. ‘How long before they start on this place and we can all go home?’

‘I’m very sorry about that, Sir, but I am afraid the whole situation is caused by circumstances beyond my control–’ Sid sounds as if he is reading a bulletin fixed to the gates of Buckingham Palace, but my thoughts are elsewhere. Supposing Riley’s mob did start trying to knock down the Cromby? That could well spark off enough scandal to force weasel-features to halt his dastardly plans for a bit.

I potter about until lunch-time and then pop round to the local boozer. As anticipated the sons of Eire are tucking into a well-earned glass of lunch and I salute them cheerfully.

‘Hello there, me boyos,’ I chant, trying to get a lilt into my voice, ‘the top of the morning to you. And a fine day it is for a drop of the hard stuff.’

‘Bugger off!’

Attempts to get alongside these lusty lads are obviously going to have to be handled with a bit more subtlety.

‘Sure, and I’m having the divil’s own trouble with this dratted crossword,’ I continue. ‘Could you be tickling my memory with the information as to the longest river in the dear old Emerald Isle?’

‘I’ll be tickling your back passage with the toe of my boot if you don’t fuck off!’ Unpleasantly dirty fingers close round my throat and I get a Cinerama Holiday view of half a dozen blackened stumps which might just once have been teeth. The owner of this gross affront to the British Dental Association sprays my mug with saliva and a whiff of rotting vegetation which could be used to gas rats. ‘We’ve had enough of youse perverts,’ he continues, moving my head around with his hand as if trying to find a crack in the wall which might fit it. ‘If you don’t get your backside out of this bar in the next two minutes, you’ll get my drill up it.’

‘Don’t encourage him to stay, Paddy,’ says a large gentleman with a face like a plateful of boiled potatoes, ‘to his kind that’s a promise, not a threat.’

‘Throw him out!’

‘Murder him!’

‘Papist!’

It occurs to me, as my backside collides with the pavement, that this is one plan which I can forget about in a big way. I had formed a hazy idea of getting the micks so pissed that they would find it difficult to tell the difference between the Cromby, the apartment house next door, and a set of kids building bricks. With them swinging their big lead ball against the dining room windows, it might have been possible to alert the local press to another example of property developing vandalism. No such luck. Not content with inflicting injury on my precious person the surly sons of the sod are back after dinner bashing away twice as hard–but with no loss of accuracy. The building next door is falling apart before my eyes and the Cromby remains dusty but intact.

Awareness of the life-style of the Pendulum Society has not been slow to sweep through the ranks of the Cromby staff.

‘When I brought in the tea they asked for two extra cups,’ says June primly. ‘They were lined up across the bed.’

‘Four of them?’ says Carmen.

‘No, six. Two of them only drank coffee.’

‘There’s decadent for you,’ I say. ‘You sound as if you don’t approve?’

‘It’s not very nice, is it?’ drones Carmen.

‘How can you ravers have the gall to say that?’ I scold them. ‘You’ve never been fussed about hunting as a pack.’

‘But we’re not married,’ says Audrey reproachfully. ‘It’s different for them. They shouldn’t behave like that.’

‘It’s not nice,’ repeats Carmen.

‘You mean to tell me that when you get married you’re never going to have a bit on the side?’

‘No!’

‘The very idea!’

‘I should think not!’

Amazing, isn’t it? The ways of women never cease to amaze me. Take my sister, Rosie, for instance. There was a time when everybody used to. Yours for a tanner’s worth of chips and first shake with the vinegar bottle, they used to say around us. She got married to Sidney–very sudden it was–and after that butter would not melt between her thighs. The perfect wife and mother–until she gets a whiff of Ricci Volare. Then, pow! Right back to square one, or round one would be more appropriate. How she is going to react to the Pendulum Society I will be interested to find out. If I was Sid I would not be viewing her impending visit with enthusiasm. It is about half past four when the family arrive and Dad’s reaction is typical.

‘Hello,’ he says, ‘pulling it down already are they? Vermin, is it?’

‘It’s the place next door, Dad.’

‘Building an extension already, is he?’ says Mum, the super optimist.

‘Not yet Mum, though we’re pretty full at the moment.’

‘Nice class of person,’ says Mum, gazing admiringly at one of the Pendulum lot who is walking a poodle in a dramatic trouser suit–she has the trouser suit, not the poodle.

‘Yeah. What do you think, Rosie?’ But Rosie is gazing at Sam the Ram who flashes his evil lust-laden eyes at her as he brushes past her, looking as if he has got about one and a half foot of fire hose down the front of his trousers. Her expression is one I remember uncomfortably from the Isla de Amor: Rosie wants it. Really, one’s relations can be a terrible embarrassment sometimes. I said, ‘Jason has just stubbed his icecream out in your handbag, Rosie.’ That brings her round a bit sudden, and by the time little J., who looks more like his revolting father every day, gets past the reception area in a flood of tears, I reckon her mind may be on other things.

I hope it is, because Sidney chooses that moment to roll up, picking burrs out of his turn-ups. He has obviously been taking a spot of physical exercise with Sandra who wanders by a discreet few moments later looking redder than my Mum when she mistook the gents at Clapham Common for the entrance to the tube station. Sid, himself, is looking a bit flustered which Mum chooses to interpret as a sign of work strain. Now that Mum reckons Sid is worth a few bob he can do no wrong, while with Dad acute dislike has grown into seething hatred.

‘You haven’t been overdoing it, I hope, dear?’ says Mum. Sid avoids my eyes and smacks a couple of kisses on the Lea ladies.

‘No fear of that, Mum, you know me. Hello, Rosie love. I didn’t expect you so early. Hello Jason!’ Sid pops on his ‘I love kids’ expression but it does not cut any ice with little Lord Nausea.

‘S’cream! S’cream! S’cream!’ he wails. ‘I wanna s’cream, wanna s’cream.’

‘But he is screaming,’ says Sid, perplexed.

‘He wants an ice cream, you berk,’ I tell him. ‘Blimey, Sid, can’t you even understand your own kid?’

‘He never sees him long enough to be able to recognise him properly,’ says Rosie. ‘I tell you, if he saw him walking down the other side of the street he wouldn’t recognise him.’

‘Oh yes I would,’ says Sid, all indignant. ‘He’d be the one dressed like a two-year-old poofter.’

It is true that Rosie’s tastes do veer a little towards the Carnaby in toddler’s wear and I would not like to be left at nursery school in some of the clobber he gets landed with unless I had a flick knife hidden under my rompers. Nevertheless, Rosie is sensitive on the point.

‘I want the child to look nice, that’s all. If it was left to you, he’d still be wearing that thing they gave him at the hospital.’

‘He’ll be on the turn soon. You mark my words, that’s how they all start. If you want a girl let’s have another one. Don’t try and make him ambidextrous.’

‘Fine chance of that when we don’t even live together, isn’t there?’

All through this fairly typical Lea family reunion, Jason’s screams are getting louder and louder and it is perhaps fortunate that Miss Ruperts arrives on the scene to restore a little queenly decorum. She appears to be very good with children and my Mum, and takes them off for a cup of tea, a liquid which could float ma through a Martian invasion.

‘She is in one of her moods, I can tell that,’ says Sid, when Rosie has been led away to the Bridal Suite. ‘She can be very funny sometimes.’

He does not say any more, but I have a feeling that some sixth sense, or sexth sinse, is carrying his mind back to the Ricci Volare episode on one of Spain’s unsettled colonies. He never actually caught them on the job, but I think he suspected more than he rationalised, if you know what I mean.

It is just as well that he is not with me when Rosie comes back from the beach an hour later. She has taken Jason down for a paddle and, I reckon, as an excuse to get into her new multi-piece bathing costume. The one in which none of the pieces quite covers the bit it is supposed to be covering.

‘Ooh, he is nice,’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘That big fellow, Sam something. He had a bottle of spirit down the front of his trunks–’ I feel better already. ‘–got all the oil off Jason’s legs. It’s disgraceful, isn’t it? Sidney should complain to somebody.’

‘He can’t find Liberia on the map.’

‘No? Well, this fellow was so kind. He was marvellous with Jason. He asked me if I was going to the dance tonight.’

‘No!’ Maybe the words did come out a bit quick.

‘What do you mean “no”? It’s in the hotel isn’t it? I’m the owner’s wife.’

‘Yeah, but it’s private.’

‘Not if I’ve been invited by the President of the Society. That’s what he said he was.’

‘I don’t want her going anywhere near there! It’s disgusting!’ Sidney’s reaction when I tell him of Rosie’s plans is not totally unexpected.

‘But you went, Sidney,’ I say innocently.

‘Don’t push your luck, it’s different for fellers. Everybody knows that. Anyway, nothing happened.’

‘Only because your bird went off with that big bloke. He’s the one that invited Rosie to the dance.’ I get more satisfaction out of Sid’s face than from an old Laurel and Hardy movie.

‘I don’t want to see her there,’ he says, gulping. ‘You know what she’s like. Give her a few drinks and she loses control. The wrong kind of bloke could take advantage of her.’

‘I always wondered how you two came to be married.’

‘That’s enough of that. I’m serious. I’ve got a position to uphold here and I don’t want any embarrassment. It’s in your interest too, you know. She’s your sister.’

‘What do you expect me to do about it?’

‘There’s a show down on the Pier, Frisky Follies of 1902 or something. I’ll get some tickets and you can take them off there.’

‘Take what off there?’

‘Oh, blimey. Take Mum, Dad and Rosie off there, of course. That should keep them out of harm’s way.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll have to stay here, won’t I? After all, I am the owner.’

‘But I like dancing.’

‘No, you don’t. You like getting your end away. Tonight you’ll have to do without it. Your job is to keep Rosie away from that dance floor.’

‘But, Sid–’

‘No “buts”. You let me down on this one and you’ll be able to flog your old man for valve washers.’

Sid can come on a bit heavy with the old-world charm sometimes and at such moments it is unwise to push the aggrochat. I swallow back my resentment and prepare for the tedium ahead. Hoverton’s light entertainment industry is no threat to Broadway and seeing any show with my parents has been a source of embarrassment since they took me to a pantomime at Clapham Junction. First of all they always sit on somebody else’s lap and then Dad finds a seat and sits on it while it is still tipped up. He wonders why everybody is shouting at him and a right old how’s your father goes on until the manager and three usherettes force him into a seat like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Then he never understands what is happening.

‘Why is he doing that, mother?’ he demands. ‘Look, look, they’ve got it wrong. He’s got different clothes on.’

Perhaps Dad’s worst fault is that he has always seen everything. Despite only having been to the flicks about six times in his life, there is always one moment in every film when he suddenly springs to his feet, points at the screen and exclaims, ‘I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it. The bloke with the ’tash does it.’ He even did that in the Sound of Music.

Perhaps he will be better at the live theatre. He is always rambling on about how you could not beat the old music hall.

Rosie is definitely not pleased at the evening that has been arranged for her.

‘I don’t want to go down the pier,’ she says as she shovels in her last mouthful of fruit salad. ‘Is Sid ashamed of us or something?’

‘I think it’s “or something” ’I murmur under my breath. ‘Come on, Rosie, cheer up! I’ve heard it’s a great show.’

‘Who’s in it then?’ I rack my brain for some of the half-forgotten names of yesteryear.

‘Terry Grimley–’

‘He’s not still alive is he?’ says Dad, wiping the custard off his chin–some of it anyway. ‘I remember him when I was a boy.’

‘Radio’s “Mr Romance”,’ I continue lamely.

‘I wouldn’t cross the street to see him wrestling in mud with Donald Peers,’ snorts Rosie.

‘Then there’s the Amazing Arturo.’

‘What’s amazing about him?’

‘I don’t know. He juggles, I think.’

‘Big deal.’

‘And Renato and his Little Squeaking Friends.’

‘Is that the one who has the vampire bats that feed him sugar lumps? Oh, I’ve seen that on the telly.’ Mum is obviously impressed.

‘It sounds disgusting to me,’ sniffs Rosie. ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘Have a cherry brandy,’ I say, waving desperately for a waiter. In fact, Rosie has three cherry brandys before I deem her sufficiently mellow to be led off to the Pier Pavilion. With maxiMum cunning I steer the conversation round to the brilliance of little Jason, always a subject calculated to soothe her savage breasts.

I have hopes of escaping from the hotel before the Pendulum Swingers finish dusting the inside of their toes with talcum powder but this is not to be. As we pass the ballroom, Sam the Ram is having words with the hotel electrician.

‘All those lights we can do without,’ he says. ‘I’m not planning to conduct an autopsy in there. Let’s make it strictly fanny by gaslight, you dig?’

‘We’d better hurry along,’ I say, glancing at my watch, but it is no good. Rosie gives the kind of delicate little cough which has been known to spark off avalanches and lurches into King Conk.

‘Oh!’ she says, ‘it’s you.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ he says. ‘Geeze, but you’re looking lovely.’ When he turns round I can see that he is wearing a white ruffled shirt open at the neck and his trousers are so tight they look as if they have leaked through his pores. ‘I hope you’re going to save me a dance tonight?’

‘I’m being taken to the theatre,’ says Rosie, making it sound like she means quarantine centre.

‘Come along later.’ Sam smiles and runs his hand lightly up her arm. ‘I’d love to get you on the dance floor.’ The way he looks at her you know he means any floor. This bloke is definitely another Ricci Volare.

‘Charming, wasn’t he?’ says Mum, when I have eventually dragged Rosie away.

‘He looked a great poof if you ask me,’ says Dad, speaking the truth for once. ‘What’s he want to go wearing a woman’s blouse for?’

‘Oh Dad, don’t be so stupid. It’s fashionable to wear shirts like that.’

‘He won’t do himself any good in those trousers either. The body has got to breathe.’

‘In your case, I wonder why sometimes.’

‘Now, that’s unkind, Rosie.’

‘Typical, bleeding typical–’

‘–He shouldn’t go on like that–’

‘–Slave your fingers to the bone to give your kids a decent start in life and–’

‘Belt up, both of you,’ I groan. ‘Let’s get to the bleeding pier before it closes down for the winter.’

‘No need for coarse language, dear,’ says Mum. ‘I’ve noticed you’ve been a lot more free in your speech since you went on that boat.’ Mum has a very low opinion of sailors, especially those not blessed by the sight of the Red Ensign fluttering at the masthead. I imagine it stems from an unhappy incident in her youth.

‘It was a very coarsening experience, mother,’ I tell her. Little does she know.

Rosie is still sulking when we get to the pier. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that it has been raining since we left the hotel and I have been unable to find a cab.

‘This pair of shoes are ruined,’ she moans.

‘Oh, they’re shoes, are they?’ says Dad. ‘I thought you’d forgotten to take them out of their box.’

‘They’ve got cork soles, Dad, it’s fashionable.’

‘Bloody handy if it rains any more. You can float home.’

‘You sure we’ve got the right night?’ says Mum, ‘there don’t seem to be many people here.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ sniffs Rosie. ‘Terry Grimley. Oh my gawd.’

When we get onto the pier the planks are glistening with rain and the coloured bulbs–those that have not been broken–swinging in the gusty wind.

‘I think I’ll walk off the end of the pier and drown myself like Necrophilia,’ says Rosie.

‘You mean Ophelia, don’t you?’ I tell her. Rosie has a big thing for Richard Chamberlain and ever since seeing him as Hamlet on the telly, has liked to crash in with the odd Shakespearean reference. Very odd, some of them.

‘Alright, clever-shanks,’ she snaps, ‘have it your way.’

Boy, this is going to be a marvellous evening, I think to myself as I slap down the complimentary tickets. I have not stood such a good chance of enjoying myself since we ran out of candles during the power strike.

Inside the theatre there are less people than at a meeting of Jack the Ripper’s fan club and Rosie starts moaning again before I have bought the programmes.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she says. ‘I just can’t stand it.’

‘Oh, look,’ says Mum, ‘what a shame–Terry Grimley is “indisposed”.’

‘Thank God,’ says Rosie, nastily.

‘Still, there’s always Renato and his Little Squeaking Friends, Mum,’ I say cheerfully. How right I am!

The orchestra sound as if they were introduced to each other five minutes before they started playing the National Anthem and the opening number, ‘Hoverton, Hoverton, It’s not a Bovver-town!’–at least I think that is what they are singing–could be one of the most forgettable tunes written in the last twenty years. The chorus girls look like rotarians in drag and their make-up could have been put on by a bloke responsible for painting puppets. All in all, the production lives down to my worst fears and I dare not look at Rosie.

The opening number gives way–maybe surrenders would be a better word–to one of the lousiest ventriloquists I have ever seen. The patter is so bad that the dummy must have written it and the ventriloquist moves his lips more than a short-sighted lodger trying to spit out his landlady’s dentures. After that comes a Scottish comedian who does imitations of Andy Stewart doing imitations of Harry Lauder, and two child tap dancers who make up in clumsiness what they lack in skill.

‘How much longer to the interval?’ whispers Rosie. ‘I can’t take much more.’

‘After the bats,’ I tell her. ‘They’re on next.’ She shudders and I sit back as a decrepit looking geezer wearing a black cloak and false eye teeth–at least, I imagine they are false–comes out onto the stage and spreads his arms wide to receive the non-existent applause. He waits hopefully for a few seconds and then waves a hand towards the wings. From the other side of the stage one of the chorus girls teeters out holding a large cage at arm’s length. I can sympathise with her distaste because when Renato whips off the cover I can see what appears to be half a dozen broken black umbrellas hanging in an ugly cluster. My reaction is not an isolated one because a combined exclamation of disgust is the biggest noise produced by the audience the whole evening.

‘Ooh! I don’t fancy that!’ says Rosie.

‘Imagine one of those in your hair,’ says Mum. I remember her words later.

The chorus girl gingerly inserts her hand into the cage and then withdraws it sharply.

‘It bit her,’ gasps Mum.

‘I’m getting out,’ says Rosie.

‘Don’t be daft,’ says Dad. ‘They’re just trying to build up the suspense. I remember once, at the Finsbury Empire–’

‘Shut up, Dad.’

Renato moves forward swiftly and elbows his unfortunate assistant aside before plunging his mitt into the cage. More kerfuffle and one of the bats is drawn into the open. The audience sucks in its breath. Renato holds up the bat and produces what appears to be a lump of sugar from inside his robe. His miserable assistant is made to hold the bat by the tip of its wings and Renato advances to the footlights. Like a kid showing off the first tooth it loses, he flashes the sugar at the audience between finger and thumb and places it between his lips. The girl gratefully releases the bat which circles a couple of times and then swoops down to alight on the area of Renato’s mouth.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ says Rosie.

The sugar disappears and the bat takes off and zooms into the wings. I do not think it should do this unless Renato gets through an awful lot of bats in his act. Certainly, the Maestro’s face clouds over for a second as he gazes after his little squeaking friend.

‘He swallowed it,’ says Dad firmly.

‘Don’t be silly, dear. It flew off the stage.’

‘Not the bat, you stupid old bag. The piece of sugar.’

‘I’m going to be sick,’ says Rosie.

‘There it is,’ says Mum.

High above our heads the errant bat is circling the theatre, presumably looking for some means of getting out. I know just how it feels.

‘I hope it hasn’t been fed recently,’ says Mum.

‘Do you mind!’ says Dad. ‘That kind of talk isn’t nice.’

‘Having your hair messed up isn’t nice either,’ scolds Mum. ‘I had this done special.’ There is no doubt that Mum’s bonce does resemble petrified meringue.

‘Oh, no!’ breathes Rosie. ‘What’s he going to do now?’

Renato is filling his cake-hole with lumps of sugar and the beginnings of a drum roll tell us that the act is approaching its climax. The unwilling assistant takes the remaining bats across the stage in their cage and Renato advances to the footlights.

‘I don’t want to watch,’ Rosie buries her face in her hands. I glance at Mum whose eyes are wider than serving hatches. Dad is looking up at the ceiling. This kind of thing is probably very old hat after the Finsbury Empire. The drum roll reaches a crescendo and the girl on the stage gingerly releases the catch on the cage and withdraws her hand swiftly. Nothing happens. She waits for a moment and gives the cage a shake. Still nothing happens. Beginning to panic, she turns the cage on its side and shakes it viciously until, like sticky pastry, the bats begin to peel away.

After that things happen fast. A stream of bats make for Renato while one stays behind to menace his assistant. She screams, drops the cage and runs from the stage. Maybe this upsets the rest of the bats. They descend on Renato’s cake-hole like wasps on a squashed plum. There is an exclamation of pain that carries beyond the back row of the upper circle and Renato reels sideways, clapping his hand to his mouth and spraying the first three rows of the stalls with lumps of sugar. Obviously one of his little friends has taken the dead needle with him.

The bats swoop down into the audience like low flying aircraft and the next thing I know, Mum has one in her hair. I have heard some noises in my time but the sounds coming from Mum cap everything.

‘Ooooeeeooww!’ she shrieks. ‘Get it out! Get it out!’ The bat is squeaking and flapping away fit to burst and I see its evil little rat face and those teeth. Teeth! By the cringe, they are like something out of a horror comic. Around us the audience is in uproar and Renato is jumping off the edge of the stage. I tear my jacket off and throw it over Mum’s head. I have no intention of touching the bat with my bare hands. I close my hands around the disgusting quivering body–the bat’s I mean–and consider squeezing the life out of it. I don’t have to make the decision because Renato pushes me aside and whips off the jacket.

‘You are a madman!?’ he hisses. ‘You want to destroy me my little friend. See? She is frightened.’

‘What about my old woman?’ explodes Dad. ‘She’s just had her bleeding hair done. This lot is going to set you back a few bob.’

Renato ignores him.

‘Come, come Bettina,’ he soothes, ‘your pappa is here to look after you.’ Mum’s screams must now be jamming local radio stations. They are certainly not doing anything to calm down Bettina who sinks her treacherous fangs into Renato’s thumb as he extends a rescuing hand.

‘Aagh!!’ The Maestro staggers back and a row of seats collapses, taking Mum and Dad with it. In the confusion Bettina tears herself free and zooms off to join her little chums aloft. Dad belts Senor Renato up the bracket and Rosie disappears.

The last event is in many ways the most disturbing but I do not notice it until we have steered Mum into the manager’s office and started getting her outside a bottle of brandy. The show has been abandoned and Senor Renato is standing in the deserted auditorium trying to talk down his little friends who are sulking amongst the rafters. Dad is beside himself with ecstasy, having never actually connected with a blow before in his life.

‘He should never have tried it on with me,’ he says. ‘He was a fool to himself. He should never have done it. I showed him, didn’t I, love? I wasn’t going to have that Eyetie making you cry and getting away with it.’

‘You caught him in the mouth with your elbow when he turned round a bit sharpish,’ says Mum. ‘When he fell down you hit him again. Now do belt up about it. All I want to do is get away from here.’

It is then that I notice that Rosie has beaten her to it. Leaving Mum with her hand comfortably anchored to the neck of the brandy bottle and Dad trying to explain to the manager that free seats for the next performance are something short of adequate reparation for the mental and physical anguish caused, I race out into the still-rainy night just in time to reach the turnstile as Rosie is climbing into a taxi. I shout at her but she chooses not to hear and the taxi draws away. Knickers! Sidney is going to do his nut.

I waste valuable time hanging around for another taxi and then start running along the promenade. Every shelter is either full of tramps dossing down for the night or couples groping each other. These tableaux of fumbling lust sharpen my mind to thoughts of what is happening back at the Cromby. Will I get there in time to prevent Rosie tangling with Sam the Ram? Will Sidney be exposed in mid-grapple with some sexed-up swinger? New readers begin here.

I charge through the doors of the Cromby and run straight into Miss Primstone who is standing by the reception looking as enthusiastic as a bloodhound that has just received an estimate for a face lift.

‘Have you seen Mrs Noggett?’ I pant. Miss Primstone sighs.

‘I believe you will find her in the ballroom.’ It is the way that she shudders on the word ‘ballroom’ that terrifies me.

‘And Mr Noggett?’

‘I believe the little boy was having teething problems, Mr Noggett is tending him upstairs.’

‘Good!’ Miss Primstone’s eyebrows rise. ‘I mean I’m glad Sidney is looking after him.’

Maybe there is still time. I move with Elliot Ness swiftness to the ballroom expecting to hear orgy-type noises assaulting my ear drums. To my surprise there is only the subdued throb of music beating with a heart-like regularity. I open the door and it takes my eyes a few seconds to get used to the darkness. The whole of one wall is a gigantic screen onto which have been projected patterns and images which move slowly like drops of coloured water finding a path through packed ice. As I follow them down to floor level I become aware of shadowy shapes, glistening limbs, heaps of discarded clothing. Blimey! I am too late.

Or am I? About the only couple performing in a vertical plane are Sam and Rosie. He is holding her to him like she is a rolled-up carpet he is transporting down a steep flight of stairs but as far as I can make out they still have their clobber on. How long this very desirable state of affairs is going to last is another matter. Sam’s pelvic region is revolving like one of those attachments available with a Black and Decker kit and Rosie is one stage away from total knicker-loss. Alack, alas, what can I do? Any second now Sidney will return from providing succour to his fledgling Noggett and Rosie’s 36A cup is not going to be the only thing that is undone. If only she was not so impetuous! Still, I suppose it runs in the family.

‘Having a nice time, aren’t they?’ I turn round and craggy Petheridge is at my elbow. ‘I thought I was a bit of a raver but this lot leave me standing. You’d need to turn on the sprinkler system to separate them, wouldn’t you?’

‘What?!’ I say, a giant ‘thinks’ bubble bursting from my nut.

‘I said you’d need to turn on the sprinkler system to separate them.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ I try and sound dead casual. ‘You mean down the end of the corridor on the third floor?’

‘Yes. Hey, look at those two! They’re going at it aren’t they?’

Experienced readers will have no difficulty in knowing which two he is talking about, and my feet develop wings as I speed towards the third floor. I am belting down the long corridor when a door opens and–surprise, surprise–I am face to face with Sidney Noggett. His face is flushed and it does not look as if this is due to the strain of ministering to little Jason. I obtain this impression from the sight of the buxom red head who is patting her hair into place beside the crumpled bed.

‘Where’s Rosie?’ yelps Sidney, his voice combining both fear and menace.

‘She’s on her way,’ I shout over my shoulder, I reckon this being a fairly accurate statement of the situation. Sidney says something else but I don’t hear him because I am round the corner and flinging open the door marked ‘no admittance’.

The inside of the room resembles the control room of a Victorian Cape Kennedy. Brass switches and cobweb-covered circuits abound and I look desperately for some instructions. In my panic I press a large switch and realise that it is not the right one when the light in the room goes out. Ah! There we are! ‘Sprinkler System’. ‘Foyer’, ‘dining room’, ‘ballroom’. I take a deep breath and pull the lever as far as it will go. I hope to God that Sidney has not got to the ballroom yet. To add to my good fortune there is a key on the inside of the lock. I grab it, hop out into the corridor and lock the door behind me. That should keep everybody off their knees for a bit.

Not half it won’t. When I get to the top of the stairs the Pendulum Swingers are pouring out of the ballroom like there has been a thunderstorm at the nudist camp picnic. I have not seen so many wet, naked bodies since I peeped through the cracks in the back of the ladies’ changing rooms at Tooting Bec baths. I look into the ballroom and the scene resembles a tropical rain forest by night–not that I have ever seen one, but I reckon it must be something like that. One or two couples who are probably stoned are still grinding away in the middle of the floor and one naked joker is lying on his back with his arms outstretched, chanting, ‘Now grow, you bastard!’ as he gazes down at his acorn. Happy days!

Luckily there is no sign of Sam and Rosie and I am glad of this when I find Sid standing at my elbow sending glances into the darkness like cavalry scouts.

‘Has she come yet?’ says Sid nervously. ‘I wish I could get my hands on the bleeding basket who did this lot.’

‘Probably one of the residents,’ I say. ‘Oh–’ My exclamation is caused by the sight of Rosie coming through the front door. She is bedraggled but fully clothed and alone. She must have got out by one of the side exits.

‘Hello Sid, darling,’ she says, giving him a big hug, ‘what happened?’

‘Some bleeder turned on the sprinkler system. Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been struggling back from the theatre, love. My cheap-jack brother couldn’t afford a taxi. I might as well have stood under that lot, mightn’t I?’ She indicates the inside of the ballroom as the sprinklers are suddenly turned off. ‘Come on, Sid. Come and warm me up.’ She gives his arm a big squeeze and folds back her lips.

‘I ought to–Oh, well. We’ll do something about it in the morning.’ Sid shakes his head and is led away towards the stairs.

I go out of the front entrance of the hotel and look towards the pier. The moon is now high in the sky and there are a lot of stars about. Not a trace of rain. Luckily, in Rosie’s capable hands, Sid is unlikely to ever know this.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Old what?!’ says Sid.

‘Old Rottingfestians,’ I say.

‘Who the hell are they?’

‘They’re a rugby club. Playing a couple of pre-season games in the area. Two teams and a spattering of wives, girlfriends and supporters. It can’t be bad can it?’

‘It can’t be much worse.’

It is two weeks after the Pendulum Society have wrung out their Y-fronts and gone home and the Cromby is now totally isolated from its adjoining buildings. On one side is a flat expanse of red mud with a few bricks sticking out of it and on the other the Irish problem are filling the air with dust and cursing. Bookings have dropped off at an alarming rate and some couples have only entered the hotel in order to ask for their deposits back. Never the most elegant of heaps, the Cromby now looks like the foreman’s hut on a building site.

‘At least they won’t complain about the noise, I suppose,’ sighs Sid. This has been one of our main problems and ‘The Friends of Silence’ checked out before breakfast on the first morning. Even Miss Primstone has taken to wearing ear plugs.

Poor Sid’s enthusiasm has been fading fast and I know that only his pride is preventing him from selling out to Rigby. That little rat-substitute is frequently seen standing by his Rolls-Royce and supervising the demolition with an evil smile puckering the corners of his cakehole.

Mum–Batwoman, as we now call her–and Dad have long since returned to The Smoke and Rosie–thank God–has expressed herself as unwilling to risk Jason’s tender lugholes until the noise of demolition has ceased.

‘The little perisher hardly sleeps at the best of times,’ she says. ‘I’ll come back when everything has settled down.’

At this rate everything is going to settle like a ship sliding down in fifty fathoms of briny.

Elsewhere in the hotel things do not change much. Miss Ruperts spends most of her time in her room getting, or rather keeping, pissed, and Mrs Caitley is now conducting a bitter vendetta with Senor Luigi, the latest head waiter. June, Audrey and Carmen roam the corridors, hoping to find Sacha Distel without his running shoes, and Sidney and Sandra play their own intimate version of mixed singles once a week. They have no trouble making ends meet but Dennis has to fiddle twice as hard in order to keep himself in fag money.

It is with the hotel in this, not untypically, fair-to-muddling situation that two important visitors arrive independently. The Old Rottingfestians Rugby Union Football Club, and Doctor Walter Carboy.

The former straggle up one Friday afternoon in a variety of fly-spattered MGs and scruffy 1100s. Those emerging from sports cars wear loud check hacking jackets and are usually accompanied by small blondes with brooches on the front of their jumpers. The 1100s disgorge a slightly older and shabbier article with leather elbow patches on their crumpled houndstooth and unlit pipes sagging over double chins. Their women have an air of experienced resignation like cows approaching the milking shed. You feel that they have been on tour before.

One feature that characterises all the men is an air of undefeated cheerfulness that flows like something out of a Battle of Britain epic.

‘How’s it going, Tinker?’

‘Dickers, old chap. Fantastic. How’s Daphers?’

‘Not so bad. Turned a bit green when I did a ton in Lewes High Street.’

‘Cool bastard! How did the peelers react to that?’

‘No likey. I told them my grandmother was on the point of snuffing it but they wouldn’t believe me. Good God! Look who’s here. Tortor. What a marvellous surprise!’ The bird smiles slowly and extends a cheek in order to protect her mouth. Tinker and Dickers descend on it hungrily and make sure that their hands do not feel left out of things. They grope clumsily as if there is more pleasure in being seen to grope rather than the actual groping.

One of the wives–this one must be a wife–looks very cute in her long sleeveless leather jacket, and I catch her eye as she turns away wearily from the hearty reunions going on around her. She raises a finger and I move to her side.

‘Have you got a programme of what’s on in the town?’ she says.

‘Yes, I expect so. It’s probably a bit out of date, though. You’d be better off with the local paper. I’ll see if I can find you one.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ She has a nice smile. ‘If you find one can you stick it in my pigeon hole? Number forty-two.’ A quick glance at her tidy little body and full lips confirms the coarse thought that I would not be at all averse to sticking it in her pigeon hole.

‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘Going to make a real weekend of it, are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’ll be taking in some of the local entertainment as well as the rugby, will you?’

‘What do you mean “as well as”?’ she says. ‘Have you ever seen this lot on tour before? Unless you can drink your own weight in beer every evening you might as well buy a season ticket to the local chamber concerts, if you’re lucky enough to find any. I don’t expect to see Adrian again until Tuesday morning.’

I begin to see what she means when by six o’clock they have drunk Dennis out of beer. It is the only thing they are interested in. As if there is some prize being offered they stand shoulder to shoulder pouring the stuff down their throats and threatening each other with physical violence in order to pay for the next round. With Dennis rushing around trying to find some more beer, they switch to shorts and so by supper time are in a decidedly jovial mood. It must be the first time in the history of the Cromby that forty-two male guests have marched into the dining room whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’.

Some of the ladies, including my friend in forty-two, obviously find it less than amusing, but their menfolk sit down joyfully and immediately start pelting each other with bridge rolls and unscrew the top of the pepper pot so that their mates will pour the whole lot into their soup. Some joker has brought a farting cushion and this provides an endless source of amusement, especially when Sid comes out to try and restore some order. Every word he says is greeted by a loud raspberry. Senor Luigi tries to make headway with the bowing and scraping but when everybody jumps out of his chair and rests his chin on his chest every time he says anything, he eventually realises that they are taking the piss.

Only Mrs Caitley knows how to handle the bastards. She storms out of the kitchen and tells them that she will stop serving any more food if they don’t belt up. They give her a loud cheer, take a good butcher’s at the expression on her mush, and belt up.

After supper it is back to the bar and when I go to bed most of them are still at it. One or two of the younger birds stay with them but most of the wives watch telly, read a book or knit. I go into the telly lounge and ask if they would like anything.

‘Yes, a husband,’ says one of them and the others laugh.

‘Don’t hang around here too long,’ says another cute little number who deserves better things, i.e. me. ‘Frustration might get the better of us.’

I leave them, thinking that the wrong type of bloke could easily be tempted to do himself a bit of good in the circumstances and retire to my room. By chance, Carmen drops by to see if I have any brown boot polish and in the ensuing search for a tin all thoughts of other ladies in the hotel are driven rhythmically from my mind.

The next morning I wake up to find that one of the rooms has been burned out, due to a drunken Rottingfestrian falling asleep with a burning cigarette in his mitt. Numerous jokers have thrown up all over the hotel, and a running battle with fire buckets and soda syphons has kept most of the non-rugby-playing guests awake half the night. There is an angry queue forming outside Sidney’s office and their pointed chatter is loud enough to be heard above the noise of the Rottingfestrians pouring cornflakes over each other in the dining room.

It is while explaining to the narked guests that Sidney will be along in a minute that I notice one of the birds who was in the TV lounge, coming down to breakfast. She is a bit older than the others and wearing a green silk trouser suit that does not have enough spare room in it to store a postage stamp. She looks a very cool lady and sweeps her eyes over me like they are the lashes on a pair of windscreen wipers brushing aside an insect. Five minutes later Sidney comes along and the rugby hearties start pouring out of breakfast.

‘OK chaps,’ trills one of them, ‘time for training.’ Thank God, I think, now for a little peace. But not a bit of it! They march straight across to the bar and demand pints all round. Dennis does not come on duty till eleven o’clock and I try to point out this fact.

‘Come off it!’ snarls one of them, bigger and uglier than the rest. ‘This is a hotel, isn’t it? The bar should be open all the time.’

‘I’d have thought you would have had enough last night,’ I say. Fatso does not like this.

‘It’s not your place to comment on my drinking habits,’ he yelps. ‘You do as you’re told and get this bar open. Otherwise I’ll report you to the BTA.’

‘You can report me to the RSPCA if you like but the bar doesn’t open till eleven.’

‘Damned cheek.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Grab him!’

Before I can lift a finger, or, more relevant to the situation, a boot, I am seized by half a dozen pairs of strong hands and pressed back against the wall.

‘What shall we do with him?’

‘Chuck him in the briny.’

‘No, I’ve got a better idea.’

Five minutes later Sidney comes into the bar in answer to my shouts and looks around him inquiringly.

‘I’m up here, Sid.’

‘Blimey!!’ Sid has probably never seen me sitting astride a bison’s head fifteen feet from the ground, and the hint of surprise in his voice is understandable.

‘How long have you been up there?’

‘Ever since they put me up here. Sid, you’re going to have to get rid of them, you know.’

‘I can’t afford to, Timmo.’

‘And Sid.’

‘Yes, Timmo.’

‘Get us a ladder before you piss off.’

‘Oh, sorry. OK. Yeah. I’ll do that.’ Sid seems to be in a daze as he wanders out of the room. My own feeling is of a deeper and more primitive nature. I am going to get even with those bastards if it is the last thing I do. You probably remember the movie. I was staked out on an anthill at the time and Yukon Pete and that sidewinding sidekick of his, the Mexican with the easy smile and the fast knife in the back pocket, had just lifted my stake in the Eldorado Gold Mine. That, after I had dug them both out of a roof-fall with my bare hands. Little did they know that three days later when I had gnawed through the buffalo hide thongs–‘Ahem,’ the bird in the green trouser suit has succeeded in attracting my attention. ‘What were you thinking about?’

‘Nothing,’ I gulp. ‘I was just thinking.’

‘It makes a refreshing change, even if it was about nothing. What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘I’m serving afternoon teas.’

‘I’d like you to serve me as well.’ The lady has not batted an eyelid–not that I would probably be able to tell if she had. I mean, do you know how to bat an eyelid?

‘Come again?’ I Mumble.

‘I hope so,’ she says briskly. ‘Come to my room at three. Two-four-six.’

‘Aren’t you going to the game?’

‘This is the game, darling.’

‘I mean the rugger match.’

‘Darling, we all go on tour for different reasons. For some people it’s rugby. Now me; I don’t like team games. I don’t like mildewed jock straps, butterscotch socks, stud mud in the bathroom basin, vomit on the door mat or courgettes that talk like cucumbers. Do you understand me?’

‘No.’

‘Two-four-six at three. We can discuss it further.’ She starts to willow away down the corridor as Fatso staggers in through the door with his arms full of one-gallon beer cans.

‘Where the hell did you put the car keys?’ he calls out to her. ‘I’ve had to walk half a mile with this lot.’

‘I expect it did you the world of good, darling,’ she beams. ‘Why don’t you try hopping upstairs on alternate feet? I’ll time you.’

‘Bitch.’

‘Thank you.’ She draws herself up and makes with the withering glance. ‘Have a good game this afternoon, and don’t forget to put your jock strap on the right way round. I’d hate your brain to get cold.’ She stalks off while I take in the glorious news that this must be Fatso’s old lady. Wild horses are going to be required to drag me away from room two-four-six.

Around lunch time the booze intake begins to drop a little and it becomes easier to spot those who are actually playing that afternoon. They can be seen sipping brandies rather than pints and ordering salads instead of meat and fourteen veg. Quite what difference this late change of diet is supposed to make I don’t know. It must all be in the mind or whatever these blokes have instead. Half a dozen of them start rugby-passing empty beer cans round the foyer and Sandra gets a nasty belt in the bristols before they can be persuaded to stop.

It is while I am suggesting to Fatso and his friends that mouth to mouth resuscitation is not necessary that Doctor Carboy arrives. He is small, dapper, toothbrush-moustached and sports an unlit cigarette in a long gold cigarette holder.

‘Step aside, gentlemen,’ he says, putting a bulging attaché case on the reception counter. ‘I am a professional man. What seems to be the trouble, my dear?’

Sandra tells him in no uncertain fashion and Dr C. shakes his head sadly. ‘Infectious high spirits cause serious complaints. Tell me, does this hurt?’

‘Hey, wait a minute!’

‘It’s alright, my dear. I’m a doctor. Doctor Walter Carboy. No, I don’t think there is anything there to worry about. Quite a lot to disturb, but nothing to worry about. In your case I’ll waive my fee.’ He waves his hand towards the door. ‘Goodbye fee. Now, let’s talk turkey–or Turkish–I don’t mind. I would like the best room you have available and a bottle of Glen Grant sent up immediately. It doesn’t matter about glasses, just send up the bottle. I joke, of course, madam,’ he smiles into Miss Primstone’s bemused face. ‘And if you can do anything to turn off the noise next door and buy yourself a hairnet, I would be grateful. I need peace. Perfect peace.’

‘What about the rest of your luggage, sir?’

‘It’s following me from Southampton. Some of the most faithful luggage in the world. I’ve been trying to shake it off for years. And now gentlemen, enough of this idle badinage. Good luck with the spheroid and even better luck with the haemorrhoids, as my old coach used to say. Last one to my room is a cissy.’ And so saying he leaps towards the stairs like Rudolf Nureyev.

The Rottingfestrians are left speechless and it takes a few seconds before Miss Primstone shoves the keys of the Plaza Suite into Martin’s hands and tells him to catch up with Carboy fast.

‘One of the old school,’ she says. ‘We have not seen his like for a long time.’ She is right there.

About two o’clock the hotel surrenders itself to blissful quiet as the Rottingfestrians pull out for their rugby match. They are full of booze and big talk about how they are going to crush the ‘swede-bashers’ as they call the local side. Most of the wives and sweethearts troop along dutifully but there is no sign of green-pants, and the winsome chick who asked me about local events trips down the stairs ten minutes after the others have pulled out.

‘Hurry up or you’ll miss the match,’ I tell her.

‘I’m not going. I thought I told you. I can’t stand the game. I’m taking a look at the lifeboat station and the fish market. You don’t fancy being my guide, do you?’

‘I’d love to,’ I say, meaning it, ‘but I’m on duty this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow?’

‘Maybe.’ She gives me a cute little wave and dances away down the steps. I think she quite fancies me, that one. It is diabolical isn’t it? They are either all over you or nowhere to be seen.

Somehow the minutes tick by to three o’clock and my mind is not on the outcome of the clash between Hoverton RUFC. and ORs.

Doctor Carboy rings down and asks if his baggage has arrived. We tell him ‘no’ and he delivers half a dozen wisecracks and a request for a tailor, a shirtmaker and another bottle of Glen Grant to be sent up to his room. This is unheard of and Sid practically purrs with delight when we tell him.

‘It’s happening,’ he squeaks. ‘At last it’s happening. Just when I had almost given up hope. I said if we stuck it out long enough the class customers would start showing up.’

‘No you didn’t, Sid. Only this morning you were saying we should sell out to–’

‘Quiet, you viper,’ hisses Sid. ‘Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.’

‘But I do understand, Sid. You seem to think that one swallower makes a summer.’

‘Belt up with those awful jokes and get the booze in. He’s paying for it, isn’t he?’

‘I hope so, Sid.’

Ten minutes later simple Sid has disappeared, rubbing his hands together at the thought of the riches to come, and I am rubbing my hands nervously outside room number two-four-six, also thinking hopefully of the riches to come. I stretch out my arm but the door opens before I make contact with it.

‘Come in.’

‘Blimey!’

Mrs Fatso is wearing a black nylon negligee which is downright negligent in its coverage of her erogenous zones (I got the word from one of the sex books I borrowed from Battersea Public Library. Everything you always wanted to know about sex but got smacked in the kisser for asking. Something like that, anyway).

‘Come in,’ she says, ‘it’s draughty with the door open.’

‘It would be draughty in the Sahara Desert with that thing on.’

‘You like it, do you?’

‘Fantastic.’

‘I found my husband polishing the studs of his rugger boots with it.’

‘I don’t believe it. I don’t know how he can bear to leave the room with you looking like that.’ It is no hardship chatting her up. I mean what I am saying.

‘He finds it easy to leave any room that doesn’t have a bar in it. In the last three years he has only taken me out once, and that was to a film show of the British Lions tour of New Zealand followed by two blue movies. Most of those present were more turned on by the rugby film.’

‘Incredible.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think I must be ugly or something. I look at myself in the mirror and ask myself why he prefers a rugby ball to me.’

‘You’re not ugly, you’re a very striking woman.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate that. You’re not just being kind?’

‘No, no. Compared to some of the birds I–’ I stop myself just in time. ‘Compared to most of the visitors we get, you’re a knockout. I can’t understand your husband. Has he always been like that?’

‘He’s always been mad keen on rugby. He started going off me about the time I stopped ironing his bootlaces.’

‘Why did he marry you in the first place?’

‘Because the captain of the first team was going out with me. Basil is very competitive. He said he liked looking at me when I bent down to pour the teas.’

‘Oh, he noticed you, then?’

‘Yes, he said that when I leaned over my breasts looked like two rugby balls dropping over the bar of my dress.’

‘Very romantic.’

‘It was, by his standards.’

‘What did you see in him?’

‘Oh, physical things, I suppose. He wasn’t so fat then. Somehow I thought that all those healthy young men charging about were where I ought to be. About as clever as a moth hanging round a naked flame. Talking of naked, will you take your clothes off please?’

‘Gladly.’

‘Thank you. Basil doesn’t believe in sex before a game and he’s too tired afterwards, and he plays on Saturday and Sunday and trains every night of the week, so you can see that our marriage isn’t exactly a hymn to fornication.’ My friend gives a little shiver and squeezes my arm passionately. I can see that her problem is one I am well equipped to solve and continue to unbutton my shirt.

‘We rushed straight from the church to the Middlesex Sevens final at Twickenham. Basil described the selection of our wedding day as the biggest bog-up of his life. It’s not surprising I give the impression of being hard, is it?’

‘ “Hard” isn’t the word I would have used.’ I slip my hand inside her negligee and give one of her breasts an affectionate feel. Her whole body stiffens and she kisses me passionately on the mouth.

‘Relax,’ I say, when I come up for air, ‘you’re buckling my lips. Let’s do it again more gently.’ I kiss her softly and run my finger lightly over the soft swell of her tummy. Now down, and she shivers again as my fingers brush against her minge fringe. Somewhere, on some foreign field, Fatso is buckling down for a scrum. Panting, puffing, aching. Poor devil. My heart goes out to him. That is all I can spare at the moment.

‘O-o-o-h, that’s good,’ murmurs Mrs F. ‘You make me feel like a woman.’

‘You are a woman,’ I assure her. ‘We don’t have to organise a poll.’

‘Talking of poles–’ her cotton-picking fingers are trying to lead in a winner from my jockey briefs and my trousers have taken up their natural position around my ankles.

‘You don’t know how good this makes me feel.’ I am very happy for her. It is heartening to see her changing from the cool lady who deloused me with her eyes in the vestibule. She presses her body close to mine and starts nibbling my ear while her impatient fingers tug down my Marks and Spencers lingerie.

‘O-o-o-h.’

‘Hang on a moment.’ Super-optimist that I am, I have worn a pair of slip-on canvas shoes without socks so that the undressing bit can be effected tastefully and gracefully. These I ease off with the miniMum of effort and step nimbly out of my trews. I would be a wiz at the bare-foot grape-pressing lark.

The state of the parties is now, Lea naked, Mrs Fatso naked except for aforementioned sexy negligee. Like a master craftsman unwrapping a rare porcelain vase, I coax the black lace from her shoulders shedding a few delicate kisses along the length of her collar bone. I am contemplating a nibble-fest but Mrs F. has other ideas. She sinks towards the ground faster than a British space rocket and wriggles her naked legs like a frisky mare waiting for the ‘off’–or in her case, the ‘on’.

Some men might pause to hum the opening bars of Rule Britannia or comment on the rising price of butter, but not Timothy Lea. For a second, pregnant with a thousand anxieties and a million promises, I am poised at the entrance to her pleasure dome. Then, joyfully, inside it.

Oh, what fun we have in that drab room with the leaden sky outside. I catch a glimpse of sky sometimes. At the end of an hour I feel like a glove puppet that has been turned inside out so many times that its stitching has started to work loose.

We must have dozed off, because the next thing I recall is the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor. I glance at my watch and it is still far too early for Fatso to be back. Nevertheless, I am worried. The very fact that I am conscious of the noise makes me feel that my guardian angel (?) is trying to tell me something. Mrs F. reacts to me sitting up and it is just as well that she does. Suddenly, from right outside the door, we hear a gruff male voice.

‘Two-four-six did you say? Here we are.’ There is a knock on the door that coincides with the door knob turning.

I have to hand it to Mrs F. She is on her feet before you can say ‘drop ’em’ and gets to the door just as it starts opening.

‘Oh, I’m sorry madam. I’ve got your husband here. He had a bit of an accident playing rugby.’ The bloke has obviously caught a glimpse of Mrs F. in the altogether. He may hold back but hubby isn’t going to. Oh, my gawd!! I glance round the room desperately but there is only a chest of drawers with a cupboard built on top of it. Even the bed clears the ground by only a measly two inches. What a lousy way to build a hotel. Before I can chuck myself out of the window, Fatso blunders into the room and steps on me. He curses and continues on his way to the bed.

Strange behaviour, you might think, but you cannot see him. He is holding a large wad of cotton wool over one of his eyes and the other is closed in sympathy. He is crumpled, battered and bruised and the groaning noises he is making sound very genuine.

‘Dirty bastard put his fingers in my eye: Ur-r-rgh!’ He feels for the bed and collapses onto it face downwards.

I don’t wait to ask if I can make him a cup of Nescafe but grab my clothes and head for the door. Outside, a St John’s Ambulance man is standing dutifully with his hat in his hand. His face adopts what is best described as a surprised expression as I skip past him.

‘I’m the team mascot,’ I say comfortingly before I hare down the corridor.

CHAPTER NINE

The rest of the Old Rottingfestrians limp in from six o’clock until four the next morning. They have lost 48–3 and their spirits are lower than ‘God Bless America’ on the Chinese Hit Parade. Drunk and despondent they are even worse than sloshed and sociable and I watch warily as they indulge in what are known as ‘pre-dinner drinkees’. At least there is no sign of Fatso, and his lady wife favours me with a warm smile as she comes down to supper.

‘I think he’s going to live,’ she says, giving the inside of my thigh a discreet squeeze that can only be seen by Miss Primstone and half the people in the dining room. ‘He told me they got hammered. I said “Darling, I know just how you feel”.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ I say, looking around nervously. ‘Let me find you a table.’

‘Are you going to serve me?’ They must be able to see me blushing from the other end of the room. Not without difficulty, I get her seated with my little friend who was looking at the market. Her husband has still not come back to the hotel and by the end of the meal the two birds are shooting me the kind of glances that make me wonder what they have been saying to each other.

I decide not to ask them and am popping back to my room when Miss Ruperts waylays me. She is swaying slightly and I take the opportunity offered by helping her back to her office to remove the three beer bottle tops that have become lodged in her crocheted shawl.

‘I do want to talk to young Mr Sidney,’ she says huffily. ‘He has been very naughty lately. I am convinced he is trying to avoid me.’ She is dead right there. Sid is at last coming round to my way of thinking and after the Pendulum Society and the Old Rottingfestrians is a lot less keen on the convention idea. ‘I have a very interesting proposition to discuss with him,’ she goes on. ‘I am convinced it could be of great benefit to us all.’

‘I’m certain it could be,’ I say, humouring her. ‘When I see Mr Noggett I’ll tell him to come and see you.’

‘Please do. You see I have an uncle, by one of those quirks of fate not greatly older than myself, and he–’

‘Yes, yes,’ I say, ‘well, I must be going.’ I am backing out just as Doctor Carboy bowls in.

‘Dear lady,’ he trills, ‘What can I say?’ He looks round the dark, shabby room like it is an Ideal Home feature. ‘Your own incomparable beauty is matched by the elegance of your surroundings. Forgive me for not coming sooner but I was engaged in a tedious search for my baggage. Alas, without success. But what care I? You are the prettiest little baggage in the world.’ I think he must be round the twist but Miss Ruperts giggles coyly and obviously laps it up. No accounting for tastes.

‘Go and make sure that the champagne is cool,’ he says to me. ‘I’ll make sure that the blood is hot.’ He is actually taking her hand in his as I leave. I always thought he was a bit batty, now I am certain of it.

‘I reckon your Miss Ruperts is on the point of betraying you with another,’ I say, when I bump into Sidney. ‘That Doctor Carboy bloke is giving her the full treatment.’

‘If only we had a few more like him, all our troubles would be over,’ sighs Sidney. ‘I hope she doesn’t upset him. You know, I think you were right about her. I can’t afford the booze she puts away, let alone anything else. Trouble is I suppose Mrs Caitley would chuck in her notice if I gave her the boot.’

‘Mrs Caitley would probably punch your head in, Sid. Come on, why fight it any longer? This place is going down the drain. If there’s anything left when these bleeding rugger buggers have pulled out, why don’t you let Rigby have it?’`

Sid sighs and does the whole head-shaking bit, like Jack Hawkins about to send Richard Todd out on a suicide mission without his cocker spaniel. ‘Oh, blimey,’ he says, ‘after all I’ve put into the place.’ I can’t think of anything, but maybe he is talking about a different place. ‘All right,’ he goes on, ‘but the bastard will have to come to me first. I’m not crawling back to him.’

Sidney does not have to wait long for the coming. The next morning, while I am helping June and Audrey clean up the results of a fire extinguisher battle–no prizes for guessing who between–Rigby’s rodent frame bristles behind us.

‘You want to try using carpet shampoo,’ he says. ‘It’s less messy. Where’s Noggett? Hiding from his creditors, as usual?’

‘I suggest you wait in the lounge,’ I say grandly. ‘I’ll tell him you’re here.’

‘No thanks. Something might drop off the walls.’

‘I thought that’s how you got in here,’ says June, loyally.

‘Watch it, girlie, you’ll find yourself out of a job when I take over,’ snarls Rigby.

‘I wouldn’t stay here five minutes if you took over. Only long enough to open the windows.’

You don’t have to be good at reading expressions to know that Rigby does not like that, but before he can say anything Sidney appears.

‘You’re looking for me, are you?’ he says, seeing Rigby.

‘Amongst many others, I expect,’ sneers Rigby. ‘I came round to tell you that I’m fed up with hanging about. Unless you see sense by tomorrow dinner-time I’m moving my boys in to start developing the sites on either side of you. They’ll be at it twenty-four hours a day, working by floodlights. I’m behind schedule and my backers want results. If you don’t take my offer you won’t be able to accept a booking from anyone who isn’t deaf.’

‘You can’t blackmail me.’

‘I’m not blackmailing you. I’m telling you. You should be grateful to me for giving you a chance to get out of this dump. Look at it! I’m amazed it hasn’t fallen down without the other two buildings to support it.’

‘You’re a nice bloke to do business with, aren’t you?’ Sid’s fists have folded into bunches of bananas and there is a look in his eye like the outbreak of World War III.

‘I’ve heard about the kind of guests you’re taking now. Down to football teams, isn’t it? I suppose if they can’t afford the YMCA they come here.’

‘Rugby teams, not football teams.’ The words come from one of Fatso’s mates and are spoken without warmth. Since the speaker is about six foot eight inches tall they encourage attention.

‘Rugby teams,’ says Rat Features.

‘And we never stay at the YMCA. The YWCA, now that’s different.’ Mr Big is advancing towards Rigby as if he wants to use him to practise tying knots.

‘Of course.’

‘Piss off,’ says Sid, falling in beside the incredible hulk.

‘Dinner time tomorrow,’ squeaks Rigby, breaking the World Backward-walking record. ‘If you don’t agree to my terms, I’ll turn my boys loose on the site.’

‘Getoutofit!’

Rigby flashes into his Rolls like he is only let out of it on a spring. The windows are a smokey-blue colour so we cannot see him through them. Nobody expresses a sense of loss.

‘We’ll see him tomorrow,’ says the big guy. There is a note of anticipation in his voice that I do not appreciate at the time.

‘What are we going to do, Sid?’ I say.

‘I don’t know, Timmy. It just depends on what kind of offer he finally makes.’ But, from the expression on Sid’s face I know that he has as good as chucked in the sponge.

One person who remains cheerful is Miss Ruperts. When I next see her, she squeezes my arm affectionately and draws me closer. She opens her mouth to speak and I feel that it must conceal the entrance to a whisky still.

‘He’s so kind and thoughtful, isn’t he?’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘Doctor Carboy. Or Walter as he allows me to call him. Do you know he’s going to have all my jewellery valued free?’

I look at her mitts and they are indeed ringless.

‘Very nice.’ It is isn’t it? Doctor Carboy has now completely replenished the items that were lost when his luggage failed to turn up and the local tradespeople must be very grateful for his custom. He has also consumed gallons of booze and exotic goodies in the privacy of his suite. All in all, a man well versed in the art of chucking money about. Now he has taken Miss Ruperts’ jewellery–hey! Wait a minute. I detach myself from Miss Ruperts and move swiftly to Sid’s side. He is in his office slamming shut a large ledger and beginning to slide despairing hands over his mush.

‘Sid,’ I say, trying to sound very relaxed about the whole thing, ‘has it occurred to you that Doctor Carboy might be a conman?’ Sid pauses for a moment, then continues to slide despairing hands over his mush.

‘Not until you mentioned it,’ he says. ‘Now it seems the most natural thing in the world. That’s all we need, isn’t it? A conman. Very nice. When did you first become suspicious?’

I tell Sid about the ring-valuing and he shakes his head.

‘He just might be on the level,’ he says hopefully. ‘Come on, we’d better go and talk to Miss Ruperts. I’ve been trying to keep out of her way but I suppose–’

‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ says Miss Ruperts reproachfully when we interrupt her trying to find room for a couple of ice cubes in a jumbo slug of scotch.

‘I’ve been very busy,’ says Sid, lamely. ‘Now–’

‘Now,’ says Miss Ruperts, riding over him professionally. ‘Now that you’re here at last. There’s something I want to say to you–’

‘Yes, but–’

‘Doctor Carboy.’

‘Oh.’ Sid’s cakehole closes slowly.

‘A wonderful man and a wonderful doctor. He has performed miracles for me in the short time he has been here. Not one of your killjoys,’ she raises her glass to the absent Doctor C. and knocks back a Bogart-sized swig. Sid winces. ‘Now, what I have been vainly trying to tell you for the last few days is that I have inherited an extraordinarily large sum of money,’ she pauses while Sid and I gulp. ‘Some relation I hardly knew I had. Made a fortune in rubber. Quite remarkable what he did with it. The rubber I mean.’ Sid nods understandingly. ‘Now, I am very happy here, and so is my friend Mrs Caitley, but neither of us is getting any younger,’ she takes another giant swig, ‘and what I was thinking is that it might well be a good idea to turn the hotel into a clinic under the supervision of Doctor Carboy. In that way the interests of many of the more elderly members of the staff could be preserved and you would still have a profitable investment. Possibly a much more profitable investment.’

‘And you would be prepared to put some of your money into the venture, would you, Miss Ruperts?’ Sid’s tone could be described as pleading.

‘With Doctor Carboy at the helm I would have no qualms about putting my money into anything.’

‘It sounds a marvellous idea, Miss Ruperts. I have considered something like it myself. But are you certain that Doctor Carboy is the right man? Does he really have the–’

‘Without Doctor Carboy I would not consider putting up a penny.’ Miss Ruperts bangs down her empty glass on the table and the ice cubes land in it a couple of seconds later.

‘Well, it’s certainly a very interesting idea, isn’t it, Timmy?’

‘Very interesting, Sid.’

‘We’d better go and have a word about it, hadn’t we, Timmy?’

‘Yes, Sid.’

‘Have you–er, mentioned your idea to Doctor Carboy yet, Miss Ruperts?’

‘No. I thought it right that I should speak with you first.’

‘Very thoughtful of you. Does he–er, know about your good fortune?’

‘The inheritance? No. I didn’t want to appear ostentatious.’

‘Very sensible,’ says Sid, having no idea what she is on about. ‘Well, we’ll come back to you very soon.’

When we get to Carboy’s room it is empty–and I mean empty. Even the toothmugs have gone and there is no trace of all the booze we have carted up there.

‘Oh my gawd.’ Sid sinks down on the bed, a beaten man.

‘Hey, Sid, look!’ A freshly stubbed fag end is still smoking in one of the ash trays. ‘He must have only just left.’

Sid beats me to the door leading to the back stairs by a short head and it is a good race to lose. He storms through and promptly dives over a bulky suitcase waiting on the top step. At the same instant an empty-handed Carboy appears, presumably coming back to collect his last load of swag. He is a cool bastard because he carefully steps over the suitcase and extends a helping hand to Sid.

‘My goodness me. You nearly took a nasty tumble, didn’t you? Very unpleasant.’ He indicates the suitcase. ‘I rather think that this case contains some of the items that were stolen from my room.’

‘Really,’ says Sid.

‘Yes, I returned a few minutes ago to find it ransacked. You really will have to tighten up on your security precautions.’

‘We have it very much in mind,’ says Sid, wincing as he tries to lift the suitcase. ‘Blimey, the bloke certainly stashed some stuff away, didn’t he?’

‘Indeed, indeed. But I suspect that there is even more somewhere. I think I’ll take another look round the yard to see if I can spot what he’s done with it.’

‘We’ll come with you,’ says Sid quickly. ‘Mr Lea is our house detective, you know.’

‘Really. You want to keep on your toes, young man. Wouldn’t it be better if you–er, rang the police?’

‘We’ll do that later.’

Directly outside the back entrance is a Cortina Estate with the boot packed roof-high with suitcases.

‘I think we might just have found where the rest of the stuff is,’ says Sid drily.

‘All that? It never occurred to me–’

‘Doctor Carboy, or whatever your name is, you’re not fooling anybody. We know you lifted that stuff.’

‘What?’ Carboy’s display of indignant outrage is worth a government subsidy. ‘How dare you! Do you know what you’re suggesting?’

‘I’m suggesting we have a little chat,’ says Sid. ‘Believe it or not, I’ve got a proposition to make to you.’

It is about two o’clock in the morning when I go to bed and Carboy is still maintaining that somebody else nicked all the stuff from the rooms. Yes, it turns out that about half a dozen rooms have been turned over. He is, not surprisingly, very interested in Miss Ruperts’ proposition and when I leave Sid and him they are on the point of going off to see the old bag. One thing that does cheer and amaze me is that Carboy really is a doctor. At least he says he is and he has a very impressive piece of paper to back his words. It carries more swirls and squiggles than the label on a vermouth bottle.

The next morning I come down to find that Carboy and Miss Ruperts have left for London.

‘That’s it,’ I tell Sid. ‘He’s probably married her by now. We’ll be right in the S – H one T.’

‘Whether he has or hasn’t he can’t do us too much harm. I still own this hotel and if he gets nasty I’ll tell Miss Ruperts what he was up to last night. He’ll find it difficult to talk his way out of that.’

‘Don’t bet on it. He hasn’t been doing badly so far. That geezer could dive into a cesspool and come up smelling like a poof’s bedroom. Why have they gone to London?’

‘She wants him to get all the gen on her financial affairs.’

‘Bleeding heck! He’ll take her to the cleaners. Why didn’t you go?’

‘She didn’t want me to. I don’t have the same pull that he does. Let’s face it. Any deal we fix up is because she reckons him.’

Much as it pains me to admit it, I know that Sid is right and that there is nothing we can do except twiddle our thumbs and wait for Carboy and Ruperts to turn up again–if they ever do. Even as I think about it I have a horrible vision of them climbing the gang-plank of the QE II, arm in arm …

Luckily there are other things to take my mind off my immediate problems. Things like Mrs Fatso. She willows up to me, removing a crumb from the corner of her beautiful mouth and fixing me with an eye that glows like a night-watchman’s brazier.

‘There’s another game this afternoon,’ she says pointedly.

‘Your old man going to be up to it?’

‘Wild horses wouldn’t drag him away.’

‘And you’re not going?’

‘He might get hurt again. I couldn’t bear to watch that.’ She smoothes a non-existent ruckle out of her slacks. Slacks! There’s a ridiculous word for them. There is more tension going on down there than at a meeting of the Labour Party Executive. ‘I was thinking that it might be fun to organise a little team activity of our own. Quite a number of the girls aren’t all that keen on rugger.’

Hello, hello! What’s all this then? Do I detect intimations of immorality? (It’s wonderful what a course at the Polytechnic can do for your vocabulary, isn’t it?)

‘Oh, yes,’ I say, dead casual. ‘I saw you talking to one of your friends.’

‘Judy? Yes, she was very keen on the idea. She feels the fish market has little more to offer her.’

‘Very understandable. Quite what was she considering as an alternative?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Fatso takes a deep breath. Something she does rather well. ‘A party might be fun, mightn’t it? If you could round up some more able-bodied men we might pass the afternoon in more agreeable fashion than standing on a sodden touch-line shouting “oily, oily, Rottingfestrians”.’

‘Sounds a very nice idea. My colleague, Mr Noggett, has a suite of rooms which would be ideal for the purpose. I’m certain he would be only too glad to participate.’

‘Can’t you think about anything else but nooky at a time like this?’ says Sid irritably when I tell him.

‘No. What is there?’

Sid thinks for a moment. ‘You’re right. What time does the party start?’

I tell him that I have laid it on for when all the Rottingfestrians have trotted off to the rugby game and his face creases into a faint smile for the first time in days.

‘Frisky load of fillies, aren’t they?’ he says. ‘I won’t be sorry to get amongst that lot after what I’ve been through with their old men. Now we’ve only got to worry about stalling Rigby.’

To my surprise, Rigby does not show up promptly at lunch time and it is only when the Rottingfestrians are having their last pint before leaving for the game that the Rolls slides up outside the hotel entrance. Its arrival draws a cheer from the crowd of half-pissed thicknecks milling about outside the bar and this does not go down well with Rigby.

‘Take a good look,’ he sneers, indicating the car. ‘It’s about as near as any of you will ever get to one.’

This remark provokes an immediate outcry and Sid moves forward fast to avoid a possible lynching.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he says civilly. Rigby jerks his head towards the bar.

‘Not in here, thanks. I don’t like drinking with scruffy schoolkids.’

‘Come into the office.’ Sid leads the way to Miss Ruperts’ cubby hole and we are fortunate enough to find half a bottle of scotch that the old bat has left over from breakfast.

‘I’m not here to pay a social call. Are you ready to sign?’

‘We’ve given it a lot of thought–’

‘You’ve had a lot of time.’

‘–but we won’t be able to give you our decision until tomorrow.’

‘Right! Well, you’re going to have a sleepless night to think about it. I’m walking straight out of here and I’m giving my boys the go ahead to start moving in. You’d better start getting the cotton wool out of the medicine cabinet.’

‘Mr Rigby? How fortunate to find you here.’ The words fall from the lips of Doctor Carboy who comes bustling through the door carrying a bulging briefcase. Hard behind him is Miss Ruperts, her face flushed with what I imagine to be a few hastily snatched glasses of lunch.

‘Who is this?’ snarls Rigby.

‘I represent those interests of this lady and gentleman that are not covered by liquor, sex and drugs,’ says Carboy evenly. ‘I have been bringing myself up to date with their affairs. I had to go to London to read all the relevant Sunday newspapers.’

‘I’m not interested in jokes,’ says Rigby, sourly.

‘What a pity. With a face like that I’d have thought you would have had to have been.’

‘I didn’t come here to be insulted.’

‘No, I’m certain a man of your standing can be insulted anywhere. In fact, now I come to mention it, I’m certain a man of your standing could be standing anywhere. Like outside in the rain for instance. There’s a Rolls-Royce outside the front door. Why don’t you go and stand under it and I’ll tell you when it’s stopped raining.’

‘Do you know who I am?’ screeches Rigby.

‘Of course I do. You’re King Farouk’s younger brother thinking that nobody is going to recognise you without the flower pot and the dark glasses. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I know who you are. I told you when I came in. Don’t say you’ve forgotten already?’

‘Don’t beat about the bush, Walter,’ pants Miss Ruperts, casting about her for the whisky bottle. ‘Tell him. Odious little man.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Not you, Walter! Him!’

‘Very well. If you insist, dear lady. I’m sorry, Ratby, I mean Rigby, but I’m afraid you’ve been taken over.’

‘What!’ Rigby’s face turns a different shade of scarlet.

‘Yes. The Rigram Property Company is now owned by a consortium in which my fair companion here is the major shareholder. Yes, Rigby, money talks, and to you it says: “Shove off and see if you can get a job posing for a Warfarin advertisement.”’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘I don’t care whether you believe it or not. Why don’t you ring your accountant? Mr Ransome, isn’t it?’ Rigby’s face achieves another remarkable change of shade. ‘How did you–?’

‘Suffice to say that we have ways, Rigby. Now if you will excuse me. I have to cut my toenails and I don’t want anyone to get hurt by flying trimmings.’

‘I’ll get–’

‘ “Out” is all you’re entitled to get at the moment.’ There is a hard edge to Carboy’s voice that suggests that he does not spend all his time helping old ladies across badly marked zebra crossings. Rigby looks round desperately.

‘You haven’t heard the last of this. I’ll be in touch.’

‘I’ll buy a pair of gloves just in case. Good afternoon.’ Carboy opens the door and Rigby storms out. The minute he has gone we both turn on Carboy.

‘Is that true? Have you really taken over that bastard’s outfit?’

‘Virtually. Miss Ruperts has secured a controlling interest in it. To all intents and purposes she is the owner.’

‘And you did all that in a couple of hours?’

‘I know the right people.’

‘I’ll say you do.’

‘I think a glass of champagne would be in order,’ trills Miss Ruperts.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ says Carboy. ‘Now what on earth is all that noise about?’

We bundle out into the foyer and there is a tall geezer wearing a grey chauffeur’s uniform and a very worried expression.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Bloody young hooligan has driven off in Mr Rigby’s Rolls.’

‘Where’s Rigby?’

‘He’s inside it!’

‘Blimey!’

We join the drunken crowd of Rottingfestrians laughing and cheering on the steps of the hotel and follow their eyes towards the pier.

‘What’s Lofty going to do with him?’ Oh, so that’s it. I thought the big fellow had got the needle with Rigby. Little did I know how much.

‘Good God. He’s driving onto the pier!’ He is too. For some reason they have opened the gates and I can see ant-like figures hopping out of the way as the black shape zooms behind the ghost train.

‘He’s going it, isn’t he?’

‘Slow down Lofty, you Charley!’

‘Oh, no!’ The Rolls is now ripping down the pier like it is a runway.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He’s pissed.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘He won’t be able to stop.’

The last speaker is right. As we watch, horrified, the Rolls bursts through the barrier like it is made of bread sticks and dives gracefully into the sea.

‘Oh, my God.’

Some of the onlookers start running towards the pier but most of us remain rooted to the spot.

‘Look!’

To my amazement a figure appears on the surface closely followed by another. There is a pause and then they both begin to swim slowly towards the pontoon at the end of the pier. A relieved cheer goes up.

‘Did he have his kit with him?’ says Fatso seriously.

‘Come on, let’s go and clap him in.’

‘Better hurry or we’ll be late for the kick off.’

‘Time for another beer?’

‘No. We’ll have one there.’ They pick up boots and bags and disappear in a straggling convoy.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ says Sid.

‘Fantastic,’ says Carboy. ‘Come my dear, the champagne awaits.’

They go in and Sid rests his hand on my shoulder.

‘Might as well have a glass of bubbly, I suppose.’

‘Yoo hoo.’

We look up and there are Mrs Fatso and Judy and two other well-stacked birds leaning over the balcony of Sid’s room. They all appear to be wearing low-cut negligees and it looks like the production line of a small dumpling factory looming down on us.

‘Did you tell Petheridge to fall in for this lot?’ says Sid, rubbing his hands together.

‘Yeah, I told him I’d wake him up when the party started.’

‘Don’t bother. He’s been working a bit hard lately and I think we can handle this lot by ourselves.’

THE END

Confessions of a Travelling Salesman
BY TIMOTHY LEA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER ONE

Phew! I will remember that afternoon with the wives of the Old Rottingfestrian Rugby Club if I live to be thirty-two. Talk about knackered! Sidney was coming apart at the seams like a dock-struck banana and I had about as much snap, crackle and pop as a piece of wet confetti. Those women were insatiable, or to put it in another way: that is just what they wanted you to do – put it in another way.

Of course, it is all very understandable, isn’t it? I mean, if your old man went off every Saturday afternoon and ended up with fifteen other blokes all putting their arms round each other and pushing, you might feel the desire for a bit of a rough and tumble yourself.

I have a theory that the birds who fancy rugby players go a bundle on all the muscles, but reckon they can put them to better use than chasing a squashed soccer ball round a muddy field. When they find that the chaps still prefer snuggling down with each other amongst the cowpats while they are expected to cut piles of corn beef sandwiches or refill the milk jugs, it is not surprising that they begin to think longingly of a couple of balls dropping lazily between their own uprights.

This was certainly the case with the Old Rottingfestrian ladies whose speed into the loose mauls would have been the envy of their better halves. I have not seen such lack of inhibition since Aunty Flo filled her knickers with crisps and danced the hokey-cokey at the British Legion Ladies’ Night – the last she ever went to.

When we creep away from this scene of sexual carnage, I can see that Sidney is not only exhausted but well-choked.

‘Not to worry, Sid,’ I say cheerfully, ‘it was a lousy chandelier, anyway.’

‘That’s not the point,’ he grunts. ‘Someone might have done themselves a serious injury.’

‘You stood more chance of injury yourself when that bird started thumbing through her “Perfumed Garden” for new ideas. I told you that position was for pregnant hunchbacks.’

‘Probably why you see so few of them about. Blimey – I thought I had bits of that chandelier wedged in my backbone.’

‘At least you discovered it was plastic, Sid.’ Sid looks at me a bit narky. ‘I mean the chandelier, Sid.’

For those of you who have not had the pleasure before, I had better say that my name is Timothy Lea and that Sidney Noggett is my brother-in-law and part-owner of the Cromby Hotel, or Super Cromby as it will be known when the banging stops. Details can be found in a smashing book (‘once I put it down I could not pick it up again’ – Harold Wilson), available from all top class bookstalls and entitled ‘Confessions from a Hotel’. And, talking of books and bookstalls, don’t you think it is time you dug into your pocket and bought this one? The man by the cash register is beginning to look at you a bit old-fashioned like. It gets better, honest it does.

Anyway, back to the plot: Sidney is part owner because Miss (‘call me Queen of the Boozers’) Ruperts came into the mazuma that bought the property company that owned the sites on either side of the Cromby – still with me? Good! She is advised by one Doctor Walter Carboy, whose main medical experience seems to have been in the area of curing wallet fatness. I have a constant fear that they might get spliced and really put the screws on Sidney but he reckons that Doctor ‘Conman’ Carboy already has a few wives scattered about and only needs one more for the police to start hollering ‘Bingo!’.

Despite not getting lumbered with Miss Ruperts’ hand and regions adjacent, Carboy still has considerable influence over the old soak and has voted himself onto the Board of the Company which is to run the Super Cromby. The only thing he has not been able to change is Miss Ruperts’ intention of restricting the clientele to geriatrics. These are not, as you might think, German fast bowlers but old people.

Now, I have nothing against old people, my old mum and dad being a bit that way inclined, but they do slow things up a bit. Also, as Sidney has pointed out in the past, they need special attention, and the more specialists there are about, the less likely Sid and I are to be two of them. In addition, people with qualifications and experience come expensive. All in all, Sid and I stand to lose out all over the shop once the Cromby becomes a glorified old people’s home and I know that the matter is beginning to prey on Sid’s mind. I know because he keeps rabbiting on about it.

‘Timmo,’ he says, ‘I don’t fancy this geriatric lark.’

‘I’m with you, Sid. I mean, I fancy a mature bird but this is ridiculous.’

‘I wasn’t just thinking about the fringe benefits, Timmo. In fact I wasn’t just thinking about being kept awake at night by the squeak of bathchairs. It’s this whole hotel business that’s getting me down.’

‘I know how you feel Sid. It’s so static isn’t it?’

‘Exactly, Timmo. And what’s more, I get fed up with being in the same place the whole time. You know what I mean, don’t you? When you’ve done a bit of window cleaning, driving instructing, and been whipped round the Med a couple of times, you get used to a change of scene.’

Sid is dead right there. In the hotel business the only novelty about the job is the faces of the birds you wake up on. You can reckon on half your female customers trying to get you into bed as surely as night follows day. Of course, I am not complaining about this. I fancy a bit of the other as much as the next man – oops, sorry vicar! – and I know that a lot of the reason for Sid being so narky is that wifey – my sister Rosie – has decided to come down and make the Cromby her permanent abode. This is cramping Sid’s style with the ladies a little more than somewhat. Rosie is great with another infant Noggett and reckons that the Hoverton ozone is just what she and her travelling companion need. Hoverton is the name of the oil slick with buildings that taxes the last ounce of inspiration from the British Travel Association’s copy-writers. And I am not kidding about the oil. Last year most of our customers were pilchards waiting to move into bigger tins.

But back to my conversation with Sidney.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says. This is disturbing news because every time Sid thinks it costs me money or causes me pain – sometimes both.

‘Really, Sid?’ I say, trying to sound wary but enthusiastic, very difficult it is, too.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Let’s face it. This place is going to run itself from now on. With Carboy and five hundred senior citizens queuing up for the best deckchairs, there’s nothing here for us.’

‘What was there here for me in the old days?’ I ask. Well, one likes to know, doesn’t one?

‘Nothing settled,’ says Sid cautiously. ‘But I did say that if we expanded I would see you all right.’

‘But we’re not going to expand?’

‘Not in the hotel business, no. I don’t mind being nice to people occasionally, but all the time, that’s different. They get on your nerves, don’t they? Our, I mean, my stake in this place is protected whether I stay here or not, so I reckon that I can afford to expand my interest into other fields.’

‘Such as, Sid?’

‘Well, like I said, Timmo. I’ve been thinking.’

‘You did say that, Sidney.’

‘And it occurred to me that all the training I had when I was with Funfrall was about flogging things. It suits my particular temperament too. I mean, I like people enough to be able to sell them something, but when they come back and say it doesn’t work I’ve gone off them enough to be able to tell them to beat it.’

‘You’re very lucky, Sid. What are you going to sell?’

‘I haven’t decided yet. I want to give the matter some very serious consideration. We don’t want to go out there with just any old rubbish.’

‘We?’

‘You want to come in with me, don’t you?’ Sid’s voice does a nice job at the amazed betrayal level. ‘This could be it, mate. This could be the big one.’

‘I’ve heard you say that before, Sid. If you got me a job as a shark trainer you’d be telling me how marvellous it was.’

A little green pound sign lights up behind Sidney’s eyes.

‘Hey, wait a minute. That’s not bad, Timmo. All these dolphinariums springing up all over the place. If we smeared you with some kind of repellent –’

‘Forget it, Sid. You’re not getting me playing “Please Sir” with a tankful of sharks.’

‘I’d take care of all the insurance.’

‘Forget it! Come on, Sid, do you have a proposition or don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. Have a bit of faith. What I suggest is this. I’ll stay here and look for the right product – I’ve put out a few feelers already – and you can go out and get your sales training.’

‘“Sales training”? What am I going to do then? Oh, wait a minute, don’t tell me, I know. I’m going to be bloody sales rep., aren’t I? And you’re going to sit back here on your arse bawling me out because I havn’t sold enough of the stuff’.

The expression on Sid’s face suggests that he has been caused physical pain. ‘Don’t say that word.’

‘What? “Arse”?’

‘“Sales rep.”! You call anyone a rep. and they’ll chuck in their cards immediately. You have to give the job stature. The very least you can be is an Area Manager.’

‘That sounds quite important.’

‘That’s exactly what it’s meant to sound. It’s like packets of detergent. The smallest one is always called “Jumbo size”. But that’s enough from me. You’ll be learning all about that when you do your training.’

‘Do I have to be trained, Sid. Can’t I pick it up as I go along? Surely you could train me?’

‘I could, Timmo, and very good it would be though I say so myself, but I want to be able to concentrate on finding the right product. Something that fills a housewife’s needs.’

‘We’ll be selling to women, will we, Sid?’

‘I think that’s what we’re best at, Timmo.’

‘And where am I going to get this training?’

‘Very important question, Timmo. Luckily, I anticipated your enthusiasm for this new career opportunity and I wrote off to a number of our larger companies who run training schemes for salesmen.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Sid. But, I thought I was going to work for you.’

‘You are, Timmo. Once you have completed your training, and I have found the right product, you will resign and join MagiNog.’

‘MagiNog? Blimey! It sounds a bit underhand, Sid. I mean, taking all their training and then pissing off to join you.’

‘It’s a fact of business life, Timmo. It could happen to anyone. One day, when we’re a household word, it will be happening to us.’

‘I don’t see MagiNog as a household word somehow, Sid.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Timmo. You concentrate on spelling your name right on the application forms.’

I must say you have to give Sid full marks for effort. In the next few days a sackful of envelopes arrive with my humble name picked out by electric typewriter, and I plough through sheets of application forms. Previous jobs, exam results, army service, hobbies, interests.

‘Put down everything you’ve done,’ says Sid cheerfully. ‘It’s all evidence of your experience at meeting people. That’s very important in selling.’

Another couple of weeks go by and I get three letters from different firms asking me to report for an interview. Sidney is well chuffed because one of these comes from HomeClean Products who he reckons can sell vaginal deodorants to skunks.

I view my forthcoming change of career with mixed feelings. The Cromby is beginning to fill up with cantankerous old fogies but at the same time, there are a few additions to the staff who definitely justify more than a quick spot of eyeball bashing. One in particular is Miss Alma Stokely, our new physiotherapist, or, as Sid scornfully puts it, a masseuse with ‘O’ levels. Sid is a bit narky because he reckons that Alma owes her position to a special relationship with Doctor Carboy. I don’t know about special – any kind of relationship with Alma would suit me down to the ground – or any other handy flat surface. She is one of the cool, lady-like ones you catch shooting crafty glances at the front of your jeans. She wears tight cashmere sweaters and fiddles with her felt pen when she is talking to you. I reckon she is trying to fight an irresistible desire to rip my y-fronts off, but then I feel that about a lot of women – and have the scratches on my wrists to prove it.

The day before my interview in London I look through the door of her office and there is this bleeding great couch taking up half the room. It is in three separate pieces, and I am puzzling put how it works when the lovely Alma glides up behind me.

‘I see you’re gazing at my new toy,’ she purrs.

‘Er, yes, Miss Stokely,’ I mumble, because the twinset and pearls types always bring out the peasant in me. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a vibrator,’ she says. ‘They use them a lot in the German clinics.’ That’s news to me but I don’t say anything. ‘Excellent for winkling out the wrinkles on your dorsals.’ Well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it?

‘How does it work?’

She presses a button in the side of the thing and all three surfaces start shuddering and shaking in different directions.

‘To gain maximum benefit you should take a hot bath and lie on it in the nude.’

The way some of the moving parts are nearly smacking against each other makes me think that if you did not watch your angle of dangle you could have a nasty accident.

‘Would you like to try it?’ Miss Stokely’s eyes are leaning on my crutch again. ‘It’s safer if you lie on something.’ She looks me straight in the mince pies and lowers her eyelids fractionally and for the life of me I don’t think she is referring to a thick bath towel.

Unfortunately I never have the chance to find out because I hear the sound of a couple of large red hands being rubbed together and Carboy stalks into the room.

‘Well, if it isn’t Timothy Lea,’ he says. ‘And if it isn’t, so much the better. No good looking longingly at that, Lea. You’ll have to wait a few years before you’re eligible for a spot of Egyptian P.T. on that little number.’ This just shows how wrong he can be but I don’t know that ’til later.

I have been looking forward to getting back to the smoke for my HomeClean interview and it is a bit of a disappointment to find that I have to report to one of those places which is so far out on the tube that you can never remember having heard of the station before. Down Railway Cuttings and through the industrial estate and I am face to face with a man in a peaked cap who looks as if he showed people round concentration camps while they were still in operation. When I tell him why I am there his lip curls contemptuously and he is on the point of directing me to the Sales Office when a large lorry pulls up outside the gate house.

‘Got another load of SM 42’s, mate,’ sings out the driver, ‘where do you want ’em?’ The bloke on the gate shoots me a worried glance and I imagine that this must be the code number of some new product. Very exciting, isn’t it? Oh well, maybe you should have bought an Alistair McLean?

I pad round to the reception at Home Sales, and the bird there is peeling faster than the walls. She must have been on a walking tour of the Sahara Desert and left her suntan cream at home. It is surprising at a place called HomeClean that the reception area should look like a rest home for spiders; not a bit like the flash interior of Funfrall Enterprises. Still, when you think what a load of conmen they were, maybe this is a good thing.

‘We’re running rather behind schedule,’ says the receptionist coldly. ‘If you take a seat over there I’ll call you when Mr. Snooks is free.’ I am not very happy about Mr. Snooks and when I eventually see him my fears are justified. He has very thick rimless glasses, a green bow tie and a haircut that would make a gooseberry feel like screaming Lord Sutch.

‘Sit down quickly,’ he says. At least, that is what I think he says. I leap into a chair before it occurs to me that he might have said ‘Quigley’. Snooks is obviously surprised by the speed at which I have moved, especially as it has succeeded in knocking his vase of artificial flowers all over his blotter. This would not be so bad except that the vase has real water in it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought you said “Quickly”.’

‘Said what quickly?’

‘Said that I was to sit down quickly.’

Snooks looks at me blankly. ‘I said “sit down, Quigley”.’

‘Yes, I realise that now. Sorry about your blotter. Can I do anything? I’ve got a hankie here.’ Snooks looks at me warily.

‘No, no. It doesn’t matter. Sit down Quig – just sit down. Now tell me, what first –’

I feel I have to put the poor bastard right.

‘The name is Lea,’ I say, ‘not Quigley, Lea.’ Snooks looks as if he could kill me.

‘Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’

‘Because I thought you said “quickly”. You see, if my name was Quigley I wouldn’t have thought you said “quickly”. Being Lea it is easier to confuse –’ Do you ever get that feeling that nothing you can do or say is going to make a person think of you as being less than a complete berk even though you are totally in the right? A glance into Snooks’ mush tells me that I am in that situation now. My voice fades away and I try a nervous smile. Snooks does not seem to like that either.

‘As I was trying to say,’ he continues, ‘looking at your record I see that you have done a number of jobs, none of them directly associated with selling. What is it that has suddenly made you decide to become a salesman?’ I am ready for that one.

‘All my jobs have brought me into contact with people, and —’ I try one of those little smiles that Snooks does not seem to like – ‘I’ve found that when it is necessary to persuade them to do something, I have been quite good at it.’ Snooks looks at me as if he reckons I could not persuade him to pour a bucket of water over himself if he was on fire.

‘Getting on with people is a very important part of the job,’ he says, mopping his blotter, ‘but there is more to it than that. You have to inspire confidence with your appearance,’ he winces at the length of my hair, ‘know your products backwards, and to enthuse your customers with their performance.’ I nod as if every word he has said is already engraved on my heart. ‘What makes you want to join HomeClean?’

‘Because of your reputation,’ I grovel. ‘I know that you are an organisation which prides itself on the strength of its selling operation and I wanted to join the best.’

‘And our products,’ Snooks sucks in a mouthful of air. ‘The finest on the market – a complete range of domestic appliances, made to the highest specifications by British Craftsmen.’

‘All made in Britain, are they?’ I say, because I remember that Mum’s HomeClean toaster had ‘Made in Italy’ on the side of it. They must like their toast well done over there because I never saw a bit come out of it that was not like thin charcoal.

Snooks clears his throat. ‘Virtually all,’ he says. ‘We do import one or two items from the Continent and our Commonwealth affiliates.’

‘Hong Kong?’ I say, brightly. Snooks winces.

‘Australia,’ he says. ‘Haven’t you heard of the Kangiwash?’ I nod deceitfully. ‘Our record of new product development is second to none,’ he continues, proudly. ‘Our new vacuum cleaner is sweeping all before it.’ He pauses for me to enjoy the joke.

‘Oh, yes,’ I say eagerly. ‘And then there are your SM 42’s.’ I reckon that repeating this bit of information I picked up at the gate is going to show what a switched on bloke I am but Snooks’ face registers horror.

‘SM 42’s?’

I nod brightly.

‘You know about the SM 42’s?’ There is a hint of fear in his voice.

I am just about to tell him how I know when a thought stops me. My interview so far has not been one of the all time greats and Snooks seems to get an attack of the vapours every time I mention the words SM 42. Maybe I can turn these simple letters and numerals to my advantage.

‘I know,’ I say, leaning forward and fixing him with a steely eye. ‘And I very much want to join your training scheme.’

Snooks thumbs through the papers on his desk nervously,

‘Acceptance for the scheme is no guarantee of employment,’ he says. ‘You have to satisfy our instructors at Knuttley Hall and spend a period in the field during which you will be on parole.’

‘I am confident I can come up to the standard you require,’ I say with dignity. I search for his eyes again but they are not available.

‘You will be hearing from us in due course,’ he says. ‘Your past record certainly suggests that you have many of the qualities we are looking for. Tell me,’ he tries to appear casual, ‘how did you come to hear about the—er SM 42’s?’ He drops his voice when he says ‘SM 42’ as if he fears the room may be bugged.

‘I’d rather not reveal the source of my information at this stage,’ I say, rising to my feet with a languid grace which succeeds in jarring his flowers on to the blotter again. ‘Let’s just say it was from someone not too far away from here,’ I raise an eyebrow knowingly and Snooks practically ruptures himself getting the door open.

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