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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. SPIKE continued I knew what was happening, but all the same, I was still a bit scared. I could, I suppose, have run home to my Mum, instead, but there didn't seem to be a lot of point. Anyway our house was full of Boys and I was too embarrassed to contemplate how on earth I could manage to separate my Mum from the rest of the family. Aunty Maureen fixed me up with a supply of towels, rinsed out my knickers and dried them in front of the fire. Uncle Spike, bless him, pretended that he had not noticed a thing. After that, Maureen and I became even more closely bonded through having shared my small but significant rite of passage. Sometimes, when Uncle Spike wasn't around, she would talk quite frankly to me about love and sex and marriage. I think that they had a quite enviable relationship; they were not just in love, they actually enjoyed each other. As for me, I just enjoyed being their surrogate daughter. I always wondered why they'd never had kids of their own. When I was fifteen Aunty Maureen and me had one of our heart-to-hearts. I was going steady at the time with a seventeen year-old bloke called Chaz. His parents were quite well off and they had bought him a Mini for his birthday. Soon he was wanting a lot more than just a quick grope and a fumble across the gear lever and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go any further. A lot of the girls at school were boasting of their lost virginities but I was in two minds about my own. On the one hand, losing it seemed like a good idea, on the other I was terrified of not just doing it but also of the consequences. Maureen listened to me, patiently and without judgement, as I explained my hopes and fears, my desires and my confusion. Then she told me what had happened to her and my jaw had dropped. She had conceived at sixteen, following a brief encounter with a young soldier recently returned from Dunqueque.They were planning to marry when he was killed in an air raid. The pregnancy proved to be ectopic and the operation nearly killed her. Afterwards infection set in, which nearly killed her again, but obviously she didn't die and was left sterile instead. It was a heartwrenching story, but I know that it wasn't intended to frighten me off sex; that wasn't Aunty Maureen's way. "You'll do what you think best," she said to me. "In the end that's all that matters, but just be sure that you do what you think is best for you and not best for some lad you hardly know well enough to care about." That made sense. It struck a chord with me. She went on to tell me how she had come to see her own tragedy as a blessing. She hadn't wanted to marry the soldier, but "I had to," she said wistfully. "There wasn't any choice about that in those days. It was one thing to get yourself pregnant before the trip up the aisle, but it was another thing entirely to leave out the wedding altogether." She sniffed significantly. "Mind you, if the silly sod could have just waited another couple of weeks before sitting down under one of Hitler's bombs, I could have had a war widow's pension." She said this with a distinctly mischievous glint in her eyes. I ditched Chaz the next day and I waited nearly two years before I succumbed to the charms of Warren, who I had practically to seduce. I think that was part of the challenge for me. That's another facial expression I'll never forget; the look of mortified horror on Warren's face when I produced the packet of Durex. I think that he seriously toyed with running away from the brazen hussy with whom he had inadvertently become carnally entangled. In the end however he was male enough to be unable to ignore the demands of his sex. It was not a lot of fun, for either of us, and although we continued to go out together for a few more weeks, we gradually drifted apart. It was as though the intimacy had created a bond, which needed time to dissolve. Partly, I think, this was out of mutual embarrassment for what we had so unsuccessfully shared, but mainly it was down to what Maureen had warned me about. Basically, I just didn't care that much about him, and I think that once he had got what he thought he had wanted, he found that he didn't care that much about me either. We had sex twice more before we parted. Well, it was a packet of three, and I have always been thrifty! I've been jumping ahead of myself a bit; never mind. I've always been the same, and it's too late to change now, I suppose. It was Aunty Maureen and Uncle Spike who helped me when I was ready to start having a social life. I was fourteen and I was a complete tomboy. It was all due to those brothers of mine; that and the fact that there were no girls of my own age, in our immediate neighbourhood. I did all my playing with boys, wearing clothes which were mainly cast offs of Barry's. Apart from my school uniform, I only ever seemed to possess one actual frock at a time. In any event during my childhood there was not a single family wedding, I was the last born of all the grandchildren, so there were no christenings either. So, school excepted, dressy occasions were not simply few and far between, they were non-existent. There was a lad in my class called Robby. He had fair, almost white, hair and muscles where other boys of his age had spindles. His chest was broad, and he was tall and drop dead gorgeous. He buttonholed me in the corridor one lunchtime and asked, all sort of casual like, if I was planning on going to the Saturday night youth club disco. "Yeah," I said, trying to sound dead cool. "I might do." "Great," he said, all cool too. Probably, I can see that now, he was trying as hard as me to be sophisticated and laid back, but I was dead impressed. "Shall I see you inside then?" "Okay," I said a bit shakily. Had I got a date? I wasn't sure. I was friends with a couple or three girls at school, but not so friendly as I was by then with Maureen--somewhere along the line I had stopped calling her Aunty. I certainly didn't feel close enough, or self confident enough, to discuss such important matters with mere schoolgirls. "What am I going to wear?" I wailed at Maureen that evening; it was a Thursday. "Oh, shush and stop fretting," Maureen said, as she busied her self about the kitchen. "Me an' your Uncle Spike'll sort something out, won't we love?" "'Course we will, Pet." Uncle Spike was buried deep in The Exchange And Mart. He read it avidly the way other men pour over The Sporting Life or The Financial Times. Absentmindedness was not one his faults though. He could read his paper and join in with a conversation, then periodically burst out laughing at the programme he was listening to on the radio, as well as occasionally interjecting with something mysterious like: "Hey look at that," jabbing the paper as though we could all see what he was pointing at. "There's a bargain for you." For some reason Maureen's and Uncle Spike's assurances gave me no comfort and by the Saturday I had become resolved not to go out at all. I did pop round to Uncle's at around ten-thirty though; I always did. "There you are, Pet", Maureen said, beaming at me, as I entered their kitchen. "What do you think of that?" "Um, great," I said, probably a little too unconvincingly. "Er, what is it?" It was a large machine with lots of spindly arms sticking out of the top. It looked a little like a sewing machine; but nothing at all like my Mum's hand-cranked Singer, which lived, without ever seeing the light of day, beneath its dustless, shiny, wooden case. Uncle Spike and Maureen had done some sorting out in their kitchen. Tidying up was an expression that sprang to mind; but only if you knew the couple well. There had been some stuff, which was a quantity of military surplus radio equipment--all olive drab paint; oversized dials, knobs and switches; and needing the strength of Hercules to carry around. Uncle Spike had brought this bargain into the house a few days earlier and piled the whole lot onto the kitchen table. I guess that there must have been two dozen sets at least, not to mention several decrepit cardboard boxes full of spare parts such as valves and unidentifiable lengths of dusty cable. I had been there at the time Uncle Spike was carting the stuff in through the house, huffing and puffing under the strain. Pausing only to curse softly whenever he grazed a lumpy knuckle against a doorjamb, he painstakingly fetched every item of his bargain purchase from his ancient Commer van and added it to the pile on the table. All the time Maureen continued with her task of cooking dinner which was to be Toad-in-the-Hole. Their conversation that day is etched in memory, "Oh, mind out for the batter, Pet," Maureen said, as she hastened to reposition a basin when Uncle Spike plonked down the first item. "Whatever have you bought now, dear?" "Oh, just a few bits and pieces," Uncle Spike said, slightly winded, but sounding happy. He surveyed the table briefly. "You'd best just make a bit of space, love, there's a few more things still to come in." Maureen sighed, almost imperceptibly, and picked up the colander containing the washed and trimmed beans. "There you are, dear," she said. "How's that?" "Lovely, that'll do nicely. I'll just get the rest." That was how the whole job went; not a single cross word. As Uncle Spike came in with each new item, he politely informed his mate that perhaps she could find somewhere else for this or that and she silently and politely obliged. As soon as his back was turned, she re-sited the thing she was holding in her hand in any convenient place. By the time he was finished, Maureen was still using the kitchen table to complete her preparations for dinner, though now her work surface was largely at eye level. I watched Uncle Spike carefully as dinner was served up onto plates. A splash of fat fell onto one of the radios; Uncle winced, very slightly. A sliver of green bean dropped from a spoon and fell neatly through a ventilation slot; his chest rose and fell in a silent sigh of resignation. Their ability to live with each other's faults and foibles was immense! On that Saturday morning, as I stared at what I took to be an industrial sewing machine, I noticed that the army surplus radios were now piled up precariously in the corner where, until they were again moved, they would make using the door to the rest of the house difficult. It goes without saying that stuff was always being moved from one place to another in Uncle's house. "It's an overlocker," Uncle Spike told me. "He's had it for years, haven't you, dear?" "Yes, I got it when Paxton's closed down," he confirmed. "Ooh, now when was that? Let's see --- " "Never mind all that now, dear," Maureen said smoothly as she moved to intercept what might prove to a very long trip down memory lane. A long lane, may indeed have no turnings, but whoever coined that proverb had never travelled into the past with Uncle Spike. That journey was more like a sojourn around Hampton Court Maze with a blind man. Maureen produced a Tesco's carrier bag. "Look what I found in my cupboard, Katie." She pulled out a length of black silk crepe. "I think there's enough here to make you a nice, long, black skirt." I agreed with the possibility, but I still had some reservations regarding the practicalities. I wasn't a lot of use at needlework at school, but at least the sewing machines there were in some degree comprehensible. The overlocker seemed to be all levers and dials. |