Читать книгу Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington - Страница 8

Blow Jobs and Dutch Caps

At eighteen, I thought I was pretty expert at affairs of the heart.

After all, I’d experienced a 24-hour non-consummated love affair with an American soldier in Stockholm and been proposed to by a French Foreign Legionnaire on a beach in Cannes.

It had been a long hot leisurely day on the beach with not too many people. In those far-off days Cannes hadn’t yet become the hotspot of film festivals, the international jet set, glitterati and wannabes hoping to be spotted and become famous. It was still very much a French family seaside resort where Parisians in particular traditionally spent the July and August holidays.

Rita and I had saved our pocket and odd-jobs money and taken ourselves off via ferry and train to the south of France. She had just finished her first year at King’s College, London, and I had just finished twelve years at the convent school of Loreto College, St Albans, Hertfordshire.

We’d been sunning ourselves all day on the beach but it was now early evening and pale stars were just beginning to come out. Sun worshippers had packed up and gone home, picnic things had been gathered up, and deckchairs dismantled. The beach was becoming deserted.

We were sipping freshly made lemonade from glass bottles – the real stuff bought from a local vendor – when four young bronzed men approached. Straight out of a Hollywood movie, they were lean, fit and strong. None of your fake beach-bum pretentiousness about this lot.

From then on things moved pretty quickly.

Although the French Foreign Legion was part of France’s military forces, it was also open to foreign nationals. Its name had become synonymous with men of mystery of all nationalities, fleeing criminals, daredevils and would-be adventurers. Its mythic quality was reinforced by the novels of PC Wren, whose fictional hero Beau Geste was the Indiana Jones of our day, a daring handsome chap who fought and won against the forces of evil.

Our young men told us tales of desert forts and battles with warring desert tribes; of thirst, sand and unbelievable heat; and of a country called Indochina where a savage war was being waged.

Can you imagine Rita’s and my reaction? Two young girls from rural England meeting, and then being decidedly wooed by, four gorgeous young men from the Foreign Legion. What stories would we tell when we got back to England!

Our new friends were fresh from the First Indochina War and, having survived the disastrous Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam when the local forces inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the occupying French colonial forces, were now on local leave.

We knew nothing about that war, had no notion of French colonial history, and had no idea that the Second Indochina War, which we would later all know better as the Vietnam War, was still to come in 1963.

My legionnaire, the one who attached himself to me, was called Georges and he had one brown eye and one blue eye. We cuddled and kissed on the sand and as the full moon rose over the Mediterranean he asked me to marry him. A young English virgin must have seemed very desirable after the girls in the honky-tonk bars in Saigon. Even so, it was flattering.

The growing, groping relationship, however, came to an abrupt end because Rita came to her senses much more quickly than me, pulled me to my feet and marched me off to our simple pension. Georges hadn’t even got my knickers down.

I was still a virgin (we were in those days) on my third trip to the south of France during my first long university vacation in the summer of 1953 when I was fully expecting to be deflowered.

Clive, the boyfriend I was with at the time, and I had motored down to Cannes with fellow students Jean and Mike, in Mike’s dad’s car. (This was the same Clive who would lend me his Jaguar XK140 for my honeymoon-yet-to-come.) My girlfriend Jean, who was reading French at university and was therefore considered to be something of an expert in affairs of the heart, was ‘doing it’ with Mike and had given me all sorts of tips on what to do and how to behave when the moment came.

‘Don’t do it in the back of a car. Make sure it’s a bed and wear something sexy and parade around the room in it first. It drives them out of their mind.’

I did all this, although a long white cotton nightie probably didn’t really count as sexy. Then I climbed into bed beside Clive and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

There were some furtive mumblings from him and a nervous pat on the thigh (through the nightie) and finally, happily worn out and relaxed after a long day on the beach, I fell asleep.

I woke up in the morning still in full flower.

Only years later did I realise that Clive was much more nervous than me and hadn’t been able to get it up.

And never did. At least not with me.

We didn’t know much about sex in those days of the 50s. The Swinging 60s were still a long way ahead.

Our advice from my Mother Superior, who assembled our tiny Sixth Form of five for a Facts of Life lecture prior to our leaving school, was twofold: our lives were still plastic bowls waiting to be moulded (yes, there was plastic then), and: ‘Never wear low-cut dresses because it inflames men’s passions.’

We all rushed out and bought low-cut dresses.

Except mine was a daringly low cut red velvet top, which I wore with a black silky skirt. At the first university ‘hop’ (dance) the Rugby Club thought I showed definite promise. The hooker, one Arty Siddle, who could take beer bottle tops off with his teeth, invited me to Sunday afternoon tea at his men’s residence, College Hall (the same one that David Attenborough and his brother Richard had lived in when their father was principal of Leicester University). He pulled up the couch in front of the gas fire and launched himself at me with the same enthusiasm that he usually put into his Saturday afternoon rugby scrum.

I primly refused.

And he desisted.

Young men were mostly really gentlemen in those days (even rugby players) and if a girl said no, it meant no. I look at my granddaughters today and hear them telling how they only accept closed cans of drink because of so-called ‘date-rape’ drugs being slipped into them and how they move about in twos and threes, and how some of their school contemporaries send and exchange porn and self-porn on their phones, and I’m amazed at how naïve we all were way back then. It seemed like a much safer and more innocent world. It wasn’t, of course; it was more that in those days forbidden sexual behaviour and child abuse were deeply hidden.

After Arty’s unsuccessful scrumming the Rugby Club lost all sexual interest in me but adopted me as a sort of mascot. I went to all their home and away matches for a year and learnt all the dirty rugby songs, including an unexpurgated version of the classic ‘Eskimo Nell’, which was usually recited in a rustic accent and with a leering expression:

When a man grows old and his balls grow cold

And the tip of his knob turns blue.

When a maiden’s hand can’t raise a stand,

Then I’ll tell ye a thing or two …

A lascivious laugh goes down well at this point – huh-huh, he-he.

Unfortunately I can’t remember much else of it, although Alan did have a full handwritten copy of it years later and we would sit and read it together by our peat fire in Ireland and get all excited.

Clive wooed me patiently and passionlessly for the rest of that year, and when I finally told him I had met somebody else (Malcolm) he punched the wall outside of my Auntie Phyllis’s flat and made his fists bleed. I watched dispassionately, said goodnight, closed the front door and went to bed. I remember Rita had made one of my favourites (rabbit stew) for supper that night.

I subsequently had a brief (but no heavy petting) fling for a while with a Divinity student at London University called Stephen Tite. He was a vicar-to-be straight out of a Jane Austen novel with a skinny frame, a stutter and black shiny suit. It certainly wasn’t his physical charms I was attracted to. I had somehow found out (I obviously inherited Doris’s sleuthing genes) that he was a Ward of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of the Great Twelve Livery Companies of the City of London that had been established in the twelfth century as a medieval guild for the goldsmith trade. Stephen proudly told me that its motto was Justitia Virtutum Regina, Justice is Queen of Virtues. He invited me to a banquet at the London Guildhall, which also dates from the twelfth century. The Guildhall is still the home of the City of London Corporation and its Great Hall has been the centre of City government since the Middle Ages, the setting for the pomp and circumstance of state and mayoral occasions since 1502.

An invitation to a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, this was what I had been hoping for! Wearing a turquoise-blue taffeta dress (that I shudder to think of now) under a high domed ceiling against heavily panelled walls, I dined with peers of the realm, bishops, City officials, goldsmiths and the then Lord Mayor of London (whose name I don’t think I ever knew) at a long, centuries-old pockmarked wooden table. Candles flickered, lights blazed, and speeches were made. But most of all I remember dining off golden platters and drinking wine out of golden goblets. Real gold! I’ve had some pretty fancy meals since but none has quite matched that dinner in pomp, tradition, splendour and downright wonderfulness.

I like to imagine the Reverend Tite (except he’s probably dead now) pottering about his leafy English country parish giving aid to his Christian flock. I heard later that he had married a girl from Cheltenham named Constance, which seemed very appropriate.

Thirty-three years after my glittering banquet, in 1985 the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre were discovered under the Guildhall. Historians reckon that up to 7 000 spectators sitting on wooden benches in the open air watched wild animals fighting to the death there and, on especially popular nights, the execution of criminals. It seems that Justice wasn’t Queen of Virtues back in the Britain of AD 43 or so.

Banquet over, mission achieved, it was now Malcolm, with his floppy blond Hugh Grant hairstyle, green eyes, corduroy trousers and a cavalry twill jacket (standard cool undergraduate threads at the time) who pretty much took over my life.

Like me, Malcolm Pratt was from a working-class home. He had been the first boy ever from his local school to win a scholarship to Oxford. He had taken five A Levels and got A’s for all of them. He played the violin, read widely and deeply, loved the same movies and TV shows as me and was delightful company. The middle one of three brothers, he lived with his mother, Margaret, and father, Edward, in Manor Park in the East End of London. His mother, who despite her mild manner was really made of very strong stuff, refused to let her children be evacuated so Robert, aged nine, Malcolm, aged seven, and Geoffrey, aged two, spent almost every night of the five years of World War 2 in an Anderson underground bomb shelter at the bottom of their garden. On nights when they were warned the bombing would be particularly bad they camped out deep underground in the local tube station along with thousands of other Londoners. Despite living in London’s East End, the bastion of London’s Cockneys, none of the Pratts had a Cockney accent. Malcom’s mother had come from somewhere in the West Country and Edward was a bit of a mystery man. Although he only worked as a store clerk at the local hospital, he was well educated, well spoken, had only married at 35, and never spoke about his past. But every Christmas a Christmas card came in the post for him from an officers’ mess somewhere in Canada. He would quickly hide the card away.

After Malcolm’s confident assertion in the first few moments we met, as I served him a pint of bitter in The George at Wanstead, that he was going to marry me, we settled into an easy rhythm of girlfriend and boyfriend. I went down to Oxford every second weekend, where I stayed in a little B&B. Malcolm came up to Leicester, which had an external college of the University of London and where I was studying for an English Honours degree, to visit me.

The B&B was essential.

My first visit to the ‘dreaming spires’ was not an auspicious one. Some friends of Malcolm’s who lived a few miles outside of Oxford had offered to put me up for the weekend. They had been warned that I would be a late arrival as we were going to a party first.

There were always parties in Oxford of those days – breakfasts with plovers’ eggs, ‘drinks’, and social occasions of every sort. We were the first working-class kids who had breached these elitist walls and we made the most of every moment of our privileged young lives. The 50s was not the era of causes, marching for ideals, inveighing against an unequal and wicked world. Those would all come later, in the 60s and 70s. We had a beautiful young queen on the throne, Sir Edmund Hillary had just climbed Everest and Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, had told us we had never had it so good. And we hadn’t.

After the party (a not very alcoholic punch, dancing and good company – no drugs that we knew of in those days) we took a taxi to the house of Malcolm’s friends.

An anxious face answered the door.

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ said Jo, Malcolm’s friend. ‘My in-laws have arrived. Sorry, but there’s no room.’

‘No problem,’ said Malcolm cheerily. ‘Kate can come back to college with me.’

I was far too tired and naïve to see the folly of this suggestion. I didn’t realise this would mean we would have to climb in. Despite being banned by the university authorities, roof climbing has been a traditional Oxford sport for centuries.

No modern buildings then or now disturbed Lincoln’s medieval ivy-covered walls and church tower, one of Oxford’s famous dreaming spires. Imagine Hermione on the roof of Hogwarts and you get some idea of my task. Three storeys of 500-year-old stones, and a couple of (more recent) drainpipes later, knees bruised and stockings ruined, I climbed thankfully into Malcolm’s bed and he, ever the gentleman, took the couch in his study.

Today during university vacations you can stay as a guest at Lincoln College on one of those medieval staircases in a medieval room (maybe one that once John le Carré slept in or where Dr Seuss thought out his children’s books) complete with on-site ‘scout’, your personal college servant. Malcom’s scout Reggie, of indeterminate age and rather shaky hands, used to insist on toasting our muffins for us before the small cheerful fire that crackled in Malclom’s study during winter months.

In the morning a heavy banging on the thick medieval door woke me up. ‘Open up, sir!’

It was Bill, the surly college porter. (Think a cross between Bob the Builder and Shrek but with a bowler hat.) ‘I believe you’ve got female company,’ he growled.

We’d been spotted climbing in. Two hours later Malcolm was summoned by the dean, but fate was on our side. Bill had had grudgingly to admit that we had been found in two separate rooms with a locked door between us, and Malcolm’s friend Jo had put a note in Malcolm’s pigeonhole telling him there was no room at the inn.

The dean told Malcolm sternly that no woman had spent the night in the college since it had been founded in 1475. (Or certainly hadn’t been caught in the act.) ‘There’s no precedent for your behaviour.’ This was really serious stuff and a College Council had to be convened. Malcolm was rusticated (sent home) for the rest of the term, and gated (not allowed out at night) for the following term. In fact he was very lucky. To be ‘sent down’ from Oxford, expelled, would have devastated his parents and although it seems so strange nowadays to say so, it would have ruined his life.

Kissing and cuddling and the general feeling of bits and bobs of body parts was inevitably now developing into proper sex. I didn’t even know what a clitoris was, although Malcolm found out, and I enjoyed many a highly pleasurable moment on the couch in Auntie Phyllis’s flat as we watched television together. Auntie Phyllis sat on a chair in front of the couch where Malcolm and I were entwined. ‘Shh, you two,’ she would scold, ‘what do you think you’re up to?’ But never once did she turn round to spot us in action. I muffled my groans.

Then one night, when Auntie Phyllis was on night duty, I finally found out what all the fuss was about. It was all hot, sticky, a bit messy and not very comfortable. Afterwards we decided that I should go and get a contraceptive device fitted and that Malcolm would read up on sex.

If you’ve watched the BBC TV series Call the Midwife you will have had a visual of the cramped, crowded clinics in the East End of London where mothers-to-be, new mothers with babies to be weighed, women with problem babies, mothers with runny-nosed toddlers and all manner of squalling infants waited patiently in rows of hard chairs to be seen by the doctor or the nurses.

Very, very few of them, if any, were there for birth control. It just wasn’t done.

My good friend Audrey, who had red hair and green eyes and was now engaged to the Mike with whom I had holidayed in the south of France on the occasion of my non-deflowering by Clive, had the same idea. Together we plucked up our courage and went to the local clinic in downtown Leicester to be fitted with Dutch caps. These were the most common form of female contraception in those days. (Imagine a shallow round of rubber with a springy edge about the size of a large bath-plug …) Only men of dubious character or foreigners used condoms (or ‘French letters’, as they were euphemistically called) and the Pill hadn’t yet been invented.

Audrey and I were whisked into separate compartments divided by flimsy frayed curtains, had our spread-eagled legs thrust high into obstetric leg clamps, were probed and prodded and finally fitted with individual Dutch caps by cheerful nurses, who thought that because we weren’t married (but were obviously respectable because we sported engagement rings) we were very avant-garde and daring to have come to the clinic for birth control.

The Dutch cap worked well but often took away the spontaneity of sex because you had to make sure you had put it in if you expected to be making love. To suddenly rush off to the bathroom in the heat of passion and wiggle the damn thing in was not conducive to keeping things going.

The sex bible of the time was Dutch gynaecologist Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. It had already sold over half a million copies by the time I read it, and it postulated in highly technical language that the ‘critical goal of marriage consists of sexual pleasure shared by husband and wife’. It was very radical, very clandestine, definitely not the subject of tea-time talks or knitting bees. Well-thumbed copies of the book were highly sought after by eager students who knew very little about sex other than what – if anything – their parents had told them or they had gleaned from banned copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Think of it as something that had the impact that Fifty Shades of Grey had when it was first published. My protected and innocent generation had never heard of anal sex, blow jobs, fellatio or S&M.

When the first couple at my university who were known ‘to live in sin’ (that was the expression for cohabiting when you weren’t married) walked through our student concourse, we were secretly thrilled and simultaneously shocked. We half expected cloven hoofs and forked tails.

We knew little or nothing of homosexuals, or ‘queers’, except that somehow they were all confined to the acting profession. Legend had it that one of the great stage actors of the day was ‘one of those’ but that was the subject done and dusted. We were too busy trying to figure out the workings of our own bodies to bother about anybody else’s.

Talking of blow jobs … Half a century later, one of my dearest of all dear friends, a staunch Catholic, also convent educated and married at 20, but whom I suspect had never had an orgasm in her life and only knew about the missionary position, latched onto the term ‘blow job’. She went around gaily declaring, ‘What he needs is a good blow job’, or ‘Time for him to have a blow job.’

I found out later that she thought it all had to do with a hairdryer.

I’ve never forgotten the look on her face when I explained in as chaste terms as possible what a blow job entailed.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked in horror.

Needless to say she never used the term again.

I remember first reading Ideal Marriage one sunny morning as the bells of Oxford rang out all around me sitting in my B&B waiting for Malcolm to collect me for a day’s punting on the river. I was very puzzled by the diagrams and when I got to the bit where Van de Velde described a kiss as ‘an irregular intermittent pneumatic massage’ I gave up.

Practice makes perfect and now, a lifetime of sexual experience later, I’m almost tempted to find an old copy. As late as 2004 a marriage counsellor and sex guru was writing about it in Nature Review: ‘This is not a prude’s book. Young couples who grab a used copy off the Internet may have even as much fun with it as their great-grandparents did.’

Mmm. I think the sort of sex knowledge young people have today would certainly ease their passage through the book.

I never made it past the clitoris. But I have more than made up for that since.