LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      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

Скачать книгу