Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington

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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

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