Chapter 20

Another Ending and Another Beginning - December 1961 – January 1962.

The bomb dropped the week before Xmas. Mr Farrell was promoted to a position in Wellington as what Frank called ‘Two Eye Cee” to Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, British High Commissioner and the butt of lotsa totally unwarranted jokes about his name and sexual preferences.

Mr Farrell was pleased to be advancing in his career, Mrs Farrell was pleased to be able to start a MSc in Geology, but the kids were devastated. For at least a fortnight. Then they found out that the British High Commission would provide a house in Ngaio, opposite a really nice bush reserve with a public pool, and that they could be enrolled at a very good co-educational school with high academic standards. Onslow College was no more than 15 mins away by train and Chick could certainly play cricket, and perhaps (since the school was ‘progressive’) Maureen could too! Chick would meet lotsa girls, and Maureen would meet lotsa boys. What’s not to like?

Mr Farrell was off to Wellington in the New Year, ready to start on Jan 10th, and Mrs Farrell and the kids were joining him in time to start school on the first of February. Mr Farrell’s replacement was due to take over the house on Feb 4th. In the meantime, there was Xmas. Shades of the Reeds in 1959!

Xmas was busy. Grandma Henley invited Mum ‘n Dad ‘n me for a meal at the farm, and we drove down in the morning, stuffed ourselves with a very late lunch with Bruce and Robert that Grandma Henley had prepared and Mum had helped cook, and after a leisurely walk over the farm, drove back that evening. I also ate a celebratory meal with the Farrells, another with Judith, Frank and Emma, and had lunch with the Miles family, Mary O’Hara, and Chick. There, I was what Frank called “a spare prick at a wedding’. Pauline and Chick were a lot closer to being ‘in love’ than Maureen and me, and they were pretty much fixated on each other. I wondered how things would be between Pauline and me when the Farrells left.

The ensuite bathroom project had been approved, and it made sense to finish that before the new Auckland chief moved in. It wasn’t until Frank showed me the paperwork that I realised that Mr Farrell was actually the British Consul General, and that I had been moving in (or at least on the edge of) the diplomatic stratosphere. So Frank and me spent a lot of time at the Farrell’s over the next four weeks. The ‘ensuite’ was no cramped and miserable add on. The plan called for a full bath with separate shower, toilet and bidet, and huge vanity with twin sinks.

Fortunately, the master bedroom was huge, and the adjoining one was large by normal standards. We had to move a couple of walls. One was easy, but the other was “load bearing’ and moving it involved putting in a beam.

That was quite complicated. But the complications allowed plenty of opportunity to spend time with Maureen, and that wasn’t complicated at all. In spite of her whispered ‘I love you’ during one of our post orgasmic partings, she remained realistic.

“I don’t actually love you, but we certainly have limerence. I feel really lucky to have had my first massive sexual spark with someone who was perfect to explore sex with. I’m sure most people aren’t so lucky.”

“So let’s have as much time together as we can before you move!”

“You’re here almost every day working on the alterations. We can make the most of that.”

We did, including some ‘bum play’ in the shower. Two of my soapy fingers in her, and two of hers in me. Interesting, and fun as far as it went, but cocks ‘n cunts is still my thing. Frank and the Farrells were amusedly indulgent when Maureen and I regularly took a ‘long’ lunch hour together.

I never did get to say a proper goodbye to Mr Farrell. Rhonda had taken him to the Airport by the time Frank and I arrived on the job that morning, but Maureen and I had a long morning tea break and a long lunchtime too. Frank made a few ribald comments, but was otherwise tolerant. The Farrells had moved a lot before in the course of Shaun’s career, so they packed up without too much angst.

My goodbye with Maureen wasn’t particularly dramatic. She wanted a night together, but that was a bridge too far for her mother. Chick was similarly restricted with Pauline, but like Maureen and me, they coped. The Farrell’s few bits of personal furniture were packed on a truck and sent south, and Rhonda, Maureen and Chick departed for the Airport in a taxi in time to settle into their house in Ngaio before their first day at Onslow College.

Pauline and I consoled each other. Repeatedly. Now that summer had well and truly arrived, we were even able to explore her attraction to semi-public sex, and she took me to a place she and Chick had discovered in the grounds of the university where we could fuck on a blanket in a shrubbery. It was no more than twenty feet from a pedestrian path with occasional passers-by, even at night. She got right off on that and I coped with the anxiety that her orgasmic noises provoked.

I worked practically full time with and for Frank, and saved heaps. And so it went. The only excitement occurred towards the end of January. Frank and I had planned another hunt for fallow deer on the Defence force land at South Head, but a couple of days beforehand, Frank got a ring from his mate Jack Thomas, who had been busted up there bigtime.

He had been minding his own business (if armed trespassing on Defence Dept Property could be so characterised) when he got mixed up in an SAS exercise. Whether he was being taught a lesson (what Frank called ‘extrajudicial punishment’) or whether the guys who apprehended him genuinely thought he was part of their exercise, no one can know, but he was surrounded by a masked and heavily armed special forces unit, none too gently immobilised, disarmed, searched, cuffed and hooded, and made to lie face down in the back of a vehicle for about four hours. He told Frank that his rifle had been confiscated, he was going to be prosecuted, and that he had been threatened with losing his firearms license. We decided to give South Head a miss – at least for a while!

School Certificate results arrived in the post towards the end of January. Aapi, newly returned from Samoa, had made the ‘Scholarship Sixth’ at Boys High, and Robyn and Alison the equivalent in the slightly different system at Girls High. Pauline had missed narrowly, and I had missed by quite a lot (307 in my best four subjects). Mum ‘n Dad and the Grandkerrs didn’t seem too upset, particularly when I showed them my financial calculations.

School started again on the First of February, and the study group got together once, but it was more for ‘old times sake’ than study. The three doing Scholarship were now inhabiting a separate (and very very demanding) universe, Robyn was allowed to entertain Jack in her own bed, and Alison had managed to secure a similar privilege to be with Aapi. Pauline and I were well established as ‘fucking friends’, and both of us were well ahead of most of our peers in the ‘general’ stream to which we had been relegated, and could stay near the top of most of our year twelve classes with not too much effort. We didn’t need the study group for either academic or carnal purposes, but we continued the tradition of a meal together before our Friday night shift at Mary’s World. I was looking forward to a cruisy year, and I couldn’t wait for cricket to start!

We still had an empty bedroom in the flat, but I knew that Frank and Emma were still on the lookout for someone to fill it, and it was no real surprise when they brought a young woman around to inspect the room and assess Judith and me as potential flatmates. Her name was Jacqueline, but she immediately announced that she preferred ‘Jax’. She was short and fat and what Frank might have (privately) called ‘sassy’, and she quizzed us about how we arranged cooking and cleaning. Cooking was relatively easy, but with the demise of the study group, cleaning wise, things had got a bit slack. And it showed.

I wasn’t sure whether Jax had ‘cleaned up’ for the occasion, but she certainly hadn’t ‘dressed up’. Her suede ‘desert boots’ were a couple of years old, and her corduroys were as baggy as mine and short on her. She wore a turtleneck sweater with a multicoloured pattern of large squares. It had seen better days. Whether she was ‘cleaned up’ or not, the standards Judith and I had slipped into were too low for her. At least she was honest about that.

“If I’m going to move in here, we will need to agree to keep the place a lot tidier and cleaner than it is.”

Judith agreed immediately. “I’d like that. It’s getting a bit disgusting!”

Everybody looked at me. Frank seemed relatively sympathetic, but Emma was nodding along with Judith and Jax. I bit the bullet. “You’re right. We need to lift our game. I’ve slacked off a bit during the last month.”

Jax snorted. “Just the teeniest tiniest little bit?”

I maintained my usual quiet dignity as the others cracked up. It seemed we had come to an agreement about the cleaning at any rate. I wasn’t involved with any negotiation about rent, but Jax readily agreed to our suggestion for kitty and an extra contribution from regular guests. She was interested at the prospect of trying the rabbit and venison that I sometimes brought home, and confessed that she had never tasted either.

But Jax’s interest in trying the meat was nothing in comparison with the way she lit up when Judith and Emma referred to Pauline’s mother’s story about hunters trading meat for sex, and completely eclipsed by her reaction to them mentioning their own interest and Pauline’s excitement. Jax glowed! She wanted to know all about it, and I was caught between the lesser degree of confidentiality about intimate matters that we had slipped into versus the more general ‘don’t talk’ that Frank had impressed upon me when I was twelve. I explained that Pauline and I were friends who had sex, and that she got very horny when I brought home meat, but that no details would be forthcoming. Jax accepted that, but from the look in her eye, I guessed that the subject of meat for sex would be revisited sooner or later. She was moving in in the weekend.