Chapter 12: Pushing Boundaries

June 1969, age 14

The summer of ‘69 was when I really perfected being rebellious, and I wasn’t the only one. I was a teenager, so it was in the job description for me. I don’t know what Caity’s excuse was.

After an intense couple of weeks of Uncle Will’s petty meddling in our lives, things had reached boiling point. Caity and I had zero respect for the man, so we settled on a new strategy: we completely ignored him. He could shout and scream at us all he liked (and did so extensively) but had very little leverage to force us to obey. So rebellion ruled, and I went back to my routine of swimming when I got home from school each day.

Uncle Will had one trump card, and he played it at the beginning of June. “I’ve decided I need to teach you a lesson about your disrespectful behaviour. So I’ve notified your Cadets leader that you will no longer be attending.”

I saw red but surprisingly held myself back from strangling him. “I’ll go anyway”, I hissed at him.

“No, you won’t”, he replied smugly. “Air Cadets require parental permission, which I have withdrawn. If you turn up, they’ll send you away.”

I closed my eyes in realisation that he was right. “Mum would be ashamed of you; you know that? She was kind and generous. You’re just spiteful and greedy.” I stalked away in disgust, not giving him time to reply.

That night I spoke privately with Dan in the study, giving him orders to have Uncle Will abducted and thrown off a cliff somewhere. Dan smiled kindly and just told me that we didn’t need to go to the nuclear option quite yet. I said I was dead serious, but his only reply was to tell me to stay put while he went to get Uncle Will.

When they returned, Dan announced: “I think you two need a little time away from each other to let your blood pressures drop. So, I’m going to take Finn and Caity off to France for the weekend for a company function. When we return, I hope things will be more friendly.”

“Out of the question”, Uncle Will almost shouted. Dan just raised his hand and continued calmly.

“While we’re away, I suggest you consider carefully your future relationship with your nephew and niece, and whether you want that relationship to be conducted from an American prison cell. After all, I understand that your last business enterprise over there left a number of people badly out of pocket. Some might even consider it fraud...”

Ha! Take that, arsehole!

So on Friday that week we got the day off school and were driven down to Bristol, to the airfield owned by the British Aircraft Corporation, of which we owned sixty percent. We were to fly on the new plane they’d built, on its journey to be introduced to the world at the Paris Air Show. The plane’s name? Concorde.

I had been on plenty of big aeroplanes before, but Concorde was unlike any of them. Inside it was far smaller than the others, but wow did it move! Takeoff was quite an experience.

During our outbound flight, I was allowed to visit the cockpit and had a long conversation with the pilots. The man in charge was a former RAF bomber pilot, and he seemed interested when I told him I was a cadet. I asked an awful lot of questions and learnt a lot that journey.

The airshow itself was impressive, with some great aerial displays, but the groundbreaking Concorde rather eclipsed everything else there. The international response was enthusiastic, and Dan and I both felt great pride in our company’s involvement.

Three other notable events happened that summer. The first was a phone call I received from Captain Kirk. Sorry, the former Captain Kirk, as the show had been cancelled. I fondly remembered meeting Mr Shatner three years previously, but couldn’t help him when he asked if I could intervene. It wasn’t our call. We made the show for NBC, who paid for it. They had been instrumental in the show’s demise, cutting the budget and putting it in a bad time-slot. The cancellation was a foregone conclusion.

The next thing was that an American teenager named Robert Rayford had died in St Louis, Missouri, and the symptoms leading to his death had his doctors baffled. A simple phone call was made from our office in London to the Cambridge University research team that we’d tasked with investigating the Haiti outbreak back in 1966, to enquire as to whether the mystery death could be connected. Our team flew out to the US and within a few weeks had worked with the CDC to determine that the boy’s bloodwork matched the Haitian samples. He had died from the new disease, which had migrated from Haiti to America. He had died from AIDS. That prompted researchers on that side of the Atlantic to join ours in working on the horrific disease much earlier than they would have otherwise. That felt good.

The final, and biggest event was that I gave Dan a ‘go order’ for Libya. I knew I was gambling with people’s lives, and that weighed on me massively. Dan told me he would have made the same decision, which reassured me a little. Still, my fingers were crossed that fewer people would get hurt because of my decision than would have otherwise. In a childish way, I found it funny that Dan would accept my orders when they concerned entire nations, but wouldn’t accept a simple little order to assassinate my uncle!

The summer of 1969 was also when I discovered the joys of sex for the first time. I mean, other than sex with my right hand. I’d been an expert at that for some time.

At grammar school, we had formal written exams each summer, which determined our end of year reports. That year, the usual stresses were amplified, as the exams were linked to our recently submitted ‘options’. Options were when all third years picked the subjects we wanted to study at O-Level over the next two years. English, Maths and Science were all compulsory, but for most of us, it was a brilliant chance to drop our least favourite subjects like Latin. (Odi, odisti, odit, odimus, odistis, oderunt.) We had to take a language (French for me), humanity (History), arty subject (Art) and two others from a list of choices (Double Science and Drama). The problem was that if we bombed our exams in those subjects, we might not be allowed to take them next year. So ... pressure.

Peter came up with a useful little way to help us all prepare. He set up a revision group which would meet at my house. It was going to be him, me, our friend Tommy, Harry (who was still home-schooled, but had to sit an exam to see which subjects he should take when he joined our school in September), and four girls from the girls’ grammar school. So a couple of days a week the boys would get a lift home with me after school, and the girls would appear when their parents dropped them off. I expect there were some raised parental eyebrows at the idea of a mixed group, but it had a legitimate academic purpose so nobody caused trouble. Not even Uncle Will, who was giving me a grudgingly wide berth.

The girls in the group were Ellie (who had introduced me to French kissing almost a year earlier), a girl named Jacqueline whom Peter blatantly fancied, and two others named Claire and Kirsty. All four of them were an eight or above on the Harrison Scale of Hotness.

The group’s revision went along for a couple of weeks with nothing notable to report other than the exchange of various smouldering looks. That changed on a particularly warm late June afternoon when we were all getting really frustrated with our history textbook. “We’re not getting anywhere”, Kirsty commented. “Let’s just call it a night and come back to it tomorrow.”

Peter spoke up, saying: “We’ve been getting nowhere with this all week. We need some serious, high-level motivation.”

Nobody paid much attention except Jacqueline, who asked, “What did you have in mind?”

The rest of us pulled our heads out of our books at that, as there was a definite challenge in her tone.

Peter got an evil smile on his face. “Here’s what I think. We all go home and spend the evening really hitting chapters eleven to thirteen. Then we each write down a list of five questions on a piece of paper that we’ll test everyone else on tomorrow.”

Kirsty said, “That’s not really much of...”

But Peter interrupted, “Hang on! We’ll each take it in turns to ask one of our questions, and everyone else has to write down their answer. Then we compare. Anyone with a wrong answer has to remove an item of clothing.”

Wow!!! Revision suddenly got interesting. Terrifyingly interesting. Excitingly terrifyingly interesting. Obviously, I had no desire whatsoever to get naked in front of the group. Peter might have fitted into the category of being brazenly horny / daft / brave enough to just whip his cock out with no thought of embarrassment, but no way did that apply to me. Looking around, I didn’t think it applied to Harry or Tommy either, as both looked ill at the thought. On the girls’ side Ellie and Jacqueline both looked up for it, which I wasn’t terribly surprised at as they were both a bit wild. Kirsty looked unsure about it, and Claire looked trapped.

As a horny fourteen-year-old boy with a reputation to protect in front of the girls, all my concerns, warning bells and red flags were rashly cast aside with the simple two-word statement: “I’m in”. Neither Harry nor Tommy was brave enough to refuse, and the girls were led by Ellie’s supremely confident acceptance of the challenge. So just like that, it was agreed, and our fates were sealed!

That night I studied as never before! And when I wrote my list of questions I made them as hard as I could without being impossible. I fully expected that the others would do the same. I perhaps had a small advantage over the others because I still had a tutor, and he had taught me about revision techniques. Also, history was one of my better subjects. Still, I had to admit that the extra motivation really pushed me into giving it my all.

At school the next day, Peter, Tommy and I were three bundles of nervous energy. We did a little last minute history revision at break and lunch, and I kept flipping between thinking the day was speeding by too fast, or dragging too slow.

The tension was palpable after school as we had our usual drinks and snacks, waiting for others to arrive. Once we were all assembled in my room, Peter took charge, telling us how many items of clothing we were each allowed. We sat in a circle on the floor to take our turns, so there were eight questions per circuit and seven opportunities to loose one of the nine items protecting our modesty. It could have been a short game! The girls must have felt even more pressure, as their modesty would be severely compromised one item sooner.

When we got started it was apparent that there were going to be naked people in the room very soon, as the questions were haaaard! (Like several body parts nearby.) After the first circuit, I was actually doing quite well. Everyone had got at least two wrong, but that was my limit so far. Peter had already removed five items (two shoes, two socks and his watch). Peter was probably the smartest person in the room, but it seemed he was strategically dumbing-down. The girls had mostly given up their shoes and socks, so things were about to get good.

Before the second circuit started, Peter dropped the bombshell of a new rule. “By the way, we keep going until we’ve got through all of our questions. If you’re already naked and get an answer wrong, you have to do a dare chosen by the questioner.” That got giggles from Ellie and Jacqueline. The rest of us tried our best not to vomit. None of us had sense enough to argue.