Chapter 1

Friday 13th December 1968 to Friday 21st March 1969

I was not worried about bad luck, not being superstitious, so I was happy to go out and about on Friday 13th December 1968. Indeed at the time I blessed my good luck, for I met pretty Penelope Roasburie.

It was at a Christmas carol service on the evening of that very date. The service was in the chapel of a Hall of Residence at Manchester University that I had previously inhabited in my final year as a student studying for my LLB, my law degree.

I had left University six summers previously, was now 26 years old, and was very gainfully employed. I was, they always told me, gifted. I had a photographic memory, and seemed to have no trouble with any of my school subjects. As a result I sat my ‘O’ levels at fifteen and my ‘A’ levels at seventeen, gaining ‘A’ Grades in English, History and Mathematics.

I had always been interested in the law aspect of history and literature, and so applied for a law degree at Manchester, completing it with a First in 1962 aged 20. I was actually sought (nowadays they call it headhunting I believe), by a Manchester law firm, JRW Ltd., the initials standing for the surnames of the three founding fathers of the firm, Jenkins, Reich and Walsh.

The three founders were de-mobbed together in the late 1940s after the war and decided to set up in general practice together. By 1968, the practice dealt mainly with a wide range of company law.

While the three partners might have been interested primarily in my head, they got the whole package, right down to my toenails.

They sponsored me and then employed me through the following three years’ training, and by 1968 I had also worked for them for three years fully qualified.

The work was varied and at times demanding, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was by then assigned permanently to some companies that had asked for me by name, and was kept busy with them and more casual clients.

My bonuses were substantial and even at my young age, there was some talk in the rumour factory of my joining the Partnership as a Junior Partner, though the talk did not come to anything.

I had bought, under mortgage, a newly built two bedroom flat: hallway, with kitchen and a large living room to the right, a bathroom ahead and two bedrooms to the left. It was modern, warm, neat and roomy. The mortgage was steep early on, but easily manageable with my bonuses, and since I was single, I was very cheap to run. Of course I was not to know that in 1972-3 house prices would double, and coupled with rampant inflation, this would cushion my payments further.

Another very pleasant aspect of work was the personnel. Some of the clerks and all the secretarial staff were female, which was common at the time, but there was also a woman solicitor as well as the eight other men. Her name was Zena.

Now in those days, Zena would have been called ‘coloured’ or worse, ‘half-caste’, and it was a tribute to her that having the two disadvantages of colour and gender, she more than held her own to qualify in law and land a job with our firm. Mind you, she was extremely talented: she had to be. She worked in the office adjacent to mine, and we shared a clerk.

Early on we discovered that she lived on my way to work, so I volunteered to give her a lift and for five years it had been normal practice for us to travel together to and from work daily in one or other of our cars most days of the working week.

It didn’t hurt that she was really beautiful, with rich brown skin and straight glossy black hair, but I never flirted or made any moves toward her, not that I didn’t want to, but simply because I had not the courage. The result was that we became close friends, but never more than that. We would have tea together about once a week, and from time to time we’d have dinner, or go to a concert or a play.

I suppose I was average looking (there has been some deterioration since then). Six feet tall, twelve stone (a hundred and sixty-eight pounds in American money), slim with decent musculature. So, average looking, not devastatingly handsome, not ugly. You get the picture.

Zena had warned me early on against making advances to the clerical staff or the clerks, though two of the women who were friends of Zena sometimes got lifts home with me. However, outside work, I did have a couple of short term relationships which petered out after a few months each. I was not ready to settle and it seemed, neither were they.

The luck of the 13th December came from three things acting in my favour: one, the Chaplain had contacted me in a panic when the guitarist who was to accompany the singing went down with ‘flu, begging me to fill in for her. Well, I was no professional, but could hold my own (guitar). It was the era of the protest folk song and of folk groups, and I was very much into that genre at the time. Penny noticed me since I was playing.

The second stroke of luck was that Penny and her flatmate had hosted a party at the university chaplaincy the night before and there was a small barrel of beer unfinished that Penny needed to move to her flat for the Christmas vacation.

The third stroke was that I had a car and the chaplain told Penelope this salient fact. It was a cold, foggy night. So it was beer that brought us together – an auspicious beginning in anyone’s book.

The first I knew was a voice behind me.

“Graham Proctor?”

I turned. After all it was my name. First impressions: rich brown shoulder-length shiny thick hair, startlingly large green eyes, pretty little nose, full lips, roundish face with good cheekbones. My eyes did not have time to travel further, in any case I was in the thrall of her beautiful face.

“Yes?” Being a lawyer I had a way with words. I added a smile.

“I’m Penny Roasburie. Tony Ledson said you might be able to help me.” Big engaging smile, twinkling eyes.

I cocked an eyebrow as an invitation to proceed – Athletic see?

“The thing is, we had a party last night at the Chaplaincy, and I need to move a barrel of beer to our flat before the Chaplaincy closes for the vacation. Fr Tony said you’re a kind helpful man, very friendly, and you have a car.” She ceased her flattery and looked at me hopefully.

“You want me to move a barrel of beer to your flat? How big?” I told you I was bright.

“Living room, one bedroom, kitchen and bathroom,” she said with an impish grin. She was growing on me.

“The beer,” I said doggedly, though I allowed a grin to cross my lips in acknowledgement of her pedantry.

“A Firkin,” she said, her grin continuing and if anything, widening. Was she expecting a firkin risqué response? She didn’t get one.

“Seventy Two Pints?” I said knowledgeably, drawing on past experience working in a bar. “I hope most of it was drunk – I couldn’t lift a full one, not being a drayman!”

She looked impressed. “Yes, I’m sure most of it went last night.” Again the expectant wait.

“OK,” I said. “You coming as well?”

“Yes, of course,” she said with a hint of the patronising, “Tony’s given me the key to the bar. You get to drink some as a reward!” and she laughed. It was a tinkling and musical laugh, a laugh you would like to hear often.

“It won’t be fit to drink after we’ve moved it,” I argued. “It will have to settle again.”

Now I honestly never thought this was fishing for an invitation, but I got one nevertheless.

“So you’ll have to come round after Christmas when it’s settled, won’t you?” Again those eyes twinkled; she knew how to charm.

I was duly charmed and nodded vigorously, and she laughed that laugh again, her smile lighting up her face. She definitely deserved more of my time.

Now as I said, she was not devastatingly beautiful like Zena, but she was very, very attractive – slim and well-proportioned: neat and full up top and a neat round behind, good legs. Yes, by then my eyes had done the tour. Most girls of twenty are pretty, but she was more than that, and did I say neat?

She was intelligent and fun to talk to, and we had a good chat on the short drive through the murk to the chaplaincy, and thence to her flat.

What she craftily hadn’t mentioned was the fact that she and her flatmate lived in the attic of an Edwardian house: two long flights of stairs to her top floor flat. The flat took over the whole top floor, and the sloping ceilings, following the rooflines, gave it an interesting look. A large landing off which were, clockwise, a bathroom, a kitchen, a storeroom/pantry, a very large living room with a minuscule veranda beyond two french doors, and off the living room a large bedroom with two three-quarter beds.

On a foggy December night it wasn’t warm in there, in fact it was bloody cold, though the gas fire soon took the edge off the freezing living room. No central heating: this was a student flat in 1968!

She offered coffee and I accepted. We sat and chatted without taking our coats off. Patty her flatmate was not in evidence, and I learned she was staying with her boyfriend that night.

Having done Penny a favour, I felt emboldened to ask her out, and rather to my surprise she accepted eagerly, at least I thought so.

I had not bargained for our first date being the next day, doing Christmas shopping in town and returning library books, followed by tea and crumpets back at her flat. It was good enough for me: I was dating a girl, and a pretty one at that: who cared what we did?

Over the meal it transpired that she was going home for Christmas the following Wednesday. She lived near Chester, about forty miles away from where we were, so of course I volunteered to drive her, and of course, after some rather contrived reluctance out of concern for me, she accepted.

To seal the deal we went to a folk club in a pub on the Monday night, and we kissed our first chaste lip-kiss when I dropped her off afterwards, gently refusing her offer of coffee, since I had to get to work early the next day to make up for taking the day off on Wednesday.

I could tell she was not sexually loose, so it was clear I would have to go carefully; already I knew for certain that she was well worth all the self-control I could muster.

In a way it was a good thing, for we got to know each other well on the journey to her parents’ house, each giving the other an autobiography and then plenty of discussion about politics, religion, morality and current affairs generally. We found we were were very comfortable with each other, very relaxed, and in agreement over most things.

The house was a few miles outside Chester City in its own grounds, and gave testimony that the family were very wealthy indeed. Her mother was cooly polite, and I could feel some reserve. I put it down to snobbery since I was a Manchester lad and had never lost the accent, where it was clear these people were Cheshire Set and spoke with plumbs in their mouths. Her father was civil bordering on friendly. He apparently owned a manufacturing company, inherited from his father.

“Penny says you work for a solicitor’s practice?” Mother asked, clearly less than eager to spend more time than absolutely necessary conversing with me.

“Yes, it’s mainly involved with business law – JRW Ltd.”

“Isn’t that–?” her father began, but mother was talking, and glared him into silence. For a dynamic executive he seemed very docile!

“In a clerical capacity?” I thought I detected a sniff of distain.

“No,” I said. “I’m a lawyer. I deal mainly with creating and assessing contracts and dealing with industrial law disputes.”

Chapter 2 »