The rain which only a moment ago seemed like a mere threat was now in full pelt. There had been nothing more than pinpricks on the face or hands a mere five minutes earlier. Then it graduated to huge drops which struck the grey, dry earth and splattered it with a polka-dot of brown. And now, its smell, let alone its insistent rhythm on the roof of the hide, was unmistakable. A gust of wind pushed against the latched door, not strong enough to burst it open, but certainly fierce enough for a puddle of dampness to seep through the gap at the door's bottom and along the woodwork on its upper edge.

How could the weather change so quickly? One moment, the day had been calm, a few grey clouds scattered about amongst the fluffy white ones and the odd chink of blue through which the sun occasionally shone, pooling shadows beneath the spreading beeches and oaks. Now, the sodden earth was erupting in puddles that coalesced and widened over the slithery clay soil. And the driving rain hammered down on the ferns and shrubs of the woodland through which the path had led.

And it had led here, to this hide, where there were no birdwatchers, perhaps because they were all doing their bit for King and Country, to give jerry a bloody nose, and to show Hitler that the British had real spunk. Inside, as secure as in an Anderson air-raid shelter from the rain, the downpour was an incessant rhythm beating against the walls and roof, while what little light there was entered through the hooded narrow gap where men with binoculars would normally be gazing at the striding herons and wading coots still outside in the huge lake, wholly undeterred by the ferocity of the elements.

Edward strained up on tip-toes to peek through this gap at the pounding rain that agitated the water surface into a mosaic of widening ripples, while rivulets slid off the leaves of the dark overhanging branches and cascaded onto the reeds below. The sky above was a thoroughly filthy coal-black colour, like the ashes left in the grate when the fire had been left to snuff out. Or maybe like the smudged newsprint on Edward's fingers when it was finally his turn to read the Daily Mirror, impatiently turning the pages to the cartoons. He especially liked the Jane comic strip: the girl who sometimes managed to lose most of her clothes to the delight of British servicemen and to the dismay of his tut-tutting mother.

"Golly! It really is raining outside!" Edward exclaimed. "It's raining cats and dogs!"

"Not real cats and dogs?" Katherine wondered. "That's just a saying, isn't it?"

"Of course it is, silly!" Edward said. "It means it's raining lots and lots. Listen to it! There's tons of rain coming down."

"I don't like the sound," Katherine confessed, staring at her bare knees as she knelt cross-legged in the corner of the hide, only her face and knees at all illuminated by the narrow band of light coming through the gap where Edward was looking out so intently. "It's like when the planes come at night. When they drop bombs. It's frightening! Do you remember when they bombed Armstrong Avenue? That was horrid."

"Armstrong Avenue?" Edward wondered, turning his head round to regard Katherine, his ears sticking out prominently from the sides of his short cropped head, the few still remaining freckles pale and pink against his maturing features. His voice was on the cusp of breaking: sometimes like a radio broadcast cracking into so many inaudible fragments, sometimes cohering into a childish chime and sometimes hinting at the man's voice to come. "That's near where you live, isn't it? We've not had many bombs fall round our way. Jerry must like your part of town."

"It was horrid! Horrid!" Katherine repeated. "Does it look like it might stop raining? I didn't think it'd get as bad as this. Mummy said it might rain a bit. She tapped her barometer thing in the hallway. She said: don't stay out too long, it might rain. Didn't she?"

"I don't know. I only met you in the park, remember."

Katherine nodded. The park seemed such a long way away now: its swings, slides, bowling green and football field just memories after Edward and she had slipped through the gap in the wooden fence and strolled along the path to the lake where the birdwatchers would often congregate. Katherine would like to see a birdwatcher now, in his tweed jacket and brogues, flat cap on his head and binoculars secured around his neck and resting on his chest. Perhaps he could help get them away from all the rain.

"It's not stopping, is it?" Katherine asked.

Edward shook his head. "Not yet it isn't. But it can't last forever. We'll wait for it to stop, or at least not rain so much, and then we can run back home."

Katherine sniffed. "I hate the rain! It's made my shiny shoes so muddy! Look! And I've got some horrid black splodges on my nice white socks. Mummy'll be ever so mad when she finds out!"

Edward laughed. Girls! They were hopeless! No wonder it was men that went off to fight the war and the women stayed behind: working in the factories and driving the buses and teaching in the schools. War was man's stuff. It wouldn't do if you were a girl and worried about getting muddy shoes while jerry was goose-stepping all over France and Russia. He leaned up against the walls of the hide to look at the rain outside. His bare knees rubbed against the rough planks of the wall, his toes straining to support his whole weight. He was taller than he used to be, the ruler marks on the yellowing kitchen walls didn't fib, but he was still not as tall as he'd like to be.

He settled back down on the flat of his shoes, one sock still pulled up to just below his knee, the other flopping above his scuffed black shoes. He turned round and regarded Katherine, in her blue and yellow dress, with the glass bead necklace around her neck and over the slightly raised bumps on her chest. Like him, Katherine was also growing towards that mysterious destination of puberty, but in such an obviously different direction. Edward was at the age now where he was beginning to realise that the girls of his own age, equally awkward in their early adolescence as he, were developing towards being the girls of his masturbatory imaginings, the ones whose images he and the other boys had perused guiltily by the bicycle sheds, their full voluptuous bosom teasingly hiding a mystery that demanded to be revealed, and, beneath whose tight trousers, which only models or Hollywood actresses ever really wore, there was a mysterious area that excited the boys' imaginations. Edward had seen nude sculptures of course, but Billy said that real women had something else under their skirts which they never showed in sculptures. Billy's sister had told him about it, but except for it being hairy he couldn't remember too much of what she'd described of it.

Edward sat down next to Katherine, an uncomfortable swelling under his shorts which he'd long ago found out did not mean that he needed to go to the toilet. Although when he was younger he recalled rushing outdoors into the privy, only to be puzzled by the perplexing behaviour of his willy. And if George hadn't told him what his Daddy had told him, who knows when he might have learnt just what this strange new phenomenon meant?

"Gosh! That looks funny, Eddie!" Katherine commented, pointing at his tented shorts. "What's that?"

Edward wasn't sure whether to boast or blush. Being on the threshold of so many things, he chose to boast. "It's my cock," he said, uttering a word that still sounded awkward to his ears.

"Your 'cock'?"

"My willy. My pee-pee. You know, Kathy!"

"But it's sticking up, like a sort of soldier."

"It does that!" boasted Edward. "It means I'm growing up to be a real man."

"Really!" Katherine exclaimed, her cheeks burning, but their gleam hidden in the shadows of the hide. "And what did you call it?"

"A 'cock'. It's called a 'cock'."

"That's silly!" Katherine laughed. "Why not call it a willy. Why name it after a bird?"

"That's what you call it when it grows up and starts getting stiff."

"Gets stiff?"

Katherine's face had a very strange look about it, her eyes shining in a way that Edward was in no way able to interpret, although they shone out relatively brightly in the darkness. She looked down at Edward's strangely crumpled lap, the woollen fabric of his shorts pushed up enough for the legs to let through more than a comfortable breeze of rain-chilled air. She glanced back at her own lap, and held her gaze there for longer than Edward felt was right for something of so little apparent substance, before returning her gaze back to Edward's lap.

"Let's see," she said.

The hormones struggling for supremacy in Edward's body erupted into a blush which burnt his cheeks with almost flu-like intensity, while his penis became, if anything, even stiffer, the glans pushing through the constraints of his foreskin, rubbing against the cotton fabric of his underpants and adding an extra degree of distress to his predicament.

"What did you say, Kathy?"

"Let's see!"

"What? Look at my cock?"

"Yes!" Katherine said firmly, and quite breathlessly.

Edward nodded. Well! Why not! He just hoped Katherine wouldn't tell his Mum. He undid his belt, pulled down his shorts to his ankles, pushing his arse off the ground to ease them down. And then, seeing Katherine's large brown eyes widen at the glimpse of erect penis through the crack at the front of his underpants where he'd normally put it through when he needed to wee, he repeated the operation with the last cotton frontier, until around his ankles were bunched not only his wayward socks but his shorts and underpants.

"Golly! It's big!" Katherine exclaimed.

Edward nodded, looking down at his perfectly average sized erection. It was a sight for which he was acquiring a greater affection. His penis stood out erect, perhaps five or six inches perpendicular to his waist, a thick garden of hair bunched densely at its base and one or two sprinkled along its length, a shovel-shaped purple glans at the tip, puckered and sensitive, even released from the constraints of the underpants, and its length, a twitching pole of manhood, on which the veins were so very clearly delineated.

"Your balls are big as well!" remarked Katherine with awe.

"Balls?" wondered Edward. He'd never thought much about them, but so they were. And then suddenly, ooh! That was an odd feeling. "Urrggh! Why'd you touch them?"

"I don't know!" admitted Katherine, surprised at the intensity of Edward's reaction from such a gentle prod.

"What do you think, Kathy?" asked Edward, his bosom swelling with pride.

"It's a funny thing," remarked Katherine, with some indecision. "I knew it got big, but not sort of like this!"

Edward sat down on the wooden planks of the hide, his legs as wide apart as they could be, now that he'd totally removed his shorts and underpants, and his penis standing out swollen with pride and manliness between his thighs.

All the while, the rain, which had seemed so much the centre of the two adolescents' attention a few minutes ago, had gradually lessened. The thundering against the walls and roof of the hide had dropped down to the merest whisper of a beat, like a drummer in a big band teasing his cymbals with a brush. And the smutty grey skies had broken into fragments. And then several fragments parted to let through a window of blue and the brilliant rays of the late Spring sunshine.

"Ooh! Look!" Katherine exclaimed, as the sunlight illuminated Edward's penis, showing it up as brilliant white and startlingly purple, casting a black shadow on his still-hairless thigh. "It's such a wonderful sight!"

And then, Katherine leaned forward, her plaits falling on the shoulders, her glass beads hanging down below her neck and themselves glinting in the sun, and her lips pursed in the way she might squeeze them when she kissed her mother goodnight. She brought her face closer and closer to Edward's penis, until the beads rested on his thigh, the ribbon of one plait trailing down the outer side, her eyes wide open and full of a wild gleam that frightened Edward, who had never before suspected that eyes could contain so much unrestrained desire, and then she pressed her lips against the purple head of Edward's penis.

It was brief. It was barely two or three seconds of contact. But a few seconds that caused Edward to tremble in an uncontrolled and unsuspected way, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets as he strained to watch while feeling equally unable to move, his penis jerking quite slowly and steadily more upright. Katherine's wide-open eyes and her creased cheeks appeared both to mock and to be in awe of him. Her lips were yet to be rouged by her mother's lipstick. And the teeth behind those lips were still somehow too large for the face that contained them. And those lips then telescoped away from Edward's fevered gaze, as did the brush of Katherine's plaits and the coldness of her glass beads, leaving him feeling somehow more naked and vulnerable than he'd ever felt before, his shorts and underpants by his side, splinters in his bare bum and his penis twitching between retreat and triumph.