Chapter 2: Saturday July 6th 1963-Part One

It was a fine evening on what had been a day filled with warm sunshine and Roger Thompson was helping his father erect the very large tent that they had become so expert in putting up during their camping holidays over the last three years. Even at thirteen years and nine months he could, if he had to, put up the tent by himself. So between the two of them, Roger and his father Stanley accomplished the task in a matter of thirty minutes while his mother, Evelyn, and his sister, Caroline, heated a kettle on one primus stove and cooked a meal of bacon, eggs and baked beans on a second.

Roger was feeling only a little a little stiff from being squashed in front of his sister in the two person sidecar. Caroline, who was a year older at almost fifteen, had spent the entire trip with her knees in his back for the entire trip down to the south-west coast town of Looe in South-East Cornwall from their home in West London.

The sidecar was attached to the 650cc Panther that his parents had bought brand new three and a half years ago thanks to his mother spending nearly two years getting up at three-thirty in the morning to work with a crew that cleaned a ten story office building.

The large property where they were pitching their tent was divided equally into two areas, one for tents and one for caravans with five large brick constructions separating each area. The five brick buildings consisted of male and female showers, male and female toilets and a building that contained a number of sinks and dish racks and detergent for those that needed somewhere to wash their crockery and utensils. Naturally those facilities came at a price already built into the site fee.

The owners of the property, James and Elizabeth Wilson and their children, fifteen-year-old George and twelve-year-old Doris, she would turn thirteen on Tuesday, lived in a large five bedroom house at the north end. And the beach wasn't too far away considering. A walk to the bottom of the street would lead them to High Street. They had been told that if they turned left and took the first on the right they would arrive at the sandy beach in a matter of ten minutes, twenty in total from their tent site.

Sand was something they weren't used to, the beaches they usually frequented on the Kent and Sussex coast were generally pebble and not sand and on the trip down Roger and Caroline had found themselves talking about two glorious weeks sunbathing and swimming on wonderful sandy beaches.

"Dinner's up Stan, Roger," called out Evelyn as she watched her husband and son finished hammering the last of the pegs into the ground as they made sure the eight lengths of rope were secure and stretched tight enough to hold the large four person tent. She managed a smile but couldn't help but wonder just how often she would be smiling over the next two weeks.

Roger turned quickly and saw four plates filled with bacon, eggs and baked beans sitting on the flat piece of plywood they used as a table and a pot of tea brewing on one of the two primus stoves. But he found his attention being drawn away from the food. His mother and his sister were both crouched down, both balancing on the balls of their feet with the cheeks of their bottoms resting on their heels, and with both pairs of knees spread for balance the way they were Roger could see the white cotton material of his mother and his sister's underwear.

His father had gone to get a blanket from the rack that he'd used his engineering skills to attach to the roof of the sidecar and had come back just as he'd been staring right up their skirts in a manner so obvious Roger thought he just couldn't fail to notice. 'He must have seen him staring' thought Roger, Caroline and his mother certainly knew he'd been looking. Caroline, of course, wasn't a problem, she was used to him trying to catch glimpses of her in her underwear or even nude so she just grinned and poked out her tongue and then pressed her thumb against the tip of her nose and waggled her fingers at him in her time-honoured 'up yours' sign. Of course he hadn't succeeded in seeing her naked yet. Indeed her hadn't even seen her breasts, or any naked breasts for that matter.

No what bothered Roger about this situation was that neither his mother or his father said anything when they were always ticking him off at home for his habit of trying to look either up skirts and down blouses of his mother and his sister. Of course the threats were worse when he was caught trying to catch a glimpse of either his mother or sister while they bathed in the tin bath in the kitchen of their dilapidated semi-detached two and a half bedroom house.

The house was called a two and a half bedroom because of the three main upstairs rooms. While his parents got the bigger of two bedrooms and his older sister Caroline got the other Roger as the youngest was packed off into a tiny room often referred to as a box-room, and with good reason, all he could fit into it besides the hand-me-down bed he slept in was a box in the shape of a packing case that he used as a bedside table.

As Roger's thoughts turned to the effort of filling and emptying that tin bath, a job that invariably fell to him, he realised that was the one good thing about this holiday, the availability of daily showers. Two weeks without the seemingly endless hours he spent filling and emptying the bath, two weeks without having to bathe in somebody else's bathwater because he was the youngest.

Then something else occurred to him as he positioned himself at the makeshift table, his parents not saying anything about the fairly blatant way he had been staring at his mother and his sister's underwear wasn't nearly as curious as how they could suddenly afford the trip down to Looe and the pegged off site for their tent when he knew that the rent collectors had been constantly chasing the rent and that the electricity bill was, as far as he knew still unpaid.

Roger decided that it wasn't a good time to ask that question, if there was a good time. He knelt in front of his plate, grabbed a knife and fork and began to eat while Caroline poured out four cups of tea and passed them around. Of course the transistor radio was on and they had been listening to the BBC's ball-by-ball commentary of the closing stages of the third days play at Edgbaston of the England-West Indies test match. And after the comprehensive thrashing at Old Trafford and the excitement of the draw at Lords it looked like England had a chance to win one. Two late wickets, Carew for 40 and the vital one of Kanhai brilliantly caught by Tony Lock off Shackleton for 32 had swung the game just slightly England's way.

"Looking good dad," Roger said optimistically as the commentators wrapped up the day's play.

"Yes, so far so good," replied his father tempering his boyish enthusiasm. "But we've seen it all before. England have to learn to play for the full five days. And don't forget that there's still the small matter of Sobers, Butcher, Worrell and their wicketkeeper Murray to come. It seems to me that another hundred and six runs shouldn't present too much of a problem."

While Roger and his father talked about the cricket and how they saw the series finishing up Caroline tried to talk to her mother about what they were both interested in. Things like clothes, movies and music. Of course when it came to music they just couldn't stay on the same page, Caroline could only talk about the Beatles and the rest of the groups that were springing up on the back of the 'fab fours' extraordinary popularity while the closest her mother could get to popular music was Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Her preference, she knew, was for the English traditional jazz artists like Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber and American blues legends like B.B King, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim and Jimmy Reed.

It was around an hour later when things started to get a little strange for Roger. He had shared the dishwashing duties with Caroline, helped unload the sidecar, the rack and the pannier bags and placed the gear in the tent before padlocking it's entrance. It wouldn't be very secure he knew, but with every camper looking out for each others equipment and with a couple of security people walking the field in the evening he knew problems weren't expected.

It was after everyone had showered and changed with a view, he thought, to the four of them walking down to the beach and stopping at one of the local pubs on the way back that Roger discovered his mother wasn't coming with them. Not only that but she was wearing a mini skirt like the one his sister was wearing. Though if anything it was even shorter than all of the mini skirts that Caroline possessed. It was of the sort he'd seen a lot of the dolly birds wear around where they lived, a skirt he didn't even know she owned, one that he thought looked expensive and one he was sure would reveal her underwear if she bent over. Usually if she wore a skirt they were always knee length at a minimum and usually about mid-calf. And then there was the blouse she was wearing, it was sheer and white and it made it perfectly clear that she wasn't wearing a bra. That was unheard of and so was the sight of the previously unseen areola and nipples.