Jenny lay half asleep in her bed. Well, not really her bed, her bed was at home, this was just the one she had been allocated. She was tired, very tired, and she had just been through the most painful experience of her young life. But it was worth it, when they had given her the baby to hold for the first time she knew it had been worthwhile. She was lucky too, she thought, most of the girls here would never see their babies. They never had any visitors either, at least her mother came to see her twice a week. She knew that wasn't easy for her mother, it was a twentyfive mile journey, and the family car was getting old, and there was still a long wait for a new one. And petrol was three and six a gallon so it was expensive for her too.

She looked out of the window at the bright spring sunlight, the leaves just showing on the trees, and her mind wandered back to when this all started.

Jenny thought she was a very lucky girl. She had managed to get herself a job in the village at the local garage. She would be serving petrol and doing the accounts. Well, entering the invoices and takings in Stan's big book. Stan owned the garage in the middle of the village, with its two electric petrol pumps and the new workshop behind them. The old wooden buildings were still there to one side, used for storage and garaging for the taxis, but for 1958 this was all very modern. When she wasn't doing the books or serving petrol, she could help the mechanics. She loved scraping the carbon deposits off the engine cylinder heads when the mechanics had taken them apart for a decoke, it was very satisfying to see the shiny metal after the spray of carbon chips had been removed.

She would rather have been an assistant at the local shop, but that cow Gladys Strong had got that job. Her father worked for the local estate and she thought she was a cut above everyone else. Jenny couldn't see how that worked, after all, she was a farmer's daughter and her father owned the farm.

There were two mechanics at the garage, and she thought they seemed very nice. The elder a man of perhaps forty, was a swarthy, gypsy like character invariably called Jimmer, who was always laughing and joking, the younger was in his early twenties and newly married. His name was Tony and he rode to work on a 600cc Norton of which he was very proud, and kept in tip top condition, always polishing its grey paintwork with its red lining, or checking the oil and tyre pressures. He had given her a ride around the village on one occasion, which was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to her. By God, her mother had made her bum sting when she found out though, she was like a woman possessed. Jenny wouldn't go for a ride on that bike again, nor any other. Not that Tony would have taken her, because Stan had threatened to sack him after her mother had complained to him.

Stan was only a short man, but he was the owner, and you didn't mess with him. He spent most of his time out doing taxi work. There were three cars, two nearly new Vauxhalls, a Wyvern and a Velox, which were really nice. Jenny wished her mother had one of these instead of the old Hillman she drove. The Vauxhalls even had heaters. There was, though, some discussion in the village as to how Stan could get hold of cars like this, but she thought that was probably only jealousy. Stan's other car was an old Vauxhall limousine. This had lots of space in the back with folding seats behind the wind up glass division, and a very comfortable back seat. Jenny could vouch for that. This car was used to take the grammar school children to the main road about three miles away so that they could catch the school bus.

Perhaps that was where her troubles had started, she mused, and her thoughts went back to when she was ten years old ... no, it was even before that.

Whilst Jenny wasn't shunned by her father, there was no doubt that he would have preferred to have a boy, and that would have been no great problem had her mother been unable to have more children. But after Jenny there were no more. Her father was older and had married late; her mother, who had been a land girl, had probably seen a good opportunity. He had wanted a son to take over the farm; she security. Her mother, and perhaps she was the real root of all Jenny's problems, looked after Jenny with great care, and she was rarely allowed out of sight. When it came to school, she wouldn't send Jenny to the school in the next village. No, that wasn't good enough, there were too many ruffians there, but there was a small private school not too far away, set up by a local landowner for his own children, together with a few others, and her mother took her there every day. The standard of education at this school was much higher than at the village school, and eventually Jenny had passed her eleven plus examination. This was taken at the age of ten and decided what sort of school you went to when you were eleven; the grammar school in one of the local market towns, from which you might go to university, or get a good job with a local council, or perhaps train as a nurse; a secondary modern school where you learned practical things, and might become a cook, a seamstress or a hairdresser. If you stayed at the village school the boys became farm labourers, and the girls generally got pregnant and married in short order. Very few children who went to the village school ever passed their eleven plus.

Jenny was quite exited about the prospect of going to the grammar school. There was, however, a dark cloud on the horizon in the shape of her uncle, her mother's elder brother, who was the caretaker at the school. Her uncle didn't particularly like children and he was quite happy to class the pupils at the local grammar school as the worst behaved of any that he had encountered. Badly behaved, ill mannered and, the school being co-educational, obsessed with sex. Jenny's mother decided to send her to the girls' school in another market town, which lay at the third point of a roughly equilateral triangle. To say that Jenny was devastated would be a gross understatement. She had been looking forward to attending the grammar school because there were a number of children already attending from the village who she knew, and she particularly liked a boy whose family had moved into the village a couple of years before, and it would give her the opportunity to better herself and possibly leave the village. She pleaded with her mother, but to no avail, her mother was adamant that Jenny would not attend that den of iniquity.

So she went to the girls school.

Jenny thought about the garage. It had been exciting at first, serving the customers with petrol, dealing with change, and entering the amounts in Stan's big book, whether it was cash or credit. Everything was new and there was a lot to learn.

The first time her mother came in for petrol she was filling the tank whilst her mother went into the workshop. She emerged a few minutes later with Jimmer.

"It's an odd sort of noise," she heard her mother say. And Jimmer had replied that perhaps he'd better take a ride in the car so that he could hear it. Her mother sounded grateful and they drove off.

When they returned Jimmer got out saying, "I think you'll find that'll be much better Mrs Rook."

Her mother looked a little red faced, but she thanked Jimmer telling him that it might need more attention soon.

Jenny was a bit puzzled by this, but supposed that Jimmer had been able to fix the car out on the road, and since he said nothing she supposed this was a complimentary service for regular customers, or perhaps it would be added to the bill next time some work was done on the car. Other customers were always nice to her, and some of the older men were very friendly. Jenny enjoyed their attention, but she always felt there was something else; she didn't know what, and she had very little experience of men, or indeed boys, come to that.

She thought about her first day at the girls' school. She had been very apprehensive, she didn't want to be there, and she knew none of the other girls. She wasn't the sort of girl who could make friends easily, and being a little overweight and not particularly pretty, she became the butt of many pranks played by the clique of popular girls. They cruelly taunted her for her distinctly rural accent, her weight, and made jokes about boys that she completely failed to understand. Jenny had become withdrawn and introverted, she avoided sports and was an average to mediocre scholar. Her lack of any friends meant that she had few social skills. By the time she left school she had no academic qualifications, but she had shed the juvenile pudginess and developed a very pleasing figure. Whilst she still wasn't a pretty girl, her long black hair did something for her, and although she didn't suppose she would have a long line of admirers, she still had an interest in the same young lad that she had wanted to attend grammar school with, not that she saw him very often, if he was interested in girls it didn't show.

She left school at fourteen, and her mother arranged for her to get the job at the garage.

"You'll be better off getting some experience outside home," her mother said. "Your father doesn't need any help with the dairy and I can't have you hanging around me all day."

So there she was, a couple of weeks into her job, standing behind the high desk leaning on her elbows and gazing, unseeing, across the forecourt, when she heard someone come in through the workshop door behind her. She didn't look round, Stan was out and she knew that Tony was in the pit, so it had to be Jimmer.

She carried on with her muse as he came up behind her, and was suddenly rubbing the front of his trousers against her bottom. She jerked upright, and as she did so his hands slid around to cup her breasts. Jenny was speechless, she didn't know what to do, the attention was nice but she was sure he shouldn't be doing this. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear.

"I wonder if you're like your mother," he said with a laugh. And almost as soon as he had arrived, he was gone.

She could still feel his hands on her breasts, it felt nice, and she wanted it to happen again. But what did he mean by what he had said? What was there about her mother for her to be like? She hadn't known then. She looked out of the window as she heard the crunch of tyres on gravel, and went out to serve petrol.

She could still feel those hands, she thought she would always feel them, even though the hands that now touched them were so tiny. Baby Phillip. She had named him after the son in 'The Archers' a radio programme that she really enjoyed listening to. The happenings at Brookside Farm and all the characters in Ambridge seemed so real. And Phil Archer was her favourite, it was so sad that he had been widowed. Jenny was sure that Phil and Grace had been a lovely couple, even though they were only on the radio, and there were no pictures. They said that Grace's death was to spoil the opening night of the new television channel, ITV. Really, people were so horrid. But having a choice of television programmes was good, and she supposed that Grace wasn't a real person anyway ... and now Phil was available again. Well, she could dream, couldn't she? Her mother had approved and agreed that it was a good name, much better than some of the silly names young mothers were calling their children nowadays. "Really," she had exclaimed, "Elvis! Whatever next!"