Chapter 107

The person who now knew the least about our forthcoming holiday in Brittany was me!

Julie sorted out her papers while I made us another cup of tea, and then she updated me on what was planned. We (she after seeking the advice of the travel agent) had elected to use the fairly recently inaugurated Townsend-Thoreson ferry service between Portsmouth and Cherbourg.

“Are you quite sure that we can get ferry tickets this close to travelling? Shouldn’t we have booked weeks ago?”

My blonde lover shook her head.

“It’s fine, my darling, I phoned them up from the travel agents, and we got a very helpful lady – we’d have no chance of booking a car now it’s peak season, but they’ve always got room for a few bikes or pedestrians. We’ll have to pay for a reclining seat each, but that’s not a lot.”

“A cabin?”

“Not a hope! I asked about them. She said that they were mostly gone by mid-June. It’s a really popular route.”

“And the bikes?”

“Sheila checked with her Mum yesterday morning, all organised. They’ve even got proper panniers on the back wheels, although our sleeping bags will have to be bungied on.”

I nodded. That all sounded good. Then I had a worrying thought. I hoped that the three girls had got their heads together about the dates and were pretty sure that none of them would be off games while we were away. The start of Julie’s period when we’d been camping in Cornwall the previous summer could have been disastrous, and the thought of shared French campsite washrooms at such a time was not at all attractive. I was sure that they would have thought of it, but as Julie & I hadn’t...

“Err ... you remember that little hiccup we had at the end of our holiday at Sennen Cove?”

She giggled.

“All sorted, my sweet. You haven’t got a thing to worry about; all three of us will be fine. We’ve compared our dates, and we’re all clear. You aren’t going to miss out on any nookie while we are away.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Sheila worked out how to do a bit of jiggery-pokery with her pills; she got extra from the clinic, and just kept taking the active ones until she was synchronised with Jen. I’m three weeks ahead of them, so we’ll have a whole fortnight when none of us are off games, and that’s when we’re going camping.”

“Is that safe?”

After Vee’s mishap over Easter, and her hastily arranged wedding, we were all a little more conscious of the limitations of the contraceptive Pill. As much as we all enjoyed making love as much and as often as we could, early motherhood was not in any of our plans.

“Sheila reckons so. She did it while they were all doing their exams so that she didn’t feel rotten with her period, and that was a couple of months back. She and Adrian fucked like bunnies to calm down after each exam, and there was no problem. She’s back to being regular as clockwork.”

“That sounds a very good idea!”

“Yeah, and when we get settled down here, I think I’ll try and delay mine a week as well, so that we’re all off games together – it will make organising Six Musketeers events a lot easier!”

I nodded in agreement. I’d already discovered that having a full time job was a lot more restrictive than I had anticipated – no more Wednesday afternoons off to play sport, no more morning lie-ins if the first lecture wasn’t until 11, no more finishing at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and having a couple of hours to fill until teatime. It also made the weekends much shorter; visiting Bristol from Cardiff had been a doddle when you could be there by five o’clock, but spending the whole of Friday and Sunday evenings travelling half the length of England on a train made a Six Musketeers event much more of an expedition that needed forward planning. Having a better idea of exactly when all three girls would be able to take part would certainly simplify things.

We’d had a postcard from Sian & Malcolm in reply to our change of address note; they were having a great time hillwalking at weekends being so close to the Scottish mountains. Their hobby fitted in well with the working week, so time off wasn’t quite so precious for them. They still needed to plan trips back south to coincide with Bank Holidays, otherwise they ended up taking odd days of their holiday allowance – like they’d had to for Vee’s wedding. That reminded me.

“Have you heard from Vee? How’s she getting on?”

“Oh lord! Didn’t I tell you? Sheila had a letter last week from Sian, who gave us Vee’s news. All going well, baby beginning to show, no more morning sickness but horny as hell – sounds like Fred isn’t getting very much rest when he gets home!”

I grinned. I could easily imagine our randy little flatmate pumped up an extra gear on her pregnant female hormones, and almost pitied her husband. Almost – Vee in the throes of passion had been in the same sexual excitement league as Julie, Jen and Sheila, and that was with merely liking her as a close friend, not loving her like I did the others.

Actually, I’m doing her a disservice, describing her as merely a ‘close friend’. That memorable morning at the Richmond Road flat, when Vee had pulled her nightdress over her head and settled herself down on my cock to show Sian & I how to have the girl on top, I had thought that I’d died and gone to heaven. Petite she might have been, but her figure was exquisite, and she had rapidly caused my first premature ejaculation through over-excitement. Vee had taught me a great deal about pleasing a woman, and we’d had some amazing romps together. Yes, it had got a little tricky when I had got serious with Julie and Sian had got together with Malcolm, leaving Vee the odd one out, but luckily she had found Fred in time for our summer earning money at the vegetable factory, so that had all worked out in the end. I did miss our sexual encounters, but it was pretty soon very clear that she & Fred had more than a lot in common, and that they had a future together.

I was willing to lay a lot of money that Fred wasn’t showing any reluctance to live up to his marital responsibilities, even if it was testing his stamina and endurance. He was probably going to work every morning just to regain his strength for the night to come!

“We were all joking about the side effects of pregnancy, and Hamish got really worried about how Jen will be when they decide to start a family. He’s hoping to get you and Adrian to come and stay, so he can get some rest. Jen was winding him up something rotten about just how demanding she’s going to be!”

“Are you quite sure that she was exaggerating?”

She held her hand out palm down and wiggled it side to side. I laughed.

“No, I didn’t think so either!”

We got back to the topic of our holiday. Julie consulted her notebook to check precisely what she had written, and told me which ten days holiday to book.

Then we went to bed to celebrate her return home. I’d missed her and she’d missed me, and it was great to be back together again.

First thing at work the next morning, I dropped the required memo in to Anita, who passed it to my supervisor Adam, who approved it and passed it to Personnel, and my leave of absence was official.

The tea-break conversation at work was about the sentencing of the former Labour M.P. John Stonehouse, the one who’d faked his own death on a beach in Miami and run off to Australia with his mistress, getting seven years for fraud. Despite now being banged up in Wormwood Scrubs as a convicted criminal, he was still a Privy Councillor and a Member of Parliament! The slimy git hadn’t even had the decency to resign those positions when he was found guilty.

There was also continued rude and irreverent comment about the appointment of Dennis Howell as ‘Minister for Drought’ to supervise the water rationing. There were rumours that he had been asked to take part in a rain dance on behalf of the nation – though at that stage of the drought, the consensus was that anything was worth trying. Julie and I had certainly taken his advice to ‘share a bath to save water’ to heart.

(Poor Dennis Howell got a lot of stick. A likeable Brummie, his family had narrowly escaped maiming or death eighteen months earlier when the IRA had put a bomb in their Ford Cortina on their driveway. When the drought finally ended with a deluge, he was made Minister for Rain, and a little later, when heavy snow hit East Anglia, he was made – yes, you’ve guessed it – Minister for Snow!)

I had a meeting with Anita and Adam Ransome about what was going to happen with my daily duties while I was away; there was nothing urgent about most things, but there were a couple of deadlines for reporting that needed to be met. Fortunately I was pretty up to date, so I didn’t have to bust a gut clearing my desk before I went away. I’d seen some people staying late and coming in at weekends just to be able to go on holiday – which of course they were then too tired to really enjoy!

Julie’s period had arrived on time; with the warm weather she was avoiding the hot water bottle remedy for period pain, but she took a few painkillers at night and was fine. We did have some fun together – the rubber ‘shower’ hose that connected to the bath taps came in handy for cleaning us up – but most nights we just cuddled.

Then, at last, the big day came and I left work at lunchtime, met Julie at the flat, and we took a taxi to the station with our sleeping bags and rucksacks.

On her return to Middlesbrough, Julie had described to me how the drought had affected the normally green English landscape; despite her warnings I was still a little shocked at how brown and scorched everything was; in some places there were signs of vegetation having been burned – once the train actually slowed to a crawl as we went through thick smoke, with firemen extinguishing a blaze on the railway embankment! I had heard that there had been a couple of blazes up on the North York Moors where careless people had discarded cigarette butts, but it was clear that with no rain for weeks, a lot of vegetation was tinder-dry.

Mum and Dad welcomed us with a high tea when we got to Stamford, and we spent the early part of the evening checking over the tent and camping kit. Mr Johnston was driving the factory’s Luton van when he dropped off the other four just after eight. I asked him how the harvest was going; he grimaced and said that the drought was now seriously affecting yields. I commiserated, and wished him luck.

Mum produced a box of a thousand teabags which Jen had asked her to get from the cash and carry. It was fairly large so we had a discussion about whether we needed to take them all. The final agreed figure was a likely five mugs of tea a day for six of us, times twelve days, or around 360 teabags. Mum duly got out her roll of freezer bags and we ended up with four plastic bags each containing about a hundred, just in case. We also pinched a dozen of Mum’s black refuse sacks to line our rucksacks, so that IF it did happen to rain, our spare clothing should stay dry.

We were up and about bright and early the next morning, we wanted to be through London just after rush hour, so that we’d have some spare time at the Carter’s to sort out the bikes while the shops were still open for emergency purchases.

In fact we made it to Brighton for half past eleven; Adrian spent the time while we waited for his father to pick us up in enquiring about taking bicycles on the train. Luckily he found an older porter who knew the ropes, and was able to explain which trains had a luggage van and would be able to take us. He did warn us that it was pretty much self-service and we’d have to catch the guard in good time to load our bikes.