Chapter 109

After once again profusely thanking the Carters for getting hold of the bikes for us, and making our summer cycling holiday in France actually possible in the first place, I collected up all my belongings and hugged my five friends goodbye. I was headed straight back to Middlesbrough, as I had to be there for work the next morning.

Kenneth and Pamela Carter again expressed their delight that the twins had enjoyed their holiday so much; I had a feeling that they had finally worked out that constant high-pressure striving for academic achievement had robbed their kids of some of the fun of being young, and that this first holiday abroad with friends of their own age had been another milestone in Adrian and Sheila at last being recognised as adults by their parents.

Sheila (still being my ‘official’ girlfriend as far as her parents were concerned) took me to the station and gave me a very intense snog on the platform as we waited for my train. She giggled as she insisted that these extra few minutes had been well worth the 2p cost of the platform ticket, and gave me a lovely smile and hug when I told her that I’d have happily paid many times that amount just to be with her a while longer. I left with genuine regret that I couldn’t stay another couple of days, and promised that we’d meet up again very soon. The twins were our best friends as well as lovers, and I hoped that they would remain so after Julie and I got married and they embarked on their own careers.

Julie was taking a few days to go and see her parents in Exeter, Jen and Hamish intended to spend the nights in Stamford and the days flat-hunting in London, and the twins were having a few more days at home with their folks, then heading back to the vegetable factory for a couple more weeks of paid work before their University term started.

I was thinking more about the girls and our cracking good holiday together than about the countryside the train was going through, but I did look out of the window occasionally. England looked incredibly parched after the long summer drought; even though there had now been some rain, everything was still very dry. Getting across London on the Underground was the usual hot and chaotic process; it must have been even worse before the Victoria Line was opened. I ended up walking in the wrong direction at King’s Cross; occasional visitors like me must have been a real annoyance to the regular commuters who knew to an inch exactly where the tube doors stopped. I considered having a swift pint of Ruddles at The Shires bar in the station, but there was a train about to depart, so I quickly bought an Alexander Kent paperback from the John Menzies bookstall instead (it was slightly more expensive than a pint at 45p, but would last much longer). The newspapers still had headlines about the hosepipe bans; I laughed to see a photo of one chap standing in the River Thames in the west of London throwing a bucket of river water over his new Mark Two Ford Capri to get around the restrictions on washing cars. Then I trotted along the platform and found myself a seat; the train jerked into movement as I opened my book. The journey north passed quickly as I lost myself in the fictional account of the eighteenth century Royal Navy and the American War of Independence.

I picked up some bread, butter, cheese, milk and eggs on the way home from the station. The flat was hot, stuffy and airless after our absence; I opened all the windows and things soon improved. I phoned the Carter’s and spoke to Sheila; she thanked me for letting them know I was safely home, and repeated that she’d thoroughly enjoyed the holiday. I told her that I’d also very much enjoyed her; she was more than a little guarded in her response to that, so I guessed that she wasn’t alone in the room and kept the rest of the conversation light. Next, I phoned my Mum, to find that Jen and Hamish had already arrived and were waxing lyrical about Normandy and Brittany. Our grandparents had been chuffed with all the postcards, so that was worth the effort. I sent my love, took my first leisurely bath for a fortnight, ‘cooked’ myself a bachelor’s supper of scrambled egg on toast, washed up and went to bed, already missing Julie’s presence beside me. Solitary eating is not my thing; it insults the food if you just shovel it in rather than take the time to appreciate it. I’d got used to chatting to Julie as we prepared and enjoyed our tea together. Similarly, a double bed to yourself is a lonely place when you can smell your girlfriend’s perfume and hairspray on her pillow, but she’s not there beside you.

On my return to work on Wednesday morning, I found that I hadn’t been missed. So much for feeling indispensable! My postcard from Mont-St-Michel was up on the noticeboard, and people did comment that I looked refreshed. There was a very large pile of journals and circulating memos on my desk; I had to do some speed-reading to get that lot initialled and passed on to the next person. I treated myself to pie and chips on the way home; there was a lonely evening in prospect. Julie phoned about nine o’clock; her parents had dived straight into their duty-free cigarettes so were relatively content with life; but they were still nagging her about finding a teaching job back in Exeter. The great news as far as I was concerned was that she would be travelling back north on Friday, ready to start at her new school on Tuesday. We’d have the weekend together to relax.

I have to admit that although I very much missed my girlfriend those first couple of nights, I wasn’t sorry to have a few days to recuperate from a fortnight of Six Musketeers sexual excess. Even though I had got back into regular practice with Julie sharing our bed every night again, that holiday had been especially memorable.

Thursday night I nipped round to my old digs to give the Loftus’s the 200 Duty Free Woodbines I’d bought them as a present; they were chuffed that I’d remembered them and I had to be quite insistent that I didn’t want any money for the fags. I did have a cup of tea and some cake with them, and then headed back to the flat to polish my shoes and press my suit.

First thing the next morning, I had a formal meeting with my supervisor, Adam Ransome, and a chap from Personnel, to carry out the Review of my probationary year with ICI. I was optimistic that I would be confirmed as a permanent member of staff; my colleagues all seemed happy with my efforts. When I reported for the meeting, I found a third man there, who I very vaguely remembered from my company induction, and was re-introduced to me as Len, the Divisional Training Officer (DTO). He was the man who had the power to allow me to do a PhD on the firm’s time and money. That kind of let the cat out of the bag as far as probation went; he wouldn’t have been there if the firm was going to let me go.

I’d been puzzling over exactly what I was going to research for my PhD for almost a year now, and was still no closer to selecting a topic. I had spent the Wednesday and half of Thursday going through the circular copies of the journals and magazines that had appeared in my in-tray while I had been away, and one new idea had struck me. I decided to throw caution to the winds and try it out on them.

“I’ve just been on holiday, so I’ve been catching up on things. I saw something about the Flixborough enquiry, which suggested that the chemists weren’t talking to the chemical engineers, who weren’t talking to the mechanical engineers, and nobody was actually co-ordinating the whole thing. Obviously, we don’t yet know if that contributed to the accident, but I’ve been wondering if I should perhaps try to broaden my knowledge by doing something more in the high-pressure engineering line. Get a better understanding of exactly what is involved; for example, I know that in the Haber vessel outside we’re running at three and a half thousand PSI and about nine hundred Fahrenheit, but I haven’t the slightest idea what that equates to in pipe and vessel thickness, welding standards, quality of steel and so on. Flixborough looks like it was a catastrophic failure of some kind, and I’m guessing from what I’ve read so far that something went badly wrong with inspection and maintenance.”

There was a short silence while the three of them considered my statement and looked at each other. The DTO spoke first.

“Normally, I’d be hoping for some original research and a possible patent or two. However, this Flixborough event has shaken up the whole industry; an awful lot of local councils have been asking if it could happen in our plants in their areas, and safety has hit a new high at Board level. We’ll get some brownie points if we can suggest procedural improvements, so I’m not going to stop you. Think it over, develop your proposal and get back to us.”

“Does that mean yes, no or maybe?”

They laughed. Adam answered my question.

“That’s up to you, Jon. We really do want you to do a PhD, but please take your time over deciding exactly what you want to research, ask our advice if you need it, and tell me if you want an introduction to one of the Universities to discuss your ideas. Len’s got some very useful contacts. Oh, and by the way, I’ll buy you and Julie a drink at the Social Club tomorrow night!”

Adam’s secretary, Anita, smiled at me as I left his office.

“Congratulations, Jon. Mine’s a gin and bitter lemon, since you asked!”

I grinned back at her.

“I’d better get down to the bank tomorrow morning and get some cash then!”

“That might not be a bad idea!”

Actually, a round of drinks for my colleagues wasn’t going to be too painful. The firm picked up all the fixed costs of the social club, so the drinks price was pretty much the wholesale cost plus a small mark-up to pay the wages and run a slush fund for things like disco hire for dance nights. It would have cost me much more if we’d gone to one of the local pubs, which had to pay rates, rent to the brewery and still make a profit. You could easily understand why the working-mens clubs were so popular when you looked at your change after buying a few drinks in one of the town centre pubs.

It was of course a huge relief to know that I now had a permanent job; with a firm like ICI, in those days it was a job for life if you wanted it. When I got back to our flat to find Julie already home, I told her straight away. She too was delighted, and I was sent down to the off-licence for a bottle of Mateus Rose to drink with our celebratory reunion supper.

In the morning we went shopping; I drew some cash out of the bank and that evening we took a taxi over to the social club and had some drinks and dancing with my colleagues. Anita and Julie chatted away like old friends, and it was a good evening. We got another taxi home, and made slightly drunken love before holding each other as we drifted off to sleep.

Although we’d had a great holiday, and the sexual gymnastics of the Six Musketeers had been more than enjoyable, it was even better to wake up with Julie in our own bed again. Our long months of separation were finally over, and we were building our future together.

Sunday was a quiet day; Julie spent most of it checking she had everything ready for her first day at school on Monday. It was going to be what they called a teachers day; there would be no pupils in, so she had a chance to get to know her new colleagues and find her way around the building unimpeded. She came home full of enthusiasm; although the buildings were old and in need of renovation and updating, she liked the people she had met and was looking forward to starting her career. Tuesday went even better; the kids were in for their first day, and she’d started getting to know them by asking them to tell everybody what they’d done over the holidays. She said that it had got quite repetitive, but at least she had made a start on learning their names.

We had a letter from Hamish and Jen at the end of the week with their new address; they had found a small first floor bedsit flat in Kensal Green, a few streets away from Wormwood Scrubs prison, and were moving in there prior to starting their accountancy training. They said that it was fairly grotty, but it was cheap, and they didn’t see themselves being there for more than two years. Jen reported that they were going to be living a very different life from their three years in a Hall of Residence with all meals supplied, but there seemed to be a very good café at the bottom of the road where they could have a leisurely Sunday breakfast. Julie chuckled at that, and reminded me of the times we’d go out for breakfast from our Cardiff flat.

After all the frequent and indiscriminate coupling of that passionate fortnight in Brittany, there was a certain amount of relief over the next couple of weeks as all three girls happily reported the start of their periods; Vee’s Easter mishap was still hanging over us a bit like the Sword of Damocles. We lads had even got into the habit of asking the girls at breakfast every morning if they had taken their Pill – very rarely if ever had they forgotten, but they didn’t mind us checking.

It wouldn’t now be a huge problem if either Adrian or I impregnated Julie (though it would be a real nuisance in starting her career), and we might even get away with Hamish’s red hair genes being passed on. Similarly, if Jen ended up with a bun in the oven, at least she had now got her degree, and there would probably some leeway in gaining her accountancy qualification. It was Sheila we were most worried about, because she still had two full years of Medical School to complete, and she really couldn’t afford to take a year out to have a child. (Not of course that the concern ever actually stopped any of us having sex with Sheila just as often as we could (nor her welcoming our advances), but we were all aware that the risk was there.) Our luck had held so far, so we all crossed our fingers and hoped that it would continue to hold.

Now that we both had jobs and were actually living together full time, Julie and I took the big step of getting ourselves a television set. We went down to Radio Rentals on Saturday 11^th September and took out a year’s contract on a colour TV, and then headed to the Post Office to buy a licence, so as to be able to watch it without fear of the detector van pulling up outside. The TV was delivered on the 18^th, which worked perfectly, because every Monday night for the next twelve weeks we were glued to the BBC production of “I Claudius“ starring Derek Jacobi. Julie had read Robert Graves’ original book, and I had a vague idea of the history of the period, but we were both surprised by how much we enjoyed watching it each week. There was certainly a whole lot more on the telly than just “Dr Who” on winter Saturday afternoons.

It took us two nights of viewing sitting on our hard wooden kitchen chairs for us to decide that we really needed a comfy settee where we could relax and cuddle. Julie had spotted a second-hand furniture place during her explorations of the local area, and we went over there on the Saturday morning. We only wanted a two-seater; there was one there in decent nick for £2.50, and we snapped it up. They asked another 50p for delivery which I thought was very reasonable; it was certainly money well spent as it saved us an awful lot of blood, sweat and tears with two beefy lads pushing it up the stairs to the flat for us.

It didn’t take us two more nights to realise that we could still both watch telly with Julie bent over the back of the settee and Gustav doing the business from behind. Julie giggled as she said that I was unusual, being a man who could do two things at the same time – of course she had always asserted that women could carry out several different tasks at the same time! She then proceeded to question me on what the main story on the Nine O’Clock News had been; I couldn’t tell her the answer because I had been totally concentrating on what we had been doing at the time. She licked her finger and held it up in the air in an unmistakeable gesture of victory; I had to give her the best of that one.

We did indeed watch a lot more TV than we had expected; there were some great programmes on, and we enjoyed relaxing and cuddling while watching them. It also made it a lot easier for both of us at work the next day at tea break, when everyone else was discussing what had been on – we could now join in with the conversation, even about “Coronation Street”! Julie also found it useful to have seen “Blue Peter” and “Crackerjack” so that she could answer any questions the children at school might have about what had been shown in the programme. We quickly invested in buying a weekly copy of both the “Radio Times” (BBC programmes only) and the “TV Times” (ITV) so that we could go through the listings and see what we might want to watch. “Film ‘76“ with Barry Norman became a regular feature, as did “The Old Grey Whistle Test“, ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris’s often-wry late night take on ‘serious’ rock music. Both presenters had a dry sense of humour that we both appreciated; Barry Norman’s frequent comment ‘and why not?’ had become a national catchphrase.

We decided to hit the second hand furniture shop again for a small square dining table, finding an old mahogany one with turned legs at the corners. It did double duty as Julie’s lesson preparation and homework marking desk and as our dining table when we had cooked ourselves a proper meal that deserved more than the formica table in the kitchen. With the standard lamp and the two small bookcases we’d picked up from the family moving abroad, that corner of the sitting room looked quite business-like.

One thing they never tell you in the advertising about becoming a teacher is the health risk! The little brutes constantly bring their lurgies into school, and as everyone of our generation knew, “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases!” Julie lasted almost a fortnight before she brought a stinking cold home with her, and my enduring memory of that first winter in Middlesbrough is the taste of Beecham’s Powders and the smell (and feel) of Vick on my chest as we tried to stave off the worst of the symptoms. Even dosing ourselves with a couple of Haliborange tablets every morning failed to boost our immune systems sufficiently; we made sure that we ate properly to give ourselves the best chance of fighting the various illnesses.

Sheila phoned one evening in mid-September to tell us that they were finishing at the vegetable factory and heading back to their folks for a week, but quite fancied popping up to us for the weekend to see our place and take a look round Middlesbrough. It was with great regret that Julie and I decided that our streaming colds were not something that we wanted to share with the twins; we had already discovered back in Cardiff that trying to make love with a bunged up nose and persistent cough was the very opposite of romance and passion! They were disappointed, but said that they’d still love to come up sometime, when we weren’t flying the plague flag. We were a little embarrassed; it wasn’t even Autumn and we’d gone down with a winter cold. How on earth the little beast in Julie’s class had caught one that early in the year was a mystery. I kept to myself at work to ensure I didn’t pass it on to anyone else; it wouldn’t have made me at all popular.

We weren’t hors de combat all the time; we managed a couple of trips down to London and Bristol before Christmas; we had a great time with Jen and Hamish in late October (Half Term weekend) at their new Kensal Green ‘Luv Nest’, a small upstairs flat with bedroom, living room, tiny bathroom and even smaller kitchen. Hamish had found a comedy club in Little Venice that they took us to on the Saturday night; you could have a drink and a snack while you listened to a stand-up comic, and we had a good laugh.

A month later, we paid a visit to the twins for a Six Musketeers ‘Shagaganza’ (Hamish’s recent invention, an extravaganza of shagging). When we got to Clifton late on a cold and wet Friday night, Adrian made us a pot of tea while Sheila heated up some fried potatoes to go with the usual delicious Mr Waite’s sausages.

“Are the terrible two not here yet?”

“Nah, they have to show their faces in the office for some exam results tomorrow morning, so they’ll be here after lunch.”

We sat down and chatted as Julie and I ate. It was a very welcome meal after our journey half way across the country in the dark, and the pot of tea got refilled and re-emptied before we were finished.

“Thanks, Sheila, I was more ready for that! One of the kids had a nosebleed over lunch so I didn’t get to finish mine, I was too busy sorting him out.”

“A pleasure as always! Thank you for flogging all the way down here to see us. It’s a long way when you’ve been working all week.”

She stood up to collect our plates. Adrian turned to me, and put on a truly bad foreign accent, so mangled that I had no idea what he was trying to portray.

“Hey, Johnnie! You want nice girl? My sister, very nice girl. Very clean, very pure? You like her very much! OWWW!!!”

His sister was grinning in resigned amusement after smacking him on the back of the head.

“You and your bloody Douglas Reeman books! I don’t need you to pimp for me, thank you very much.”

He grinned.

“I’ve been waiting to use that line since I read it on our last trip home on the train! It was too good a chance not to!”

Whether she had been pimped out or not, Sheila dragged me off to her bedroom just as eagerly as her brother escorted my girlfriend to his.

Sheila wanted to try something that she and I hadn’t done before; she told me that her Twin and Hamish had both very much enjoyed it, and she thought that Julie might also like to give it a go. She lay on her front with her legs over the end of the bed, and got me to fuck her hard and fast while holding her left shoulder and her right upper arm so that she wouldn’t / couldn’t move away from me. She made so much noise that the other two stopped what they were doing and came in to spectate; Gustav was certainly pushing all her buttons, and in between my panting for breath I was also having a really good time – her internal ridges seemed especially pleasurable as my erect tissue ran to and fro. It was certainly athletic fucking for pleasure; there wasn’t a chance to display a whole lot of love and affection, though! That came later.

Jen and Hamish turned up after lunch on Saturday; the weather had turned even more autumnal and there was a westerly half-gale throwing the cold rain against the windows overlooking Caledonia Place. The remedy, as always, had been to shutter them, light the gas fire, and put the kettle on. My sister and her boyfriend were damp under their anoraks despite having taken a taxi from Temple Meads; Jen’s immediate and common-sense solution was to remove their clothes and start on the Shagaganza!

It was quite a twenty-four hours. Julie and I were both utterly shagged out when our taxi arrived to take us to Temple Meads to catch our train back to Middlesbrough; the other four intended to continue for a while longer, though Adrian was without doubt flagging. It was just as well that Hamish’s parents hadn’t known we were in town; we’d probably have fallen asleep over Catriona’s Sunday lunch. As it was, we dozed most of the way home. Julie phoned Clifton when we got back to our flat; Adrian answered and said that Sheila had crashed out on her bed two hours earlier, and he was going to join her just as soon as Hamish phoned to confirm they too were back safely. I don’t think I was at my best at work on Monday despite having caught up on three hours lost sleep on the train! Julie and I were tucked up in bed by eight that evening – and not because we were both feeling randy!

Life went on and the nights continued to draw in. I took an afternoon off work to go and watch Julie’s class perform their Nativity Play; I was impressed with how she had orchestrated it so everyone got their chance to be at the front of the stage and say something. There were probably more grandparents there than parents, but it was a pretty good turnout. Julie was understandably shattered afterwards, so I cooked our supper and once again we were in bed by eight and fast asleep by about five past. Her term finished a couple of days before my office Christmas close down; she nipped down to Exeter for two nights, dropped in at the twins to give them their Christmas presents from us, and met me in Stamford on Christmas Eve. My sister and her boyfriend were already there; their bosses had bowed to the inevitable that no-one would do a scrap of useful work on Friday and given everyone the day off.

Julie and I spent the whole time between Christmas and New Year at Stamford, mainly for my grandparents’ sakes. We had a great Christmas lunch with nine of us round the table, and the present opening was a whole load of fun.

I’d dipped deeply into my savings from my Duty Officer shifts, and bought her a Kenwood Chef mixer, which I knew she wanted when we could afford it. There was no way that we’d be able to carry that back on the train, so I’d actually stashed it and some of the attachments over at my old landlady’s place, and then taken it over to our flat while Julie was in Exeter. My girlfriend was therefore confronted with a pile of presents comprising one large gift-wrapped box, three glitter-decorated envelopes and half-a-dozen smaller parcels in Christmas paper. We made her open the smaller gifts first, just little things like bath salts, a woolly bobble hat, gloves and a scarf. Then Jen passed her the big box, pretending it was pretty heavy. We all laughed at the look of surprise on her face when it weighed almost nothing. Mum pointed out that she had used last year’s paper so it was okay if Julie just ripped the paper off, so she did that, and opened the box to find just an instruction book for the Kenwood Chef. She’s not stupid; she realised immediately that in order to have a copy of the book of words, I must have bought a machine, and she launched herself at me to thank me. The three envelopes contained the instructions for the liquidiser that Jen and Hamish had bought, the mincing attachment from the twins, and the slicer and shredder from Mum and Dad. Julie was delighted, and said that she couldn’t wait to get home and try it out.

The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special 1976 was particularly memorable for the Breakfast sketch, where the two of them prepare breakfast to the tune of ‘The Stripper’, involving incredible choreography to ensure that the toast was ejected from the pop-up toaster just in time to be caught on the plate – we were all rolling around with laughter. If I remember correctly, that was also the year when they did ‘Singing in the Rain’ with Ernie as Gene Kelly, but no rain apart from the drenching Eric got every time he passed under a window or gutter downpipe.

It was one of those slow leisurely days (apart from the usual rush to finish eating the main course by three o’clock so as to watch the Queen’s Speech on TV) when we ate, lazed in front of the fire cracking open monkey nuts, and ate some more. The living room fire probably burned more wrapping paper, satsuma skins, Quality Street wrappers and broken nut-shells than it did coal, and by nine o’clock, when Mum suggested a slice of cold turkey, bread sauce, gravy, bacon and chipolata sausage with re-heated fried sprouts and potato, all of us descended on the kitchen to load our plates, even my grandmothers. Mum and Jen took the grandparents home while the rest of us tidied up before heading for bed. Boxing Day started at a later hour than a usual day; Jen pointed out to Hamish that one of the reasons we followed the local tradition of eating Pork Pie for breakfast was that it saved the woman of the house from having to cook breakfast after working her fingers to the bone in the kitchen the day before. Hamish was sensible enough to whole-heartedly agree with all the sentiments!

The cinema in Broad Street was showing its usual selection of older films over the holidays; there wasn’t really the demand in a town the size of Stamford for a long run of one film. As long as I could remember, if we had wanted to see a new release, we had to go into Peterborough or Leicester. The advantage of Broad Street was that it was easily walkable and we could stop in at one of the town centre pubs for a beer after the film. Julie and I ended up going to see “Gone With The Wind”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Sound of Music” and, unusually recent, Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” with Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman, which we’d enjoyed watching in Cardiff when it had first come out a couple of years earlier. Mum and Dad roared with laughter the third time we said we were going off to the pictures; they said it was very much like their courting days in the late 1940s and early 1950s!

Jen and Hamish headed down to Bristol for Hogmanay with Alastair and Catriona. The twins came up to stay for a couple of nights at New Year; Adrian shared my room and Julie and Sheila had Jen’s. Naturally, as soon as we thought my folks would be asleep on the 30^th, I sneaked in with Sheila and sent Julie back in to Adrian. Mum and Dad held a small New Year’s Eve party; very soon after the First Footers from next door had left and we had all headed for bed, Julie joined me for the first consummation of our love in 1977. The twins started the year as they meant to continue; Adrian had told me that their ten days with their parents had been pretty lean as far as nookie went, and that they were intending to get back to their flat in Clifton just as soon as they could.