Chapter 84

Julie and I made another trip up to Reading for the first weekend of May, to have a full night or two of passion alone with Jen and Hamish in their rooms and, more importantly, hopefully to get away from the growing pre-Finals stress in Cardiff and relax for a while.

Our dissertations had successfully been submitted for typing in time for the midday Friday 2^nd May deadline; there was now absolutely nothing more that we could do to improve them, but we were reasonably confident that we’d done a good job. Frankly, we’d got to the stage where we could recite them in our sleep, and the only alterations we had made in the last week had been very minor changes in style and checking the numbering of the citations of other academic publications. We just had to trust the typists to pick up anything silly that they might spot, and to our final proof reading before handing them in for marking and publishing.

It was a huge relief to drop our manuscripts off with the various Departmental secretaries and get our receipts for them; we met up again for a quick snack at the Union Salad Bar to celebrate, before heading back to the flat to sort out the leftover mess and return any outstanding books to the Library. Julie and Vee had huge piles of books and bound academic papers that they’d gathered and referred to while writing their dissertations, and all six of us ended up carrying heavy cardboard boxes to the Library for them. They were not the only ones; one of the librarians resignedly pointed us to a corner of the second floor, where there was already a huge pile of boxes.

“Put a piece of paper with your name and library number sticking out of the top book, and then it’ll be easier for us to clear your account.”

“When will you get these done?”

She grinned.

“Oh, surprisingly quickly! I know that there are thousands of books there, and it looks like a huge job, but it’s really not that bad. Now that the dissertations are all in, the place will be pretty empty next week, and we’ll be able to get on with these without much interruption. You’ll be signed off well before graduation, so don’t worry about that.”

Then my girlfriend and I headed back to the flat where I picked up my already-packed rucksack and headed for the station. British Rail very kindly kept to the timetable and we were in Reading just before six, and eating our tea with my sister and her boyfriend in their Hall refectory at half past.

Despite it having only been a fortnight since last seeing Jen and Hamish, as usual we massively overdid it on the sexual athletics, and came back to Cardiff utterly satiated. (For ‘satiated’, please read ‘completely shagged out and totally unable to get it up again’!)

Jen and I had one particularly amazing coupling; it happened on the Sunday morning when we’d shagged ourselves to sleep and had somehow gone the whole night through without waking. Gustav was rock hard when I opened my eyes and realised that my sister was gently stroking him, and to my delight she sat herself on him facing me, and then leaned back so that I could see him going in and out of her, with her clitoris and labia on full display – one of my very favourite positions, except for the fact that the girls boobs were always well out of my reach.

Full of energy after a night’s rest, after a bit I got her to move forwards and I hammered upwards into her until she gasped in delight and spasmed around me – I could see the muscles in her tummy contracting rhythmically as she achieved orgasm, but Gustav was just mosying along nicely, as happy as Larry. Then I got her to lie on her side, so I could thrust from behind, holding one breast with my left hand, and flicking her clitoris with my right thumb. As she was so worked up, I was able to be quite rough, and she had another climax pretty quickly. Then I flipped her over and gave her another come in the missionary position Mark 2 (with her legs on my shoulders), before getting her to lie flat on my chest holding on for dear life while I worked my hips madly, striving for my own ejaculation. I made it, and Gustav’s jerking and instinctive attempt to get through her cervix caused her to get there for a fourth time!

It was the first time that I’d ever managed to give a girl four climaxes in four different positions without stopping, and we clung together for a while, right up until Gustav remembered that as well as putting my seed where it was required, he also had a secondary task of releasing the urine that had built up in my bladder overnight, and unless we got to the loo quickly, there would be an unfortunate accident!

We decided to give the usual early morning lengths of the swimming pool a miss that morning! Neither of us felt that we’d be able to expend very much more energy without a decent breakfast and a short nap.

Julie laughed when Jen told her about our exploit over breakfast; she did say that next time it had damned well be her that I did it to, but she was kind enough to give credit to the extra excitement of swapping partners – she had yet again enjoyed Hamish a little too much, as they never tired of seeing if they could just manage one more orgasm, and they were both a little bit sore!

(Sheila had confided that they had the same problem whenever Jen and Hamish spent the night in Clifton – they were very welcome but massively oversexed visitors, who were always ready for another go, and who left them exhausted and utterly satisfied when they left!)

After lunch that day, before Julie and I headed back to the railway station and Cardiff, we all had another go at the standing up unsupported position which Adrian and Sheila had demonstrated; we quickly discovered that we hadn’t yet quite got the knack or the brute strength. There was much hilarity as we all failed to keep upright. Jen and I thumped back onto Hamish’s desk, he and Julie fell over sideways (fortunately onto his bed), Julie and I started swaying dangerously and had to lean against the wall rather than go over, and our hosts went a buster on the floor, luckily without injury, although Jen later reported an impressive bruise on her thigh.

Oh well, we’d tried. After all, the twins had admitted to a lot of practice before they got it right themselves. Meanwhile there were two erections which the girls thought really shouldn’t go to waste.

Hamish rested his bottom on the back of the ‘G-Plan’ issue easy chair and Julie stood facing away from him and moved up and down on his dick until they both got there; Jen and I opted to sit with our chests touching in the middle of the bed and slowly rock ourselves to orgasm, which took so long that our other halves went off for a shower and were back before we’d finished! We then quickly showered ourselves, and just got down to the refectory for a snack before they stopped serving.

The train was quite full for a Sunday leaving London; we did find two adjacent seats and Julie napped most of the way home with her head on my shoulder; we bought a pasty from a chippy on the way back to Richmond Road and ate it with a pot of tea shared with our flat mates before retiring to bed, to catch up on our sleep.

“Yes” had played the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff on the 2^nd and 3^rd of May; none of us had bothered getting tickets as we couldn’t really afford the time or the money. Sarah and Monica from downstairs had gone with their boyfriends on the Friday, and Vee related that they had enjoyed the concert, although they did say that “Slade” on 21^st April had been better.

Monday morning, the fifth of May, came round all too soon, but for us the studying routine of the last three years had gone. It seemed odd no longer to have the dissertation deadline looming over us, and it was now a matter of looking at the exam timetable and working out which topics to revise in what order.

There were no more lectures; from now on it was entirely up to us to revise from our own resources and spend as much time as we could refreshing our memories of all the topics we had covered over three years of study. All we had to do was check in with our tutors occasionally, and keep an eye on our pigeon holes in case there were any last minute changes to the exam timetable.

That first week was pretty weird; although we’d recently got into the habit of spending nearly every waking hour on refining our dissertations, we hadn’t had all six of us in the flat all day every day, as up to then an awful lot of time had been spent in the Library or the Departmental Reading Rooms.

It was hard to resist the temptation to slope off to the kitchen every time we heard someone boiling the kettle, and after a couple of days we had to agree set tea breaks when we’d all stop revising for twenty minutes, which we found less disruptive. Even our tea meal was just a break before we started the next four-hour stint that theoretically ended with bed time; we went for things that could be easily and quickly cooked and eaten – scrambled egg on toast, spag bol, ‘quick’ macaroni cheese, cheese on toast and grilled sausages with baked beans were pretty much the menu that week. Ten o’clock bedtime as a plan to ensure we were well rested fell apart that first night; Julie and I went through to make some toast at half past eleven, and found that we were quickly joined by the others, still fully dressed and still busy revising – and still peckish.

On the Tuesday morning, Vee took Fred and I with her as beasts of burden when she bought up what seemed like half the loaves of thick-sliced bread on the shelf in our local shop – the owner let us borrow one of the wire bakery trays to carry our loot home – and a vast quantity of eggs, margarine, Marmite, marmalade and a catering-sized block of New Zealand ‘cheddar’ cheese. It was, though, the sensible thing to do – with the urge to snack whenever we took a break, we six polished off one loaf for breakfast, another with elevenses, a third mid-afternoon, a fourth at nine o’clock, and a fifth at one o’clock Wednesday morning. The poor gas grill on the cooker never got a chance to cool down!

On Wednesday afternoon, after an ‘eggy bread’ lunch, Julie dragged me off to Maindy Baths for our regular swim; although I’d been reluctant to go, I did indeed feel better for a bit of exercise and a change of scene, and I went back to my notebooks refreshed.

We did deliberately make time to go out and have the ‘Student Special’ curry on the Friday night; it was a welcome change from the books, and a much-needed breath of fresh air and a stretch of our legs – we had suddenly realised as we waited for our meal that, apart from Fred buying some more bread, eggs and milk on Thursday morning, none of us had left the flat for a day and a half!

That year’s season of Doctor Who concluded that weekend, on 10^th May, with the fourth and final episode of “Revenge of the Cybermen”. We most certainly weren’t going to miss that! It was generally agreed that Tom Baker had made a pretty good start as the Fourth Doctor, and we all missed the time of relaxation from our studies – and, to be honest, the regular Saturday afternoon ‘team outing’ of all six of us from the flat, and the beer afterwards that had become a custom. This time we picked up pie, peas and chips on the way back from the Union, with a couple of pots of tea to sustain us for another long evening of revision.

The second week of revision, the 12^th to the 18^th, was pretty much a re-run of the first, but without Doctor Who to look forward to. On Tuesday some of us nipped to the Indoor Market to restock the fridge and food cupboard; Vee snapped up a huge bunch of Leeward Island bananas going cheap, and Sian bought several lettuces and enough radishes, cucumbers and tomatoes to keep us in salad for a couple of days.

Our Finals took up the last two weeks of May; the less said about them, and that preceding fortnight of revision, the better. We were all tired, stressed, worried and grumpy, and it was with great relief that we all laid down our biros for the last time.

Malcolm and I had made a deal that we wouldn’t hold a post-mortem after each exam; there was no point in being worried that we had submitted different answers, and we contented ourselves with a word or two of relief that another one was over. Julie and Vee sat in the kitchen and agonised over the first of their exams, but as soon as Sian pointed out that they were clogging up their brains over something that was now finished with, and that they’d never have to read William Langland’s 14^th Century allegorical poem ‘The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman’ ever again, they giggled, and moved on to some John Milton to prepare for their next ordeal.

Looking back at the exams after forty years, it’s incredible to think that we sat on a hard plastic chair at a tiny wooden desk and wrote our answers on exam books for three whole hours at a time, went home to revise madly for the next exam, had four hours sleep, and then did it again the next day, and the next. I don’t think I could do that now – in fact I know I couldn’t; my fingers are so used to typing on a keyboard that when I do pick up a pen these days, it seems almost foreign to my nature.

All six of us had fallen out with each other at some stage in the lead up to our exams; there were rows, sulks, silences, screams, shouts, tears, tantrums and tempers. And the three girls were just as bad! Simple things like discovering that there was no milk left, or someone had left the butter out in the sun, or there was a wasp in the kitchen, all started people off – but at least none of them were serious matters.

Luckily, we never all threw wobblies at the same time, so there was always someone to calmly remind us that we were tired and stressed, and actually it wasn’t that big a deal.

Even Julie and I had words a couple of times – but we made sure that we always made up before bedtime. Sometimes there was a rush to apologise as we got undressed, on one occasion we both said ‘sorry’ at the same time, and then burst into hysterical laughter that brought Sian running in to check that we were okay!

The six of us were all good friends, and that made a huge difference. We’d worked very long hours together at the vegetable factory the previous summer, we’d all had winter colds and suffered together earlier in the year, we’d in some ways all matured together, so we did look out for each other.

Our sex lives had suffered; we were very late to bed (normally in the early hours of the next morning), and quite often one of us would have fallen asleep before the other had finished their planned revision for the next day’s exams. The mornings were too much of a rush to laze around in bed and do our usual cuddling, and the complicated exam timetable meant that most of the time our different Faculties had different exam times – so I would be out all morning, and Julie all afternoon, or vice-versa. Her period was due soon, so I’d be ‘resting’ anyway.

On Tuesday of the first exam week, Fred and I were humorously bemoaning the ‘ongoing lack of legover situation’ as we waited outside the Great Hall for Malcolm to come out of the Gents; Vee and Julie of course both had the Department of English exam timetable, whereas Sian was often programmed to be in the same exam room as us, so she and Malcolm were going to be getting more time together than we were with our girlfriends. I certainly overheard some sounds coming through their bedroom wall one afternoon that didn’t immediately convince me that they were still sitting quietly turning the pages of their notebooks...

I did notice a couple of days later, when there was no English exam, that Fred used the opportunity well when he got home at lunchtime – there were definite sounds of passion coming through the kitchen wall from their room while I was making a pot of tea, but sadly Julie was still off games so we couldn’t make it a duet. Vee also looked a lot happier for a good shagging, even if she then spent teatime worrying over whether she’d done enough revision for the next day!