Chronicle 24 -1980: Noughth Week Part 1

Saturday 4^th October

I was standing outside Oxford railway station and it was raining.  Not just raining but absolutely tipping it down.  I didn’t have a proper raincoat; just a short waterproof jacket, which was proving to not be as waterproof as I had hoped.  The legs of my trousers were wet. My socks and feet were wet.  My hair was wet.  The first couple of days of the month had been warm and dry with the temperature approaching 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Now the temperature had dropped and it had rained the last couple of days. As ever, the weather had been better at home and as my mother drove my sister and I over the Chilterns on the M40 the weather ahead looked, as was often the case, darker and gloomier.  My mother had dropped me off that morning, the beginning of noughth week, and helped me move my stuff into my new room in the college annexe near the Oxford Union.  In fact, I had a view of the famous debating chamber from my room, on the top floor of the staircase. It was an attic room with a sloping ceiling. I couldn’t believe that I was on the top floor again but at least I didn’t have anyone living above me, which I didn’t think I would like.  I had had lunch with my mother and sister at The Nosebag cafe, which was just around the corner opposite the Union.  The cafe was on the first floor and you had to ascend to it up some narrow wooden stairs. C. K and I went there a lot.  I waved my mother and sister off before walking directly to the station.  A was due to arrive from Edinburgh at just after two.

“Give her my regards!” said my mother.  “Don’t forget to be careful!” she said.  My sister sniffed.  My mother was always telling me to be careful whenever a girl was mentioned by me.  What she meant was ‘don’t forget to use contraceptives’.  I didn’t think there would be anything like that with A. It had been too long.  I hadn’t seen her since the summer of 1977; over three years before.  Although we wrote to each other regularly, if not often, I had no idea what she would be like now.  She was just fourteen when I first met her but now she had been at university, living away from home, for a year. She had had a number of boyfriends and, without ever having been explicit about it in her letters, I knew that she had lost her virginity the previous year.  She had been younger than I had been, in fact.  I hadn’t even spoken to her on the phone or seen a photo of her. I figured it might be uncomfortable for us both.  We had both moved on emotionally and sexually.  The days of our tentative, breathless, first explorations of each other had long passed.

The previous term I had been chatting to G who was taking an ex girlfriend from home to the College ball.  C had been teasing him about ‘having her in his room afterwards.’

“It doesn’t work like that with exes.  You can’t go back.  It was two years ago,” he had said. I had seen her at the ball, looking glamorous and sitting on one of the college benches, smoking, chatting to a man who had his arm around her.  G was nowhere to be seen. He was obviously right. No way back. I thought about C and I. She had wanted to come to my house over the summer but couldn’t because of her job.  It would have been just for the day, though.  She now lived only a short train ride away. Not like A.

The connecting train from Wolverhampton was running late.  I had been there for half an hour.  Worrying.  The longer I stood there the more I worried. It was over a five hour journey for her. I looked up at the sky.  It didn’t show any signs of clearing up.  Oxford was in its most, but not untypical, soggy mode.  Everything felt and looked grey and damp; a damp that seemed to soak into everything, especially the limestone of the university buildings. If you were lucky you got a few sunny weeks in the summer term but mostly my memories of the place are of grey skies and drizzling rain. I looked at the sky over the car park.  It showed no sign of easing off.

“Hello!” came the voice from behind me.  There she was, dressed in blue denims, black plimsolls and a blue kagoule.  She was wearing a huge backpack.  Her hair, which was much blonder than it had been, was in a ponytail. She looked the same but different; particularly her face, which had filled out a little, so she had lost that gaunt look she had when I last saw her.  When she had been revising for her exams, and after she knew she was leaving to live in Glasgow. she had stopped eating and the last time I had seen her she had looked, thin, pale and ill.  She smiled.  The same smile, though. Lovely A!

“Hi!” I said, standing about six feet away from her and looking her up and down.  “You’ve grown!”  She was a good couple of inches taller than I remembered. About five foot six now, I guessed. She smiled again.

“Don’t I get a hug?” she said.  I stepped forward and we embraced rather awkwardly, as I was conscious of her huge backpack, which meant I couldn’t put my arms around her.  She kissed me on the lips, briefly.  I asked her what was inside the backpack as it looked big enough to keep her alive on the moon.

“Stuff!” she answered. A lot of stuff, obviously.  I remembered she said she was bringing a lilo to sleep on. We set off towards my room, once I had taken her backpack.  Getting this on was a right performance, as I hadn’t ever carried a backpack before and the straps needed adjusting, which I couldn’t fathom at all.  “Still rubbish at practical things!” she observed, as I totally failed to work out how to get the strap loops bigger.

Between the two of us we eventually got it sorted and onto my back.  It was heavy.  I didn’t know how she carried it but she had always been stronger than she looked. We walked up Hythe Bridge Street towards the town.  It was a fairly grotty end of town and not exactly the best introduction to the City of Dreaming Spires.

“Where are all the colleges?” A asked as we crossed into George Street.

“Further in.  I’ll take you on a tour when it stops raining!” I said.  If it ever stopped raining, I thought.  When it was like this it could set in for days.

“You don’t have to look after me all the time if you are busy!” she said.  That meant she really had come to see the city not me, I thought. We trudged past the towering blank brick wall of the Odeon cinema.  I said that I was up to date with my work.  We didn’t have a collection to do for the beginning of term as we were starting all new subjects and I had written my essay. The term didn’t officially start for over a week, I told her.

We turned into New Inn Hall Street and walked past the church where C had taunted me to try to have sex with her just off the street, after our Chinese meal, the previous term. We went through the iron gates to the College annexe.  From the street it looked like a row of three and four storey nineteenth century houses.  Inside, however, modern staircases had been put behind the old facades.  There was a green space inside, with paths to three other staircases, also built into old houses, set at 90 degrees from the main ones.  C, K and H were going to be in these houses.  There was a bigger, older building near the entrance which provided a few flats for married graduate students. ‘If we got married we could have one,’ C had said while we were still at our infatuated stage and were worrying about the room ballot.  I had not been very keen on that idea.  Maybe it contributed to my increasing unpopularity with C.  Who knew with her?

“Where’s your room!” asked A.  She had put her hood up and looked like a pixie.  I told her I was on the top floor.  These staircases were locked, unlike the ones in College and we had a key to open them.  Visitors would ring a bell and you could let them in, although you would have to run downstairs to do so, as there was no remote entry switch.  If you were a visitor and you wanted to leave a note you just had to hope someone else inside would respond.  My room was small and although there was a window you could only see out of it if you stood up.  The room had heating that worked, however, as I had discovered when I arrived that morning and it was actually warm.  It also, luxuriously, had a wash basin.  Half way down the stairs between each floor and built into the external, modern stairwells, was a bathroom consisting of a loo, washbasin and, behind a tiled wall, a shower. Technically, they alternated between men and women but, in reality, we found, everyone just used the nearest one; the only difference being the provision of sanitary bins in the women’s ones.  My bathroom was literally ten feet from the door of my room.  What an improvement over the previous year.  “I’m desperate for a wee!” said A, as we passed the women’s on the floor below mine.  I told her where my room was and said I’d leave the door open. I gratefully put down her enormous backpack on my floor and filled the kettle at the washbasin.  No more having to leave the room to fill the kettle! 

There were three other rooms on the floor but no sign of life, yet, in any of them.  I recognised the name of one of the girls, who had the room opposite, a quiet girl who K knew (K knew everybody, though) who had been to Roedean, a famous, posh, girls school. Roedean sat on an exposed hill above the cliffs near Brighton.  We used to drive past it when we had holidays in Sussex. R, the girl, later told me it was so damp in the winter the water would run down the inside walls of the dormitories.  No damp in my new room, thank goodness. In fact, given it was quite cold out I thought the room was pretty perfect. 

The other two names on the staircase list, at the bottom, were not familiar at all.  They were both girls too, however (men and women had their names written differently on staircase lists). Something to look forward to, perhaps.  

A returned and looked around my room, which didn’t take very long.  I explained that I had lots of pictures and posters to stick up on the walls and she offered to help.  She asked if I had any food, as she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I didn’t, apart from some cornflakes which were in the kitchen. We had an actual kitchen on the floor, with a fridge, a Baby Belling oven and two hot plates. I took her back to The Nosebag where she ate three toasted teacakes and said she felt much better.  I told her that College dinners hadn’t started yet so asked if she would like to go out to dinner, as I hadn’t many cooking implements or food yet. 

Back in my room she helped me finish unpacking. We made a start with sticking up my posters and postcard collection.  These were, largely, art nude postcards, many of which C and K had bought me the previous year, which I put on the wall above my armchair, or posters of science fiction illustrations, which mainly came from Science Fiction Monthly. This was a large broadsheet, loose leaf SF magazine which featured stories and novel cover art which was published, briefly, in the mid-seventies.  The best thing about it was the double spread posters of science fiction book cover illustrations by artists like Tim White and Chris Foss, which were printed in it.

“I remember these from your bedroom at home!” she said. We stuck these on the walls with blu-tack, as there wasn’t any prohibition on this, like students have these days.  The room looked a lot less bare when we had finished.  I had been careful not to get too close to her.  I decided I should maintain my distance.  She seemed happy with that.

I apologised for the small room but she said it was bigger than her first year room which had been in the old athletes’ village, used for the 1974 Commonwealth Games.  I wanted to take her over to have a look at College but it was really pouring now and neither of us fancied it. 

By now it was getting on for dinner time.  A wanted a pizza and, conveniently, Sweeney Todd’s was just around the corner, so we wouldn’t have to go too far in the rain.  In fact, the location of the annexe was much better than College for shops and restaurants.  There were two entrances to the annexe grounds, one the Union side, closer to College and the other on New Inn Hall Street, where you could park to unload, which was much more convenient than having to get Radcliffe Square opened specially.  From that side we were only a few hundred feet from the Westgate Centre with Selfridges department store, and Sainsbury’s supermarket. From the Union Side you came out in Cornmarket, the main shopping street with WH Smiths, the bank, Boots, the Co-op and the covered market. The annexe wasn’t as iconic as the old College but we would still go there for meals and tutorials.

Over dinner, we spoke about our holidays. I had sent A postcards of Sussex and the Lake District.  I asked her how her holiday in Italy had gone and it was apparent something was wrong. I asked her what it was and a tear ran down her cheek.

“Hey,” I said, risking stroking her cheek and catching the tear. She had been going to Italy with her parents and had a relatively new boyfriend who wanted to come too. She had written to me, I remembered, telling me that they were going together. Her parents hadn’t allowed it, however.

“They woudn’t let him share a room with me.  They still think I’m a virgin”, she explained and rather than the boyfriend being understanding he had got upset with A, called her a ‘child who couldn’t do anything without mummy and daddy’ and threw a sulk.  When A and her family returned from their time in Florence the boyfriend announced that he had found a ‘grown up woman’ and dumped her.

“When did all this happen?” I asked.  It was just after she had gone back to university, a few weeks before.

“That was why I rang you to arrange coming here!” she said, snivelling. “I was miserable!  He was such a bastard.”   Oh dear, I thought.  “He wasn’t interested in anything about me other than sex and he was useless at that. I slept with him too early, I guess.  She pulled a pocket tissue out of her pocket. “Sorry. I’m being such a girl.  Maybe he was right!”  I didn’t want to probe into her sex life, really. I still saw her as a schoolgirl, in a way and my schoolgirl at that.

“Well, he must be insane!” I said.  “Obviously an idiot with no taste!”

“I knew you’d be nice!” she said, giving me a wan smile. “Tell me about your horrid ex-girlfriend.  We can be miserable together!”  I gave her an edited version of C and my spiralling relationship the previous term and how she had gone off with the creep from Madgalen.  I didn’t mention H or J, her sister.  “This is the first time we’ve done this!” she said. It actually was, I realised when she explained her comment.  The first time that just the two of us had had dinner together.  We smiled at each other and she patted my hand.

We finished dinner at about eight and A asked if I had any wine in my room. I didn’t but there was a branch of Victoria Wine in George Street.  Its selection wasn’t as interesting as Oddbins but it was much closer.  I thought A might want a white or pink wine but she chose a Côtes du Rhône, which she insisted on paying for herself, as I had bought dinner.  We walked back to the annexe and she put her arm through mine.

“OK?” I asked.

“Am now. Lovely to see you again.  I’ve just been feeling really crap!”

“It’s just a shame that you live so far away,” I said.

“I don’t live far away.  You do!” she said.

Back in my room I switched on my desk light, rather than the overhead light, in its white, paper, ball shade.  The room was warm and I plugged in my cassette player.  I asked A if she wanted any music.

“Got any jazz?  Getting into jazz,” she said.

“Dave Brubeck?” 

“Perfect. I’m just popping out. Open the wine!”  This was all very familiar. Romantic lighting. Quiet music. A bottle of wine. It just wasn’t familiar for A and I.  I sensed we both still felt a bit uncomfortable. I got my candles out and even managed to find the matches.  I put them on my desk under the window. Maybe that was too aggressive.  Too romantic. A hadn’t made any physical overtures, other than the kiss when we first met and putting her arm through mine on the walk back from the restaurant.  I suspected she was off men. I needed to act like a friend not a former...lover?  We hadn’t quite been that.  Sexually intimate, yes, but anything more? Maybe at that time when she told me she had to move to Glasgow we felt emotionally close, as we sat by Chertsey lock.  I lit the candles anyway.  When she returned I went to the loo, too. When I got back to my room she had put out my desk light and just left the candles.  The last time I had lit them was for R, before the ball. A said I would need more candles as mine were nearly burnt away. Something else for the shopping list.  She obviously liked the candles, anyway.

I said we should pump up her lilo before it got too late.  She pulled everything out of her bag, to get at the lilo and small pillow in the bottom and produced a big box of Scottish shortbread as a ‘rather crap present’.  I told her it was an excellent present.  She wondered whether she should have brought some whisky but I said I didn’t like it.  She didn’t either, which is shy she hadn’t brought any. She didn’t have a pump so I had to blow the lilo up with my mouth.  She took a turn as she said I was looking worryingly pink.  Once it was done she lay on it and said it was perfect.  I told her that, of course, she was going in the bed and I would go on the lilo.  She said I was too big and she was fine and she had slept on it before.  She asked if I had every slept on a lilo.  I admitted I hadn’t. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.  I said if she couldn’t get to sleep we could swap.

I sat on my bed and she sat in my armchair, next to my wardrobe.  She spoke a bit more about her recent break up.  She did most of the talking and I soon realised that this last man had been her third serious boyfriend but had really hurt her.  I seemed to have missed one of her relationships but then I could see why she wouldn’t want to write to me about it.  I had been rather less sensitive and had burdened her with many of my C crises. We sat there and drank the whole bottle of wine, slowly, catching up on all sorts of stuff or elaborating on things mentioned in our letters.

She asked if it was OK if she went to bed as she had had a long day. It was about ten, I suppose. We both cleaned our teeth and I looked away when she took her clothes off and changed into a pale blue tee shirt.  I realised that I hadn’t got any nightclothes and suggested she look away when I got changed. 

Sorry,” I said.  “Stopped wearing pyjamas.”

“I know what you look like!”  She smiled.  “Don’t worry!” I stripped quickly and slipped into bed and she got into her sleeping bag. I caught a brief flash of her pale legs as she climbed in.  I had switched off the desk light, which we had put on after I blew the candles out.  She was right, there wasn’t much left of them.

I lay there and wished I had kissed her good night.  It was too late now.  To get out of bed, naked, and go over just to kiss her might seem a bit pushy.  Lovely A, I thought, in my new room.  She had changed, of course, other than her height.  She seemed much more confident, despite her recent romantic setback, and it was even reflected in the way she walked; a fluid, athletic sort of bouncing stride. She had to do a lot of walking in Edinburgh, from her halls of residence to the main university buildings. She had also taken up cross country running, training around Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano which dominates the city.  I hadn’t been to Edinburgh, at that point, but it is a very hilly place.

I usually fell asleep almost immediately but, apart from the fact that it was a little early for me, I lay there thinking.  Thinking about C and wondering how she would be when she returned to Oxford the following weekend.  Hoping K wasn’t still cross with me over H. Worried about what H wanted to talk to me about when she got back.  My relationship with A had been more straightforward, I supposed; new, exciting and exploratory.  We were both at the same stage as regards sex and relationships.  Both having fun. We had never really reached the stage where we took each other for granted, as C said we had, perhaps. A and I had never had any cross words between us. I remembered that time in my bedroom at home, when she had pulled her dress off to reveal her naked bust to me for the first time.  The same day she had sucked me off under a tree by the river at Runnymede. I got an erection and took hold of myself, letting all my sexual memories of A flood back.  I hadn’t come for a couple of days. I started to surreptitiously massage myself; stopping occasionally to check if A was moving.  It sounded like she was asleep. I tried to make a hole under the duvet so there was no sound of my hand rubbing against the inside of the cotton cover.

“Are you having a toss?” she asked, quietly.

I let go of myself and pretended to be asleep.

“Are you having a wank?” she asked.  I didn’t reply.  “This is ridiculous!”  I could hear her unzipping her sleeping bag and dropping something on the floor.  “Shove up!”  A now naked A climbed into my bed.  The bed was a foot narrower than my bed at home and my bed in the first year.  A was, however, very slim. I also, because of my bigger bed last year, had a double duvet so there was none of that problem of empty space around the edge that you got with having two people under a single duvet.  It settled around us, cosily. There was just about room for us both if I lay on my side.  Just. “If you want to finish yourself off you can.  You can come on my tummy!  I would do it for you but I am very tired and I might not be much good.  I hoped that tomorrow...”

“I’m fine,” I said, embarrassed about being caught out but delighted about the implied promise for the next day. “I’m sure I will sleep better now.”  She took my cock in hand and squeezed it gently.

“Hello again!” she said.  She kissed me; softly and rather lingeringly.  “Good night!” She turned onto her side and pressed her back up against my front so we were spooned up, her bottom pressing my erection against my stomach. I put my arm around her and she wriggled against me.

“Good night!” I said.  Lovely A.  I felt happy and relaxed and I did, at last, fall asleep.

Sunday, 5^th October

When I woke the next morning A was already up. Amazingly, I had managed to sleep through the night, with her in the bed, without waking, unless she had gone back to the lilo, that is. She was sitting at my desk and writing. She was dressed in her blue tee shirt and was scribbling away furiously at something.  She didn’t notice that I was awake so I just lay there and watched her.  Her tongue was sticking out, which she did when she was concentrating.  One of the little things about her which I had forgotten over the years but now came back to me.  My bed was much lower than my one in the first year which you had to actually climb into.  The desk was next to my bed so I could see her legs under it.  I noticed that the pale hairs she used to have on her legs had gone; they were completely smooth.  She wriggled on the chair and parted her thighs.  I was about to say ‘good morning’ when she slipped her left hand between her legs. I could see the muscles in her forename work as she obviously gently fingered her pussy under her tee shirt. I enjoyed watching her, surreptitiously, as she caressed herself.  She put her biro down on the desk and replaced her left hand with her right.  She leant back in the chair and, shortly afterwards, looked over at me.

“Caught me!” she said smiling.

“What are you doing?”I asked.

“Having a play.  Thinking about your cock!” she laughed and took her hand from between her legs. “Sorry.”

“I meant what are you writing?” I asked. “Nothing wrong with having a play!”

“My journal.  All my sexy thoughts!”

“Obviously very sexy thoughts!” I said. She stood up and came over to give me kiss.  I was hoping that she might hop back into bed but she said she needed the loo and pulled a thin towelling dressing gown out of her backpack.  It was like Mary Poppins’ bag and seemed to contain endless amounts of ‘stuff’, as she had said.

“Don’t read it!  I might read you some later!” she said, closing her pink, ring-bound book and disappeared out of the door.  I got up and opened the blind over my desk but was good and didn’t look inside the book on the desk.  I caressed my still throbbing cock for a few seconds and remembered her clasping it last night.  I hadn’t been sure as to where we might be, sexually, when I met her the previous day and we had had our awkward hug at the station but she seemed relaxed with me, thankfully.

She came back about five minutes later and I went down to the bathroom too. It really was good having a loo just a few steps downstairs from my room.  When I got back she had got the kettle on the boil.

“Tea first or cuddle first?” she asked.

“Tea or cuddle?  Tea or cuddle?  Hmm...” I said. She pulled off her tee shirt and stood before me naked.

“Alright, cuddle!” I said. I took off my dressing gown and we embraced, standing there; much more comfortable naked than we had been when embracing at the station.  I stroked her back and her bottom and she grasped my burgeoning cock. We got back into bed, with me on my back and her on top, gently rubbing her groin against my erection as we kissed and caressed each other. I stroked her bottom and slid my finger into her slit, from behind.  She was nice and slippery.  I penetrated her with my finger.  We lay together for about ten minutes, kissing, caressing and gently exploring each other again.  I rolled her over onto her back and cupped her breasts. “These have...”

“Grown.  I know. I like them now.  Big enough!”  She had always been lacking in confidence about her bust size but they had definitely grown.  They were like C’s now, with a nice coupe shape.  “I’ve got you all excited!” she said, rubbing my cock in her soft hand.

“You have!” I agreed.

“Would you like me to suck it?” she asked.  My heart leapt with joy.

“You do what you want!” I replied.  I didn’t want to push her.  I wanted her to make the running, on her terms.

“Do you know what I really want?”

“What?”

“Get out of bed!”  I was disappointed but did as she asked.

“Sit down.  Sit down here!” she pointed at the floor next to my bed. I sat down with my back against the bed and looked up at her, quizzically.  She stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at me for a few seconds.  “Don’t you remember?” she asked. She came and sat on my lap; astride me.  I kissed her. She took hold of my cock. “Remember this?” She rubbed my cock head between her soft labia. Then she placed it so I was just lodged at her entrance. She removed her hand and I remembered. “Now!  No premature ejaculation!” she said.  “It stopped us at the vital point last time!” She laughed and pushed her hips forward and I slid up inside her for the first time. She was hot and very, very wet.  We stopped and looked at each other, grinning. She took hold of my head in her hands and planted a big, soft, wet kiss on my lips.  She started to undulate slowly on top of me.  I put my hand underneath her bottom to feel where I was penetrating her. I stroked her perineum as she moved her hips slowly backwards and forwards. I began to thrust slightly as well. We both gently moved, caressing each other’s skin and kissing.  It!  With A!  I’d thought about it so many times.  I had dreamed about it.  It was as a lovely as I had hoped. No fears about performing or impressing.  Just that gentle, primal movement.  In and out of her hot wetness.  In and out.  Wonderful.  Too wonderful.

“Sorry!  I’m going to come!” I warned her, after only a minute.  We hadn’t been going very long at all and she had really got me going in the previous ten minutes.  I was a bit embarrassed as I felt I was acting like a seventeen year old again.

“Come! I’m on the Pill.  Come inside me!” I had to take her word for it, I supposed.  Maybe part of her bust increase had been down to the Pill.  C reckoned it was worth a cup size. Despite this, I tried not to come.  But it was A.  Lovely A!  We had so nearly done it that time before in my bedroom at home.  The position we were in then was the one she had just recreated. She had remembered!  Her astride my hips, sitting on me. “I can feel it!” she said, as I spurted inside her.  I knew it was a powerful one. I wondered whether the force of an ejaculation was solely based on how long ago the last one had been or whether circumstances could effect it. I kept spurting.  Five or six times. One of my great sexual goals fulfilled.  Proper sex with A. I was able to keep thrusting for a time, not losing too much stiffness. She fell forward onto me and rested her head on my shoulder.  I kissed her cheek and we sat there quietly as I felt liquid running over my balls. “Lovely!” she sighed.  “Just lovely!”  

After a while she wriggled a bit and ejected me from her cunt. Another rush of liquid followed.  She stood up and looked down at me again.  “That was a creamy one!” she said, looking at my prick.  It was certainly wet. Several big drops fell from her pussy onto my carpet.  She went over to her bag and pulled out a pack of pocket tissues.  She wiped herself between the legs and apologised for dripping on my carpet.  I told her she could drip wherever she liked.

“Let’s have some tea and then I will get to work on you!” I said.

“Bugger the tea!” she said, getting back into bed and spreading her legs.. I knelt between her thighs and slowly licked her pussy for about ten minutes.  Parting her labia, stroking the pink tip of her clitoris, licking inside her entrance and penetrating her with my tongue. Her delicious, prawn cocktail flavoured pussy; all pink and glistening. She had, I now realised, given my experience with other women, very prominent bits.  I loved the way her labia popped out of her slit, unlike J, for example. I pulled them apart with my fingers and tickled her pee hole with the tip of my come.  “I’ll wee myself!” she warned, laughing.   I decided not to use my fingers on her but just concentrated on licking her. Maybe it was the sex we had had earlier but I thought she was the wettest she had ever been. The folds between her inner and outer lips were particularly wet. White creamy liquid seemed to be flowing everywhere, leaving a damp patch on the sheet. She put her hand on top of my head just before she came, as she often did when I had licked her in the past. She had a ‘lovely orgasm’ and we cuddled up again for a time.

“So beautiful!” I said, looking at her face and kissing her softly. 

“I was worried, when I first arrived yesterday.  Worried you wouldn’t want me!” she said.

“Of course I want you!” I said.

“I wasn’t at all sure. I came all the way down to see you so we could have sex and you hardly touched me.  I had to tell you to give me a hug!”  I told her that I thought she just wanted a friend and wouldn’t want sexual complications.  She said sex was exactly what she wanted as she had felt rejected and been made to feel that she wasn’t much of a woman.

“You always had an older soul.  Older than your years!” I said.

“That’s why you never guessed you were being sucked off by a fourteen year old!” she laughed. “Fast learner too, eh?”

“It was a very effective performance!” I replied.

“It squirted everywhere, your spunk! Couldn’t believe it!”  I said that it had taken me by surprise too. She smiled and sat up a bit, resting on her elbows.  I looked at the lovely profile of her perky bust. She was looking at the art nude postcards on the wall next to my wardrobe. She said that I hadn’t had those in my bedroom at home.  She suggested I get Playboy and stick up some centrefolds but I said that might not go down too well with most girls.  She said she wouldn’t have minded.  I didn’t tell her that C had once made the same suggestion. 

“If you stuck one inside your wardrobe door you could leave it open, lie in bed and wank in front of it,” A said, shockingly.  "Different girl every month!" I told her I didn’t need a picture, I would just think about her.  Anyway, my wardrobe door didn’t open that far, we discovered.  I did wonder about doing a drawing of her for the wall, though.  It would annoy C, I thought.

After a quick shower, which we had separately, we went out to find breakfast.  It was Sunday morning and the church bells were ringing.  We walked down the High towards the Queen’s Lane Coffee House, where I had gone with J at the end of the previous term.  We walked slowly, arm in arm.  It had even stopped raining, although it was still cloudy. We sat down in the coffee house and ordered bacon sandwiches.  We sat in silence for a while, just looking at each other.  Not feeling we had to speak.  I didn’t have to impress A.  She knew me and she obviously still liked me. I realised that I adored her.

“I so wanted to do that last night,” she said, after a while.  “I was too tired and I wanted it to be perfect. I probably should have waited until tonight but I couldn’t.  My pussy was doing all the thinking!”  She laughed. “I had been dreaming about it all the way down on the train.  I even went into the loo on the train and had a bit of a play!”

“A, you naughty girl!” I said, delighted at this revelation.

“Oh, I’m a much naughtier girl than I was back then.  Hopefully you have some new naughty tricks too!” she said.  I told her to hush up as the cafe was starting to fill up.  She sipped her hot chocolate and raised her eyebrows at me.  “I thought you might not want me now.  With C and everything.  Redheads!  You always liked them.  I’m just very mousey.”  She admitted to having her hair coloured to make her look more glamorous.  It had just lightened her hair a little. It wasn’t anything radical. Dirty blonde, she called it. “Appropriately!” she added.  “When we are fifty and married with children we can go away for illicit weekends together!  Abandon our boring husband and wife and be abandoned together.  Promise we will do that.” We shook hands, formally and laughed.  We discussed where would be a nice place to go.  Somewhere by the sea we agreed. Italy, she decided.  The South of France, I thought.  Somewhere warm where we could be naked together all day. We agreed and then she thought that by the age of fifty we may not want to see each other naked.  "It all feels the same in the dark, though!" she laughed. I said I liked doing it in the light so I could see. 

I asked her about her journal.  She had always had a journal, since she was about eleven.  It was both a record of her activities and a catalogue of her thoughts and feelings.  She didn’t fill it in every day, she said.  It wasn’t a diary.  She thought that the proper term was ‘pillow book’.  There had been a famous one written by a Japanese lady nearly a thousand years ago, she said.  A said she just wrote longer entries when something momentous happened or she had something particular on her mind.  She had just written a piece about her journey to Oxford, her thoughts about me and her sexual excitement at seeing me again.  She had hoped I would be kind and affectionate as she had been feeling so rejected. I reassured her that all the affection I had had for her in the past remained and that she would always be a very special person to me.  She leant across the table in the café and gave me a kiss.  I said that I wrote a sexual journal but didn’t write about my thoughts, really.  She teased me and said that was typical of a man. ‘What you did not how you felt.’  I said I didn’t have a book, as such, but just wrote on A4 paper which I kept in a file box at the bottom of my wardrobe, buried under a load of model kits, so my mother wouldn’t find it.  We agreed it would be fun if we both wrote up our encounter that morning and compared accounts afterwards. 

After breakfast I took her back to show her all around College.  She wanted to see everything I had written to her about; where my room had been, where C and K’s room had been, the nice bathroom on Heberden, the Law library, the chocolate machine, even the laundry, where I told her how C and I had been caught at it by F.  She insisted on going down into it and experiencing its damp soap powder and mould smell.  She said if she had been wearing a skirt we could have ‘done it’ there and then but she had only brought her jeans with her.  We had a subterranean snog instead.  I took her into look at the more conventional sights: Hall and the Chapel.  I said I would try to get her a guest ticket for dinner in Hall. As we headed back to the lodge I ran into my most hated law tutor again; the really smarmy one. I couldn’t believe it.  He was the one I had encountered when I came back for the day during the summer.  He looked at me and then looked at A.

“Done your contract essay, I hope,” he said. No, ‘did you have a nice holiday?’ or ‘how are you?’

“Of course,” I answered.

“Hello, I’m A,” said A. He looked uncomfortable and maybe actually realised he had been rude.

“Are you studying here?” he asked her.  She told him Edinburgh and he didn’t quite sneer.

“New friend?” he asked me, hopefully, ignoring her again.

“Old friend,” said A, putting her arm around my waist. “Getting reacquainted!”

“Hmm,” he said and stalked off.

“What a rude man!” said A.  I told her he was the one who had raised the issue of my ‘intense relationship’ with C getting in the way of her studies. “Should have just told him to fuck off!” said A.  I was surprised at her use of the word.  Nice girls really didn’t swear back then.  C and H’s sister, J, were very exceptional.  I had another girlfriend after I left College, R, who had been there when I was, although we didn’t hook up until afterwards, and I only heard her use a four letter word once in the two years we went out, when a French driver gave her car a nudge from behind (as they have a habit of doing) when she didn’t pull away from a junction, in Saumur, fast enough.

For the rest of the morning we walked around the part of Oxford up around Magdalen Bridge.  Fortunately, she didn’t show any interest in going punting.  We went into the Botanical Gardens and along the Cherwell, where we had a good view of the colleges in the distance, beyond Christ Church Meadows.  We then went over the footbridge, along the Isis and looked at the college boathouses. Needless to say, there were rowers out training on the river. We stopped often, to have a kiss and A looked happy and relaxed.  I reminded her that this was, of course, the same river we had walked along together when we first met. Further up, there were some of the old ornate college barges which they had before the boat houses were built.  We wended our way back to the Head of the River where we had lunch inside. She asked if I was still drawing, as she would like me to do a picture of her.  I said yes I was and would love to.  She asked if I had done any drawings of C and I admitted I had.  She asked to see some but I said that I had left them all at home.  After lunch we looked at Christchurch, Oxford’s biggest and most splendid college, which had its own cathedral, and got back to my room at around three.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked. She did and then suggested we write down our accounts of our coupling that morning.  We sat next to each other at my desk and scribbled away, drinking tea and eating shortbread biscuits. I put some Mozart on the cassette player; my favourite Mozart symphony; number 35, the Haffner. She would reach out, occasionally, and stroke my thigh and sometimes my groin.  Writing my account was making me stiff, which she found amusing.  We read our accounts out to each other.  She was right.  Mine seemed rather mechanical and hers was all about sensations and feelings.  She wrote a whole paragraph about the moment where I penetrated her for the first time, although she rightly observed that in fact she had really ‘enveloped’ me.  I was pleased that her feelings of joy, and a sense of unfinished business dealt with, were the same as mine.  She pushed her chair back and stood up, suddenly.  I looked at her quizzically.  She was undoing the buckle of her pink canvas belt.

“Got me going!” she said, pushing her jeans over her slim hips.  “Come on! Clothes off!” Soon she was naked, pulling my bedcover off and unfolding my duvet before climbing into my bed.  I only had two chairs in my room that year and what I had discovered, when my family had dropped me off, was that visitors might have to sit on the bed.  I thought, therefore, that it would be better to keep the college provided beige bedspread, to protect my duvet underneath. I stripped off too and slipped into bed with her. She threw the duvet off. We wriggled about and kissed and licked and then she turned so she was head to tail with me, lying on her side.  She put her fingers around my cock and just gently massaged it; looking at it.  She popped her mouth over me and got it really wet and then went back to massaging it and looking at it.  “I just love cock!  Yours more than anyone’s!”  That was nice to hear.  C had told me in no uncertain terms that she preferred the creep from Magdalen’s. A was pulling my foreskin up over my knob and then down again.  Every time she revealed my purple glans she licked all around it, just under the head. She was really lavishing attention on it. It was now dripping wet and she was sliding her hand up and down its length. She resumed sucking me and I slipped my hand between her thighs and pulled her right leg towards me so as to guide her leg over my shoulders and into the sixty-nine position; something we had never done before with each other. “Mmm” she murmured. She resumed slurping on me and I licked her slowly; flicking her fleshy labia with my tongue and stroking her stiff shaft with my thumb.  I even stroked her rosy anus with the pad of my finger before penetrating her cunt with my tongue and shoving my nose hard up against her arsehole. We kept each other going for ages until I came in her mouth.  I finished her off with a combination of licking and fingering her pussy.  We stayed head to tail, lying on our sides.  The room was lovely and warm. We didn’t need the duvet over us.  I decided that my new room was going to be great for sensual fun. “You always make me come!” she said, after a while, stroking my balls.

“I don’t enjoy it if the girl doesn’t come!” I replied. I then wish I had said ‘you’ instead of ‘the girl’.  I didn’t want her thinking about any other girls.  Too late.

“How many other girls have there been?  Lots? Or just C?”

“About the same as you have had men, I suppose,” I said, twiddling some curls of her pussy hair in my finger. 

“Seven?” she said.  I was surprised.  I thought that there had only been three boyfriends.

“No!  Not seven!” I said, trying not to sound shocked, even though I was.

“How many then?”  I thought about it.  Did I include Mandy the hairdresser and J from Finland even if we hadn’t done It?  I decided not to, although it would have given us a closer score.

“Four including you!” I admitted.

“Any one night stands?  I’ve had some,” she said.  “Parties.  You know!  I get drunk and get slutty!”  I thought of Mandy again.  The first girl I had done sixty-nine with.

“Two night stands,” I replied.

“Isn’t two nights a relationship?” she pondered.  “Albeit a short one!”

“I don’t think about that,” I said.

“That’s because you are a man.”  She said.  I didn’t say anything. I wanted this line of conversation to end. She got out of bed and felt inside her backpack agian.  “Time for my pill,” she said, waving the familiar looking packet. I mentally relaxed.  “Who were the other two?” she said after she had come back from a trip to the loo.

“Other what?” I relied, knowing exactly what she was asking.

“Other women.  You had sex with!”

“Sisters,” I admitted.

“Really?” she squealed.  “Disgraceful!”  she laughed. “Not at the same time?  Oh God!  How disreputable!  Brilliant!”  She seemed quite taken with the idea.  She didn’t have any siblings.  “Did they each know about the other?” she asked. I told her all about H and J, then, of course.  She asked if I would be resuming with H when she came back to College. I said that I suspected it had been a one off and we had broken up. “Not surprised if she found out you were screwing her sister as well!” She said neither of us seemed to have much luck with partners. “You haven’t asked me about my men?”  I said I wasn’t interested in the past.  She ignored me. “It was the Pill,” she said, after a while.  “I was uncomfortable and nervous with actual sex.  The first time I just had to rely on him pulling out in time.  Stressful.  I didn’t enjoy it.  Wasn’t prepared, in any way.”  He had been a one off after a party and she had regretted it.  I supposed I had been lucky with C with our first time.  We had worked our way up to it and really enjoyed it. With her first proper boyfriend they had used condoms, which she didn’t like, so she had gone on the Pill, even though she wasn’t yet eighteen. It had transformed her sex life, she said. She just loved doing it after that.  I didn’t say much as she chattered on.  I didn’t want to think about her with other men. She stretched. “I’m starving.  Sex makes me hungry.  What can we eat?”  It was Sunday so there had been no shops open. Fortunately, she fancied a burger.

“Ah!  You can discover the wonder of Burgerland!” I said.  She asked if it was far and I said it was about two minutes walk away. We got dressed and I was glad the whole talking about other partners conversation had stopped.

Until I went to college I had never had a burger.  I had had frozen beefburgers, cooked by my mother, of course.  The way she cooked them meant that they were either still a bit frozen in the middle or were incinerated.  There seemed to be no middle way. We had them with mashed potato and baked beans.  Worse still, she served Cadbury’s Smash dried potato, as she refused to make proper mash.  Hers always had powdery residue at the bottom as she didn’t stir it properly.  I had not. however, had a burger in a bun from a burger restaurant, until I went to College.  Burgerland, on Cornmarket, was my first experience. I think K had taken me there the first time.  MacDonalds didn’t come to Britain until 1974 (and hadn’t reached Oxford yet) and Burger King didn’t appear until 1977 so they were not common outside the big cities. The only UK Burger chain was Wimpy (which was just down the street from Burgerland), whose burgers, I was led to believe by the only American at my school, were a pale and flaccid approximation of what was served in the US.  Burgerland served a standard burger for 30p and their quarter pounder for 63p.  Fries cost 19p but were small, so you were best to buy three lots for two people. If you ate in you had to pay VAT on top, so A and I took ours to eat back in my room, given Burgerland was only a hundred yards from my staircase.  The quarter pounder was actually quite tasty and had pickled cucumber and, I seem to recall, Thousand Island Dressing in it.  Then, as now, though, I find burgers rather unsatisfying.  I like to take my time over a meal, not just have something that takes five minutes to eat. At that time English people struggled with hot finger food too and everyone would eat pizza, for example, with a knife and fork. Fast food was still largely fish and chips and, disappointingly, there wasn’t a good fish and chip shop in central Oxford.  Anyway, I didn’t like fish and preferred sausages in batter. Burgerland in Oxford is now a Burger King. I have only ever been to a MacDonalds once, on a motorway in Poland, and found it really awful. I have been known to occasionally have a more designer type burger, from hotel room service, perhaps, but I still struggle with the messy eating it with fingers thing. Basically, I don’t like the whole concept of fast food. Food shouldn’t be rushed; it should be a languorous sensual pleasure, like sex.

The other thing about burgers, as A and I discovered, was that they really made your room stink.  Fortunately, with a kitchen just around the corner we could put the packaging into the bin there and, with the window open for a few minutes, remove any lingering smells.  We didn’t have any alcohol so I made some tea.  It was raining again and the drops pattered onto my skylight window.  We lit the candles but they were getting perilously low.  She said we needed to do a lot of shopping the next day.  She had planned on coming to Oxford on Saturday and then going back Monday, if things had been a bit tense between us but now she said she might stay until Wednesday or Thursday.  She asked me if that would be OK.  I told her that would be wonderful.  A friend was taking lecture notes for them both but she didn’t have a written assignment that week. They didn’t have tutorials like we did. She said that she would cook me dinner in the kitchen tomorrow. In September I had received some money from an investment taken out for me after my father died.  It was around five hundred pounds so I was feeling well off enough to splurge a bit.  I wondered about taking her to La Sorbonne as a treat.  I didn’t say anything.  I would think about it.

“Shall I put some music on?” I asked, as it was now dark.  My Dave Brubeck tape had exhausted my jazz music.  I had some Glem Miller, of course, but now that reminded me of J and my Charleston lessons

“A shower.  Let’s have a shower together!” she said.  I didn’t know if that was her way of telling me that I was smelly but we both went down to the little bathroom. The tiled shower stall was small but you could get two people in there, despite what H and I had reckoned. I got it up to temperature and we stepped in. I had some nice soap and we gently soaped each other under the shower.  I had my hands on her tits, with my fingers each side of her swollen nipples.  She was stroking my bottom and gently rubbing her soapy pussy against my thigh.  We were just rinsing off when she put her fingers around my erection. I pushed her legs apart and bent my knees. I slid up inside her and she raised one leg, rubbing my thigh with the inside of hers.  “Let’s get back to your room!” she said after a few thrusts.  I pulled out of her and she pumped my cock a bit more before we dried ourselves.  Or attempted to, but while there was room for two in the shower stall itself, outside it there wasn’t really room for two people to dry each other.  We went back to my room and took off our dressing gowns, which was all we were wearing.  She pulled my duvet off and lay down on my bed after removing the duvet. 

“I really will do some more drawings of you tomorrow!” I said. I’d really wanted to capture her new curves and toned legs and bottom. She nodded and then slowly spread her legs.  Her pussy was revealed completely and then she parted her labia with her fingers, provocatively. I stood at the foot of the bed, throbbing, and looking down at her in excited disbelief as she slid her index finger into her cunt.

“Fuck me!” she said.  I briefly wondered if her strong language was something to do with living in Glasgow but then I realised that perhaps she was just completely turned on.  Our intimate activities that day had been soft and gentle but as I knelt between her thighs and she grabbed my cock I knew she wanted something more energetic. She guided me in herself and although I started quite slowly I soon sped up. She crossed her legs over my back and moved her hips in time with my thrusts.  I popped out a couple of times as she was going at it so hard.  We didn’t kiss.  I supported myself on my forearms and we just watched each other’s faces as we got more worked up.  Fortunately, her sucking me off before dinner had given me more staying power than I had had during the excitement of our first one, on the floor, that morning. I wanted to make her come and I seemed to be getting her there, as her breathing came in rapid, staccato breaths.  Her insides gripped me and I managed to dribble out a little after a while longer. “Oh my God!” she said after a while.  “Just what I wanted!” 

I stayed inside her, gradually losing my erection.  Now we kissed. Conscious of her small frame I rolled to one side and pulled out of her.  She apologised for leaving another damp patch on the sheet. She climbed on top of me and put her head on my chest.  We lay there for ages, not saying anything but occasionally kissing each other. I started to feel dozy but I needed the loo.  She was still on top of me.  I looked down at her and then realised she was asleep. How could I move without waking her?  I couldn’t. I lay there and hoped I would doze off too but all I could think about was the pressure on my bladder.  I wondered if I could gently roll her off me so she was up against the wall. I slipped my hand under her hip and tried to lever her off to my right.  She squirmed about and made things worse as she was now lying partly across me. I now didn’t even have a leverage point.  I stayed still and hoped she would move on her own but she didn’t.  An annoying tickle in my bladder was now becoming a sharp pain, especially as she was lying across my stomach. There was nothing I could do. I put my arm under her collarbone and heaved her to one side.  She groaned and kicked a bit but I got her up against the wall.

I switched off the desk light, grabbed my dressing gown and went down to the loo.  My bladder hurt so much it took ages before I could pass any water.  Eventually relieved, I went up the stairs to my room. A was now sprawled across the centre of my bed, face down.  Her bottom and the backs of her legs were really toned.  More toned than any other girls I had seen; even J from Finland. Unfortunately, there was now no space for me to get into bed.  We had deflated her lilo that morning.  I couldn’t blow it up again as it would make too much noise and, anyway, she had buried it at the bottom of her backpack.  I didn’t want to go through all her things to get to it. I walked over to the bed and picked up the duvet, which was on the floor. I would have to roll her again.  This time she woke.

“Mmm!” she said. I turned her onto her side and spooned up behind her.

I had just drifted off to sleep when I felt her climbing over me.  She needed the loo too.

“Sorry!  Sorry!” she hissed, grabbing my dressing gown.  I moved up to the wall so I could lie in my usual position. A returned and cuddled up behind me again.  “Sorry,” she said again and kissed my neck.  Nothing to be sorry about, your gorgeous creature, I thought.

Monday, October 6th

Amazingly we were still in the same position when we woke the next morning.  I half expected her to have ended up on the floor but then thought that bodies stuffed into a bed that was too small must unconsciously adapt to the lack of space. I lay there, waiting for A to become conscious. I idly played with my cock with my left hand, enjoying the feel of her body against my back.  She kissed my shoulder.  I turned over to kiss her on the lips. Her hand went straight to my cock. She apologised for waking me again the previous night.  I told her that I always fell asleep again quickly.  We cuddled and caressed.  This was wonderful, I thought, as I sucked at her nipples.  Naked A, all warm and soft and passionate. How many more days would she be able to spend with me?  We seemed to be alone in the building and, indeed the whole annexe.  I hadn’t seen anyone else around, although as the weekend approached I knew more people would appear. The freshers would come earlier but they would be in the main college buildings not here. I worried about C and H returning but A climbed on top of me and placed me inside her again.  I had obviously made enough semen overnight to pump up inside her, as she gently undulated on top of me.

“Tell me if I am overdoing it,” she said after a few minutes.

“Overdoing what?” I asked.

“The sex. Too much.  Wearing you out. Wasting your time,”

“Idiot,” I said, and kissed her forehead. “Any time.  All the time. My first love!”  Even as I said it I thought I might have overdone it myself but she looked pleased and kissed me.

“Yes.  Whatever happens we will always have that. It makes us special to each other!  However,” she paused ominously, “sex is all very well but what I really need is...” Commitment? Marriage? Babies? I wondered, in a slight panic.  She laughed, at my obviously horrified expression. “Breakfast!”

I knew that The Nosebag did breakfast and it was a lot closer than the Queen’s Lane Coffee House. We both had a full cooked breakfast and A wrote us a shopping list. As it was Monday morning it was busy in Cornmarket. She got distracted by the Covered Market and I had to spend nearly an hour, unbelievably, wandering around there with her.  She thought the meat in the butcher’s looked good and said we would get it there on the way back as she was going to cook me dinner.  The butchers in the market were real old fashioned ones (as they still are) with dead poultry and animals hanging from hooks above the windows at Christmas.  I’d never bought anything to cook in Oxford as we didn’t have kitchens in the main College building.  I had assumed we would just go to Sainsbury’s.

We went into Radcliffe Square and I took A up St Mary’s Tower to see the excellent view of the city.  Her hair blew around in the wind, amusingly, and she took some pictures with her little Kodak camera. 

We headed back to the Covered Market via the High Street.  We stopped off at Athena to get some more pictures for my room.  I got some large Roger Dean art cards.  A, being a SF fan, approved.  We went back into the Market from one of the High Street entrances, rather than through the entrances opposite the Co-op. She said she was going to cook Spaghetti Bolognese and bought some mince at Hedges in the market.  They minced it freshly for us. It was a lot more expensive than Sainsbury’s would have been but she said it would be better.  Oddly, I had not cooked Spaghetti Bolognaise myself at home; just had my mother’s mad version where everything went raw into a Pyrex dish and cooked in the oven for two hours. We did go to the supermarket for the other ingredients but not before she had bought a couple of candles in the market. I had got two bottles of Chianti in Oddbins, so when we got back to the annexe at lunchtime we were all set up for dinner. 

We had bought a baguette and ham for lunch and sat and listened to Songs of the Auvergne on my cassette player, which I had placed on a convenient little miniature cupboard in my room. I suspect it was supposed to be a bedside table but I never used it as that and kept my glasses in it. Next to it I had an upturned cardboard box on which was a metal tray holding my half dozen mugs.  The kettle was on the floor next to this. Above this were some shelves attached to the wall on which I had put my books and cassettes. It was all very convenient compared with my old room.  A made another list, of cooking utensils we needed. 

After lunch we had a visit to the Ashmolean Museum.  After a couple of hours there we walked back past the Randolph Hotel to Debenhams department store, where A seemed intent on spending my entire investment proceeds in the kitchen department. I had brought knives, forks, plates, a tin opener and a small saucepan from home, as my mother didn’t contemplate me cooking anything more complicated that beans on toast or soup.  A insisted I got a big saucepan, a frying pan, a sharp knife and a wooden spoon. I drew the line at an expensive French garlic press, saying I had one at home my mother could bring up when she next visited.

I only had two chairs, compared with the four I had had in my first year rooms; an armchair and a chair at my desk.  We pulled the desk into the middle of the room and put a chair each side.  Then we went into the kitchen and I watched A cook Spaghetti Bolognaise. Completely different from the way my mother did it!  First she cooked the mince in the frying pan, then added the onions and garlic (and she put very finely diced carrot in it to my surprise) to cook in olive oil, which was an uncommon way to fry, then.  My mother used to use butter and my aunt used to cook everything in lard.  Then she opened the tinned tomatoes and broke them up in the pan with a wooden spoon. Finally, she added some tomato puree before tuning the heat right down. My mother didn’t use tinned tomatoes, just a whole tube of puree. Tomato puree caps have a little cone on them, so you can use it to pierce the foil on the tube.  My mother never worked this out and used to use the tine of a fork to pierce the foil, which would often send puree shooting across the kitchen.  Because of this, I never worked this out either and opened the puree in the same way as my mother did.  I didn’t notice how A had done this and it was another ten years before a girlfriend showed me how to open puree tubes properly!

“Hey, that smells real good!” We both jumped and there was another girl, coming through the door into the kitchen and smiling at us.  She had short wavy dark hair and was quite stocky, at about five foot four.  She had amazingly white teeth and strange clothes.  Well, not really strange, just a bit different. Trousers that didn’t look quite right. That wasn’t the shocking thing though.  The shocking thing was that she had an American accent. We had had an American join our school for the sixth form.  He was the first American I had met and this girl was the second.

She was called L and was from New England. She would be one of my neighbours on the same floor. A said there would be enough dinner for three but she politely refused, saying that she had just arrived and needed to unpack.  She would become a great friend.

We went back into my room and opened the wine. A had made me get two bottles so she could pour a little into the Bolognese just before serving.  We sat and talked about what sights I could take her to the next day. She wanted to go to Blackwells, the huge university bookshop, as there were a couple of books she had been looking for for her course. I said we should go to Blackwells music shop too. A liked bookshops so I thought we should visit Parker’s and the Paperback Shop as well.

We went back to the kitchen to cook the spaghetti.  These days spaghetti comes in short lengths about a foot long.  In those days spaghetti came in blue paper packets and was twice the length.  Getting it into a pan was a tricky operation.  You couldn’t leave it in the water standing upright like you can with modern spaghetti as it would have just fallen out the pan.  You had to push it into the boiling water slowly, avoid the hot steam, keep enough pressure up to feed it in to the saucepan as it softened and bent but not push it so hard that it snapped.  Of course there was very little choice in pasta shape then.  You could get spaghetti, macaroni and lasagne sheets and that was about it.  No penne, farfalle, spirali or any of the other different shapes you can buy now.  There was no fresh pasta either.  No tortelloni or ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta.  The only ravioli was tinned, in a sickly tomato sauce, and would have been unrecognisable to an Italian.  Likewise, there were no fresh herbs in supermarkets.  A put some dried basil into the sauce while the spaghetti cooked. You also couldn’t buy spaghetti forks.  It was at this point that we realised that we didn’t have a colander so I had to drain the pasta by holding the saucepan lid just open a little. You then had to pull great forkfuls of long spaghetti out of the saucepan. We had cooked far too much. We knocked on L’s door but she still said she wouldn’t join us.  We told her we would leave her some in the kitchen in the pans and she said that would be great.

We lit the new candles and put them on my desk and had a proper romantic dinner. A’s Spaghetti Bolognaise was much better than my mother’s, of course, and I cooked it regularly from then on, although always felt slightly guilty if I was cooking it for another girl. We had splashed out on a little plastic tub of dried Parmesan too, even if it did, as ever, smell like sick.  You couldn’t buy fresh Parmesan in the shops of course, unless you went to Soho.  Eating Spaghetti Bolognaise is not easy at the best of times but with two foot long spaghetti it was even more difficult. I didn’t have any napkins.

“Shit!” said A, as an errant strand of pasta lashed her blue blouse, leaving a red mark.

“Perhaps we should have eaten it naked!” I joked.

“We must remember that for next time!”  Just the fact that she said there might be a next time sent a thrill through me.  Would A and I be able to meet more often now that we had managed it once.  More spaghetti, more kisses and more sex?  We were well into the second bottle of Chianti.  I suddenly stood up, walked to the other side of my desk, took her chin in my hand and kissed her.  She put her hands around my neck and responded.  We had not quite finished dinner but abandoned our food, pulling each other’s clothes off. I knelt in front of her and pulled the waistband of her white cotton knickers down.  As ever, I was fascinated by the way the crotch clung to her pussy until the last second and then popped down to the same level as the rest of the garment, now sliding down her thighs.  I kissed her pussy.  She stepped out of her knickers and stood in front of me naked.  I ran my hands up her legs which were very smooth.

“Your legs are so smooth!” I said, kissing her hipbone.

“Did them especially for you!” she said. “Although I usually don’t bother in the winter.”  They were also incredibly toned.  I could feel the muscle under her skin, especially in her thighs. We slipped into bed and she kicked the duvet down to the foot  She sat upright, astride me, as she said she had eaten too much for any other position and we had a long, slow one, with her gently rotating her hips and me grasping her bottom.  Afterwards, we lay next to each other, just managing to be side by side in the bed, looking up at where I had stuck my new Roger Dean cards on the sloping ceiling over the head of my bed.  You had to be slightly careful when getting out of bed so you didn’t bump your head. “Maybe I can stay until Friday,” she said.  I kissed her again.  I had forgotten how nice her kisses were.  So soft and tender.  C and I had stopped kissing really, despite still having sex, the previous term. It was more like it had been with H. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been having sex with A until I knew exactly where I was with H, although the signs weren’t good.  I had met A first, though. Maybe H and I really were just a two night stand. We lay together, saying nothing and holding hands like the teenagers we used to be. Well, A still was a teenager. “I need the loo,” she said eventually. I told her about C’s chamber pot, which she found amusing, rather than horrifying, as J had done.  “Sensible if you have to go down four floors to the bathroom!” she said, getting up.  “Unless you trip over it!”

She put her dressing gown on and disappeared.  I put mine on and took the dirty crockery into the kitchen. The American girl had obviously eaten the leftovers.  I checked the bin just to check she hadn’t thrown them away. She hadn’t and had put my pans in the sink to soak.  I got rid of our leftovers (well, I didn’t really leave anything) and added our plates and cutlery to the sink.  I’d deal with them in the morning. I went to the loo which was free, so either A was finished or had gone downstairs to the ladies. I went back to my room and found A, naked, brushing her teeth in front of my washbasin.  I kissed her shoulder.

“So much better to have a loo close by!” I said.

“Did you watch each other?” she asked.

“What?”

“You and C.  Did you watch each other wee?  With the pot.”  I admitted we did and that C liked showing off doing it and how she seemed fascinated by me doing it.  “Remember that time?  Under the tree in the rain?  At Runnymede.  I watched you but I couldn’t see much.  I found it…” she tailed off and raised her eyebrows. “I went home and played with myself for ages!” 

“Me too,” I said.

I washed and did my teeth too and we hopped back into bed, under the covers, this time spooned up with her in front. We lay together in silence.

“OK?” I asked, after a while.  She wasn’t asleep, I could tell.  I could sense her thinking about something.

“Yes.  More than OK.  Happy!” We lay in silence for a few more minutes.  “Have you ever wanted to fly to another planet in a rocket?” she asked, unexpectedly. I asked her what had brought this on and she said my room at the top of the building, with its hatch like window looking up at the night sky, reminded her of a space capsule.  She felt secure and happy in it.  I didn’t think my room looked anything like a space capsule but maybe it was suggested by some of the posters from Science Fiction Monthly that we had put on the walls.  She said that since she first read a science fiction book at the age of ten or eleven, Heinlein’s Between Planets, she thought, she had dreamt of travelling to another planet on a spaceship.  We discussed similar interests from my perspective, but I said that my interests were stimulated by films and visual images rather more than literature, although at that time I read, almost exclusively, science fiction or fantasy novels. I told her how my imagination had been stirred by the cool, crisp images of Chesley Bonestell in books like The Conquest of Space and Beyond the Solar System, which I borrowed from Ashford Library when I was about the same age as she had discovered science fiction.  I liked some of the rockets on the New English Library Robert Heinlein paperback covers, by Bruce Pennington, too. 

Even the rocket in the two Tintin books, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, was interesting, even though I never read another Tintin book.  These were the most popular books in my junior school library and being able to take them out often meant waiting weeks. When contemporary Apollo rockets had a tiny capsule, a rocket that had different decks and an on board lunar vehicle, as in the Tintin books, seemed wonderful.  I even built one out of Lego although it was, very curiously, square in cross section, not circular of course, as the range of bricks in those days was limited.

“In the fifties people thought that the whole rocket would travel to the moon, of course, not just a small part of it!” I said. I told her about my Airfix kits of rockets.  By the time I met her in 1976 mine were long gone, so she hadn’t seen my models.

“Put some music on!” she said after a while.  I was surprised as I thought she was ready for sleep but she seemed wide awake.

“How about The Planets?” I said, joking, really.

“That would be perfect,” she answered. I got up to put the cassette in.  I went to close the blind on my window but she wanted me to leave it open so she could see the stars.  I said it was cloudy and you couldn’t see them but she said she could see them.  “I know they are there.” she said. She asked me to tell her more of my space interests from when I was small. I told her about a series in TV21 magazine based on an imaginary journey to Mars and exploration on the surface.  My sister and I had played Martian exploration for weeks. That Christmas we had both been given sets of space toys with rockets and lunar type vehicles.  My sister’s set even had a large plastic lunar crater landscape in it.

We then talked about our favourite SF films. Not the recent wave inspired by Star Wars but fifties ones like Forbidden Planet and When Worlds Collide. As I turned the cassette over for the second, more atmospheric, part of The Planets it became clear that seeing When Worlds Collide and the final journey to a habitable planet on board a rocket, was what had set A off, years before, on her interplanetary fascination.  She couldn’t remember the name of the film but clearly remembered the last scene of the planetary arrival, on what I remember thinking was a terrible matte painting.  I later found out that this painting had been just a preliminary sketch by Chesley Bonestell, for the planetary matte picture but the producers refused to pay for the finished article which, I am sure, Bonestell would have made a tremendous job of, so just used his sketch in the film.

She told me that her love for science fiction had annoyed the last boyfriend who had found it childish.  I said that he obviously had no sense of wonder, a phrase that had become popular with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, three years before.

“I told you he must be an idiot!” I said.

“And that is why I am naked in bed with you and not him,” she said, climbing on top of me. Even though I had come only an hour and a half before, the contact of her skin got me stiff again.  At that point the final movement of The Planets started to play, the mysterious and evocative Neptune.  “Love this,” said A. “Just really love it!” She reached between us and guided me inside her again.  She squeezed me with her internal muscles but didn’t move. We just lay together, joined at the groin. It was music to fly through space to. The music subsided into silence.  I was starting to feel sleepy and even the click of the cassette player, turning itself off at the end of the tape, didn’t disturb me.  A was asleep, lying on top of me, her head on my shoulder. I could feel her breath on my skin.  I was still lodged inside her cunt, still partially erect, dozing off myself...