Arthur McCann Read online

  Unfortunately my scout shirt, woggle and neckerchief had become so foul with grease that I reluctantly had to put replacements before a new parachute for a pilot. Otherwise, I was warned, I would be drummed out of the scouts.

  On the first evening I wore my new shirt I had a terrible ten minutes getting by the smoke screen trucks. I tried creeping along, as close to the wheels as I could, but a sentry who was supposed to be guarding against German agents spotted me and at once the hunt was on. My only advantages were my swiftness of foot, my ability to turn and twist, and the fact that I was small. But they caught me, my parcels were ravaged, and when I arrived in the park the remaining fish and chips were mashed into what could easily have been taken for a thick soup. One of the balloon men was particularly annoyed and berated me. It was then that Rose came in.

  She had been in the park for about a year, a large and pretty girl, with a pink face and stormy black hair. She typed in the orderly office every day and when she saw me she would call out cheerily and wave. Her smart blue uniform was very swollen at the top and I tried not to look at it too much, or think about it at night. She probably had a large bottom and fat knees too, but I don't remember. To me she was a formidable friendly and desirable balloon girl. She pushed aside the complaining airman, picking up one of his few remaining unmashed chips, dropping it casually into her mouth in the same movement, and then guarded me out of the hut.

  'Your shirt, lad' she sighed when we were outside in the evening sun. 'What a terrible muck.' She had a Yorkshire voice, almost unknown to my ears.

  The chips get squashed against it,' I explained with more sorrow than I felt, for her large calico hand was on my shoulder and part of it touched my neck. ‘It's a new one, as well. I've even got a mess on my woggle.'

  'Which is your woggle?' she asked quietly.

  'This is,' I said pointing to the leather band holding my scout neckerchief at my throat. She touched it and I felt the backs of her fingers against my enlarging Adam's apple.

  'How come they always get so mushed up?' she said. She took me by the hand and we reached the door of a hut.' Just a tick,' she said. Pushing her head around the door she called violently, ‘Get 'em on, girls. There's a man coming in.'

  Some small commotion came from inside the hut and I backed away nervously. ‘Don't worry, lad,' said Rose.’It'll be a right treat for them to see a real man for once.' She giggled engagingly. 'I've got some stuff that might get the grease off.' She waited for a moment and then called: 'All clear?' It was and we went into the airwomen's hut with beds and little wardrobes lined down each side. There were about half a dozen women in there and I stood thin and embarrassed, while two of them let out wolf whistles at me. Two were dressed in their uniforms, a couple more were in woolly dressing gowns and two were in the same bed, their heads sticking out in curiosity mixed with mild annoyance, wet hair in curlers, blankets clutched up about their necks.

  'You didn't tell me how the chips always get mushed up,’ Rose repeated. She had sat me on the rough blanket of her bed and she was kneeling in front of me, rubbing something into the grease on my shirt. Her breasts were hanging forward heavily against my knees giving me agonies of happiness and fear.

  ‘It's the smoke screen men,' I explained, wanting her to stay like that for ever. To my annoyance she backed away from my knees.

  'What's it to do with them?' she asked.

  ‘I have to run past them and they try to grab the chips from me,' I said resignedly. 'They do it all the time.'

  She stared at me with speechless concern. Then, I thanked God, she leaned forward again, those great tender tits against my boy's bony knees, and began working again on my shirt.' Do you mean to say those men do that? Chase you and knock you about?' she said eventually. 'Have you told any of the boys here?'

  'Yes,' I answered. 'I had to tell them because the chips kept getting in such a state. But they said I'd have to run faster, that's all.'

  To my joyous embarrassment the other girls in the hut were gathering around now. It was like sitting in a forest of large and beautiful trees. One of those wearing a dressing gown leaned forward to touch my head sympathetically and as her body came forward and the robe opened I felt like a greedy boy looking into a bag of huge sweets. The two in the bed remained where they were but called out questions and sympathy. Eventually Rose took me to the park gate and with my head full of the smell of her powder and the chemical she had put on my shirt, I walked home like a small prince through the violet evening.

  On the next fish and chip run I crept in my usual fearing Indian fashion to the edge of the smoke screen vehicles to be greeted with a shout of 'Hello Little Arthur!' It was the sentry. 'Come on, son. Nothing to be afraid of.' Nor was there. For the smoke screen men had suddenly become benevolent escorts, seeing me safely on my way, asking me, if I had time, to go for fish and chips for them and sending their love to Rose. For the first time I came through without a scratch or a bruise or a single crushed chip. I don't know what Rose did to them. Nor will I know.

  I only know what she did to me.

  My association with Aircraftwoman Rose Kirby is, I imagine, somewhere documented, written up, and filed in the archives that tell the detailed story of Britain's fight against Nazism from 1939 to 1945^ It probably makes plum reading for any clerk who knows where it can be located. For me it is among the sweetest memories I have. I can even remember her number. 842912.

  In that golden wartime summer nothing happened between us for a long time. I used to go down to the park and carry out my fish and chip run as before, but now with no danger of damage from the smoke screen men. She always behaved like a big rosy friend, smiling at me with her round and pretty face and touching me with her expansive chest; sometimes gently making fun at me. In the empty evenings, when nobody seemed to be about, and the vapour trails of the day's planes had faded from the sky, we would sit comfortably in the lee of the tethered balloon. She was reading Gone With The Wind and she was a slow reader. It took her half of July, all of August and into September. I would be reading Wulf the Saxon by Henty or Baden Powell's Scouting For Boys, for I was anxious to get several proficiency badges that summer.

  We would read passages to each other, quite long pieces sometimes. I found it difficult to get unduly enthusiastic about the blighted love of Scarlett and Rhet, and I don't think she always followed what I was saying about following a spoor or lighting a fire without matches, although she used to help me to memorise the nature signs I had to learn for my woodcraft badge.

  Very few people used to see us or bother us. When the balloon was not flying the others in the unit would go into their huts or disappear into the park or visit the picture house in town. She had a full-blown melodious laugh, like a sweetly played tuba. When she came to a description of a battle in her book she would put her wide plain hand on my thin arm to arrest my reading and in an almost comically flat Yorkshire voice she would relate the passage, supposing that, as a boy, I must be interested in battles and blood. I would wait patiently while she retold the slaughter and then I would enlist her aid in rehearsing the woodcraft signs; the signs which signified the presence of water or a mad dog, or the two stones which told the tracker that the quarry had gone home to tea.

  'That looks like a cottage loaf,' she said, when I showed her how the stones were placed, the smaller sitting on top of the other. 'Gone home, is it? I think that's really neat, Arthur, that is. Really neat. Much better than writing it down.'

  'Well,' I said logically, 'in the forest you wouldn't be likely to have pencil and paper and even if you did the message would probably get blown away.' I looked up at her and saw she was regarding me with a potent, serious smile. 'Will you help me with some of the others?' I asked carefully. Something nervous began wriggling inside my chest. I hesitantly glanced again at her to make sure I wasn't mistaken, and my throat clogged with the sudden and powerful excitement.

  'Come here Arthur, lad,' she said quietly, moving up closer to the balloon.

&
nbsp; ‘I am here, Rose.' The sentence stumbled out like a man staggering from a fire.

  'I mean here,' she urged, half laughing.' Here. By me. A bit nearer.'

  I shuffled towards her childishly, on my bottom, and sat there, stark with anticipation. Quickly I turned to look at her again and I saw that her peachy face was shiny with perspiration. Her lips seemed enormous and fruity and her eyes shone like lights.

  'Move around to me a bit, love,' she muttered seriously. ‘Round facing me.'

  I felt my limbs do as she required. Then, abruptly, her head lolled forward as though with tiredness and, astounded, I felt the lovely, full, flow of her heavy hair against my face and my neck. My boy's face went into it, my nose burrowing into its luxury. Instinctively I rubbed myself against her face and I could feel it wet through the strands of her hair although I did not know whether it was tears or sweat. She made short little sobbing noises and I asked her helplessly: 'What's wrong? What's the matter, Rose?'

  A moment later I knew for sure what was the matter. Her fingers were picking at the buttons of my shorts. I felt the cool evening air whistle through the front and her beautifully soft, big, comfortable, airwoman's hands dip inside. I would have had a choking fit but I fought it back in case I spoiled it all. My breath was popping out in plaintive gasps, I could feel my face burning, and my legs shuddered.

  Her head was still against me, the hair still smothering me, so I could not see, only feel, what she was about. She had all my personal bits cupped in her wide-winged hands now and had taken them out, as though they were quite separate parts from the rest of my body. She did it with gentleness and concern, like Old Moses, the poacher who used to take rabbits from their burrows on the banks of the Ebbw, with the rabbit hardly moving or protesting at all.

  (He was a very interesting man, Old Moses, which, needless to say wasn't his real name but just a nickname made up by the children of the district. But he had a marvellous way with animals and I had thought of trying to contact him with regard to the habits of the badger, which I was studying in connection with my woodcraft badge. A family of badgers had made a home a bit further up the river and Old Moses knew all about their habits and their mating and all that sort of thing.)

  Well, anyway, she was holding me like that down there, like Old Moses, kneeling against me still so that I couldn't see, only feel, what was going on. I felt ashamed that my thing was so stiff, like a little signpost, but it was something I found I honestly could not prevent even when I became even mildly excited. There it was, the bloody nuisance, stuck up, impudent, disgraceful. I could feel it and, worse, I knew she could see it.

  'I'm sorry, Rose,' I apologised. 'I'm very sorry.'

  Then she did begin to cry. Her head was jogged with sobs and her large tears kept plopping on my bare knees.

  'I'm wicked,' she sobbed. 'Wicked.'

  I was just about to tell her she wasn't wicked when she did something to me, well, to mine, which indisputably was. I do not intend to enlarge on it here, since it still remains, despite all that has happened since, as the supreme shock of my life. At that age I did not even know that such things could be done. But she lowered her head and she did it right there and then. I fainted.

  Young and artless though I was, I learned quickly and cleverly in those earliest days in the park. Shattered I might have been, and no one since the founder himself has ever repeated 'A scout is clean in thought, word and deed,' so assiduously as I, and pausing carefully between the last three nouns, but soon I was dragging my wretched, depraved young body from my bed at two in the morning, dressing like a thief and making off to the park.

  Had I been an enemy agent I could so easily have blown up that balloon; well, not blown it up, but cut it to shreds or set it loose. Because no one ever challenged me when I went there in the dark. There was a guard on the balloon compound, propped in his little shed like a body in a coffin, but there was an entirely adequate entry through the park boundary hedge from the main road which no one bothered to block. The first time I went was on the same night as the unbelievable encounter I have just described. When I had fainted Rose parcelled away my private parts and pounded off for some smelling salts. When she returned on huge and anxious tiptoe I was sitting against the flank of the balloon desperately memorising my woodcraft knowledge, repeating the signs aloud to myself as a barrier against what I was convinced was rapidly approaching insanity. It could not have happened, I told myself. I was just going crazy. My mind was going to curds like the scoutmaster said it would if you did certain things that I could not resist doing.

  But when Rose came back like a sweet-smelling cloud I knew that it was unbelievable reality. Neither of us mentioned it, but I could see by her overflowing expression that it had been and would be again. I said I ought to be going back home or my mother would start looking for me in the dark.

  'You will come back, won't you, little Arthur?' she said with sincere anxiety, waving the smelling salts in front of my face. Then she smiled and said one word, one thrilling, adult, fantastic word - ‘Lover'. As she said it my eyes began to spiral in my head and I thought I was going off into another faint. I grabbed the smelling salts and took a deep sniff.' I'll come back - lover,' I gurgled through the invisible stranglehold around my throat. 'Tonight.'

  I ran home like a berserk redskin, seething with jubilant boiling emotions. They escaped like steam jets from every joint and hole and seam of my body. I kicked over a dustbin, seized a harmless cat by the tail (since I was in uniform, a unique sight for any student of scouting,) and eventually ran into the school bully of whom I went in terror. I laid into him joyfully with both bony fists, reducing him to a blubbing heap on the pavement, and suggesting he should send his dad along next time he wanted trouble.

  My elation was not sobered at home. As usual my mother was sitting with her eternal dejection, waiting for my father. I made her a pot of tea and washed the dishes for her, brought in some coal (she had a fire, winter and summer; a sort of symbol of her long vigils).

  All the time I chattered like a South American parrot, about scouts, about school, about Mr Finnegan who had tumbled from a street lampost while trying to spy on his wife in bed, about the war, about Hitler, who, I confidently told my mother, would be finished in six months. She began laughing at me in a puzzled way. 'Never heard you go on like this, Arthur,' she giggled. 'You sure you haven't been drinking?'

  'Never touch it, mum,' I assured her, breaking a fresh grin on her worried face. ‘There's more to life than drinking.'

  Suddenly serious she said: 'I'm glad you know it, son. It makes men and women do wild and wicked things.'

  Christ, I thought. What would I be up to if I was hitting the bottle as well?

  Although that night I was creeping out on a grown-up assignation, I was still barely more than a child. As I bent timidly through the darkness of the house and out into the street I felt like Wee Willie Winkie. It was two o'clock, an opaque summer night, close and still, with cats arched in the street and a policeman propped asleep beneath a lintel at the bottom of our road. I took fright when I thought I saw a face in a shop window and then realized it was the mirrored moon. For the occasion I had put on my best suit, brown shoes, white shirt, tie, and my Odeon Saturday Morning Club badge on my lapel.

  I went like a shadow through shadows, gently avoiding the sniffing Home Guard sentry outside the off-licence, reaching the park, and letting myself in through the gap in the hedge. The balloon was lying like a fat woman asleep, rolling a little in the touch of night breeze. The excitement I had seething through my body left no room for any fear. I knew where she slept, the hut and the very bed. It occurred to me that the door might be locked, but it wasn't.

  There was a short squeak as I turned the little brass door knob but the door swung without sound and I stepped in. It was close and scented in there. Suddenly I realized with a thrill of strange masculine power that I was in a room full of sleeping women. I could sense their breasts moving in the dark; I could see a
white female face pinned beneath a column of moonlight coming in at a window.

  Rose was snoring, a little lilt of a snore, lying on her front with her lovely big face buried in her pillows, her blankets kicked down the bed, a sheet half covering the moonlit breadth of her sweating back. I stood small by her bed, fighting down a sudden and urgent feeling that I ought to run, that everything was imagined. But I had her scent in my nose now and that made me stay. I knew that it was true, that her hair had been in my face, that she had done that extraordinary thing she did. It was true, and I knew it would be all right.

  At first I thought I would rouse her with a kiss, and I hovered over her, lips pursed, trying to select a spot on which to put it, her cheek, her forehead, her shoulder, bare but for the single bridging strap of her nightdress, or the very middle of her fine large back. But my courage was only a lad's and I pulled away at the final instant. Instead I extended a worried finger and tapped her almost formally on the arm. She mumbled and stirred but did not wake. I put the finger into the nightdress strap and gave it a brief tug, letting the palm of my hand drop on to the shoulder. The sensation of her flesh went through me like a shock. I thought I was going to be taken short. I closed my hand over the warm skin I loved so much and felt her move and half wake. 'Fuck off,' she whispered.

  I was transfixed. I pulled my hand away in some sort of terror. My whole body seemed to have dried up with those awful discouraging words. She stirred again and murmured: 'Fuck off, Danny, will you.'

  Danny! I thought the top of my young head was going to fly off. Danny? Who was Danny? Who the hell was he to be told to fuck off? Jealousy and wrath flooded my interior, already well occupied with apprehension. I stood up and regarded her with indignation and tears. She opened one large eye, quickly followed by the other: 'It's you,' she breathed in immediately happy surprise. 'Little Arthur.'