THE TENT

Oliver's mid-teens in 1982, with exams at school and a tenting holiday with a friend.

There was a war in the distant Falkland islands and the first female Prime Minister was trying to show the world that a woman can be every bit as ferocious (and wrong) as a man might be if he chanced to wear her shoes. All this meant that it was 1982 and Oliver Bramwell was approaching his GCSE examinations with a great deal of trepidation.

But that didn’t deter him from making plans for when the nightmare of academic testing was over. And he still harboured rosy memories of his last brief stay in hospital and the nurse he had taken a huge fancy to. And, he thought with a ginormous inner grin, she had rather liked him. Either that or the momentary visual treat that had stayed with him ever since had been an accident, and he found that hard to believe. But now he was sixteen, and it was all so long ago.

There were other things on his mind as well as the world of schoolboy academia. His mother had been incarcerated in Brumpton jail since he had been too young to understand what was going on in the world and he only had the vaguest memory of what she looked like or who she was. True, she had murdered the donor of the sperm that had created him, but that was little more than an abstract concept in Oliver’s mind. But he had heard that she would soon be released back into the world after serving around a dozen years behind bars and every time he pondered on what it would be like to meet her again he had very little idea of who she actually was.

But considerations of maternal meetings weren’t allowed to interfere with his concentration on the three r’s, but Gavin was.

Gavin was his new best friend and they had a special relationship based entirely on the fact that Gavin was an orphan in foster care and he was as good as an orphan in foster care, and they planned to take an elderly tent for a week after the exams were over and go to look at the sea, cycling to and from the coast on bicycles they both had built from scrap purloined in all innocence from a scrapyard on the outskirts of town.

“We’ll set off early,” said Gavin on their way home from school, pushing their bikes because some mischievous idiot had let his tyres down and he didn’t have a pump.

“We’ll need to if we move at this speed,” puffed Oliver as he struggled past a letter box with his satchel threatening to fall from his shoulder.

“It’ll be fine,” assured Gavin. “We’ll get there in the afternoon and I know the best shop for fish and chips for miles around...”

“And the girls will be dressed for summer,” grinned Oliver. Nurse Saunders was still firmly lodged in his mind, not that it would be she he expected to chat to if he chatted to anyone.

He had long thought he must be in love with her. After all, it had been years….

He wasn’t too sure about chatting to strange girls. But he did know he liked their shape and the best way to get further acquainted with shape was via the gift of the chat. At least, he hoped that was the case.

“They’ll all be in tee-shirts and shorts,” sighed Gavin, breaking into his thoughts.

“With beautiful tans and hair rustling in the summer breeze,” agreed Oliver.

“Or little frocks,” burbled Gavin. “I love the sight of little frocks and long bronzed legs...”

“I’m a breast man,” murmured Oliver, thinking yet again of Nurse Saunders, “But legs are okay,” he added. “I can quite take to legs.”

“We’ll have the tent,” said Gavin with a mischievous lilt to his voice. “We can use it one at the time if you like.”

“One at the time?” queried Oliver. “Why would we want to do that?”

“You know,” quipped Gavin, “what the lads tell us about at school, what they can do because they’ve got their own homes, not like us in care. But with a tent of our own pitched well away from anyone with ears we’ll be the same as them. Girls like it, you know. Kissing and cuddling and … other stuff.”

“When it comes to what the Rickies of this world say I reckon most of it’s bragging with not much behind it,” opined Oliver. “I was talking to a couple of the girls from near where I live on the way home from school and they said that what Ricky said was tosh. They said girls wouldn’t do what he said he did with them unless there was something wrong with their heads!” Ricky was an ebullient, loud boy who was on course for failing most of his exams, and that failure he put down to sexual excesses with half a dozen girls rather than an innate inability on his own part to concentrate on anything worth concentrating on.

“I dunno,” sighed Gavin, “but it’ll be fun finding out...”

oo0oo

Exams come and go, and these did. The invigilator was crotchety Mr Cadwallader, and the very ferociousness of his gaze as he scanned the examination room was enough to enforce concentration.

Before the results were due (and Oliver was encouraged by the fact that he knew pretty much all of the answers to the tests he sat) the two boys set off on their bicycles for the coast, Gavin with properly inflated tyres and Oliver having the burden of the greater part of their luggage crammed into a greengrocer’s orange box he had somehow managed to fit behind the saddle.

It was the best part of a hundred miles to the coast and it was by far the longest ride either boy had attempted in a single stretch. But they managed it despite a foolish lack of experience, with the early start, before the sun reached its peak, being acknowledged by both of them as a blessing as they struggled along the flat fenland roads until, late in the day and exhausted, they pedalled the last few miles to their seaside destination.

After a much needed rest and refreshment they found a site and paid the, to them, exorbitant charge for the pitching of one small tent. Erecting it might have been another struggle, but it wasn’t: Gavin (whose tent it was, borrowed from his foster-parents) had practised several times and got it down to a fine art.

“Our own private sex chapel,” he murmured, winking and looking almost foolish.

Then, even though it was getting late in the day, it was time to go in search of the girls that Gavin so wanted to find freely decorating the beaches and promenade of the small town.

There were plenty around, short-skirted or in shorts and with gorgeous hair, long and flowing and fashionable, but they all seemed to be with someone else. It seemed that the girls Gavin searched for usually went about in twos, and none were interested in being anything but with each other though some were interested in idle chatter with two boys, none seemed to want to split to make a twosome with one of the lads.

They were about to give up and postpone their amorous intentions until the next day when a voice, laughter-filled and happy, cut the air with a decisiveness Oliver couldn’t ignore.

“Oliver Bramwell! It is you Oliver, isn’t it?”

He spun around and his heart almost stopped its beating as he saw Nurse Elly Saunders mere yards away and she was hand-in-hand with the doctor who had been so concerned about the contents of his skull after the football incident.

And with the sight of the nicest smile he’d ever seen, one of his deepest dreams expired.

© Peter Rogerson 04.01.17