4. A First Caravan

THE POETESS, Part 4

She spent the next day lost in thought. Sitting in her bay window she watched a thrush stalking cross her lawn, and back again. Looking for someone? Looking for a friend or a lover? At least it was free and not trapped by the lock-down of a pandemic!

Back in the last few weeks of my schooldays I saw Roy so often that I thought the we’d be together forever. I not only thought it, I wanted it! There was something about the way we were that had the taste of eternity about it like the year between birthdays had when I was little, before mum and then dad died. It was after then that I was stuck with Aunt Clara until I’d had my belly full of her, and after a particularly silly row I left the home I’d lived in since my birth, the one the selfish bad-tempered creature had inherited, being dad’s sister...

“I’ve left home,” she said to Roy. She was carrying a suitcase in which she had stuffed everything that mattered to her, and the day was as grey as her heart felt. There were clouds everywhere, her hair was wet and her raincoat barely adequate. Underneath it she was wearing the reason for her decision to depart the family home. Underneath that raincoat she was wearing the tiny kilt, tartan and pretty as Heaven, that she’d bought secretly with the money she earned delivering papers on Sundays.

She liked it, but more importantly, Roy liked it.

“You look really nice in that, like a model,” he told her.

“Like Twiggy?” she asked.

“You’re more pretty than her, but yes, a bit like her I suppose,” he replied thoughtfully. That was a few days earlier. Now she dropped the bombshell about leaving home.

“Where will you stay?” he asked.

The silly thing was she hadn’t actually asked herself that question. So far there had been a quantum leap in her affairs and she was suspended halfway between leaving home and having somewhere to stay.

“Our old cottage?” she suggested.

He stared at her, not believing she could even think that.

“For starters., it isn’t ours and for seconds there isn’t what I’d call a bed and for thirds, if your really need thirds, you can’t lock the door! Pinky, you’re the prettiest and cleverest girl I know and I’ll bet there are some scoundrels, some sex-mad rotters, who’d so anything to spend a night with you. No, you can’t stay there until it’s fixed up and at least made safe!”

“We’ll do that, then,” she said, determinedly.

“What? When?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “we can start now and maybe we’ll be done by tea time. It can’t take forever to make an old place like that safe from visiting perverts.”

“Are you real?” he asked, “it’ll take a lot longer than an afternoon to make that place anything like habitable: it’ll take weeks if not months!”

“What will I do, then?”

“You’ve met my mum and you know how Victorian she is,” said Roy thoughtfully, “she thinks that if a boy is courting a girl, that’s what she calls it, it’s because they’re about to make babies, and I don’t think we’re planning to do that just yet, are we? So she won’t let you stay with us.”

She noticed the just yet part, and something inside her shivered.

“You mean you’re planning to do things to me that will make me pregnant some time in the future?” she asked, “but not just yet?”

“Well, for starters we’re not married,” he told her.

“Were we planning to get married?” she asked.

He looked uncomfortable because he knew his words when he replied might be quite the wrong words even though they’d say the right things.

“You know I’m crazy about you,” he murmured, thinking at lightning speed despite the slowness of his speech

“And I like you,” she said, prompting him.

“And I want to be with you,” he continued.

“Is it my imagination or is there a but coming?” she asked.

“Well, maybe.”

“Why?”

“There’s lots I don’t know,” he confessed, “like how to make sure a girl, say you, really wants to spend forever with me. And if I decide that you do, how do I go about arranging a wedding? There’s churches with vicars to be chatted to, and banns and things like that to be sorted out, a reception to be planned … and doing all that because you’ve quarrelled with your aunt does seem a bit like shooting a duck with a cannon!”

“Don’t you talk about shooting ducks, Roy, I won’t have it!”

“Well, a sparrow then.”

“I can’t go back home, you say you won’t help me with fixing up the cottage this afternoon and now you say you won’t even marry me! So I’m to be homeless, am I? Sleeping in gutters and being meddled with by tramps and all sorts of filthy men? And all because you say your mum’s Victorian?”

“I won’t let any filthy old men get their hands on you!”

“I can stand up for myself!”

“I’m sure you can, but … maybe there just might be a gorilla of a man who’s a tiny bit stronger than you?”

“I’d kick him in the you-know-what!”

“Do I? Where’s his you know-what that you’d kick him, in then?”

Yes, I threatened that, silly girl that I was! Because I had no idea about the physiology of the male sex, just that they could pee standing up and I couldn’t! And to think they say that the sixties were all sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, and I knew nothing about drugs, had neve rmet anyone who played a rock’n’roll guitar, and I thought that sex was what happened between birds and bees because that’s how it was explained to me before I left school. Yet there I was towards the end of the sixties thinking I could survive in a tumble-down cottage all on my own and that nobody would try to take advantage of me lonely in the wild,s wearing a tiny but pretty tartan mini-kilt complete with a shiny pin to hold it together!

“Of course I know, silly! Between his legs!”

But that was like saying that Brumpton is a town somewhere in the solar system, as vague and meaningless as that, and as explicit as her mind could go.

“My aunt’s got a caravan parked behind her house,” he said after a pause, “it’s quite a small affair that they use for holidays, but there’s no water or electricity. But she might let you doss down in it for a few days if we ask nicely, and the good thing is she lives just across the road from me and she’s nothing like you say your own aunt is!”

“A caravan?” she said, “I can’t think of anything better! I’d love that, for a few days!”

“Well, it’s cold in winter, so it can’t be for long,” he said, “come along then, speak nicely like a proper young lady, and she might say yes!”

“I am a proper young lady!”

And that’s what we did! He went, all humble and sweet like a little boy still in short trousers and his aunt, a lovely woman not much older than us at a guess, aunt Mildred she was, listened to what we both said and handed me a key and told me, with a smile, that I’d have to leave it as clean as I find it.

You know, I could do with that caravan now, old as I am. It’d make a change from this room and this view. Damn the pandemic and all this lock-down boredom.

© Peter Rogerson 10.03.21

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