8. The First Facts of Life

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

THE POETESS, Part 8

It took several weeks for Rosie to be ready to move back into her parental home, and as she cleared Clara’s stuff out until she reached a layer that had been there all her life she began to feel that nothing had really changed at all. But there was a lot of stuff she didn’t, couldn’t, need, some of it her father’s clothing that had been stored in a wardrobe since his liver gave up the ghost and he passed away. And there was some of her mother’s stuff too, not the right size for Aunt Clara, though no doubt she’d explored the possibility, but it was still where it had been left.

And finally a box containing baby clothes. Her baby clothes, the ones that mum had put aside when she grew out of them, just in case. She had no idea what she had meant by just in case. Maybe another baby would launch itself into their lives, but she was sure her mum had been too old for that. She’d said so times many.

Everything bar the new phone had to go, but she was keeping that. It was a conduit into a world she wanted to explore now that she had the income to go out and about a little. Her schooldays were far behind her and a vast future filled with untold dreams and adventures lay ahead. That phone might just come in useful.

Christmas that year came and went, both as the sixties faded into the seventies and then, an age and a lifetime later, during the twenty-first century Covid pandemic when not even that ginger Tom braved the cold of a fierce winter to pay her a visit. And without that ginger cat the days became boring affairs. There was nothing worth watching out of her bay window, just frosted grass and a white world.

There is, she decided, only so much daytime television that a soul can take before boredom sets in, though she did find some of the educational stuff broadcast for schoolchildren trapped at home by the lockdown moderately more interesting.

I was in a better state back then, she thought ruefully, My life was made of certainties. I was never going to grow old, never going to be stuck like I am now, always going to have a warm hearth, a happy family laughing and squabbling around me, and a man… I never had that man, so the family was no more than the pipe dream borne of wishful thinking…

It would have been nice to see Roy now and again, but what with long days working at Woolworth’s in the busiest season of the year and her work at home, dislodging the last remnants of Aunt Clara and her junk, she didn’t see him. Yet she heard rumours of him, rumours that turned her stomach into a knot of stress. He had a girlfriend, the same one week after week, and she was pretty as a picture according to all. Deliriously happy, it was suggested, and on the cusp of getting engaged to him.

Aunt Mildred had agreed to take some of Aunt Clara’s less unfashionable things, though they were few and far between, but Rosie went round to deliver them and spend a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon with the ever-smiling woman.

“You see anything of our Roy these days?” asked Aunt Mildred cautiously. Her nephew was so preoccupied by his new relationship that he spared very little time keeping her up to date with the comings and goings in his life, so she wasn’t sure.

Rosie shook her head. “I hear he’s got a girlfriend,” she replied, sadly, “I did like him, you know, and that kiss I had with him down by Miller’s cottage, that’s the only kiss I ever had with a boy.”

“There are ways of getting close to a lad without risking an unwanted pregnancy, which is what Roy thought you were scared stiff of,” murmured Mildred, “I’ve been known to do some rather wonderful things myself over the years, and tell you the truth it’s far from being unpleasant. What do you know about the human equivalent of the birds and the bees?”

She shook her head again, looking ashamed. Suddenly, she felt totally ignorant and had to face up to a life in which important truths had somehow been left off her personal educational agenda.

I remember that day, the older woman thought, sitting in what she had come to call her pandemic parlour and with a small smile on a still attractive face, Dear Mildred asked me what I knew about men and their bodies, and she could tell that I was little better than ignorant. She went to a cupboard and took out a slim and shiny book and opened it at a particular page. Well thumbed it was, as I recall, as if she turned to it quite often...

It showed a naked man in all his glory and I must have instinctively known something about the male body because it didn’t really surprise me. Then she turned the page, and the same man stood there, but in a less relaxed state, and I remember swallowing, because now it did surprise me slightly.

“There’s nothing at all wrong about this,” Mildred murmured, “and to be quite honest it’s rather nice. If you look carefully you can see that the man is equipped to be the bee, if you like, though what you’re ogling at doesn’t actually sting, and we girls are the flowers. I rather suspect I’m a rose, fragrant and pretty or so the lads used to suggest … and so are you, my dear. Now looking at that picture and remembering what you look like when you get out of the bath, naked and wet, can you work out what goes where?”

“I think so,” Rosie murmured shyly, “it all seems to make sense now you put it like this,” and she indicated the shiny magazine Mildred was holding.

“These are the facts of life, and if nobody knew anything about them the human race would die out in a generation or so,” Mildred said. “So now you have a little knowledge and before you go playing the field of handsome young men we’ll have a word about doing things safely, without unwanted babies.”

And we had that word, me shy but understanding what she was telling me, and then I went back home to my family home, deep in thought, armed with new knowledge. And those thoughts, I can still remember them, were a mishmash of Roy, my first kissing Roy, and the derelict cottage down Strong Lane.

It was comforting being at home. Rosie had liked the caravan, it had been cosy and warm with the heater on, but still restricting. Now she had moved her things into what had been her parents’ bedroom, used what had been their bed (Aunt Clara had slept on it too, so she equipped it with a new set of bedding just in case) and made her home as comfortable as she could.

Roy was still on her mind, though, and as she mulled over her new understanding of the birds and the bees she wished with all of her mind that he’d knock the door and smile at her the way he had.

Winter was just about over when he did just that. But he had a pretty girl draped all over him, and the expression on his face could only be described as sickly.