Garden of Delights
Late summer, 1969. The country evenings in the fields around my home village were all hazy-lazy stillness, the days a wash of nostril-widening delights: honeysuckle, wild dog rose and jasmine, lavender, fresh cow dung and ripe apples perfuming the air. The skies were clear apart from a few woolly, puffy clouds and the whine of planes ferrying British troops across the Irish Sea to quell the pesky Republicans, who had started leaving explosive shopping bags outside police stations.
Times were changing from the bucolic 60’s to the confrontational, tough 70s, but you could still walk down our village street and meet the local foxhounds being run by a man on a horse, wearing crimson jacket and jodphurs. The Post Office sold sweets by the ounce in paper bags, and the empire was still red. But I had other things on my mind.
The year before, I had left school with minimal qualifications and an optimistic smile, and joined the navy, by jove! By that summer, and my first spell of leave, I had already sailed once around the entire world, braved Cape Horn, waved at Table Mountain and gasped at Australian men wearing shorts and long socks together with nylon shirts and ties. Bizarre customs in foreign lands indeed.
Accordingly, I considered myself a man of the world. OK, I had yet to start shaving regularly — nonetheless I felt I had the whiff of foreign adventure and action about me, and saw myself as a bit of a Jack the Lad (JtL). Plus I had time on my hands; four weeks before my next ship sailed. I was ripe for action.
I got back in touch with some of the people I had been at school with. Most were still there, studying for A-Levels and were therefore beneath me. But one or two mentioned that the next village to my home, Blakesley, was having a harvest festival bash in the vicarage grounds. And that there would be a marquee, beer, folk music, dancing — and girls. Just what a shore-leave, time-rich JtL was looking for.
The night of the Blakesley Harvest Festival jamboree arrived. I also arrived, looking damn smart in my Roger Moore white polo neck with brown corduroy pants, and my naval dress uniform shoes. I have a vague recollection of Brut 33, but that might be wishful thinking. I felt (and hopefully looked) attractive to women.
The marquee had been put up on the vicarage lawn, and was full of middle-England life and harvest warmth. Fruits of the hedgerow and field were interspersed with an interesting range of village and farm locals, mostly drinking beer. Decorous festival goers were sitting around the perimeter of the marquee on hay bales, discreetly pulling straw out of their trousers and panties. This was because the bales were marvellously rustic, but were also shedding large volumes of extremely itchy, arse-aggravating straw ends.
Less decorous groups of young men were perfecting the art of pushing each other backwards over the hay bales to the accompaniment of coarse, rural laughter and intimations that the leg-in-the-air collapsee was a pathetic wanker. No matter, the evening was about hearty entertainment, not lah-de-dah concert going chitty-chatter. I sank another pint.
But there seemed to be a lack of what I was principally there for — buxom, knowing, apple-cheeked ploughgirls or daughters of the Lord of the manor. I pondered as I downed yet another beer. Maybe I was just too early to the do? Maybe the evening would liven up later? Maybe another beer would conjure up some talent?
Strictly speaking I was under age, and shouldn’t have been drinking. But as I was now a Working Man, I felt qualified to drink as much as I wanted, no matter that anything more than two beers turned me into a quivering stammering jelly with a bursting bladder. I chatted briefly and, I thought, intriguingly, with the daughter of the vicarage owner. She smiled and tolerated me: in retrospect I think it was the polo neck.
But as we chatted, my concentration began to wane. Not because of her lack of interest or charms, but due to the inevitable bladder pressure building under my corduroys. I excused myself, and went outside to urgently look for the toilets.
The vicarage lawn where the festival marquee had been erected was surrounded by a centuries old walled garden, complete with thick shrubberies, gorgeous flower beds and gnarled, ancient trees. But no evidence of toilets. Irritatingly, the marquee’s indoor action with its sweaty dancing milkmaids, beer-quaffing ploughmen and bale-jumping youths had made the air outside seem a lot colder.
As the temperature dropped, the bladder clenched, the pressure mounted, I dithered as I sought relief, and the pressure and my urgency went into the red zone.
I spotted a gap in the garden’s neat foliage, dashed into the vegetation and just managed to stop short in a tiny clearing, inches from colliding with the garden wall. Phew! The perfect spot, out of view yet handy and just right for the massive piss I had to unload. So I unloaded, aiming as you do when drunk for that piece of old newspaper on the ground. The feeling of relief and the sound of urine splashing heavily on the newspaper was heavenly.
However, the drop in temperature, the dash, the beer, and the thought of my chances with the girl I had been chatting with all conspired to muddle my senses slightly, so when I heard some shouting I just shouted back in the general direction of the marquee.
The shouting became louder, I laughed and shouted back even louder, as I squeezed out the last of my piss. I then staggered back astonished, as the piece of newspaper rose up from the ground in front of me, turning itself into a shirt surrounding a very angry, urine-soaked young man with his trousers down. He lunged furiously at me, grabbing me with both hands round my neck.
“What’s he doing in here?” I thought.
A second voice penetrated my inebriation and helped with an explanation. “No, no, don’t. Let’s just go, let him go,” said a second, female, voice as another vague form rose from the urine-soaked patch at my feet, adjusting nether garments as it did so. “Leave him alone, let’s get out of it.”
But her cries were in vain. By now, the smelly-shirted, bare-legged, would-be lothario was pushing me violently backwards out of the shrubbery, stumbling along in his trouser shackles. I was also stumbling, partly through the effects of the beer, and partly because I was being manhandled in reverse through a flower bed. I was so startled, drunk, consumed by the horror (and, I admit, by the gradually increasing mirth) of the situation that I collapsed, wrenching myself from his grasp. I lay shuddering among the begonias, and would have pissed myself laughing if I hadn’t just emptied all I had over the couple. They fled.
I gathered my wits, brushed myself free of foliage and dirt, and wandered back into the marquee. Nobody had apparently noticed the brief altercation outside. The music and dancing was now ramping up and had covered any scuffles and shouts that might otherwise have merited investigation.
I resumed my chat with the squire’s daughter, got her phone number and even extracted the promise of meeting again next weekend. My JtL leave was looking good.
Better, I assume, than a continuation of the urgent and passionate love affair between my damply ambushed Blakesley couple. If, by any slim chance, either of you are reading this story — sorry about all that.
