You must remember that all this took place fifty years ago when, for an adolescent boy in a boarding school, anything to do with sex was cloaked in ignorance and imbued with compulsively attractive feelings of deep, dark guilt.
But there was a second reason why the yew forest was a place of very ill omen. Twice, four years and two years previously, boys from Minster Hill had been found hanging from their belts from one of those dark, seamed boughs. The forensic details of their deaths had not been made public, though in both cases it was rumoured that sexual activity had preceded death and verdicts of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed were returned by a bemused and horrified jury. On both occasions the school Chaplain had used his sermon on the Sunday following the inquests to attack, in coded terms, the practice of masturbation, dwelling on the feelings of shame that could follow, a shame intense enough to make a young lad take his own life.
None of this seemed to bother James though he did keep to the lower edge of the forest. Presently he edged forward again as far as the fence that overlooked the meadow and, this time, the rear of Fat Mary’s smallholding. We were much closer than we had been before, not much more than a hundred yards away, and looking down on a graveyard of agricultural machinery.
An old tractor rotted away on huge flat tyres, the multiple tines of an ancient harrow looked like the ribs of a giant dead fish, the rust-red discs of a plough like saurian vertebrae. Grass and brambles grew through them, willow herb too, in spikes of dark pink bloom, and sorrel already brown and crusted with friable seeds. Long ago Fat Mary’s father and brothers had ploughed two of the fields each year and grown rape and flax, barley and oats. The brothers died in Burma, in the forgotten army, Mother hanged herself, Daddy died of drink. Fat Mary survived on and by the animals she reared and let the fields return to pasture.
There was also an ancient pump mounted on a fluted cast-iron column — the only water supply she had. And just then, as we settled down to watch again, the back door opened and she came out.
She had taken off all her clothes.
She went to the pump, worked the long handle, filled a bucket, tipped it over her head. Then she did the same again. Next, she scrubbed herself all over with a huge bar of green Fairy soap, before washing the suds away with a third bucketful. The fourth she took to the lean-to toilet shed at the end of the building. We fancied we could hear her pissing. Then she went back indoors. All in all she had been visible to us for about five minutes.
She was magnificent. In the bright, hot July sun her body glowed pearl and rose and a deeper red where her clothes had been too tight. Her neck was an ivory tree-trunk, her shoulders were like fat rounded hams. As she worked the pump, her huge breasts swung like sacks of cream netted in blue veins and nippled with discs like saucers. Once, while pumping, she straightened and used her wrist to wipe the sweat from her brow which was streaked with her coarse, gingery hair and for a moment, upright, with her huge torso tilted back a little, she was a goddess.
When she tipped the flashing water over herself it slid through the suds, driving them down, and the acres of her skin looked sleek and strong like a whale’s. Her huge dimpled buttocks were so pressed together that the cleft was not obvious, until she put her hand between to soap inside, and when she turned her stomach hung like a stuffed hammock and all but buried in shadow the multiple creases beneath and the flattened triangle of straw.
But for all the flabbiness of her body, torso, breasts and buttocks, her limbs, though massive, were strong and round and firm, dimpled again at knees and elbows, but structured by the muscle and sinew deep beneath, the power house that could carry not only her own weight but made nothing or not much of an extra hundredweight, or split the massive logs that were stacked against the wall of her cabin.
The long and the short of it was — I fell in love.
Well, what’s your definition of that miserable state?
I had never before seen female naked flesh beyond what the pre-bikini swimming costumes of the late nineteen forties (which included hideous rubber bathing caps) allowed. I had no, or hardly any, preconceptions of what constitutes female beauty or what in a female body might stimulate sexual desire. Even the air-brushed or eclectically posed women in Health and Efficiency were plump by today’s standards. I had, moreover, been taken to the National Gallery where a visit to Dutch maritime paintings, de Cuyp cows and trompe-l’ceil interiors, all deemed to be aesthetically uplifting, could not be undertaken without a hurried passage through the Rubens rooms. And Fat Mary was not that much fatter than the Goddesses poor Paris had to choose between. So, there was no reason to be repelled by her size.
And the attraction? Fantasy made flesh and dwelling, if not amongst us, then little more than three miles away. As soon as the plank door closed behind her I knew I had to see her again. The summer holidays came and that image haunted me. Surreptitiously I drew crude pictures of her and hid them from my parents. I willed dreams of her and sometimes was visited by her in unwilled dreams. By September, when we returned to school, I was obsessed. I haunted the market and caught glimpses of her in her tweeds, which, perhaps oddly, did nothing to put me off. I just stood in front of her, gawped, turned bright crimson, and imagined what I knew lay beneath. Only one thing bothered me and I pushed that away as an absurd irrelevance — I knew she must be at least twenty years older than me, possibly as much as twenty-five. You cannot now imagine how the repression and ignorance of anything concerning sex and the female body poisoned our minds in those days and led to such deep and foetid infatuations.
The weather turned chill, the leaves turned and dropped, and I shivered on the edge of the yew forest whenever I was allowed out and sometimes when I was not, filled with despair because I knew that even if I caught a glimpse of her, I stood no chance at all of seeing her undressed. I came on my own now, though once or twice I fancied James was maybe behind me in the woods. In school we saw even less of each other than before — with the new school year timetables had been changed, and hierarchies redrawn following the summer end-of-term exams. He was now in the Remove, would be sixteen before he took School Certificate and did woodwork instead of Latin. I had sold or bartered my SS dagger in the way boys do, but I had heard that it had passed on two or three more times and that James now owned it.
But none of this was important. What kept me awake at nights and patrolling those fences even when the frosts came and the pond below froze was the obsession, the overwhelming desire to see Fat Mary naked again, and. And what? I hardly dared imagine. Yet believe it or not it was not until December, late December, just three days before Minster Hill broke up, that I remembered that day in July, how we had seen her let herself in with a big iron key taken from a high ledge in the porch. It was a Saturday morning again, first light and that cold greyness in the high sash windows that told you it had snowed in the night even before you looked out. I lay there on my back with my eyes open listening to the grumbles of my companions as they too woke up, and then their exclamations of delight as they saw the snow, and all I could say to myself, over and over again was — ‘I can get in, I can get in whenever I want.’