My parents used to take me to church every Sunday, I think because they thought I would be mixing with the right kind of people, or at least not the wrong kind. This was in the late 1960s, when the world was coming alive with a new spirit of adventure which included music, travel, and the new age extended to sex. Or so people said, anyway. While I had had a steady girlfriend, MIchelle, for several years I was seventeen and still hadn't got beyond the stage of putting my hand up her skirt, plunging a finger into her and leaving it there. I didn't know what I was doing. I hadn't even seen her naked.
Being a bit of a singer, I had been co-opted into the choir and my girlfriend would have liked to join me but had to admit she was tone deaf. That meant that at Friday night choir practice I was to all intents and purposes unattached. Everybody knew I wasn't, but the girls seemed happy to see me free from Michelle's clutches. They all went to a different school from me. I had passed a scholarship and went to a posh place, boys only, but these girls all went to the secondary modern. There was Karen, a bug-eyed, buck-toothed blonde who thought she was glamorous - and in my ignorance I agreed with her. The short grey fur coat was what did it. She was trying to turn herself into some man-eating junior version of Sophia Loren, and that was all right with me. But she was a flirt who would be giving me the come-on one minute, then doing the same with someone else a minute later. Then there was Marilyn, who was nineteen and all the boys thought of as a sexy older woman. Too old for me. Too mature and scary.
And then there was Jenny, the churchwarden's daughter. She was seventeen going on forty: short and dumpy, not the most beautiful but she smiled a lot and was very friendly.
One night when her father came to pick her up, he invited me to their house the next day to help him with preparations for the church fete. I was surprised but felt quite honoured. I didn't know what I could contribute but I was a polite, helpful lad.
I cycled round there the next afternoon and helped him plan where the stalls were going to go and what would be needed. Half a dozen coconuts for the coconut shy and a box of Jaffa oranges as prizes - that sort of thing. We were sitting at the kitchen table when Jenny came running in from the garden, tripped and fell, grazing her knee. She made a right fuss about it, so her Dad picked her up and sat her on a worktop while he grabbed a first aid kit and dabbed the graze with antiseptic: cue more screaming. When he had applied a large plaster, the phone rang. It was the minister, summoning him to help with something at the rectory, so he hurried off, asking me to keep an eye on Jenny. As we heard him pootle away on his Honda 50, I looked at Jenny and she smiled shyly. She was still perched on the fake granite slab, her short skirt revealing pale, stout thighs.
"Okay?" I said.
"It's not stuck properly," she complained. "Look."
I went over and stood in front of her. I smoothed the plaster into place and she put her hand on mine.
"Have you and Mish ever done it?" she asked impishly.
It is quite difficult to think hard and quickly , but sometimes it has to be done, and this was one of those times. Should I act blase as if I couldn't believe she was asking such a question, should I tell her to mind her own business, or should I admit the truth?
"No," she said. "I thought not." She paused before continuing. "I have," she said. "Girls mature quicker than boys. I don't know why. You'd think it would be the other way round, wouldn't you? Come here." She pulled me towards her and we kissed. It wasn't like kissing Michelle. Jenny's mouth and tongue seemed to promise there was more to come. She moved my hand up her thigh and I thought I was going to cum on the spot. Then she stopped and leaned back.
"Sniff me," she said, so I did. I took a deep breath without moving, and was about to say how nice she smelled when she grabbed my head and pushed it down towards her skirt. "Down there," she urged. She pushed me down further and parted her legs. I thought this was terribly rude but it was making me excited, so with trepidation I rested my cheek on her left thigh and breathed in.
"Like it?" she said triumphantly. "Why do fellas like smelling girls' cunts?" She said fellas like Davy Jones of the Monkees.
I blushed and fumbled for words.
"You're a brainbox," she said persuasively. "Don't you do biology or something at school?"
"I'm on the arts side," I explained, coming up for air. "English, French, German, Latin..."
"They don't have sex education?" she asked, aghast. "We do. This is 1969. There's been a sexual evvv, err, olution, whatever you call it. Mrs Rodd told us about it." She looked at me sceptically, then mellowed. "Ahh, you're embarrassed. Isn't that sweet?"
If there is one thing I hated it was being called sweet. It was like I was a cat or something, a nice little thing that nobody was afraid of. The least this girl could do was be a bit wary of me.
I pushed my head back between her legs and right up to her knickers. I bit her mound harder than I meant to and she recoiled.