We walked back from the Fox down the old pathway by the side of the church, looking up at the gargoyles and joking about how they reminded us of various members of staff. We entered the college grounds via the archway that led into the quadrangle.  

‘I need a slash,’ I said turning towards the library block.

‘See you by the cricket pitch,’ said Craig, ‘I’ll sign us back in.’ He jogged off towards the admin block, a thin sheen of sweat on his brown shoulders.

‘Sassenach’s game,’ grunted Alan, ‘I’m away to improve my mind.’ He turned towards the library itself.

As I emerged – relieved – from the toilet, the adjacent door to the common room opened and Penny stepped out.

‘Hi, Pen.’

‘Hi, John.’ Her brown curly hair was tied back and she wore jeans, along with a shirt knotted at the waist to leave part of her stomach bare. She put her arms around my neck and we kissed, I let my fingers stray to the exposed flesh at her waist. We’d been a couple for almost three months now and had developed a lazy familiarity.

She licked her lips. ‘You’ve been to the Fox.’ she said, gazing into my eyes.

‘Yeah, with Craig and Alan. You coming to watch the cricket?’

‘Anything to get out of there.’ She inclined her head towards the common room and continued, ‘Sweaty Johnstone’s down to his Y-fronts and I think he’s on a losing streak.’

‘Yeuch!’

‘It gets worse, somebody’s brought in a Wurzels record.’

‘Ooh arrgh!’

She gave me a playful thump on the shoulder and we walked out into the quadrangle, strolling towards the playing field, our arms around each other’s waists. With the touch of her skin on mine; feeling the gentle sway of her hips as she walked, and the sun warm on my back I knew I was the luckiest seventeen-year-old alive. My cartoon devil popped up and told me if I played my cards right I could get a lot luckier.

Finding Craig sprawled by the boundary rope, we dropped to the grass alongside him. ‘Anything happening?’ I asked.

‘Not a lot. The staff are batting.’

A cricket match on a perfect English summer’s day: the sound of leather on willow, the gleaming whites of the players, the sporadic applause of the crowd. Except it wasn’t much like that. Yes, it was a perfect summer’s day, but few of the players wore whites; most were in oddments of casual gear and sportswear, some of the fielders wore just shorts. The game was a fun end of term event.

Colin Stubbs was bowling. He was in my economics class. The best cricketer in the college, he often turned out for the local club XI. Stubbsie seemed to be the only one taking the game seriously. A shout went up as a wicket was demolished and we clapped our hands lazily, as you do when it’s a hot day and you can’t be bothered to get too excited.

We propped ourselves on our elbows and half-heartedly watched the game for a while. Karen Davies, from my art class, came over; as ever she was overdressed in a long sleeved shirt over a dark T-shirt. She spoke to Penny, barely acknowledging Craig and me, then they wandered off together; I assumed to talk girlie talk.

Craig and I rolled onto our backs and half closed our eyes. I watched the wiggling things that move about in front of your pupils, and allowed my mind to drift once more to my plans for the coming holiday.

‘Have you had it off with her yet?’ Craig’s voice broke into my contemplation.

‘Penny?’ I questioned, opening my eyes wide and checking in case anyone else was in earshot.

‘No, Angela Rippon. Of course Penny!’

‘Not yet. But we’ve talked about it. We both want to be sure.’

He turned his head and with an earnest expression and narrowed eyes searched my face. ‘Have you been listening to Woman’s Hour again?’

‘Craig, this is serious.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. Penny really matters to me and I don’t want to spoil it.’ I’d rehearsed that argument, and I thought it came out quite well.

What it in fact meant was that I’d never been out with a girl for this long before and I wanted to make sure I got my just reward. The bright light of sex was looming large at the end of the tunnel of adolescence. I didn’t want to risk a derailment before the station. Lost Virginity – Change here for Adulthood.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said then grinned. ‘Guess who’s helping Don’t-Do-It-Deborah with her homework next week?’

I grinned back. ‘You really fancy your chances there, don’t you?’

‘She’s weakening, mate. I just know it. She can’t hold out against my animal magnetism forever.’ Craig was on the same train journey.

We returned to contemplating our eyelids for a while before discussing, from our encyclopaedic knowledge of Motor and Car road tests, whether a Jaguar XJ12 was a better car than a Mercedes 450.

By four o’clock we had frittered away the afternoon and felt exhausted.

Craig, Penny, myself and about twenty other Abbott Hallbrook students living in the village were bussed the six miles or so there and back each day by a chartered coach. By 4:10 p.m. we were waiting opposite the college gates, shirts back on, army surplus haversacks slung on one shoulder, impatient to go home and start the holidays in earnest.

We gave a cheer as the big beige and white Bedford hissed to a halt. We began to file on board, the chrome badge by the door read ‘DOMINANT’ in confident sans serif capitals. I wondered if it were possible to get a job thinking up names for buses. I’d always enjoyed playing with words; one of my junior school reports had read: ‘John has a competent command of the language’. I was rather proud of that.

Penny was sitting halfway down the coach on the side nearest the pavement. I put my bag on the rack and dropped onto the lurid orange, red and black upholstery beside her.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she whispered so no one else could hear.

‘About what?’ I whispered too, though I wasn’t sure why.

‘About us, and  …  you know.’

The cartoon devil appeared in a puff of smoke, rubbed his hands together and cackled in my ear.

Penny went on, ‘Well, your mum works Thursdays and Fridays, my mum helps out at the old people’s day centre on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Tim goes to his gymnastics class on Tuesday afternoons during the holidays.’

‘So?’

‘So, there are three days in each week when we have an empty house somewhere.’

I’d been waiting so long for this moment I couldn’t quite believe it was happening now. ‘You mean we can …? You want to  …?’

‘Thursday, I thought. Give us a chance to get any study out of the way. If that’s okay?’

‘You bet!’ I replied in enthusiastic tones. The cartoon devil was beside himself but I fought hard to stay calm, adding as an afterthought, and in a lower voice, ‘If you’re really sure?’

She said nothing, but her hand squeezed my left thigh. ‘Penny Harris you’re far too good for me,’ I said, ‘I don’t deserve you.’

‘Make sure you get all your homework done,’ she chided.

‘You sound like my mother,’ I said. But I knew she was right. I’d always been a last minute operator where homework was concerned but Penny’s meticulous planning made me resolve to get it done and over with. Strange how girls sometimes had a good effect on your life for the wrong reasons. Besides, throwing myself into the work would, I hoped, help to keep my mind off sex for the intervening five days.

‘Did you get the  …  things?’

‘Things?’ For a second I didn’t understand what she meant. ‘Oh, yes, no problem.’ I thought of the packet of Durex hidden in my bedroom bookcase, behind the Alistair McLeans and the Len Deightons; and of the trials I’d gone through to obtain them. ‘No problem’ seemed somewhat inadequate. The bus moved off with a lurch.

The journey proceeded through a patchwork of stone-walled countryside and took about twenty minutes. We rode past farmhouses and cottages and one spectacular, if inappropriate, pink Spanish style villa which we had nicknamed t’hacienda. The driver had the radio on and we were in a mellow, contented mood when we came to a halt and alighted in the village square. The place was a small town I suppose but everyone who lived there called it the village.

The square was the geographic and social the centre of what was otherwise a sprawl of housing. We had a decent range of shops. No big names, no Smith’s, or Woolworth or Tesco, but there were local supermarkets, bakers, chemists, butchers, everything you needed for most stuff. For more serious shopping we caught the train and went to Middlesbrough.

For us teenagers the square was our social centre too. The place where we would arrange to meet, hang around and chat, check out the cars and the people as they passed.

The coach had brought us down the High Street from the hills, passed under the railway bridge, and dropped us a few yards short of the roundabout that formed the hub of the place. Beyond the square the High Street continued dead straight for about a quarter of a mile until it ran out of 1930s villas where the tarmac turned sharp left and became the Coast Road.

The secondary school we had attended stood inland of the Coast Road like a great stranded ship. As first and second years we had dreaded winter cross country runs along the Stray and the beach, our skinny, shivering knees exposed to the cruel North Sea winds and stinging sand.

Turning from the bus stop, I began to walk with Penny and Craig, back up the High Street; we ambled along in the late afternoon heat. The summer holiday stretched out before us, September and college and A-levels seemed a lifetime away. An ambulance sped past, two-tone horn screaming.

‘He won’t sell much ice cream going at that speed,’ I said.

Penny laughed without sounding amused. ‘Where did you borrow that one from?’

‘Eric Morecambe, I think.’

‘I sometimes think you build your whole life around jokes.’

‘Not my whole life.’

She giggled.

‘Now, you two,’ said Craig, ‘I don’t want to have to throw cold water over you, there are shortages, you know.’

I laughed and we turned right into Chapel Terrace, so called because of the old, square-jawed, Methodist chapel – now descended into the world of sin and housing a one-armed bandit repair business – which stood on the corner.

It felt cooler here as the buildings cast shadows over the narrow street. House martins swooped in graceful dives from under the eaves in search of insects. Craig lived in the last house on the left side of the street; it had a square of tarmac next to it where his mum parked her battered blue Citröen Dyane.

Saying goodbye to Craig, Penny and I walked on. Chapel Terrace ended in a row of concrete bollards; beyond these was a patch of well-trodden grass and then you were on the estate.

The estate had been constructed in the late ’60s and so the houses were still thought of as new. They were in that part brick, part weatherboard style that was popular at the time.  The whole thing occupied the site of an old wartime aerodrome and all the streets were named after planes. Crossing the grass, we were in the turning area at the end of Hurricane Close. Walking more or less in a straight line took us to a pathway between high garden fences, at the end of it stood a ‘No Cycling’ sign; which deterred no cyclists. After fifty yards the path emerged between low white post and rail fences onto Lancaster Drive.

Here, on the spot where we had shared our first kiss, we stopped and relived the moment. ‘Till Thursday then,’ she said.

‘Thursday,’ I replied. One word loaded with significance. Then as an afterthought I added, ‘Won’t you be at the carnival tomorrow?’

‘Trust you to break the romantic spell,’ she said.

‘Sorry, I just couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing you for five whole days.’

‘I’ll be there, but it’s Thursday that’s special.’ She smiled, and we kissed again a brief brushing of lips as she patted my backside.

‘There’s no chance of me forgetting that,’ I tried to smile back, but it came out as a leer. I then began to walk the hundred yards uphill to my house. Penny crossed the road and continued down another pathway to reach her home in Lysander Gardens. I strolled past the striped lawns and regimented flower beds of suburbia. Ahead I could see my dad’s more casual herbaceous style; colourful plants I didn’t know the names of fought for attention, beneath the front windows and around the base of the cherry tree which sprouted from our front lawn. 

It being Friday, my mum was still at work. On reaching the house I went through the side gate to let myself in via the back door. Sandy, who was loose in the back garden, bounded up to me wagging his tail in greeting. I gave his ears a friendly ruffle. ‘Hello, boy. What are you up to, eh?’ He trotted off wagging his tail to lie in the shade behind the garage. Runner beans clung to their bamboo wigwams in the sunshine, patrolled by a lazy bumble bee.

Entering the house I went up to my room; I was still thinking of Penny and had a bonk on by the time I reached the top of the stairs. In my room I stripped off my clothes, lay on the bed and had a wank, thinking of my contact with Penny during the day and anticipating the pleasures of next Thursday. I followed this with a lukewarm shower, and changed into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

Padding barefoot down to the kitchen, I made a mug of tea and took it out to sit in the shade of the patio with my book of Arthur Miller plays. Holidays only just started and I was studying already, I decided this must be love.

Sandy wandered over and sniffed at my crotch, he always seemed to know when I’d been playing with myself. I scratched his head; he gave me a superior look and returned to his shady spot to lick his balls.

I tried to read the book but the words wouldn’t connect with my brain. I sipped tea and allowed my mind to wander, anticipating the events which the next few weeks would hold.