Spring of '63

I was 15 when it happened, new bosom and eletrical jolts to my crotch, not understanding any of it. We were Catholic, you see, devout with all the trimmings, eternally at church and repenting our sins. Except that I didn’t have any, well not until that day anyway.

He was Jean-Claude, wonder boy, mist of black hair and blue eyes that made my knickers wet. I didn’t think he’d look at me twice with my faded hand-me-downs from my sister Rebecca. But he took me for a picnic and read poems to me in french. It was awfully romantic, made me tingle all over. To this day, I don’t know what he was on about but it was for me, and that’s all that mattered. So he took me, with a keen ardour and I loved him, I really did, probably just for looking at me.

But I had to go and get bloody caught. I cried buckets for a week until Rebecca told me about her boyfriend’s dad who did that on the sly. A few bob and I’d be rid, he said. So I braced myself, felt the knitting needle as he performed the task in hand. I was sick for a long time after that. Mainly because it hadn’t worked. I was still pregnant. A blunder, he’d called it. Jean-Claude returned to France. I was disowned. But I light the candles on Raymond’s fifth birthday cake and I’m glad now that things were what they were.