Lean and intellectual, broad-minded and narrow-lipped, Meg Ryan haircut, but secretly I preferred Hedda’s little sister Betski, rounder-hipped, more succulent if you like, and I did, but at fourteen the art of deception yet unmastered with bated breath I screwed up courage and did it.

Lounging on hot towelled concrete by the pool at the school where our parents tortured the minds of budding morons, hers at mathematics, mine at French, neither subject much called for in the colonial wilderness of the nineteen fifties, we had spent the morning, in fact the week: really the whole of the summer vacation, inching closer.  When the touch finally came – I think it was toes – and didn’t at once retreat, my heart took up the hammer and started banging away like a jack rabbit.  But then I felt something else wanting to join the jack-hammer rhythm and it wasn’t the blues.

Those days of tight swimming trunks, ah the agony, the embarrassment, roll over quick, face down, press into the towel on the hot concrete, ah the pleasure, ah the shame, ah why can’t those big shorts be the things to swim in, ah can’t even stand up except there, no hiding place, can I roll down the grass slope for a quick jerk behind the bougainvillea?  But competition lurked and I knew if I left the scene Powerdive Pete would be at Hedda’s side before you could say Jack Robinson.  And Hedda was a prize not to be shared.

And it was my toe touching hers, mine, so I did it, hoping, praying, longing for one thing to lead to another thing and that roll down the slope would find us in clover, laying down and do it again.

You know when you’ve thought of something, some magical momentous moment, seeded by movies of professional lippy-suckers, watered by a thousand times imagined, nurtured in pictures in your mind, practiced on the back of your hand before doing something else with the front, and then, finally, in the fantasy of a glorious climax, you do it…

Watch this space…