Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/40

16 in our hearts we knew he was telling us the truth, and we were almost crazy with breathless desire.

I got him to invite me up to the Vicarage and I saw Mary the nurse-girl there, and she seemed to me almost a woman and spoke to him as "Master Will" and he kissed her, though she frowned and said "Leave off" and "Behave yourself", very angrily; but I felt that her anger was put on to prevent my guessing the truth.

I was aflame with desire and when I told Howard, he, too, burned with lust, and took me out for a walk and questioned me all over again and, under a haystack in the country we gave ourselves to a bout of frigging which for the first time thrilled me with pleasure.

All the time we were playing with ourselves I kept thinking of Mary's hot slit, as Strangways had described it, and at length a real orgasm came and shook me; the imagining had intensified my delight.

Nothing in my life up to that moment was comparable in joy to that story of sexual pleasure as described, and acted for us, by Strangways.

Father was coming: I was sick with fear: he was so strict and loved to punish. On the ship he had beaten me with a strap because I had gone forward and listened to the sailors taking smut: I feared him and disliked him ever since I saw him once come aboard drunk.

It was the evening of a regatta at Kingston. He had been asked to lunch on one of the big yachts. I heard the officers talking of it. They said he was asked because he knew more about tides and currents along the coast than anyone, more even than the fishermen. The racing skippers wanted to get some