Blakeney

They honeymooned in Blakeney, at a place called the White Horse. It was 1961 so they were just in time to completely miss the Swingin’ Sixties.

They were both virgins. She was making him wait. That was one way to catch a husband, in those days. I’ve often wondered if that meant that the men who were most eager to marry quickly, whirlwind romance, all that, were the ones most likely to be led astray by their dicks throughout their lo-o-o-o-o-ng married lives. Anyhow. He wrote her a series of ever-more heated letters in the run up to the wedding. Not the sort of explicit stuff we’d come out with nowadays, with our porno-literacy and frank shamelessness, but a lot of panting enthusiasm about finally being alone, having the opportunity to be close, and so forth.

He had almost managed to get some practice in, before he met her, on a rare and bold overseas holiday with a friend to Spain. They had met a pair of Spanish nurses (oh happy fate!) and spent the week wooing them. Come the last night, he was lying on a deserted beach under the cover of darkness, kissing her, and he thought he might be onto a sure thing with his dusky Latin temptress. He edged his hand under the frill of her skirt and she didn’t move it away. He left it there a while, then stroked around her knee and began to move upwards. He realised to his shock that she had a thick mat of hair running down the inside of her thighs almost to her knees. Curly, springy leg-pubes. He knew from the dance halls that English girls did not have this. Respectfully (appalled) he removed his hand from the frills of her petticoat and walked her back to her hotel. It left him with an enduring horror of Mediterranean women, and I’m sure this is the reason why he married a strawberry-blonde with almost invisible eyebrows and lashes, just in case.

She made the dresses for all seven of her bridesmaids, each one a different pastel shade with a sheer net of embroidered daisies over, and jaunty pillbox hats to match. Her mother was a seamstress for Norman Hartnell and her aunt worked for a milliner, so they knew what they were doing. She looks slender, elegant, beautiful. He looks nervous in the photos. Skinnier than we’ve ever seen him, with his hair heading towards a quiff. He says it was called a brush-cut, slicked with hair oil.

I think they were married in the morning and drove to Blakeney after the wedding breakfast. It must have been a long, long drive in those days on those roads: it take ages even now, from London. The place though, looks idyllic, still. I went there last weekend. I’ve never been before, but the road passed so close I wanted to swing by, see what it was like. The White Horse sits half way up the High Street. Flint-and-brick cottages lead down to a quay with small sailing boats moored amongst the rushes.

I suppose they freshened up, had supper, chatted. She was very nervous, I know that because she told me. Him, I’m not sure whether he had specific worries at this point or just general ones. They went back, got ready for bed, each taking their turn in the bathroom. She had new nightdresses for the honeymoon. Two was the prevailing advice, for obvious reasons. They did the deed. She never told me how that went, and I didn’t want to know. It turned out not to be the main event of the evening.

His foreskin was very tight, and had dug in like piano wire. The end of his penis had bulbed out above, swollen beyond all reasonable extent, deep purple-red, angry and painful. They had no idea what to do.

They waited. They panicked. He was certainly beyond arousal now, but it wasn’t going down. He looked at it and started to feel faint, sick. What young man wouldn’t? They were in a horror of embarrassment. He lay on the bed, terrified, appalled. She got dressed and went downstairs, roused the landlady, asked her to call a doctor, said her husband was ill. The landlady, knowing they were on honeymoon, was terribly concerned and asked lots of questions which the bride was unable to answer in any sensible way.

It was late Saturday night in Norfolk. The doctor, when finally roused from his bed, would not come out until she had explained exactly the nature of the “illness”. Maybe they had lots of panic calls from newly-weds, maybe they needed to check. So she whispered, trying her best to explain, having no vocabulary to describe the scene, worrying that the landlady was listening all agog further along the corridor. The doctor would not come up but prescribed a cold bath with two pounds of table salt. She asked the landlady, who had to unlock the pantry and whose eyebrows were by now so far risen up her forehead they had disappeared into her hairline.

I suppose after that, the cold water and the shock ebbed everything away naturally. They had booked for a week so they had to face the landlady twice a day until the next Saturday. I don’t know how the rest of the honeymoon went, or what happened after that, how things were. They sorted themselves out enough to have a family, after a few years.

“Don’t rush into sex”, she advised. “It’s a disappointment for everyone concerned”.