First Kiss

The rain which only a moment ago seemed like a mere 
threat was now in full pelt. There had been nothing more 
than pinpricks on the face or hands a mere five minutes 
earlier. Then it graduated to huge drops which struck the 
grey, dry earth and splattered it with a polka-dot of brown. 
And now, its smell, let alone its insistent rhythm on the roof 
of the hide, was unmistakable. A gust of wind pushed 
against the latched door, not strong enough to burst it 
open, but certainly fierce enough for a puddle of dampness 
to seep through the gap at the door's bottom and along the 
woodwork on its upper edge. 

How could the weather change so quickly? One moment, 
the day had been calm, a few grey clouds scattered about 
amongst the fluffy white ones and the odd chink of blue 
through which the sun occasionally shone, pooling shadows 
beneath the spreading beeches and oaks. Now, the sodden 
earth was erupting in puddles that coalesced and widened 
over the slithery clay soil. And the driving rain hammered 
down on the ferns and shrubs of the woodland through 
which the path had led.

And it had led here, to this hide, where there were no 
birdwatchers, perhaps because they were all doing their bit 
for King and Country, to give jerry a bloody nose, and to 
show Hitler that the British had real spunk. Inside, as 
secure as in an Anderson air-raid shelter from the rain, the 
downpour was an incessant rhythm beating against the 
walls and roof, while what little light there was entered 
through the hooded narrow gap where men with binoculars 
would normally be gazing at the striding herons and wading 
coots still outside in the huge lake, wholly undeterred by 
the ferocity of the elements. 

Edward strained up on tip-toes to peek through this gap at 
the pounding rain that agitated the water surface into a 
mosaic of widening ripples, while rivulets slid off the leaves 
of the dark overhanging branches and cascaded onto the 
reeds below. The sky above was a thoroughly filthy coal-
black colour, like the ashes left in the grate when the fire 
had been left to snuff out. Or maybe like the smudged 
newsprint on Edward's fingers when it was finally his turn 
to read the Daily Mirror, impatiently turning the pages to 
the cartoons. He especially liked the Jane comic strip: the 
girl who sometimes managed to lose most of her clothes to 
the delight of British servicemen and to the dismay of his 
tut-tutting mother.

"Golly! It really is raining outside!" Edward exclaimed. "It's 
raining cats and dogs!"

"Not real cats and dogs?" Katherine wondered. "That's just 
a saying, isn't it?"

"Of course it is, silly!" Edward said. "It means it's raining 
lots and lots. Listen to it! There's tons of rain coming 
down."

"I don't like the sound," Katherine confessed, staring at her 
bare knees as she knelt cross-legged in the corner of the 
hide, only her face and knees at all illuminated by the 
narrow band of light coming through the gap where 
Edward was looking out so intently. "It's like when the 
planes come at night. When they drop bombs. It's 
frightening! Do you remember when they bombed 
Armstrong Avenue? That was horrid."

"Armstrong Avenue?" Edward wondered, turning his head 
round to regard Katherine, his ears sticking out prominently 
from the sides of his short cropped head, the few still 
remaining freckles pale and pink against his maturing 
features. His voice was on the cusp of breaking: sometimes 
like a radio broadcast cracking into so many inaudible 
fragments, sometimes cohering into a childish chime and 
sometimes hinting at the man's voice to come. "That's near 
where you live, isn't it? We've not had many bombs fall 
round our way. Jerry must like your part of town."

"It was horrid! Horrid!" Katherine repeated. "Does it look 
like it might stop raining? I didn't think it'd get as bad as 
this. Mummy said it might rain a bit. She tapped her 
barometer thing in the hallway. She said: don't stay out too 
long, it might rain. Didn't she?"

"I don't know. I only met you in the park, remember."

Katherine nodded. The park seemed such a long way away 
now: its swings, slides, bowling green and football field just 
memories after Edward and she had slipped through the 
gap in the wooden fence and strolled along the path to the 
lake where the birdwatchers would often congregate. 
Katherine would like to see a birdwatcher now, in his tweed 
jacket and brogues, flat cap on his head and binoculars 
secured around his neck and resting on his chest. Perhaps 
he could help get them away from all the rain.

"It's not stopping, is it?" Katherine asked.

Edward shook his head. "Not yet it isn't. But it can't last 
forever. We'll wait for it to stop, or at least not rain so 
much, and then we can run back home."

Katherine sniffed. "I hate the rain! It's made my shiny shoes 
so muddy! Look! And I've got some horrid black splodges 
on my nice white socks. Mummy'll be ever so mad when 
she finds out!"

Edward laughed. Girls! They were hopeless! No wonder it 
was men that went off to fight the war and the women 
stayed behind: working in the factories and driving the 
buses and teaching in the schools. War was man's stuff. It 
wouldn't do if you were a girl and worried about getting 
muddy shoes while jerry was goose-stepping all over 
France and Russia. He leaned up against the walls of the 
hide to look at the rain outside. His bare knees rubbed 
against the rough planks of the wall, his toes straining to 
support his whole weight. He was taller than he used to be, 
the ruler marks on the yellowing kitchen walls didn't fib, but 
he was still not as tall as he'd like to be. 

He settled back down on the flat of his shoes, one sock still 
pulled up to just below his knee, the other flopping above 
his scuffed black shoes. He turned round and regarded 
Katherine, in her blue and yellow dress, with the glass bead 
necklace around her neck and over the slightly raised 
bumps on her chest. Like him, Katherine was also growing 
towards that mysterious destination of puberty, but in such 
an obviously different direction. Edward was at the age 
now where he was beginning to realise that the girls of his 
own age, equally awkward in their early adolescence as he, 
were developing towards being the girls of his masturbatory 
imaginings, the ones whose images he and the other boys 
had perused guiltily by the bicycle sheds, their full 
voluptuous bosom teasingly hiding a mystery that 
demanded to be revealed, and, beneath whose tight 
trousers, which only models or Hollywood actresses ever 
really wore, there was a mysterious area that excited the 
boys' imaginations. Edward had seen nude sculptures of 
course, but Billy said that real women had something else 
under their skirts which they never showed in sculptures. 
Billy's sister had told him about it, but except for it being 
hairy he couldn't remember too much of what she'd 
described of it.

Edward sat down next to Katherine, an uncomfortable 
swelling under his shorts which he'd long ago found out did 
not mean that he needed to go to the toilet. Although when 
he was younger he recalled rushing outdoors into the privy, 
only to be puzzled by the perplexing behaviour of his willy. 
And if George hadn't told him what his Daddy had told him, 
who knows when he might have learnt just what this 
strange new phenomenon meant? 

"Gosh! That looks funny, Eddie!" Katherine commented, 
pointing at his tented shorts. "What's that?"

Edward wasn't sure whether to boast or blush. Being on the 
threshold of so many things, he chose to boast. "It's my 
cock," he said, uttering a word that still sounded awkward 
to his ears.

"Your 'cock'?"

"My willy. My pee-pee. You know, Kathy!"

"But it's sticking up, like a sort of soldier."

"It does that!" boasted Edward. "It means I'm growing up 
to be a real man."

"Really!" Katherine exclaimed, her cheeks burning, but their 
gleam hidden in the shadows of the hide. "And what did 
you call it?"

"A 'cock'. It's called a 'cock'."

"That's silly!" Katherine laughed. "Why not call it a willy. 
Why name it after a bird?"

"That's what you call it when it grows up and starts getting 
stiff."

"Gets stiff?" 

Katherine's face had a very strange look about it, her eyes 
shining in a way that Edward was in no way able to 
interpret, although they shone out relatively brightly in the 
darkness. She looked down at Edward's strangely crumpled 
lap, the woollen fabric of his shorts pushed up enough for 
the legs to let through more than a comfortable breeze of 
rain-chilled air. She glanced back at her own lap, and held 
her gaze there for longer than Edward felt was right for 
something of so little apparent substance, before returning 
her gaze back to Edward's lap.

"Let's see," she said.

The hormones struggling for supremacy in Edward's body 
erupted into a blush which burnt his cheeks with almost flu-
like intensity, while his penis became, if anything, even 
stiffer, the glans pushing through the constraints of his 
foreskin, rubbing against the cotton fabric of his underpants 
and adding an extra degree of distress to his predicament.

"What did you say, Kathy?"

"Let's see!"

"What? Look at my cock?"

"Yes!" Katherine said firmly, and quite breathlessly.

Edward nodded. Well! Why not! He just hoped Katherine 
wouldn't tell his Mum. He undid his belt, pulled down his 
shorts to his ankles, pushing his arse off the ground to ease 
them down. And then, seeing Katherine's large brown eyes 
widen at the glimpse of erect penis through the crack at the 
front of his underpants where he'd normally put it through 
when he needed to wee, he repeated the operation with the 
last cotton frontier, until around his ankles were bunched 
not only his wayward socks but his shorts and underpants.

"Golly! It's big!" Katherine exclaimed.

Edward nodded, looking down at his perfectly average 
sized erection. It was a sight for which he was acquiring a 
greater affection. His penis stood out erect, perhaps five or 
six inches perpendicular to his waist, a thick garden of hair 
bunched densely at its base and one or two sprinkled along 
its length, a shovel-shaped purple glans at the tip, puckered 
and sensitive, even released from the constraints of the 
underpants, and its length, a twitching pole of manhood, on 
which the veins were so very clearly delineated. 

"Your balls are big as well!" remarked Katherine with awe. 

"Balls?" wondered Edward. He'd never thought much about 
them, but so they were. And then suddenly, ooh! That was 
an odd feeling. "Urrggh! Why'd you touch them?"

"I don't know!" admitted Katherine, surprised at the 
intensity of Edward's reaction from such a gentle prod.

"What do you think, Kathy?" asked Edward, his bosom 
swelling with pride.

"It's a funny thing," remarked Katherine, with some 
indecision. "I knew it got big, but not sort of like this!"

Edward sat down on the wooden planks of the hide, his 
legs as wide apart as they could be, now that he'd totally 
removed his shorts and underpants, and his penis standing 
out swollen with pride and manliness between his thighs. 

All the while, the rain, which had seemed so much the 
centre of the two adolescents' attention a few minutes ago, 
had gradually lessened. The thundering against the walls 
and roof of the hide had dropped down to the merest 
whisper of a beat, like a drummer in a big band teasing his 
cymbals with a brush. And the smutty grey skies had 
broken into fragments. And then several fragments parted 
to let through a window of blue and the brilliant rays of the 
late Spring sunshine.

"Ooh! Look!" Katherine exclaimed, as the sunlight 
illuminated Edward's penis, showing it up as brilliant white 
and startlingly purple, casting a black shadow on his still-
hairless thigh. "It's such a wonderful sight!"

And then, Katherine leaned forward, her plaits falling on 
the shoulders, her glass beads hanging down below her 
neck and themselves glinting in the sun, and her lips pursed 
in the way she might squeeze them when she kissed her 
mother goodnight. She brought her face closer and closer 
to Edward's penis, until the beads rested on his thigh, the 
ribbon of one plait trailing down the outer side, her eyes 
wide open and full of a wild gleam that frightened Edward, 
who had never before suspected that eyes could contain so 
much unrestrained desire, and then she pressed her lips 
against the purple head of Edward's penis.

It was brief. It was barely two or three seconds of contact. 
But a few seconds that caused Edward to tremble in an 
uncontrolled and unsuspected way, his eyes almost popping 
out of their sockets as he strained to watch while feeling 
equally unable to move, his penis jerking quite slowly and 
steadily more upright. Katherine's wide-open eyes and her 
creased cheeks appeared both to mock and to be in awe of 
him. Her lips were yet to be rouged by her mother's lipstick. 
And the teeth behind those lips were still somehow too 
large for the face that contained them. And those lips then 
telescoped away from Edward's fevered gaze, as did the 
brush of Katherine's plaits and the coldness of her glass 
beads, leaving him feeling somehow more naked and 
vulnerable than he'd ever felt before, his shorts and 
underpants by his side, splinters in his bare bum and his 
penis twitching between retreat and triumph.

And that was that.

Edward's penis was back inside his shorts and underpants, 
its prominence steadily becoming as much a memory as that 
of the heavy rain now totally dissipated by the breaking 
clouds and the fresh rays of the sun. The hide was no 
longer so dark and mysterious, and a new urgency gripped 
Edward and Katherine as they reflected that a birdwatcher 
might yet choose to come this way. And anyway, wasn't it 
going to be teatime soon? So, the hide was abandoned and 
the two youngsters hurried along the path back to the hole 
in the fence at the park where they'd met by chance only an 
hour or so earlier.

When Katherine got home, her mother had also returned 
from the munitions factory where she worked, her nails 
chipped and her hands coarse from the work she'd been 
doing. There was still a dark smudge across her cheeks. 
She was perched on the stool in the kitchen smoking a 
Woodbine and smiled as her daughter entered the room.

"You didn't get caught in the rain, sweetie?" she asked. "I 
was ever so worried you might."

"No. We sheltered in a hide. By the lake."

"'We'?" wondered Katherine's mother. "Who's 'we'?"

"Me and Eddie," said Katherine, feeling a little nervous.

"Eddie? A boy is it? Not a girl's name, like Edwina?" 
wondered Mrs. Kenyon, narrowing her eyes. 

Katherine nodded her head, feeling the chastisement of her 
mother's eyes. 

"What did I say about you and boys? Or you and girls for 
that matter? You were a good girl, weren't you?" She 
lowered her gaze towards Katherine's crotch, hidden 
beneath her flowery dress.

Katherine nodded her head again. "I'll never let anyone 
touch me there, Mummy!"

"It's for your own good, dear!" said Mrs. Kenyon, blowing 
out a ring of blue-grey smoke. "You don't want people to 
look there until you're much older. You don't know what 
they might think. I know it's normal for a girl to want to ? 
to want to get to know boys better, but it's just not normal, 
is it?"

"No," agreed Katherine. "Not with the war and everything."

"Indeed not," sighed Katherine's mother. "Nothing's 
normal. Your Daddy in North Africa and Hitler dropping 
the bombs and you growing up to be quite a different kind 
of person to what we thought you might be? It's not 
normal at all!"

Katherine felt awkward as she always did when her mother 
hinted at things which even in the modern world was 
difficult to discuss without embarrassment. "What's for tea, 
Mummy?"

"Tea, Kathy?" Mrs Kenyon said with a broad smile, ruffling 
up her daughter's hair with the hand not holding her 
untipped cigarette. "I got some rashers from under the 
counter at Mr. Deacon the Butcher's. He's a gent. Saved 
them for me. And there's some jam I got from Mrs. Banks. 
She makes her own, you know, from the strawberries 
growing in her garden. We'll have a real feast, you and I!"

Katherine smiled. Her mother was so kind to her. Although 
it was difficult for her working in the factory, and looking 
after her daughter, and all the while anxiously waiting for a 
parcel of mail from some undisclosed address in the British 
Empire where her father was defending Freedom and 
Democracy. The two of them busied themselves in the 
kitchen, before settling in the living room to listen to the 
BBC Home Service, seated around the dining table that still 
seemed somehow empty without Mr. Kenyon in his place at 
the table insisting that they say grace before tucking in to 
their victuals. 

 And then, not long after the last sip of tea from the delicate 
china cups, there came that high, piercing note that 
Katherine recognised so well.

"Oh no!" she said. "It's been ages since the last raid! I 
thought they'd stopped!"

"No such luck!" Katherine's mother sighed, hastily 
gathering together a book and her knitting needles. "At 
least we've eaten first! It'd be horrible to stay out all night 
hungry!"

While Katherine and her mother sheltered in the air-raid 
shelter, with no sounds at all to disturb them, no roar of 
aeroplanes or the ack-ack of anti-aircraft fire, and the 
occasional piercing howl of a fox or owl, the girl's mind 
wandered back to the similar time spent in the hide with 
Edward. When Katherine had compared the downpour of 
the rain to the downpour of the bombs that destroyed so 
much of Armstrong Avenue. That really had been like 
sheltering from rain. Only a much more deadly rain. One 
that tore houses apart from the inside. One that ripped sofas 
into shreds. One that left the shell of houses with the 
wallpaper facing the street, sometimes with pictures still 
hanging from the wall and sometimes with coal-scuttles still 
beside fireplaces. 

The memory of Edward's erect penis was prominent in her 
mind, making it impossible for her to focus on the text of 
her many times re-read Swallows and Amazons novel, 
whose words swam unfocused under the candle-light. 
Katherine glanced up at her mother who was knitting some 
gloves in the pale glow of the paraffin lamp. What would 
her mother say if she knew? But at least now she had 
something for comparison. And she now knew a little of the 
smell and even taste of a boy's willy. And he called it a 
'cock'. A strange word, so unlike the word 'penis' that her 
mother and the eminent London doctor employed to name 
it. Cock. Penis. Willy. Katherine wasn't sure which word 
she liked the most, but 'cock' being so short and abrupt 
somehow sounded like the naughtiest word. And the fact 
that it sounded so naughty made it sound altogether more 
exciting.

"Touch wood. Quiet night so far, Kathy sweetheart!" 
exclaimed her mother.

Katherine nodded. Most times the siren went off it was like 
this. Well, not even Mr. Pike, the Air Raid Warden with the 
tin helmet, knew what Hitler's dastardly plans were. She 
imagined Hitler with his generals in a big room giving 
orders to say which road and which hospital or school to 
bomb. Why did he choose Armstrong Avenue that night? 
That was so frightening. The bombs dropping only a few 
roads away, the vibrations shaking the shelter, while 
Katherine gripped her mother around the shoulders, her 
back being patted and her hair stroked, gaining comfort 
from the embrace of her mother whom she loved so much. 
And all the while those horrible thuds, thumps, crashes and 
even, she fancied, the sound of rotor-blades as a dive-
bombing aeroplane swooped low over their house. And 
what had poor little Susan McDonald done to deserve 
losing her house in the bombing? Why did Hitler tell the 
Luftwaffe to bomb her house? And all those other houses?

And then, rather sooner than it did on that other terrible 
night, the air-raid sirens called out the all-clear. And as it 
always did, when that piercing sound resonated through the 
Anderson shelter, there was a kind of lifting of a weight 
from inside Katherine's chest. Though on that previous 
night, there had also been a kind of dread and apprehension 
that maybe her own house had been hit by one of Hitler's 
horrible bombs. She could imagine Adolf Hitler himself in 
the plane laughing as he dropped one of those tear-shaped 
things on her collection of Arthur Ransome books. And 
maybe burnt that old teddy bear of hers into a cinder as 
well.

"Well, now we can sleep in the comfort of our beds tonight, 
sweetest!" said Katherine's mother gathering up her knitting 
and lifting up the paraffin lamp so that it reflected some 
very strange long shadows across her face.

And not have to smell pooh in the chamber pot, either, 
thought Katherine, but not voicing her thoughts. 

Mother and daughter emerged from the Anderson shelter, 
where it was built at the very end of a garden now 
dedicated to the cultivation of vegetables, whereas once it 
had sported a lawn and flowerbeds. Mrs. Kenyon led her 
daughter along the paving stones they'd laid out together 
early on in the war when ration cards were quite the new 
thing, and kissed her gently on the forehead.

"Now you can sleep under your comfortable quilt, sweetie. 
Isn't that nice?"

"Yes, Mummy!" said Katherine, reciprocating the kiss by 
hugging her mother round the shoulders and then dashing 
upstairs. 

She stopped at the landing to look down at her mother, 
who hesitated with an extinguished candle and her half-knit 
gloves. She smiled at her mother, who smiled sadly back, 
and then scurried into her bedroom.

And then, at last, the privacy that had been denied her for 
so long, while she sheltered with her mother. Katherine 
washed herself, scrubbing her teeth furiously and 
impatiently, before pushing open the door to her bedroom. 
She hoped her mother wouldn't come to kiss her goodnight, 
as she used to do when she was younger, and pulled her 
clothes off as quickly as she could, the memories of her 
brief encounter in the hide so vivid to her, that first kiss, 
which she fancied she could still taste on her lips, and then 
stood, naked, in front of the wall-length mirror that was 
framed into her tall wardrobe.

'Cock'. That was what Edward had called it. And it had 
been pretty big, Katherine thought. Huge! Of course, 
Katherine had only ever seen one for real in her whole life, 
and therefore at least knew that the penises on those 
classical statues, whose pictures she saw in those art books 
her father had left behind, were smaller than the real thing.

Well, not that much smaller, Katherine reflected, holding 
her penis between her thumb and forefinger, but when it got 
stiff, as it was getting now, as she remembered the time 
she'd kissed Edward's cock, it was much much bigger than 
the one sported by, say, Michaelangelo's David. But 
Edward's was bigger even than her own! Perhaps hers too 
would grow to those dimensions, but was it possible? Her 
body was taking on the contours of a woman's body. The 
mounds of her bosom were swelling to new dimensions and 
her nipples sometimes felt as sensitive as her glans.

Katherine knew she was a special girl. Her parents had 
made her aware of this from as early an age as she could 
remember, just as they assured her that her oddness 
wouldn't mean that they loved her any the less. And now, 
that strangeness becoming more pronounced as her body 
grew in two separate directions both independently and 
simultaneously, Katherine also knew that she was in many 
ways not as strange as she'd feared. Having seen, having 
even felt and tasted, Edward's own erect penis, she now 
knew that the worries and anxieties that had so frightened 
and worried her, and about which she knew, just knew, she 
couldn't divulge to her mother, now she equally well knew, 
and that discovery relieved her more than she could say, 
that other penises, and not just hers, also became stiff, and 
erect, and pushed against the constraints of one's 
underwear.

But one worry still remained, as Katherine lay naked on her 
front on her bed, stroking and fondling her erect penis, her 
head burrowing into the comfort of the feather-filled pillow, 
her buttocks thrusting slowly but urgently with a rhythm 
that Katherine had never been taught, but came from deep 
inside her. Did other penises also do what hers did when 
hers got so stiff? Was she alone in having a penis that 
behaved in such a strange way?

And as the semen exploded, warm and gooey and smelling 
so rich, over her fingers and onto the sheets, Katherine 
wondered also not just whether other penises ejaculated as 
hers did, but whether they left boys quite as exhausted as 
hers left her after it had released its liquid wealth. Would 
boys also be left, hot and sweaty, the drool on the pillow 
damp against the cheek? And, after that first kiss in the 
shelter of the hide, whatever her mother said, this was 
something that one day, Katherine was determined to find 
out for sure.