That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters Read Free Book Online

ardour. It was the sound of whispering coming from the bunk opposite ours, where one of my friends was sleeping with a boy who was new to the group. The whispering then became more urgent.
    ‘No! No! No!’ And then, ‘No, please, you’re hurting me.’ And with every ‘No’ I remember that Bob squeezed me to him as if I were the one calling out. For what I think was several minutes, while the rest of us held our collective breath, this poor girl’s pleas hissed out into the silence, punctuated by pitiful sobs, which eventually died into whimpers and then finally stopped. What was chilling about it was that there was no utterance whatsoever from the young man, just the lonely, frightened sounds of the girl. No one spoke or moved. I know that, were my adult self to be miraculously transported back there, I would have spoken out in the darkness to that girl and put a stop to what was going on. But back then, we weren’t sure and, indeed, one of the boys the next day, when his girlfriend had expressed her concern, was reported to have said, ‘Oh, she was all right. She must have wanted him to or she wouldn’t have got into bed with him.’
    Bob and I lasted only the length of the summer holidays but in my memory, like all summer holidays from childhood, the time was idyllically stretched. I have no photographs of Bob, but in my blurry memory he is tall, dark and handsome, with a bit of a Roy Marsden look about him, easily outclassing the normal run of suitor. So I thought myself lucky. There had been two or three before him, but they felt more like practice until the real thing came along. My dates with them involved mainly writhing about, while trying to keep straying hands out of my bra in case they should happen upon the handkerchiefs stuffed therein, as we sat in the back row of the Princess Hall Cinema on Smethwick High Street, on seats scarred with cigarette burns, black and shiny where thousands of bottoms had worn away the once plush-red upholstery. Some of them had large holes gouged out of the front so that when you sat down a great gust of air would be expelled, sending your dress flying up.
    It always seemed as if very few of the audience had actually gone to see the film. People would be talking at normal volume, running up and down the aisles, fighting, or throwing things. I was once hit on the head by a flying shoe and another time, bizarrely, I saw half a grapefruit fly through the air and land ever so briefly on a chap’s head like a chic little hat. On one occasion someone actually set fire to his seat and we were all evacuated, but generally when the anarchy reached a certain pitch there would be a complaint, prompting the manager to storm down the aisle to the front and scream at the top of his voice, ‘All right! That’s it! All the one and nines out!’ And those in the cheap seats would be shown the door.
    But my dates with Bob were on another plane. He had just left school, grammar school to boot; having done A levels, he was going to teacher training college; my brothers didn’t sneer and, most importantly, my mother approved. So when he came home for the weekend after being away at college for about a month and told me in his front room - the room in which we had rolled about, copping a frenzied feel in painful and awkward positions on the tiny sofa; the room that I had left on so many occasions with my lips and chin raw from kissing, relishing the soreness of the hot, angry beard rash as I lay in bed at night, dizzy with romance and lust - that he thought it was best that we perhaps finished, it was as if he was suddenly speaking Urdu and, indeed, everything in that familiar room instantly became unfamiliar. He too became unfamiliar; gone was the warm, crinkly-eyed, only-between-us look and here was the awkward staring-down-at-shoes-and-carpet look and body language that said, ‘Don’t make yourself comfortable, you won’t be staying long.’ He walked me to the bus stop. I don’t know