It is every woman’s romantic dream, at least in England, to live in a country cottage with roses round the door and an old fashioned country garden with its informal mixture of flowers, herbs, and vegetables densely packed into a small space. In a country where most people now live in towns or cities, many in drearily uniform suburban estates, I have often wondered if the English passion for gardening is partly an attempt to recreate that idyll. However, I am one of those few people fortunate enough to be really living what others can only dream about.
My cottage is one of a pair that were originally part of the farm that had been in our family for generations, and which were originally built for the farm workers. At the rear of the cottage was a large paddock of about two acres, which was only overlooked by the garden of the adjoining cottage, and beyond that was an area of old deciduous woodland, which, unlike many of the darkly forbidding Forestry Commission plantations that march across our northern landscape, was light and airy with many sun-dappled glades.
Like my father’s farm, the cottage lay in the western lee of the Pennine Hills. In spring and summer, the hillsides were green with the young grass and bracken, which turned to burnished gold in the light of the late autumn sun. The open fields dotted with the white specks of the sheep which were allowed to roam free until the first winter snow. The cottage was separated from the road by an ancient stone wall of local grey limestone covered in colourful patches of lichen and with ferns growing from between the stones in the shady places where the sun only shone at the height of summer.
The small front garden in summer glowed with the multicolours of the profusion of old fashioned plants like hollyhocks and lupins. A stone path led from the gate to a front door of dark oak which was indeed surrounded by an arch of white and pink rambling roses which filled the air with their sweet scent from late spring to early autumn. I am indeed blessed to be living in such an Eden.
The mass migration of agricultural labourers to the industrial cities in the nineteenth century, and the increasing mechanisation of farming resulted in a major decline in the rural population and many cottages fell into disrepair. With unusual foresight, my grandfather realised that the cottages on his estate were an important capital asset and in the years following the Second World War when new housing was desperately needed, he gradually sold them off, using the profits to purchase the most modern agricultural machinery. Most cottages were purchased by members of the growing professional middle class whose incomes were rising and who could afford to buy a car which would allow them to live in the country and work in the town.
My great aunt had married the son of the owner of a small cotton spinning mill in the Lancashire mill town of Oldham. Despite his comparative youth, my great uncle took over control of the company on his father’s death in 1928 at the age of fifty-nine. The decline in demand for British cotton goods during the First World War meant that hundreds of cotton mills began to close during the 1920s, a situation that was later made worse by the economic downturn of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
My great uncle’s father was a proud man and refused all offers from larger companies to purchase the mill. My great uncle could see the writing on the wall, however, and a year after his father’s death he accepted an offer to purchase the company from the Lancashire Cotton Corporation, which had been set up by the Bank of England to rescue the cotton industry, and he was retained as managing director. Sadly, he was one of the twenty-seven people killed during the V1 attack on Oldham on the morning of Christmas Eve 1944 when he was in his way to work on foot, owing to the restrictions on the sale of petrol to the general public.
My great aunt and uncle had no children and on his death, she was left with a large house for which she had no need, and a comfortable income from his investments in steel manufacture which had suffered a hit during the depression years but had recovered during the war. For a while she lived on in the house, all alone except for the domestic servants, but when her brother started selling the farm cottages after the war, she sold the house and after paying off the servants with a handsome settlement, used part of the proceeds to buy her favourite cottage on the farm where she had been born.
My great aunt was able to live comfortably off her investment income and during my childhood, my younger siblings and I often visited her and listened to her stories of the old times. She was an excellent cook and despite having enjoyed the services of a professional cook through her married life, she had never lost any of her skills. I remember with particular fondness her home grown apple pies with a pastry crust that was just perfect, served with hot custard and cream from the farm.
I grew to love the cottage as she did and when she died in 1981 at the grand old age of eighty-three, whilst I was in my final year at university, she left me the cottage in her will along with a substantial legacy. Following a year at teacher training college, I was fortunate to be offered a teaching post in the English department at a new high school in Haslingden, which was only about twenty-five minutes away by car on a good day.
Before I moved into the cottage I decided to use some of my legacy to modernise it, which meant complete electrical rewiring and new plumbing. I also had central heating installed — although I retained the lovely open fire in the main living room — and a brand new kitchen, as there was no way I could have cooked on the antiquated cooker which my great aunt had grown accustomed to. With the addition of double glazing – quite a new idea at the time – it was going to be a cosy nest for me, my cats, and a future husband when I acquired one.
There was a small outhouse at the back of the property which I had considerably extended to make a garage, and a stable for my horse – definitely the most important of my improvements. Before I went to university, I had ridden out for at least a couple of hours every day of the year.
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My upbringing was unremarkable and ours was a happy home filled with laughter, except for one significant exception. At some time in their thirties when I was still an infant, my parents had become converted to naturism. Unless they were expecting visitors, my parents both went around the house wearing nothing other than a pair of wooden clogs or Wellington boots, and my father would often go and do the milking totally naked – I don’t suppose the cows were at all perturbed.
Once we were out of nappies, all of us children ran around in the nude without any sense of shame, and as there were both boys and girls we developed a healthy knowledge of the difference between the sexes. When we reached sixteen, my mother wisely sat us down and explained the facts of life in a sensible matter of fact way, including the pleasure to be had from loving sex with a committed partner. Teenage curiosity was not stifled in any way and we all took a keen interest in the manner in which other’s bodies were changing physically as we grew into maturity. There was none of the smutty talk and sniggering that was common among our less enlightened school friends.
By the time I went to university, therefore, I had seen my father and brothers’ penises in their flaccid and erect state and appreciated the difference between a mature man and a youth. Equally, the boys were comfortable with the difference between the ripe fullness of our mother’s bosom and our pert breasts. Touching was also allowed, and indeed we would often see our mother stroke father’s penis in a tenderly affectionate way, or our father come up behind her and cuddle her and caress her breasts – all this was healthy and accepted as normal. I can remember clearly at the age of nineteen showing my eighteen-year-old brother the way my inner labia parted to reveal the pinkness of my cleft, pulling back my clitoral hood to reveal the shiny bud within, and allowing him to touch my most intimate parts.
Our holidays were always taken at a naturist resort where the healthy delights of naked living were taken for granted. Those who can remember the naturist magazines of the time will possibly be surprised to learn that the absence of erect male penises and the demure depiction of female pudenda in the photographs were a gesture in the direction of respectability. This was a time when the publication of explicit photographs of naked men was forbidden and female genitalia were airbrushed out in top-shelf girly magazines – so different from today when explicit images of people having sex are commonplace on the Internet.
In retrospect, the impression of monogamous sexual relationships among naturists given by the magazines published by the movement was a fiction, and the reality was that naturists enjoyed a sexual freedom that was unusual in those more repressed days. The appreciation and respect for the human body that naturists enjoyed was generally accompanied by an equal delight in sexuality that might have shocked the general public, and drawn censure from the moral guardians of the nation had it become common knowledge.
Masturbation was regarded as healthy, but only in private, either alone or with two or three close friends. Of course, guilt-free extramarital relationships were also pursued within the privacy of the lodges, but explicit public sexual activity was forbidden by general agreement. Naturists did have a moral code but it was based on mutual respect and caring and equality between the sexes in a loving environment.
We usually took our holidays with another family who were close friends of our parents. Even in my late teens, I never even thought about the nature of the relationship between my parents and Uncle John and Aunty Rosie – not our real uncle and aunt, but that was how we addressed close friends of our parents in those days.
However, on the last summer holiday I took with my parents before going up to university, one of my girlfriends told me that she had noticed one evening that the curtains of my parents' lodge – we children slept in separate lodges, boys and girls together – and drawn by curiosity she had peeked through the window. What she told me was somewhat shocking at first, but as it didn’t seem to have affected my parents' loving relationship in any way.
I soon accepted that what they did in private was entirely their business. She said that she had seen my mother sitting on Uncle John’s lap vigorously riding his cock while my father and Aunty Rosie were watching in obvious pleasure and satisfaction.
I don’t wish to give the impression that there was no sexual activity amongst us teenagers – after all, we were at an age when our hormones were at their most active. But we had all been taught from our early years that sexual intercourse was a pleasure to be enjoyed with a loving and committed partner and that an orgasm was a wonderful gift to be treasured.
In those days we developed physically a couple of years later than teenagers today — although physical maturity doesn’t appear to be matched by an equivalent emotional maturity. However, from about the age of sixteen or seventeen, we began to experiment sexually in mixed groups of four or five, and I remember many secretive torchlit sessions of hugely enjoyable mutual masturbation in the woods.
It was then that I discovered that I had an exhibitionist streak, and the memory still lingers of the pleasure I got from spreading my labia and playing with my clitoris whilst watching one or two young men stroking their erect cocks until they ejaculated all over their tummies. The feeling of power, and the look on their faces as they approached their climaxes was extremely arousing and made my own orgasms exquisitely sweet. It is a pleasure that, thanks to my understanding husband, I still enjoy today.
We naively believed that our parents were unaware of our nighttime sessions, but in reality, they had confidence that they had imbued in us a deep moral sense – albeit different from the accepted norms – and trusted us not to exceed clearly defined boundaries of behaviour.
Surprisingly none of these group sessions included oral sex, but by the time I was eighteen I was enjoying the delights of giving and receiving oral pleasure with my special boyfriend in the privacy of my bedroom – merely a holiday romance as I didn’t have a long term serious relationship until I went to university. It might seem surprising, but I was technically still a virgin when I went to university, not out of prudishness, but because I hadn’t yet met a man with whom I wished to share the almost sacred pleasure of penetrative sexual intercourse.
