“I was born and brought up in a remote town in Zimbabwe, which was then called Rhodesia. My father was a minister in the Anglican church – the Church of England – and he was there not so much as a missionary as to maintain the work the missionaries had done and encourage the natives to continue in the church.”

This was Dorothy speaking. She was my next door neighbor, and a bit of a sad case. Her husband had died the year before after a long illness and you could tell she was lonely. I had invited her in for a drink, because I hadn’t been there long and the only real contact we had had was when she complained about my music one night. We shared a garden and I had left the patio door open, so the sound went round the back as well as through the wall.

“It was a long way to the city,” Dorothy continued. “There was just me and my brother and mother and father. Apart from us there was just the staff. We had a cook, Agnes, and a general assistant, Essie, who did the cleaning and suchlike. Agnes was a big woman – not tall but fat. She was eating all day long. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard. And she cooked such heavy stuff. Stews with dumplings, pies and all that. Mother gave her a cookery book and left her to it. Essie was taller and quite athletic, but also slightly masculine, I thought. They were the only people I really knew, or at least saw regularly, so my little world involved them. They were both black, very dark skinned, but I thought nothing of it.

“You could call it a sheltered upbringing, although the country was a bit wild. I didn’t think I was lonely because it was all I’d known. But you know, when all you have is four or five people, no TV or any of that, your thoughts revolve around these people.”

I could imagine the simmering stew of adolescent emotions se was referring to. She was wearing a long floral cotton dress with a wide skirt, and she was playing with the hem as she spoke. She was quite slim, Dorothy, with greying dark hair and a sad, weary face. She must have been pretty once, but life had ground her down.

“To cut a long story short,” she said, “At 18 I met a visiting priest, Kenneth, and we fell in love. Well, I fell in love and he had a vacancy for a wife-stroke-housekeeper. He was in his late 30s then, but that was okay for me. I wasn’t looking for excitement, I just wanted to be a woman. And women got married, so I did. We came back here to England and moved around a bit, never very far, and then he got sick and we just got stuck here in Worthing. He was bedridden for five years and I cared for him. The district nurses came every day but most of the hard work was for me to do.”

Dorothy was visibly saddened talking about her husband, so I switched it back to Zimbabwe.

“What did you do for fun out there?” I asked.

“Not a lot,” she said. “ We read and I tried writing a novel but I had nothing to write about because I had no experience of life. Just about the only event of note was when… I’m not sure I should be telling you this…”

I smiled my encouragement, and she continued.

“One day I went into Agnes’s room out the back and found her sitting in her armchair, sort of laying back, with her knees in the air. There was a shape under her skirt and I realized it was Essie. Agnes looked at me sort of shocked, and coughed, but Essie just carried on, so I sort of waved and left. I was quite shocked, although I didn’t really know what they were doing. I tried describing it to Mother, but she just blushed and said Essie must have been darning Agnes’s knickers or something. Must have been pretty dark in there, I thought.

“To be honest, I didn’t really find out at all until last week, when one of the church boys fixed me up with internet and I started, what do you call it, surfing.”

“Wow,” I said. “Your husband didn’t…”

“Cripes no,’ she said, straightening herself. “Once a year for the first 10 years and then never again. And it was only the bare minimum. He was a good man, but had no idea and no inclination. Anyway, I’ve taken up far too much of your time and drunk all your Martini, so I’ll leave you to it.”

And with that, Dorothy whisked herself out of the situation and retired to the safety of her home.

So, she had witnessed an occurrence that, my subsequent research told me, was not unusual in such a country at such a time. With the men scarce and likely to be at it with someone other than their wife even when they were at home, the women would eat each other out, just to fill that sexual void. It sounded quite civilised in an odd way.

I didn’t see Dorothy the rest of the week, but on Sunday afternoon the sun was out and I was lying on a sunlounger on the lawn when she appeared, carrying a jug of something pink and two plastic glasses.

“It’s a cocktail. I found the recipe online,” she said proudly. “Watermelon , freshly crushed, with Bacardi and that coconut one, what’s it called?”

“Malibu?”

“That’s it, Malibu.” She pulled over the other lounger and sat on it sideways, looking at me. I sipped my drink.

“Nice,” I said. “Quite refreshing.”

“Oh good,’ Dorothy said. I could see she was waiting for some sort of invitation.

“Make yourself comfortable,” I said, waving a hand at the lounger. She went off and found the little white plastic table that went with the set, and when our drinks were safely on that, she lay back and kicked her sandals off. Again she was wearing the long, wide-skirted floral dress, and she pulled it up to her knees, a motion I thought she regarded as rather bold.

“So tell me about the other places you’ve lived in England,” I said, just to get the conversation going. She spoke at length about churches and congregations and wardens and their wives

“You must think I’m terribly boring,” she said at last. “Never really seen or done much.”

“Well,” I said, the cocktail loosening my tongue and perhaps letting off the safety catch. “I’ve never seen a woman with another woman up her skirt.”

Dorothy let the straw slip from her lips in panic.

“Oh, that struck a chord with you, did it?” she said.

“Apparently it was a common thing they did, “ I spluttered. “Had to get their kicks somehow.”

“So what do you think they were actually doing?” Dorothy asked. I couldn’t tell if she was winding me up, flirting or really didn’t know.

“ Sounds to me,” I said in my role as experienced, broad-minded younger man, “like Essie - is it Essie? Yes, well she was performing cunnilingus on Agnes.” Now I was the one blushing.

“Licking her out,” Dorothy said evenly, gazing into the distance.

I couldn’t allow this moment to pass, however protective I felt towards this naive, motherly figure.

“Yes,” I said. “Very popular these days.”

“Women doing it to women?” she asked. “Not just men?”

“For a man it’s more or less expected,” I said, trying to sound scholarly. “And I suppose with two women, they have less equipment to play with, so…”

“Yes, perhaps we should change the subject, Ross,” she said, suddenly feeling in charge.

Dorothy and I stayed out there on the loungers until the sun went behind the hedge. Then we adjourned to my conservatory and sat together on a wicker settee. She made another jug of the cocktail.

“We should give it a name,” she said, smiling as she sat down. “Essie’s Delight.”

“Agnes juice,” I offered, and we laughed together, both of us embarrassed. I could feel Dorothy building up to something and eventually she came out with it.

“So as you can tell,” she began nervously, “I’m not exactly a woman of the world.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.

“Nothing right with it,” Dorothy countered. “Why should everyone else have all the fun?” She was sitting forward, her knees far apart but that big protective skirt keeping her safe.

“Do something about it, then,” I suggested.

“Such as?”

“Isn’t there a man you find attractive who you think feels the same about you?”

“Nobody I would trust,” she said. “Only… no…”

“Who?”

“You, Ross,” she said finally. “But I’m not even sure you find me attractive. Do you?” She put a hand on my knee.

“I think you’re lovely,” I said, patting her hand.

“Not what I meant,” she replied. “And you know it.”

The truth is, although she might not have been the sort of woman many guys daydream about, she was neat and tidy, in reasonable shape, and the fact was that the atmosphere had suddenly become very erotic, very intense. We both fell silent.

“Anyway,” she said at length, “When Kenneth died I vowed to myself I would never have sex with anyone else.”

“Does kissing count?” I asked gently.

“Kissing might be nice,” she said, staring at the floor. I put an arm around her and pulled her to me, lifted her face and kissed her gently on the lips. She allowed my tongue to play in her mouth for a second, then withdrew. “Mmmm,” she said. “I like that.”

I grabbed her again and kissed her passionately and she melted into my arms and kissed me back, mimicking the motion of my tongue.

I put my hand up Dorothy’s skirt and caressed her thigh.

“That’s sex,” she said, sitting up. “Stroking my thigh is sexually provocative.”

“What if I kissed it in a friendly way?” I asked, clutching at straws. Dorothy said nothing, so I lifted her skirt and gently kissed her knee. She sort of purred, so I kissed her further up towards her goldmine and she let me progress until my nose touched her pants. Then she froze.

“That would be licking,” she said. “That would be Essie and Agnes.”

My mind was racing, looking for possible loopholes, and I thought I had found one, but it came with its own problems. I tried it anyway.

“What if I licked you around the back?” I ventured. She said nothing but her face registered a complaint on the grounds of decency.

“What do you mean? Around the back where?”

“Your bottom,” I said, encouraged by the fact that she hadn’t slapped me or stormed out. “That’s not a sexual organ. Nothing reproductive about it.” I summoned the courage to look her in the eye to push for a response.

“Where is your bathroom?” she replied.

When she returned after a few minutes she said nervously, “How?” I presumed she would feel self-conscious here on the settee with windows all around, even though it was a private garden. I took her hand and led her upstairs.

In the bedroom I knelt in front of her, put my hands up her skirt and pulled her pants down.

“You don’t touch any sex parts,” she said, semi-seriously. “How?”

I manoeuvred her onto the bed in a kneeling position and drew her skirt up onto her back. I could only imagine how she felt in this bizarre situation, utterly exposed and facing the prospect of extreme physical intimacy for, according to her, the first time.

I kissed Dorothy on her buttocks and smelled the soap from my bathroom. So far so good. Now for the moment of truth. I ran my tongue slowly but steadily into her crack and licked her secret hideaway. She groaned.

“And that is not a sexual act?” she said, suppressing a laugh.

“Not at all,” I said, and proceeded to lick her arse for all I was worth. She succumbed to the pleasure, moving around to get my tongue exactly where she wanted it. After a while she said, “Okay Ross.”

She lay on her back and said “Okay. Things change. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and I think it’s time to… get up to date. This is not Rhodesia in the 1960s. This is England in the 21 st century. Let’s do what people do.”

With that, she climbed off the bed, wrenched the dress over her head and threw it onto the floor. She skillfully reached behind and removed her bra. She had full, perfect breasts on which the nipples were erect. Her skin was pale and a little slack in places. Of course she had pubic hair, thick and dark.

She lay on her back and put her arms up, inviting me in. I lay on top of her and she parted her legs to let me slide between them. I moved down and sucked her nipples and she writhed with pleasure. As I moved further down, she spoke.

“So we’re getting into Essie and Agnes territory,” she said. “Will it be fun, Ross?”

“You tell me,” I said, as my tongue ran over her pussy lips, parted them and plunged as far as it could into her vagina.

“Gosh, yes,” she cried. “Crumbs!”

I licked Dorothy for several minutes – an experience I had never thought would happen and I’m sure she hadn’t either. When finally I came up for air, I kissed her and she said, “Mmm, that’s me,” licking my lips.

When I plunged my cock into her she gasped and held me tight, then she lay there and savoured the feeling and the very idea of being fucked.

She came like a wailing banshee, scratching my back as I hadn’t experienced since teenage days.

I pulled out and came on her stomach, then lay on top of her.

“Okay, Dorothy?” I asked softly. A tear trickled from her eye but she smiled, brushed it away and said, “Thank you.”