The Other Side of Mary. Book 1: Homecoming

By Thomas Weaver

Sex is always on a soldier’s mind, but Tommy never realised how much sex was also on the minds of those he left behind. His over-sexed, slightly kinky fiancée was not likely to have spent those seven months going without it, and yet she would never consider going with another man. The other girl he desired almost as much as he desired his fiancée had been living with her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strict Publishing International
• Release date: Nov 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9780857790811

Book preview

THE OTHER SIDE OF MARY

by Thomas Weaver

Book One: Homecoming

Smashwords Edition

Copyright  2009 Thomas Weaver

Strict Publishing International

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PREFACE

This book is fiction, and yet much of what happens in it is not. There is nothing I have written that has not happened and does not happen hundreds of times, thousands of times, or perhaps millions of times every week and every day between consenting adults.

Some readers may find some of it shocking because I have not left anything out. Each sexual act is described in all its detail. It is more than merely a look at it through a chink in the curtain. My story is in the room, and even more than just in the room: it is in the heads and the bodies my characters, feeling the emotions, the passions and, above all, every physical sensation experienced by every one of them.

Equally, some readers may find it shocking because the story is set at a time when their parents or even their grandparents were young. Surely, they say, my parents and grandparents had more morality than we have around us today? Not at all. I know; I was there. I grew up during and after the Second World War, and I can tell you without any shadow of a doubt that sexual urges were as compelling a force for young people then as they are now. Possibly they were more compelling, for the stresses of war made each and every action more immediate and more important. Pleasure was rare in wartime, and relationships were often fleeting.

Today, what people may do in private is far more widely known that it once was. We tend to think of the variations of sexuality as a product of the modern age. Again, we would be wrong. Attraction, same-sex relationships and polyamorous relationships have always happened, and there have always been those, many perhaps, whose sexuality stretched far beyond the limitations of convention. Exploration and discovery of that sexuality is my theme, and although my characters may be fictional, their actions and their discovery of themselves and of each other most certainly are not.

*

So? You are still reading. You cannot say you have not been warned. This is no social study of human sexual behaviour, nor is it an attempt to shock, titillate and arouse. It may do that, but that is not its purpose. This is a story, a good story I hope, and one that has its basis in real sexuality. It is, therefore, explicit, and that is the last warning you are going to get. If you do not like reading explicit sexual literature, then stop now.

Ah, and still you are here. Good. In that case, we can peek around the curtains and find our way past them. We can see and feel for ourselves just what happens in so many rooms in so many houses where, even now, the neighbours would be startled to find out just what those oh-so-respectable people down the street are doing and how extreme their sexual activities really are. If you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it, then I know that we are all going to get along just fine.

Thomas Weaver.

Homecoming

Tommy sat looking out of the train window as it sped north, not that he noticed anything of the tracks, telegraph poles, or towns that sped past. He had been wounded twice in France in the days and weeks after D-Day, and he had spent the last eighteen days in hospital. He lost a lung, and was deemed unfit for any further military service in any capacity in any of the armed forces. His last week had been spent at London’s Woolwich army barracks where he finally got his discharge papers at eight-o-clock that morning. He was now a civilian.

Tommy had been in the armed forces for just seven months. Last January he was drafted into the Royal Artillery at Oswestry, and it was now July. He had hardly noticed the miserable summer so far, but suddenly, as if in celebration of his military discharge, the sun shone and it was hot even with the carriage window half open and the blind down to fend off the glare.

Tommy dozed as he thought of the rush he had had that morning; of waiting anxiously outside the dispatch office for his travel warrant and the delay as a second lieutenant went to great pains to explain that all the relevant discharge papers would be sent on later. It was a last minute dash to get to Euston station and then spend the grand sum of seven-shilling and six-pence to phone his mother to let her know he was at last on his way home.

Is this it now? his mother asked hopefully Are you out of the army and out of the war for good?

You are talking to plain Mr. Tommy Kearns now, he told her. Mum, can you get word to Mary for me?

I’ll phone Brian right away. He should be able to get a message to her.

Ok thanks mum. I’ll have to go or I’ll miss the train. I’ll see you about two-o-clock.

Tommy ran for the train and, much out of breath, managed to find a seat by the window not so much for the view, but because sitting there would avoid much of the disturbance of people moving about him.

Mary was Tommy’s fiancée and partner. For much of the time before his call up they had lived together more often than not. Tommy had known Mary since school, but it was only when she was coming up to her eighteenth birthday that he realized this was the woman for him. He had made his first move during an air raid that had happened while they were both at a party one night, shortly after her birthday.

The air raid siren had sounded, but by the time they left the house the first air raid shelter was full. Before she could protest, Tommy grabbed her hand and was running to another shelter, in the opposite direction to all of her party friends. Mary protested, but not too much. It was no more than a few minutes after entering this near-empty shelter that they were cuddled up and Mary was responding to Tommy’s kisses with no protests at all. In fact, Tommy was very surprised at the way Mary held him and returned his kisses with kisses that were long, soft and very loving.

Mary had been employed in a food factory all of her working life - six years - and had worked her way up until she was now part of management team. His mother always rang Brian to get a message to Mary, even now, but Tommy doubted that Brian had anything to do with Mary’s work these days. He had been Tommy’s and Mary’s boss once, but that was long ago.

Brian had offered Tommy his job back as a motor mechanic as soon as he heard Tommy was being discharged from the forces. Good mechanics were still hard to come by. Tommy would take the job, but not until he had had a week off at least, and he really hoped that Mary could take a week off with him. They had seven months of absence to make up for, and Tommy reckoned a week just might cover it. After that, it would be back to the normal seven times a week and twice on Sunday.

Tommy’s brain was lulled by the rhythm of the train and it being so warm that even the slight breeze blowing through did not make any difference. He drifted into a doze as he thought of Mary and how she looked the last time he saw her. Five-foot-six tall with blond hair, long and flowing down almost to her waist, her body was a beautiful thirty-two twenty-four thirty two. He worshipped the ground she walked upon, and believed she was body-perfect. He never tired of admiring her shape and adoring her bottom and her legs.

The train had not been going more than half an hour when it started to slow. ‘Hold ups already,’ Tommy thought, but the train stopped at a station. He was on the wrong side of the train to see what station it was, but even if it had been signposted, he doubted he would know it anyway. He felt somehow disturbed that they had stopped already before the train had really got going, but then his mouth fell open and his eyes widened. Charlie had come into the compartment and sat down opposite him, and all he could do was sit and stare at the young dark haired beautiful woman as her perfume, Charlie’s perfume, wafted over him as she arranged herself comfortably in her seat next to the window, looking out.

Charlie? Tommy said in shock and surprise.

She looked at him. Do I know you? she asked, and Tommy realized he was mistaken.

No I’m sorry, but you look so much like my fiancée’s friend, he said hastily. You could be her even down to your perfume.

Well, I don’t have a twin so it must be pure coincidence. My name is Jenny.

Oh, good, Tommy replied. I mean, good because you’ve told me your name, and I’m sorry I made a mistake.

Going home on leave are you? she asked. Bet you can’t wait.

Yes, permanent leave. I’ve been discharged, Tommy told her. I got caught up in a fight in France and ended up in hospital. I know it doesn’t show, but it’s permanent. It puts me out of the war for good.

Are you and your fiancée happy with what’s happened? I mean, will you and she be able to cope with your wounds?

Err, yes I reckon so, Tommy told her. It’s not too disabling. Fact is, I should be able to live a normal life.

I’ve just had word that my boyfriend has been hurt. He’s in Egypt and he is coming home for good. He is not my fiancé and I’m frightened of what will be wrong with him. They have not told me and I don’t think I want to see him anymore. It’s not like he even asked me to marry him or like I even thought about marrying him, but we have been writing to each other a lot and well, I don’t know… Her voice tailed off, her mind on what she had been saying as though she had forgotten Tommy was there. I think our parents expect us to marry, but I’ve never said I will nor has my boyfriend asked me.

Tommy leaned back in his seat. ‘Shit, I never thought of that.’ He wondered how Mary felt. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he swore silently, then after a moment calmed himself. ‘I’m not disfigured. Nothing shows. I’m sure Mary will accept me as I am, because I’ve not changed either physically or mentally. She won’t desert me.’

He looked at the girl again. ‘Pity about her bloke though. She is beautiful, and so much like Charlie I could easily fall in love with her right here and now.’

Tommy thought about Mary and how at first they struggled with their consciences. Mary had resisted his attempts to ‘try it on’ over so many months. When she did finally consent, it was only to a limited amount of trifling, which she allowed just on her bum and the back of her thighs outside of her clothes. For a long time it was only those parts of Mary that he massaged and fondled. He was not obsessed with any one part of her, but he thought these were parts requiring particular admiration. The whole of Mary was, of course, up there on a pedestal; from her beautiful, fair face with its pert little nose, to the tips of her toes, and since their engagement there was not one inch of her that Tommy had not seen and explored with hands, lips, tongue or member. Well, maybe not every inch.

He wondered if Mary had changed over the last seven months. He also wondered whether he had changed much. Apart from his wound that had healed completely and, so the doctors said, would not stop him leading a normal life even with a lung missing, he did not feel as if he had changed. His outlook on life was different, certainly. He was happy, particularly happy to be alive. Others were not. Many others, and many of them his friends, were not. That, inevitably, had made his outlook different, but he was the same person, wasn’t he?

He supposed it would be no good to plan the few hours after he did meet Mary. He did not know whether his mum and dad would also be at the station to meet him, or even if Mary’s friend Charlie would be there. Mary had mentioned Charlotte frequently in her letters, and Tommy gathered they had renewed their friendship and become really good friends again.

Tommy and Mary had got to know Charlie when she first started working at Dunning’s, and they became friends when on the convoys in the early years of the war. Dunning’s made and packed boxes of emergency foods for the troops on the front line. Those boxes were graded and known as A, B or C rations. The ‘C rations’ had just the bare essentials for survival, while ‘B rations’ included sweets. ‘A rations’ had all manner of extras, such as cigarettes and chocolate. Just where these graded boxes ended up was anyone’s guess. Tommy saw the inside of one or two of them now and again himself, and he knew some of the girls that put good luck notes in them.

At the beginning of the war when some things were in their early stages of organization someone had come up with the idea of relieving the hard-pressed military of the task of convoying supplies. In Dunning’s case, producing the food for the troops on the front line where, obviously, it was impractical for civilian convoys to travel, these food boxes had to be taken to all kinds of unrelated locations: Crewe Railway Station; an unnamed army barracks defined only by a map reference; a shipyard, and other places as far apart