I started wanking Shugg Logan when we were both second-year boys at the Academy, as Grammar Schools were called in 1950s Scotland. They had made Shugg repeat a year, which left him, at fifteen, that much older than the rest of us, and in adolescence an extra twelve months makes a big difference physically, emotionally, and sexually.

He was a hard, developed lad, happier at games than with books. In the changing room and showers, you saw he already boasted dense chest and pubic hair, from which a huge cock swung enticingly. He never joined in the balls-grabbing horseplay that enlivened shower-time for the rest of us of us when the games master's back was turned, nor did his demeanour encourage trying to involve him. Once, catching me erect and staring, he gave me a look so fierce I took care afterwards to limit myself to secret glances. But at least he knew now that I wanted him.

Shugg - whose actual name was Alex but only teachers ever used it - lived with his widowed mother in a small house on Linnburn Drive. Though this was only just off my route from school, we seldom walked back together. My mother liked me home for an early-ish tea, and it would have spoiled Shugg's cool image to hurry. Nor did he need to, for Mrs Logan worked in central Glasgow, so her son had his own house key and an hour to pass before she returned. It was rumoured that he often spent that hour with a Bad Lassie from the nearby housing 'scheme'.

It was my new bicycle, my parents' present for my fourteenth birthday, that won me Shugg's cock, and enabled me to wank him daily and still be home by tea time. The very first day I took the bike to school, he strolled over, admiring it from every angle, and finally asked if he could try it out, a request I readily granted. After school we headed homeward, taking turns to walk and ride, arriving at Shugg's house almost as if by accident. I think we both knew what would follow.

'You can come in,' Shugg said. 'Leave the bike in the garden shed.' In the shed, he leaned against me so I could feel his hardness pressing. We climbed the stairs to his room – he wasted no time, but immediately dropped his trousers and shorts and lay back on the bed. 'Wank me!' he commanded, and I gladly complied.

That was the start of my first love-affair, which was how I thought of it to begin with. But as weeks went by, and the thrill of simply possessing Shugg ebbed, I began to see what a one-sided business it was. Shugg would lie on his bed, school flannels down, silent with eyes closed, while I wanked him as bidden. When he came - copiously and with much agreeable writhing and gasping - he went straight to the bathroom to clean himself up, without looking at or speaking to me, leaving me to relieve myself alone. I don't believe he touched me once.

The crisis came when, one day, he produced a well-thumbed 'girlie' magazine from under the mattress, and lounged back leafing through it, motioning me to perform my usual task on his cock.

That was when I began to dislike Shugg. His inattention had been hurtful enough, but for him to intrude outsiders - women especially - into our precious moments of intimacy was more than I could stomach.

After Shugg had withdrawn to the bathroom, I scanned the magazine, trying to figure what pleasure he derived from its contents. On stained and sticky pages, variously undressed young women with Ava Gardner hairstyles, simpered lewdly in suggestive poses, each captioned with a name and where she came from - Anne from Hull, Shirley from Devon, Jane from Southend-on-Sea.

Then I turned a page, and everything changed. The picture, taken from a forty-five degree angle, and titled 'Pat from Lancashire', showed a striking long-limbed girl sitting on a mound under a tree, skirt raised past her thighs, knees drawn up to her folded arms. Pat from Lancashire had forgotten her knickers but remembered her nylons, suspender-belt and sling-back shoes. Her glossy hair rippled luxuriantly down her back - even in the black-and-white photo I'd have sworn it was chestnut-coloured. Her face was raised, with lips barely parted, and gaze lost in the far distance; her expression rapt, absorbed, as if the photographer - pornographer I suppose - had stumbled unawares on a secret, ecstatic ceremony. Behind Pat from Lancashire the outline of a distant hill rose between the gable ends of nearer houses. It would not have surprised me to see squirrels playing without fear round the seated figure.

So absorbed had I become, I failed to noticed Shugg return. 'D'ye like that yin?' He leered, winking coarsely. 'She's no bad, but I'd like tae hae seen richt up her cunt!'

'I thought it was me you liked,' I said.

'Och, you're all right,' Shugg said, 'but I really like lassies best.'

That was my last ever visit to the house on Linnburn Drive. The weeks passed. Mrs Logan remarried, to a Galloway builder, and Shugg moved to Gatehouse of Fleet with her, out of the school and my life. As for me, I progressed from Academy to Oxford to a research job near Slough, and a blissful six-year relationship with a Jamaican-born footballer, and forgot Shugg. But the image of the girl with the wondering gaze; the sense of having been privileged witness to something precious and extraordinary, lingered strangely in my memory through the years that followed.

Then Joel and I split to let him marry - he was obsessed with fathering children - and I found another, more faithful lover that serves me to this day. I fell in love with the Settle-to-Carlisle railway, that engineering masterpiece, but economic white-elephant, that spans the Pennines from Craven to the Border City. Alone or accompanied, I traversed it on every conceivable kind of train; hiked and cycled the paths and lanes along its route. Once when the tracks were closed for repairs to the great Ribblehead viaduct I, trespassing, walked the entire mile-and-half length of Blea Moor tunnel, meeting as a bonus a group of soldiers coming the other way on some exercise, and sucked off two of them in the pool of light under a ventilation shaft.

So when, several years later, I learned that conservation volunteers were wanted to repair dry-stone walls near the line, my holiday problems were immediately solved.

They billeted me in an old farmhouse. I was in the men's dorm with a bunch of lads in mid-to-late teens, with names like Darryl or Duane. Noisy and yobbish, they seemed to have brought no changes of clothes, underwear included, for the whole week, and their notion of a good time was twenty pints of lager in some innocent country pub, then to lie on the road outside and dare locals to run them over which, sadly, none obliged to do. And their (invariably loud) conversation proclaimed the liveliest contempt for 'poofs.' Though usually ‘out' in most situations, I felt no urge to play pearl to these oafish swine, and chose as my walling companion a sturdy, sensible woman, the only other volunteer even approaching my age. We heaved and hauled the limestone slabs in all weathers, Gillian and I, often only the two of us working, whilst the youngsters - who of course hadn’t brought proper waterproofs - sat out the rain in a van. Yet the wall got built, and stands to this day, a fact I take care to check whenever I'm in the area.

On the last night, cramped in my sleeping bag and dying for a wank but not daring to attract the ribald notice of the yahoos (who, to my amazement, appeared also to have abstained for the entire week,) I heard Duane snigger something to Darryl about 'poofs' in a park toilet near the railway crossing in the Lancashire town where he lived.

I was there the next afternoon. I found it easily enough, in a run-down park parted from the tracks by railings, some of which were missing with quite wide gaps. You didn't need to be told it was a cottage - its position in the park's farthest corner guaranteed that. It was empty, but the familiar, evocative features were all there; the hiss and drip of cisterns, glory-holes in cubicle walls, ancient implausible graffiti - sixty-five and impotent feigning seventeen with nine stiff inches. Surveying this scene with pleasure, I resolved to loiter outside in the sun to await arrivals, and wandered round for somewhere to sit, while a goods train rumbled past.

And then I saw it. I stood rooted to the spot, all cottaging thoughts pushed aside. There was no possible mistake; the grassy mound, the tree - its trunk thicker, but surely the same - the hill glimpsed between the end gables of two terraced rows. There was no doubt. This was the place, the very spot where Pat from Lancashire had posed those years ago; where she had tossed her chestnut hair down her shapely back and, knickerless as in a dream, drawn her knees and skirt to her breast, spread her cunt to the crisp wind and, head chucked back, gazed in secret rapture at - at what? I crouched on the mound and peered in the direction Pat from Lancashire had contemplated, almost afraid of what I might see, afraid too that greenery in the intervening years had blocked the view. But all that met my gaze was the backs of a terrace, in one of whose gardens a young Asian woman in pink salwaar-kameez was pegging out sheets.

Lost in thought, I didn't immediately spot the thirty-ish workman cycle up. Our eyes met as he leaned his mount by the toilet entrance, motioning me to follow him inside. It was a textbook cottage encounter; the glance, the mutually declared erections, the touch, the kiss ... We went back to his place, a terraced house with lace curtains in leaded windows, so stereotypically Lancashire I had to laugh; Lancashire as Gracie Fields had portrayed it, down to the aspidistra in a polished brass pot. Rob was loving, he was ardent; he made me stay to tea afterwards - a proper knife-and fork job too, not just a cuppa, with black pudding and strong Lancashire cheese. He told me his passion was Rugby League, both to play and watch - that he had realised his sexuality just in time to avoid a potentially disastrous marriage. He put on his rugby kit, and fucked me in it. We watched gay porno videos, and some rugby ones, and drank Thwaites's ale. After the videos, Rob made to fuck me again, but I stopped him, for there was something I needed to do. When I told him what it was and why I had to do it, he laughed, said it was a great lark, and readily assented.

So, at nightfall, we slipped back to the park. It was locked, but I remembered the missing railings, and we crept along the railway from the crossing, and entered easily. I led him to the mound next to the tree. Through the gap between the terraces the moon lit the crest of the hill and splashed dappled light and shade through the leaves onto the grass and the gable ends of the houses.

We kissed, we groped, we clung to each other, Rob and I, beside the mound. Gently I moved him away, and stripped till wearing only my tee-shirt. Then, seated on the knowe, I raised my knees to my chest, hitched the tee-shirt over them and gazed, gazed as Pat from Lancashire had gazed at the dark row of terraces, or at whatever strange, marvellous thing she had perceived beyond them. The young Asian woman's sheets still hung, rippling whitely in the faint breeze. In the distance, a cow bellowed.

Rob, his rugby shorts bulging, stood clutching a tube of lubricant, contemplating my lower nakedness. When I gave the nod he took me the way I had requested; fiercely, savagely, the way Joel used to and I’d wished Shugg had, ramming and driving his cock with panting and groaning that I worried would rouse the neighbourhood, but the rustling leaves drowned the sound, and no disturbance followed. We got up after he had come, kissed and hugged again, dressed, and returned through the gap, stepping along the tracks under the signal lights, back to the aspidistra and a shower and Rob's bed and sleep. I left early next morning and, except once when passing through en route to the Lakes, I have not returned to Lancashire since, having at last completed the business begun in Shugg's bedroom all those years ago, when Pat from Lancashire and I first became acquainted.

I still hear from Rob occasionally, and phone him now and then. We've both moved, of course, several times in the many intervening years. I'm well settled here in Cromer these days, and last time we spoke he talked about taking a chip-shop in Blackpool. Gracie Fields to the end! We chuckle about our romp in the park in Clitheroe, Colne, Ramsbottom or wherever it was - I can't remember and it doesn't matter. So many alike towns, so many years ago now; the details have become vague, though memory of lust still burns brightly. So we laugh, or rather Rob laughs, and I laugh too, though of course, the event has profounder significance for me than for him.

Who was Pat from Lancashire? Was she a mill girl? A secretary? A whore off the street? What and where is she now? A respectable elderly woman – someone’s grandmother perhaps? A derelict? A corpse? Was her name really Pat? I neither know nor care. But this I do know, that in my deepest and most secret heart, no moment has been, nor ever could be more precious than that time with Rob on that mound in that darkened park when, in a marriage across time more real than any priest- or registrar-blessed union, Pat from Lancashire and I forever became one.

Copyright © James Scott 2003 and 2008

[Jim Scott] [A Boy A Book A Story] [Darkness] [Pat from Lancashire] [The Quaker Oats Man] [A Matter of Conscience] [Picnic] [Incident at a Railway Station] [Cauld Comfort Kail] [Moral Uplift] [The Soldier] [Madonna] [Hero of the Revolution] [The Messenger] [Tramlines] [Innocents] [Unlucky Dip]