104 (2) End of Innocence.    Continued.

Re-arousal of Jos’s similar interest and back to not so childish games. Jos even tells me about his boyhood games in his mother’s wardrobe.

It was all relatively easy. Unaided by Jos for once, I had suddenly managed to acquire two rubber-lined and hooded mackintoshes and for a time, that seemed enough in itself. Without Jos to urge me on, I didn’t seem to have the need to actually wear them. Jos, in any case, was away in London, at college studying to be a builder and had claimed to have lost interest in such things.

After a while, I was presented with an opportunity to try to re-arouse Jos’s interest in such things. It had been arranged that I should spend a week-end in London, staying with friends of our parents who had a flat there and, as well as visiting Museums, Jos should entertain me one evening. I could imagine his lack of enthusiasm for that particular task so I decided it would be me who did the entertaining.

Jos was playing rugby for his college somewhere down near Kingston and I was to meet him there, have tea and sandwiches afterwards and then he would take me to the theatre with tickets, which our parents had already bought.

My plan was to wear my grey rubber-lined hooded mackintosh which, as it was the school type that I had newly acquired, Jos not only had not seen but also didn't even know that I had. Half the fun was to smuggle it down to London and wear it as soon as I thought I was clear of parental observation. So, after I had changed onto the London train at Downham, I put it on in the toilets and wore it the rest of the journey, firstly to my parent's friends house and, next day, down to the match, at, I remember, Hinchley Wood.

It turned out to be a lovely sunny autumn afternoon and once there, I was relieved in the first place to find there were quite a few girls watching, most wearing duffel or sheepskin coats and secondly that I was not the only girl wearing an obviously rubber-lined mackintosh, despite the sunny weather.  It wasn’t though the sort of weather where I could wear my hood up, but I did think to myself that all I needed in order to become part of the scene, was a long coloured college scarf. Most of the girls were wearing red, white and blue woollen scarves which I later discovered were the London University colours.

Jos’s reaction was not at all that I had hoped for on that week-end, he being taken unawares as he later said, but at a similar week-end some months later, arranged at Jos’s initiative since he needed an official guest at a college function,  I was allocated a college guest room and our old understanding was more than re-established. This time it was a hockey match that I attended in the afternoon and, as it was actually raining, I took him ‘unawares’ this time in my hooded cape, again the school type that I had also newly acquired. Hood up and my old school red and grey scarf wound round my neck, I put him right off his game, he said.

After the evening function, returning to my room, Jos readily agreed that the best way to soothe his knocks and bruises was to wrap them in cool, slightly damp rubberised mackintosh ………

Our old relationship was quickly re-established. Firstly, he ‘just happened to have’ his old polka-dot mackintosh hidden in the bottom of his trunk, safer there than leaving it in the roof of the summer-house at home –he said. I insisted he went and got it and, with a pretence of reluctance, he did so. Again, just to please me, he said, he stripped to his under-pants and put it on and allowed me to put the hood up in place. Just like the old days! However, once he had admired my new acquisitions, he soon stopped feigning reluctance and I soon had joined him similarly attired.

Later, I asked him about girl friends. Yes, he had plenty of them but no, they weren’t really interested in mackintoshes and such like. He said that I was the only ‘natural’! Other girls just played him along. What other girls, I asked, surprised to find I was jealous, but I got no clear answer to that.

We had quite a chat that evening and it was probably from then that I began to understand how he pretended to see my role in his life, that of a slightly obsessive sister, reliant upon the generous-natured brother to provide for her own curious indulgences in rainwear and discipline, as he had started calling it.             

              In my usual way, I thought I would jolly him along.

So it was also that evening, as we sat there, still in our mackintoshes, that Jos told me more about the development of this obsession. How, when he was young, about ten or eleven, he had noticed that our mother kept her rubberised mackintosh, then that same navy blue polka-dot that he was wearing, in the wardrobe in her bedroom hanging together with other outdoor clothes, coats and even her fur coats. On evenings when not only were our parents out but also his interfering busybody of a sister, he would climb inside the wardrobe and slip in between the coats and, in particular, into the mackintosh and close it, even button it, around himself. Not being that tall at that age, the top of his head was well below the hanger when he did this and the pressure of the adjacent coats caused the rubber lining to press tightly around him, enclosing him completely. He then found that he could get his face into the top of the outermost sleeve and breathe more easily and, following that, he found that he could then hold the end of the sleeve closed and not breathe at all.

He had already discovered that close proximity with mackintoshes gave him an erection which was accompanied by a particularly nice feeling down below. The latter was something that he had heard about at school. However, he then discovered that if he buried his face into the rubber lining, not only did he get an even nicer feeling, something that reminded him vaguely of our early mackintosh and hooding experiences, but that his erection grew bigger of its own accord. Bigger still and even nicer when he subjected himself to partial suffocation by holding the sleeve closed so that the rubber clasped tightly to his face as he tried unsuccessfully to breathe.

In passing, he said he didn’t really understand why I didn’t feel the same? My immediate response was that he was lucky that I was interested at all in these sort of things.

He would often change into his pyjamas for these jaunts, would discard the jacket before he climbed into the wardrobe and once encased in the mackintosh, would drop his trousers to get full exposure. It was terribly thrilling, he readily admitted. Within a short time after those occasions, and as I’ve described earlier, he had acquired that mackintosh for himself through the Boy Scouts Jumble Sale incident. Only a few months after that he had, also as I’ve already described, coaxed his eleven year old sister into following his footsteps by getting her willingly to put on her own rubber-lined mackintosh over merely her underwear and declare that she too thought it was nice.