RAPE OR PASSION? You decide.

At 17 and a few months I left school and moved to the family holiday home on the coast of Essex.
For the first time in my life I was self sufficient and relished it. I had 3 measly weeks of bliss before my younger brother of 15, Roy arrived, announcing that he was moving in with me!

It was 1969 and music, dancing, motor scooters and discotheques filled our heads. We both found work easily, he, on the pier running children's rides while I was swiftly taken on by an estate agent as a receptionist.

Friday and Saturday nights would find us at the local discotheque showing off our latest synchronised moves and we would finish those nights by walking home along the promenade from Clacton-on-Sea to Jaywick Sands, usually in the moonlight or pitch blackness singing our favourite pop songs.
The summer season was in full swing and we noticed the police patrol crawling by, checking the beach huts for rough sleepers or break-ins.
One cool and very windy night when the tide was coming in powerfully, dashing the beach with larger than average waves, we were suddenly called by a voice from the darkness below. A tousled head asked us for a light for his cigarette, so my brother reached into his jacket pocket to oblige.
I stepped forward to squint into the dim corner between the sea wall and the groyne.
There huddled tightly together were six young men.
"You can't sleep there!" I declared anxiously "The tide comes right up to the wall here and the police patrol along here too!"
Several of them stood up and spoke to me in a thick Glaswegian accent.
I really did not understand a single word they said!
Roy was lighting the cigarette inside his jacket to shelter from the relentless wind as I was still trying to decipher the words that had been spoken when one of them jumped up to our level grinned at me asking "Where can we go then?"
I said, quite instantly "Oh... well... you will just have to come with us!"
My brother nearly choked as he exhaled smoke and looked at me as if I had suddenly gone totally insane in the blink of an eye, but I was adamant in my naivete.
"Yes!" I said firmly "Come along!"
All of them laughed and bantering among themselves in their uninterpretable lingo, they joined us on the promenade as we continued on homewards.
In the pitch dark it was impossible to see them clearly but as soon as we entered our beautiful 3 bedroomed chalet bungalow and switched on the lights a gasp of shock escaped me "Oh for goodness sake!" I cried out as I saw unshaven faces, dirty denim outfits & uncombed hair.
With great patience they tried to speak to me in a way that I could understand which caused us all to dissolve in tears of laughter. It proved to be a hilarious discussion loaded with misheard words or complete lack of comprehension.
Roy busied himself finding ashtrays, pointing out the bathroom & providing cigarettes from his secret stash.
I asked if they wanted to have a bath and if were they hungry?
They gaped with shock at the sheer consideration of the offers I made.
One by one they bathed, shaved and passed me out all their clothes which I immediately popped into the washing machine. They had nothing but what they were wearing.
No bags. No coats.
Just t-shirts, jeans and denim jackets with underwear which revealed days of wear unwashed.
It transpired that they had been living in the back of an abandoned truck somewhere in the East End of London and had attracted the attention of the local heavy mob. They had run for their lives and one of them had suggested Clacton was a good destination because he had an aunt who lived there. Unfortunately this aunt was away on holiday when they arrived.
They had no alternative but to attempt to sleep rough on the beach.
While the bathing was going on I decided to cook them egg and chips so that as each one got themselves clean & wrapped in a towel I was able to sit them down at the dining table, in a sort of rota, to relieve their apparent starvation.
By the time all were clean and fed dawn was coming up.
They were falling asleep all over the lounge and bedrooms.
I realised that there was no way that they could stay with us for long because Roy and I were expecting our father to arrive for a visit fairly soon and he would be furious at what I had done.
As soon as the clock reached a respectable hour I ran to the phone box on the corner of the street and called my grandmother who lived in Clacton but also had a very cute holiday home which she let to holiday makers. It was just around the corner from us.
I explained the situation (thankfully my grandmother thought the sun shone out of my posterior) so she dispatched my uncle down to hand me the keys to her bungalow, on the strict understanding that it was my responsibility to ensure that nothing was damaged and that the rent was paid.
She asked for just £6 a week, which between six guys was an absolute bargain.
I paid my uncle the first £6 and we all went around the corner to settle the new tenants into their first real home since they had left Glasgow months before.
The bungalow was fully furnished, having all the kit they needed to start living there.
Bedding, crockery, cutlery, even some coal for the open fireplace. The new tenants were ecstatic.

Meanwhile Roy had gone to work on the pier, Sunday being the busiest day of his working week and he casually mentioned to his boss that he had six mates who were desperate for work.
Four places were available so Alan, Jai, Chas & Slight decided to take the offer up immediately.
Tony, the silent one, went into town. He came back victorious having acquired a job calling bingo numbers in a local amusement arcade. His brother Pete, walked to the local garage, showed his qualifications as a mechanic and was immediately offered a job.
The speed with which they went from abject poverty to standing on their own feet was astronomical but in the 1960s employment was never much of a problem in the south east of England.

I, meanwhile, went to work at the estate agent's office in town but spent most of my spare time with my boyfriend who was getting prepared to go to university. These were to be the last few weeks that we would see each other for some time.
I was not looking forward to the long months without him, we had become very close but not intimate. I was a bit nervous of sex at 17 and a few months.
I was, after all, newly out after 6 years in an all girls school.

Time ticked on by, as it has a bad habit of doing and eventually I found myself at home during my spare time, watching the Scots guys playing football on the green directly in front of our home.
My brother Roy had become their constant companion, even though he was much younger than they were. They were awed by his skills as a goalkeeper.
Their games were always raucous affairs involving much fake violence and cheating.
Roy was very happy in their company but was constantly repeating to me a little mantra that he had prepared "You are not to go anywhere with any of them alone!" he ordered and I would shake my head in disbelief that he would even think I was at all interested in any of them.
"I have GOT a boyfriend!" I would insist wondering what he took me for.
Surely he didn't think I was a slut?

The months flew by as our deep friendship with this little team became solidified.
Until the day that I caught them fighting among themselves out in the street.
I was returning from work, dressed up in high heels and a smart office suit when I turned the last corner only to see the worst kind of melee occurring outside my grandmother's bungalow.
I raced down the street swinging my handbag yelling "STOP IT!" I reached Jai and Tony, just as Tony was raising a hatchet to strike. I was horrified and held his arm, positioning myself between them like a barrier. Tony grinned but it was menacing. "He has stolen my watch!" He said through gritted teeth.
I turned to Jai who was offering the watch at full arm's length. I took it, passed it to Tony while Jai spluttered something on the lines of "I just wanted to wear it for one night!".
Jai had acquired himself a girlfriend, which was not at all surprising.
He was a gorgeous guy, with dark curly hair, sharp bright blue eyes and he was trying very hard to impress this lovely young girl, Brenda, that he had started to court.
Tony growled incoherently, stomped off to return the hatchet to it's place by the fire as I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I spent a fair amount of time in their home, cleaning, washing up, collecting washing and returning it.
I overheard the most shocking accounts of their exploits. I remember one occasion when I was so disgusted by the things they were saying about local girls that I stormed into the lounge from the kitchen, still clutching the potato peeler & pointed it at them indignantly "Why do you say such awful things? Don't speak like that about them!" My familiarity with their vernacular was by now almost complete and I was horrified by the crudeness of their descriptions of their nights, as they held what I later came to name their "post mortems".
They laughed at me saying "You should hear what those slags say about you, Fran!"
I was truly taken aback.
I didn't know any local girls at all so I couldn't imagine that they could possibly have anything to say about me. They soon corrected that illusion explaining that because I was often seen out and about with them I was considered to be morally loose and easy meat, as they indelicately put it.
I was stunned.
It did not seem to have occurred to the locals that I was just their friend and nothing more.

At the end of the summer season, with plenty of money in their pockets Tony and his brother Pete moved into a bedsit in Clacton while the others took up residence in a holiday chalet on a park with its own swimming pool. They were nearer to a few of the girls that they were regularly seeing.
The park had a shop and a bar which suited them just fine.

---

There came a night, not long after my eighteenth birthday when I was in the local discotheque having gone there alone for a change. Roy was welded to the television, I think it was a world cup event that he was determined not to miss.
I was asked to dance by a random young guy and as soon as we got on the dance floor he was groping me for all he was worth. I glanced desperately around the dimly lit room and spotted Hatchet Tony leaning against the wall drinking beer. I made an excuse to go to the toilet and on my way back to where my handbag lay hidden in the gloom under a seat I realised that the groper was lurking nearby.
I diverted to speak to Tony "Do me a favour, Tony?" I pleaded "Dance with me for a minute?" He looked as if I had stung him to the core and mumbled "I don't dance" in his usual growling manner.
"Dance with Rod" he said, gesturing to a ginger haired, weak looking lad who was standing alongside him. I explained that Rod, lovely though he was, would not resolve the problem of shifting my groper from the vicinity of my handbag.
Rod and I took to the dance floor and Tony glared at the groper.
'Oh shit' I thought hoping that Tony would not see this as a golden opportunity to start a fight.
I was well aware that he loved to fight. He was remarkably good at it too.
Suddenly, Tony stepped forward, whispered in Rod's ear and replaced him, grabbing me tight as the music changed to a slower pace.
Each time we turned I looked for the groper but he had vanished, Tony's reputation was fearsome, useful on this occasion. I went to thank him and return to my handbag but he suddenly tightened his grip and started to kiss me.
The room literally spun away from me and my knees turned to hopeless jelly.
He steadied me back on my feet, grinned menacingly at me with that familiar flash of power I had seen many times before.
"Buy me a pint?" he suggested as I went to fish out my handbag from under the seat.
We danced and talked throughout the rest of the evening and he offered to walk me home.
I refused on the grounds that it was cold and he would have to walk to Jaywick and then back to his bedsit. He said he wanted to see my brother Roy anyway, to discuss something about forming a Sunday League football team. It sounded just a little too convenient but I agreed.

The walk home was hilarious.
Under each lamp post he would stop to see if he could turn my knees to jelly again but only succeeded in messing up my makeup and dislodging my false eyelashes.
When we arrived at the chalet he marched in and engaged Roy in conversation while I slipped off to the bathroom to straighten out my hair and face. What a sight I was! Smudged and smeared with mascara and lipstick, clothes all askew and dishevelled.
When I returned to the lounge Roy was nowhere to be seen.
"He has gone to bed!" Tony stated, patting the sofa cushion alongside him to indicate that I should join him there. The TV was still showing the football game that Roy had been watching which made me think 'that is odd!' Roy never missed a chance to see an international match regardless of the hour and he certainly did not need to be up early the following morning.
Before I could question this further Tony grabbed my arm and pulled me to his side.
From then on is a blur of desperation in which he only said "I gotteh" when I protested and tried to refuse him.

I woke up at about 6am with Tony flat out on top of me.
I was numb but managed to wake him up to permit me to go to the bathroom.
When I returned he was heading toward the door and I watched him jump the front wall, turn and wave triumphantly as he disappeared down the street.
I laughed and simultaneously grimaced with a strange sharp pain in my ribcage as I closed the door.
I turned to be met with the glaring evidence of my lost virginity.
A dark dried blood stain, right in the middle of the centre cushion of the sofa, promised to be very hard to shift.

My father arrived later that day together with his new wife, her mother, & my two step brothers.
Roy was not speaking to me.
I had no idea why not until he blurted out to my father that Tony had sent him to bed the previous night and that I had been raped, right there on the sofa!
"Look at this!" He said, turning the sofa cushion over.
My feeble attempt at removing the blood stain had been a complete failure.
All the family stood in shock staring at me.
I shot to the bathroom and hid, locked inside, not knowing what to do.
I was panic stricken because under my roll neck sweater I had developed a multitude of black and blue bruises, a range of enormous love bites and my ribs were making it very hard to breathe.
My father called me to the dining room where he, Roy and my stepmother were sitting, looking like their lives had been shattered into a million pieces.
My father stated grimly that I was not to go out at all and was to go to my bedroom and pack my stuff.
"What? Why?" I wailed.
"You are coming back to London to live with us, we have a room ready for you. It was supposed to be a surprise but now I am ordering you, not inviting you!"
I burst into tears, reminding him that I had a job and friends in Clacton.
I was clutching my ribs as I sobbed and he immediately said "What is wrong with your side?"
I said that I didn't know. He looked like a thunderclap was going on inside his head.
"In the car!" He ordered and silently glowering he drove me to the hospital where he demanded a thorough examination because, as he put it - I was a rape victim!
The staff murmured something about calling the police and I begged them not to.
I claimed that my father was exaggerating, asserted that I would say that I had been willing anyway.
They did not believe me.
The x-ray showed that I had a broken rib so a wide tight elastic bandage was applied, as my father fumed, pacing back and forward like a caged tiger.
I must admit that I was terrified and he was asking me with a locked jaw for Tony's address.
I pretended not to know it, excused myself for a few minutes to visit the toilet and won myself some time.
I sat on the toilet weeping silently while the hospital went about it's noisy business outside the door.
I made my decision and quickly washed my face.
I opened the toilet door, surveyed the corridor. Nobody was in sight.
I dashed to a fire exit and belted out of the hospital grounds, heading straight for Tony's bedsit which was very, very close by.
When I knocked on the patio doors Pete pulled back the curtain and looked really surprised to see me. I asked if Tony was there to which he said, "Yeah, but he is asleep! Come in, I am just going out, sorry, must dash!" He went past me while I stood shaking, not knowing how to tell Tony what was happening.
Tony blinked awake and said "Wow, this is a nice surprise!"
I gulped and stuttered that it was not really exactly "nice".

He launched himself out of bed, pissed in the kitchen sink, all over the dirty dishes that were piled up there and cracked up at the horror on my prim little face.
"God, you are such a snob, Fran!" he teased as he grabbed me to deliver a bear hug which nearly made me scream in pain. "Wozzup?" he said, letting go instantly.
I explained about Roy's betrayal, the bloodstain, the broken rib & my father's refusal to believe that I had not been raped. I showed him the bruises and love bites. I told him that the hospital was going to call the police after they had conveyed all these injuries to paper. I told him that I had run out of the hospital to warn him that my father was fit to kill him.
"Did you tell him where I live? Does Roy know?" I shook my head and the tears started rolling down my face, unstoppable again.
We laid on the bed smoking cigarettes. We cuddled until I was calm enough to continue with the story. "Dad wants me to move to London with them when they go back tomorrow" I said miserably.
I really did not want to go. I hated London.
I knew that I would have to get back to the hospital before my Dad reported me missing.
I stood up to leave.
Tony looked devastated so I promised that somehow I would get back to Clacton to see him but right now I had to do as I was told. I was only just eighteen, remember.
I promised that would do everything I could to prevent my father from bringing the rape charge.

Back at the hospital I met my father in the corridor. He blurted "Where the hell have you been?"
"Sorry!" I said through the endless tears "I was having a cigarette outside" but he was already escorting me to the car, snorting like a raging bull.
I was not permitted out of his sight until we got to London the following evening.

I was astonished at the loving care he had lavished on my new bedroom in the attic of this new home he and my stepmother had purchased secretly, in great excitement at finally having a huge house where all the family could live together at last.
The room was huge, divided into two with an etched glass doorway. It was all painted a strange rich pinky lilac and it had beautiful Velux windows that opened to the sky in the sloping ceiling.
There were brand new wardrobes built into the eaves and it was carpeted with a thick softly patterned multicoloured almost Indian design carpet. I was utterly amazed.
I resolved to search for work immediately.
My father contacted my employer to explain my sudden disappearance and to secure me a good reference.
I was on my way to becoming a City Girl and even though I was still in a lot of pain from my broken rib, still full of fear that my father would pursue the rape charge I felt that I was about to embark on a whole new adventure.
And that, dear friends, is precisely what it turned out to be.
(to be continued...)