Chapter 1. When in Rome...
Author's Note: This is another British story, set in the late 1980s before the days of mobile phones and the Internet. The main protagonist is finishing the 'Upper 6
th
' of a 'Grammar' school, having completed his 'A' Level course, and about to go to university. (And before the Literotica censors ask, yes, every one of the characters will have had their 18
th
birthday. I've tried to be fairly explicit about this). 'A' (Advanced) Levels are the educational qualification you need to get into a University in the UK. Some universities - typically Oxford and Cambridge - also require separate entrance exams and interviews. This story is set in the 'limbo' period between finishing exams (usually May/June) and getting the results (late July - early August) to confirm that a University place has been secured, when forced inactivity, an 18-year-old's hormones, an exotic school trip and a long, hot summer combine to give unexpected outcomes.
*****
They say that smoking screws you up. For me, it led to the start of one of the most exciting relationships I've ever had with an incredible woman, so I've always felt that smoking - which I gave up years ago - was a fairly positive thing for me.
I was on the school swimming team in the sixth form and I think that the fact that I'd secretly started smoking when I was 17 slowed me down and stopped me from reaching my potential. Even so, by the time I was 18, I was the school champion at crawl, butterfly and backstroke. However, my main focus was breast-stroke - or at least a desire to stroke the breasts of as many of my female classmates as possible. I'd taken up smoking to seem more sophisticated. It worked with Kathy Barber, although that wasn't too difficult. I think if I'd offered her a Polo mint she'd have let me in her knickers. She was my first - it was pretty disastrous, but everyone has to learn.
After that, I tried it on with as many of the girls as I could. A few let me have a feel, and one or two were curious enough to let me 'go all the way', as they used to say in those days. I went out with Stephanie Jones for a couple of weeks before we finally did it in her bed. I think I made her come, though with my fingers rather than my cock. (I'd read all the manuals to find out about the clitoris and the legendary G-spot, and though I'd succeeded in finding the former - to Steph's evident pleasure - the latter continued to elude me).
Anyway, Steph and I split up after about three months, just after A-levels and just before I was due to go on a field trip to Rome. Chris Bennett managed to persuade her that he was more sensitive and caring - which, looking back, he probably was - so the lovely Stephanie gave me the heave-ho.
On the long train journey to Rome - a good 24 hours - I tried repeatedly and with a spectacular lack of success to find myself some female companionship. I spent the cross-Channel trip on deck, trying to chat up Alice Charles and her friend Emma Layton, who were both polite enough, but answered all of my questions in virtual monosyllables and would say no more. They didn't exactly tell me to push off but they made it pretty clear that they were not interested in my attentions.
So I transferred my attentions first to Leah Meade and then to Lynne Baker. Both of them were, as we now say, 'fit', and I thought I was getting on fine with Lynne until Bob Davies turned up. After a short exchange of pleasantries, she got up and followed him, and I discovered later that they'd gone off to some quiet spot that Bob had found for a snog and a fumble. I hadn't sussed that they were already 'an item'.
By the time we'd got to Rome, I was still in a state of unrequited and unfocused lust. When you're 18, you're pretty well running on neat hormones, and I found myself paying more attention to the pretty girls in the street than the history all around me. Mr Palmer and Mrs Dawson, the two teachers in charge of our party, tried to instil in us some of the wonder of the Eternal City, but to me, a lot of it was a blur of cute, smiling, tanned girls with long legs in short skirts - and with very little English. My Italian was almost non-existent, so after 'Ciao!', and a winning smile (that I have to say was frequently returned - I was around six feet tall, had long, curly blonde hair and a decent body from all the swimming) I quickly ran out of options.
I bought myself a pack of Balkan Sobranis from a tobacco kiosk to appear more sophisticated. At home I smoked Silk Cut - though, to be fair, I didn't smoke much at all - and I thought that the colourful cigarettes with their distinctive aroma would be a better option. However, with my limited language skills, I rarely got as far as offering a girl a cigarette, so that tactic wasn't working either.
The situation was made worse by the fact that I had a single room. This ought to have been good news; our group was occupying eight twin rooms, four allocated to pairs of boys and four to pairs of girls - plus six rather grotty singles and just two doubles, which were allocated to the two teachers. Having a single room should have meant I had an opportunity to invite one of my classmates - or some other conquest - back at night. But the trick on this trip seemed to be for one girl and one boy in the twin rooms to swap keys. Lynne and Bob pretty soon ended up in Lynne's room, while Louise Hatch and Ryan Trent seemed to be happy to share what had been Ryan and Bob's room. I felt this was grossly unfair - I was one of the best-looking boys in the year group, and I seemed to be the only one who wasn't getting laid.
With A-levels behind us and just the wait for the results ahead of us, before we knew which university we'd get into, it should have been a pretty relaxed time, and we didn't really need the supposed educational value of the trip, so most of us were just looking for 'lurve'. Mr Palmer had droned on about quite a few of the artistic and architectural treasures of the city, but I didn't take much of it in. Sure, I was impressed by the Pantheon - any building that's still in daily use but has 'Marcus Agrippa had me built' over the portico has got to impinge on the brain cells of even the most jaded 18-year-old. But I guess that it was Mrs Dawson's commentary on the Palatine and the Forum that gained my attention. Looking at Livia's house and hearing what a scheming, conniving bitch that woman was - Livia, not Mrs Dawson you understand - helped bring it to life. Then when she took us to the Forum and described the events of the Ides of March 44 BC, I finally began to tune in to this amazing city.
Mrs Dawson was a great teacher. I guess she was around her mid-thirties, with long dark-brown hair that she usually wore tied up, though in Rome it was more often in a ponytail. She had quite large brown eyes and an easy, friendly smile. She had often worn tight-fitting clothes and short-ish skirts to school, which caused a bit of a stir among the teachers and the male pupils, but made her popular with the sixth-formers in particular, who were always keen to respect anyone who didn't conform.
Most of all, she had this knack of treating us as equals. I remember her saying "I'm not here to tell you facts to store away - I'm here to make you think. If I say such-and-such a thing happened in a particular year, don't just write it down. Think about
why
it happened, and why it happened
then
, and in that place, and to those people rather than to someone else. What does it say about them? What can it tell us about our own time and place? What lessons can we learn from the past, because...?" At that point, we'd all chant Santayana's infamous saying - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," in a bored, ironic way.
Anyway, in the Forum, she managed to bring the whole thing alive; Julius Caesar, conqueror and tyrant, autocrat and reformer; the conspirators - Republicans, liberators or chancers? Marcus Antonius - politician, manipulator, winner and loser. Octavian, waiting in the wings for the right moment, biding his time.
In the hotel that evening, as we were finishing dinner, I saw her sitting on her own and went over to chat. She was looking rather sad, and I thought I should try to cheer her up - especially as my latest attempts to pull any of the available females were proving amazingly unsuccessful, and I wasn't enjoying being on my own.
"Mrs Dawson, that was a great tour you did for us today. Of course, we all know the story, from Shakespeare and all the historians over the ages, but to hear it from you in the place it happened - that was truly amazing."
She smiled. Her smiles were always a bit special, and I was pleased to have been the cause of one. "Thank you, Richard. So apart from the facts - and of course the story - what did you take away from it?"
"Well," I thought for a moment. "The problems of starting a revolution. How everything hangs in the balance while people on the periphery of the events wait to see which way the wind is going to blow. Do they embrace the change that maybe they've always wanted, help it happen and risk being seen as subversives if it all goes wrong? Or do they sit on the sidelines and wait until others have made some real progress before committing themselves? It seems that the conspirators were out-manoeuvred by Mark Anthony, who was in turn ousted by Octavian. The Senators could have had their Republic back, but they waited too long and ended up kowtowing to the Triumvirate and then having to make Octavian the Imperator. Revolutions take commitment."
"Good - very good. So - the assassination of Julius Caesar; good thing or bad thing?"
"Oh, surely a good thing. Out of the ashes, Rome gets Augustus and massive expansion in territory and wealth. An explosion of culture, Rome turned from brick to marble."
"And what about what came after? A dynasty of pseudo-hereditary emperors? Tiberius on Capri, hooked on pornography and leaving everything to Sejanus and his reign of terror? The mad Caligula, getting his sister pregnant and then allegedly killing her and eating the baby? Nero's incompetence and Agrippina's scheming? Civil war and a series of emperors who all lasted just a few months?"
"Those were the consequences of Augustus and the weakness of the Senate, not of the conspirators. And you're forgetting Claudius, who conquered Britain, something Julius could never do. No, I don't think you can trace all of the woes of the next hundred years or so back to a single point."
"Can't you? What about the taxation of the Colonies by George III? Don't you think that a lot of the attitude of the USA to Great Britain over the next three centuries stems from that single act?"
Her face was animated. The sadness I'd seen before we'd first started talking seemed to have gone. She liked debating politics and history with someone, rather than just the small talk she'd had from my classmates. I realised we were both enjoying this.
"Well, by the same token, you could say that Columbus landing on Hispaniola was responsible for the rape of the New World and the growth of Spain. Pizarro got lucky; he arrived on the right day, but he still didn't have to kill Atahualpa. Cortes may not have had sufficient local levies to take Tenochtitlan, and it could have all failed."
"Ah, but the pivot point wasn't Columbus - if Ferdinand and Isabella hadn't married and linked Aragon and Castile, the Reconquista wouldn't have happened. That was the start of the rise of Spain - kicking out the Moors, for better or worse. I think there's always a point, a specific event, which acts as the focus for fundamental change."
"The stone dropped into the pool. The ripples spreading outwards, and going on forever." It was one of the favourite metaphors she used in class.
"Precisely!" She picked up a half-full bottle of Chianti from in front of her and refilled her glass. She held the bottle up with a questioning expression. I presented my glass, and she refilled it. "See, there's always an event that, when you trace it back, is seen as the pivot point, responsible for any sequence of revolutionary changes. With Rome, it was probably Caesar crossing the Rubicon. After that, military dictatorship, imperial expansion and periods of civil war were pretty well inevitable. Caesar had moved the goalposts, and there was a very different game on the table. Mad George thought he could soothe opinion at home by taxing abroad - and created what was to become our biggest global competitor and ultimately the nemesis of the British Empire." She saw my quizzical expression and held up her hand. "No, that's a discussion for another time - maybe on your university course. Right now, I need a smoke."
