Joan's story – narrated by Dr. Jessamine Buller.
Editor's note: By the time this story was put together by the various participants, Joan Agass had retired to South Africa after the death of her beloved mother. It was impractical to go to East London, and she did not feel up to the effort of writing her story herself, so she suggested that we should ask her close friend and confidant to tell it. This is Joan's story as told by Dr. Buller to Ivy Matthews.
I first met Joan Agass when I joined the medical practise in Highcross street in 1947 after I was demobbed from the RAMC. She was in excellent health herself, but she was having to devote more and more time to the care of her chronically sick mother. I cannot go into the details of Mrs Agass' condition here, but, merely say that she was slowly losing all independent movement and depended on Joan for more and more. Mrs. Agass bore her conditions bravely and cheerfully most of the time, and it was clear where Joan got her courage and resilience from.
Around ten years later, in the winter of 1956-7 Mrs Agass was clearly dying, and a friendship had grown up between Joan any myself. I am a chronic insomniac myself, and we sat up together for stretches of many nights. In those long night hours, we sat in the kitchen and, piece by piece she told me this story. She is now living with her sister in South Africa; and cannot tell her story herself. She wrote to me recently, asking me to retell the story she told me over those long nights. She has given me her permission to tell the story on my own words; in fact she asked me to do it for her and I am glad to do so.
Joan had worked at the Leicester stockbroking firm of Prettyman and Bassett since she left school in 1934. For the greater part of that time she was private secretary to one of the partners, Joseph Everard. She insists that the relationship between the two was strictly formal. Although, as she says, "He never even patted me on the bottom in nineteen years", she was clearly a little infatuated by him. So it came as a devastating shock when, in February 1953, she was abruptly sacked, and told to clear her desk and leave at the end of the week.
Joan was so shocked and humiliated by her dismissal that for a time she became a virtual recluse. The depression ran its course, and, one day she came to me, thin to the point of emaciation and haggard, asking for a sedative. Around this time she took the drastic step of writing letters to Everard's biggest clients that detailed his financial irregularities and led to his dismissal and prosecution.
This breach of confidentiality got her blacklisted in the tight financial circles of Leicester, and she had to subsist for several years by typing envelope at home for a pittance. Her mother was needing more time and attention by this time, so she was fully occupied, although her emotional state was fragile.
Her working routine was inexorable, on Monday afternoon a van would call at her house to deliver the week's work, and collect the finished product.
Abruptly, after two years, the van stopped calling. She walked down the road to the phone booth outside the Chemist's, shop and heard the phone ring and ring. It went unanswered; her employers had totally disappeared, leaving her with four hundred envelopes, perfectly typed, awaiting collection, and an almost new Imperial office typewriter for which she had been paying her employers on the instalment plan.
She had recovered her mental equilibrium sufficiently by this time to look around for a job, and she called on her old secretarial network for help. Joan had a lot of friends who felt very strongly that she had had a raw deal. One of them had heard that a young financial analyst, Philip Cheshire, who had worked at Prettyman for a couple of years, and whom she vaguely remembered, was in search of a really good private secretary.
Philip Cheshire was delighted to hear from her, and eager to offer her a job. To him she was a gem; she was not only an excellent short-hand typist, but her knowledge of the financial life of Leicester was encyclopaedic. Although it was a bit rusty, it could quickly be revived.
Dr. Buller paused at this point and said, "I want to make it clear that I asked Miss Agass specifically about the next section, since I feared that some of the revelations might embarrass her. She told me firmly and specifically that I should include everything, and leave out nothing, and that I should leave the decisions about censorship to others. She wanted her full and complete testimony to be given and I am carrying out her wishes. The words I use are not hers, but medical ones, as they come naturally to me"
When I first met Joan, she was in her late thirties. She was a well-turned-out professional woman, well-dressed with a rather severe but elegant hairstyle. She would be the first to admit that she had never been a pretty girl, but with meticulous grooming, skilfully applied makeup and good fashion sense, she achieved a handsome, poised style befitting a senior private secretary in an important local business. By the time she started work for Philip Cheshire she had been at home as a household drudge for a couple of years, and she had, as she admitted to me, let herself go.
When she started work she made an effort to pull herself together, but at forty-two she felt that she was losing the battle against sagging muscles, wrinkled skin and hair losing its colour and lustre. On the positive side, within a month of starting work again she knew she was greatly valued for the contributions she was making and the knowledge she was bringing into the business, and more important still, she felt that Philip liked her and enjoyed her rather acerbic wit.
So when Christmas Eve came around with its exchange of gifts, she felt that a little extravagance was more than justified. She bought Philip a silk tie from Gieves, and, coincidentally, he bought her a bright jacquard silk scarf by Dior.
He also produced a bottle of fine solera Malmsey, laid down whilst Napoleon was on St. Helena. He made her drink two large glasses with him. Joan was chary about alcohol, but the malmsey tasted sweet and unthreatening, totally belying the punch it packed.
Not used to the drink, she got a little maudlin and started telling Philip a rambling story about her past, lamenting that she had never had any love in her life and that now it was too late. She began to cry quietly to herself. Philip didn't attempt to reassure her with a string of platitudes. Instead he took her totally by surprise by asking,
"Joan, have you ever sucked a man's penis? It seems like a good place to start."
"I've never even seen a man's penis," Joan replied, "let alone sucked one."
"Right", he said cheerily, "Come over here and kneel down on a cushion. Don't worry, I'll tell you what to do."
She went over and dropped down onto her knees in a state of bewildered excitement. Philip dropped his trousers and underpants, revealing his thickening penis and a large pair of testicles in their loose, hairy sack. Philip retracted his long foreskin, revealing the wrinkled, pink, slightly glistening glans, which was purpling and fattening before her eyes.
"Just lick the head a little, and then see if you want to go on."
Somehow, Philip had not left her the option of refusing, in any case, by now Joan would not have let a team of horses drag her away. All she was concerned about was to do exactly as he told her and to try to give him all the pleasure she could.
Step by step, Philip talked her through the process that she had heard once or twice referred to as "gam" or "plating" by her colleagues in the long-ago typing pool. At that time it had sounded nauseating and repugnant. Now she just wanted to gain Philip's approval. This was the most intimate encounter with a man she had ever experienced, and she wanted to make it last and bring it to a successful conclusion.
Under his guidance she began to suck rhythmically, taking more and more of the shaft into her mouth whilst avoiding gagging. From time to time, on his instructions, she paused to lick up the shaft and around the prominent flared head, before returning to suck just a little quicker. At length he said,
"Joan, I'm going to shoot. Try to keep sucking until I've finished, but don't worry if you can't." He pulled a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket, shook it out and held it under her chin as ropes of sticky semen filled her mouth and tricked down her chin. Joan valiantly tried to go on sucking, but it was beyond her as she felt that she was choking in the spasms of semen.
"Well done my girl. That wasn't so bad, was it? Now go and make yourself comfortable and we'll go on to the next lesson."
Joan, the sour-salt taste of semen in her mouth, went down the corridor to the lavatory and cleaned herself up, taking the time to straighten her blouse and comb her hair. She told me that the one thought in her mind as she looked in the mirror, was that she wished that she were prettier for him.
