On this summer Sunday Jack Cunningham stood in the kitchen in nothing more than sagging Y fronts. Julia, dressed in her church-going clothes, stood before him, snapping out orders. She was telling him to dust all the front parlour, sweep the hall, take the carpets out and beat them on the clothes line.
Jack stood, sheepish, holding the failing elastic with one hand. His testicles threatened to flop free from the loose elastic of the legs at any moment. Or Julia could reach out and whisk them to his knees anytime. He was very vulnerable to the angry young woman.
"And if I notice one speck of dirt when we get back from church..."
Her eyes narrowed with cruelty and contempt. And perhaps something else. Her voice lowered.
"...I'll wait till aunt is out of the house and haul those underpants off...and give you a paddling."
Her eyes gleamed with the wicked thought. Haul his underpants off.
The boy shuddered.
She looked over her shoulder to call out to her aunt she was on her way. Taking one more dismissive glimpse of the near naked young man three years her junior she took off to join Mrs Ellroy at the front door.
Jack soon found himself in the sunshine of this untypically warm Manchester summer in the back garden, dusting a mat over the clothes line. Flies buzzed around the vegetable patch and the tin garbage bin. The air vibrated with Sunday morning noises. The bells of St Patrick's summoned the city's Irish. In a bomb site two doors up, neighbourhood kids shrieked through their games. A few houses away a radio played Elvis Presley singing Tutti Frutti.
Jack had changed into the denim cut-offs. When he had pulled them on he had become erect, just like when he pulled on Bike jockstraps, or thought of the posing straps worn by the models in Young Adonis. He loved looking at those pictures.
His penis stem stretched from his cut off denims and reached like a rod down his left thigh.
Last night he had dreamt of this moment- the females off at church, him in the garden and the sexy young housewife Mrs Lacey from next door peering down at him from her upstairs window behind a curtain. In his fantasy, a big white breast fell from the opening of her silk gown. Back in London, in the hut at the ash pit around the corner from his home, cheeky neighbourhood girls had allowed him to touch their jubblies and even their fannies and half a dozen times over the Christmas holidays, on the parlour lounge in her family's Addison Road Council house, Jane Smiley had guided him into her vagina while her parents slept in the next room. There had been a squelching sound and Jack had fainted for a full five seconds at the lubricious grip on his member.
But Jane had winced accommodating his girth and stayed inert; he imagined the feel of Darlene Lacey's was more perfect still, and more capacious, and something told Jack she was bound to celebrate her pleasure more openly.
Growing up in east London he had also heard stories of "exhibitionists" who "flashed" their cocks. This, he thought, was different. Darlene Lacey had said she liked seeing the near-naked lodgers in Mrs Ellroy's house, thought it "sweet" to see young men in just their Y fronts. And he knew he now had a body that rippled like those of any of the athletes in his magazines. Six days a week the mirrors in the gym confirmed it- and the admiring glances of the other athletes and their occasional comments about his "V shape."
He yearned to show off. To Darlene.
Today in the backyard he would be presenting himself nude, like a Greek statue, not just opening a raincoat to flash a white cock.
He saw a flutter at the curtain.
He took a deep breath.
Pretending to look off to Mrs Ellroy's back steps, and not in the direction of the neighbours' window, he reached down and stroked his fat bellend squashed on his thigh. Mrs Lacey would be watching me fondle my tallywhacker, hard as a hammer sticking out of my cut-offs, he thought. He kept up the fondling for what seemed five minutes.
Then he undid the top button of the shorts. He paused. He stroked his drumskin tummy. Then at a leisurely pace he undid the second, and the third buttons...slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. He paused, looked around idly, as if doing everything without a thought.
As the fly fell apart, and the tiny denim shorts just hung, he stroked his powerful chest.
His eyes assumed a dreamy, far-off look.
As if he were just pleasuring himself in the sun.
Then, heart pounding, he took hold of his waist band, hesitated and then ever so slowly, drew his shorts to his feet, pooling them at his ankles. His dick sprang free. He flung the shorts onto the garden bed and stood buck naked in Mrs Ellroy's garden- as nude as Michelangelo's David but with an erection the young Hebrew warrior would have envied, to say nothing of his sculptor. Happily, the hanging rug was shielding him from anyone in the rear lane...
...but the unseen viewer from the window next door would be having a perfect picture.
His tallywhacker poked at the sky. The slit was bubbling like a faulty water bubbler.
Looking down at his organ Jack admired the big central artery running its dorsal length. And his glans- his bellend- hell! Was it getting bigger? Was it possible, that his fat, carved end piece kept growing? Yes, for sure it had fleshed out. Must be all the stimulation, he thought. After all, that extra half inch on his stem- that, too, was a recent growth spurt, since he had turned 18.
He gave Mrs Lacey, invisible behind the curtain, a good look. Yes, feast your eyes on this, he seemed to be saying. He slowly ran his appreciative fingers of his right hand up and down his proud length, looking down at it with fondness.
Out of his left eye he saw an unmistakeable rearrangement of the folds, as if his viewer was giving herself a surer line of sight.
Jack ran his fist more firmly up and down his stem. His other hand stroked his chest, played with a nipple. He closed his eyes and stroked and pinched away, one hand on chest, one on cock...
He imagined Darlene, with skirt drawn up, stroking herself in unison. When he peeked again he saw a flutter of the folds. Yes, she's playing with herself...looking at me.
Looking at my muscle man physique...
...as good as her own husband's...
...but trimmer, younger...
...and at my youthful dick.
His excitement was building.
He thought of the 28 year old housewife gazing at his prick. He thought of what she had said about liking the bodies of the young males she got to see in Mrs Ellroy's house. He thought of how on that visit he had presented his naked bum cheeks to her. And how her voice had sounded excited as he had posed back to her with Y fronts at his feet.
And now!
She was seeing him from her upstairs window, front on!
Nude!
Stiff!
With a real stonk-on!
And, knackers swinging, as he jacked off!
He thrilled at his own daring.
But he couldn't stretch it out any longer.
Jack winced. He made a "Grrrrrrrr...." and shot off, his load tracing a bold trajectory and collecting the glint of the morning sun. It splashed on the brickwork pathway...followed by two more...Splash! Splash!
He stopped. Took a deep breath. Recovered.
He slowly squeezed himself clean. He hesitated, looking at his sticky fingers. He smiled, thinking of how his mates called it, "baby batter." He looked up at the window. The curtain moved ever so slightly, as if covering up. Then, inspired, Jack reached out...and wiped the driblets on the paling fence.
It was a gesture at once bold...and guilty, that of naughty boy burdened by disgusting habit...and of a bold sexual rebel. James Dean might have done it, jerking off in a studio backlot.
Jack looked up at the window.
He paused.
Then he winked...lewdly.
Half an hour later, back in Y fronts and on his knees in the hallway polishing away, Jack let his mind race with the joys of his display and what Mrs Lacey might be thinking now, in her home, and what might happen next between her and him. Wow, he thought, the movement of the curtain gave the game away. She couldn't control herself, tugging the folds this way and that, getting the best view of his glorious, weight-trained physique and his pumping young cock, clawing at herself with the other hand.
And I let her see my spunk, too. Three big deposits. He thrilled at his own daring. It was the most wicked thing he had ever done in his young life. Even more than stuffing his cock into Jane Smiley while her parents slept on the other side of the wall in that tiny council flat.
He heard the jangle of keys and the voices of Mrs Ellroy and Julia at the front steps. He saw them through the frosted glass of the door. He willed his erection to subside.
The two females entered, spirits high at seeing their young man on his knees, in nothing but faded white underpants with worn material exposing his deep intergluteal cleft.
If Jack had known that, at the end of Barraclough Street, they had run into Mrs Darlene Lacey, returning from her 90 minute Salvationist service talking about the roast she was going to serve George then young Jack would have been very confused and disconcerted indeed.
At the workshop later that week half a dozen apprentices were gathered at an engine while Nick Alcott, a wizened veteran and former Spitfire pilot, led them through its circuits. Jack was wearing his Bike jockstraps under his overalls and his foreskin- his "lace curtains"- had caught in the knitted pouch. He found himself fiddling at his groin. Trying to pinch his skin and rearrange it. Nick noticed.
"Any more of that playing with your tackle and they'll send you to the Halloway house, young fella." His mates had smiled.
The Halloway house?
Gerda Halloway? Who Julia and Mrs Ellroy said was going to spank him?
Later Nick had explained.
"You wouldn't know, being a Cockney and all. But it's a fuckin' Manchester institution, the Halloway family. For years mamas have taken their young fellas there after catching them playin' with themselves, pulling the pud, beating the bishop. The Halloways have always given boys a good ole fashion one. Spankings. Over the knee. Canes too. No clothes allowed. In the bare scud. Still going, generations on. Ask yer mates: they've all been."
And nearly all had stories. Yes, the Halloways were a local institution. A fella got caught with stains on pyjamas or his pants down, and his mother whisked him to see Gerda Hathaway, just as their fathers had been whisked off to her mother or even their grandfathers to her grandmother. "She did it for my mam. Me and me brothers. A tough ole bitch- don't worry you'll get used to it, being in the nuddy and gettin' paddled and all," said one apprentice.
A week later found Jack at the very place.
The small waiting room in Miss Gerda Halloway's was occupied by half a dozen mothers in their bright summer dresses and their sons, and a few freckle-faced sisters frisky and bright eyed, looking around for fun- unlike their gloomy 18 year old brothers with eyes averted. Mrs Ellroy sat with her lodger, Jack who wore his work clothes, overalls over a checked shirt. His eyes were on his boots, as glum as any of the other young men. He seemed to sink under the weight of his heavily oiled, swept back, ducks bum, Elvis, Teddy Boy hair style.
Shivering with apprehension.
The room looked like it might have had aspirations worthy of a dentist's waiting room but had somehow fallen short. The upholstery on the chairs were splintering, the geraniums by the window were dried out, the prints of racehorses and pastoral scenes faded. On a table lay a few dog-eared publications, pre-War or even last century. One scarlet, cloth-covered volume had a gold embossed title: "A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity also for the serious consideration of parents and guardians" by Sylvester Graham.
