At Grover Cleveland High the swimming classes were held in the vast echoey basement pool, smelling of chlorine. There were bleachers rising on both sides to be packed out in the event of a competition. There were Corinthian columns and painted windows in the upper walls. The atmosphere was gloomy and...
Well, full of possibility.
For one reason.
Classes were segregated. As at other pools in the 1950s- those at YMCAs, for example- the boys swam in the nude. As the note to parents specified, "swimming for boys is conducted unencumbered by swimming costumes." In many households sisters dwelt on this particular rule over the dinner table, with the intention, it seemed, of seeing their brothers squirm and blush and hang their heads with shame.
"Oh boys don't care about those things," a helpful mother might intervene, while her son sat scarlet, twisting in his seat not looking anyone in the eye. "They're not modest- like you girls." And sisters would giggle and nudge one another, their imaginations racing with pictures of their brother and his friends, performing exercises stripped off. The girls' crotches would twitch, their panties dampen.
Girls, of course, swam with swim suits, secure and superior. And fantasised and dreamt and gossiped about the possibility of entering those sacred precincts when a class of boys was there, in the buff, their every secret on display. Trapped in their birthday suits. Girls fully dressed, boys naked as jays. Oh, sweet thought. Sweet, sweet thought.
No girl dreamt about this more than Karen Strawbridge. With her cats-eye glasses and red-hair in plaits, she was freckle-faced and had a body already running to over-weight. Pound for pound she had more prurience pumping through her than any female classmate and would give the foulest-minded boy a run for his money.
Night after night she- who had no brothers or boyfriends- constructed fantasies where tall, broad-shouldered 18 year old fellas from school- like the "dreamboat" Danny Bristol Junior with long eye lashes and ducks tail brushback hair style- were forced at her command to peel off tee-shirts, pulling them slowly over their heads, and face her shirtless. She carefully looked them up and down while they trembled at what might come.
Her next icy command always caused them to protest before reluctantly accepting her authority (in these day-dreams she might be doctor, nurse, police-woman, cruel mother) and unbuckling their belts. Looking woeful they would then stretch their belts open and shake their jeans loose and glance at her for instructions.
She would tell them to pull them off. Down their trousers would slither. Slowly, shamefully. They would be blushing like fire hydrants. And their underpants would have to follow. They would look around like frightened deer and then, slowly, down they'd pull them, thumbs hooked in the elastic...down their furry legs, then always jamming their splayed hands over their private spaces. She would icily tell them to hang their hands behind their backs or place them behind their heads. Always a delicious moment. She would then savour the revelations, hungrily, as a female who had never seen a naked male. In her fantasies she would longingly inspect a totally nude Danny Bristol Junior while his long eyes lashes fluttered with embarrassment, and other boys as well.
Lying in bed she would imagine Danny with his Elvis hair or Charlie Hodgson with his crew-cut and swimmer's physique or other boys, whose flies she had greedily stared at in the corridors, now standing bare as a board, shaking with shame. At his moment she would explode in one of those earthquake orgasms that would shake the mattress and threaten to wake her parents.
Driven by these desires to see naked boys Karen haunted the furthest reaches of the old school building. After much searching she found a peep hole that gave her a fleeting glimpse of nude swimmers as they walked from change room to pool. She saw them side-on, moving fast, thrillingly clothes-free- the very first sight made her panties moisten. She saw flanks like those of young colts, floppy or pointy things in their groins. Like cocktail sausages. Or dangling fruit. Fleeting glimpses, none of the details she craved. And not Danny or her other favorites. But these illicit peeps whetted her raging appetite, fuelled those all-consuming fantasies.
She longed to catch them, to trap them, during a swim class. Them, hopeless, caught in their birthday suits. She, with other girls, and a female teacher, of course, to make it more humiliating for the boys.
The shame and humiliation of the caught males were a big part of it.
One day it happened.
Boys got up from their seats to leave for swim class. It happened twice a week. Girls had never- never ever- got in.
This time, however, Karen's careful preparation had resulted in an actual plan. First, she and 10 other girls waited 15 minutes and then discretely slipped out of the unsupervised study class. Down to the basement corridor they crept where they met, as planned, the young teacher they worshipped: Miss Ada Braithwaite, an attractive 50s something, gray-blond independent woman with- shall we say- a somewhat healthy attitude to matters of reproduction, a lively interest in what in those days were lubriciously referred to, with a smirk, as "the birds and the bees."
Chatting with her young admirers she had referred several times to the Kinsey report on female sexuality and to Sigmund Freud and "penis envy." She once daringly said that women had a right to "sexual fulfilment." She might suggest to the girls that such-and-such a boy, with snub nose and fluttering eye-lashes or broad shoulders and narrow waist, would look "interesting" without his clothes.
The 18 year old girls tittered, imaginations racing, none more lubriciously than Karen...who paused a moment and then secreted a suggestion.
"Maybe, Miss...we can walk in on a swim class."
"Soooo..." said the teacher, who had only arrived at Grover Cleveland some months earlier. "Boys here swim nude?"
The girls excitedly confirmed this.
"Even their coach, Mister Compton," added Karen. " He's a body builder- and they say he's a...nudist. Some say he's an exhibitionist."
The teacher seemed subsumed in thought, her eyes far away.
"Leave it to me, girls," she said with the broadest of smiles.
So they found themselves on this day meeting Miss Braithwaite on the steps that took swimmers down to the basement corridor that led to the pool. From different senior classes 20 other girls had gravitated to their ranks, as carefully organised by Karen. A heavy cast iron door stood before them, closed. A shudder ran through the little army of females.
They were, of course, all dressed. They wore skirts that fell below their knees, some half way down the calves in the fashion of the 50s, many pleated. Some wore blouses with Peter Pan collars, some tucked-in sweaters, cashmere or lambswool. Some,like their teacher, wore a string of pearls. Some had head bands.
Behind this door were 18 year old boys wearing nothing...
...beyond some newly- sprouted curly hair around their groins.
Apart from that, they were naked, from their hammerhead toes on the ends of their boney feet to their crew cut or Elvis haircuts.
Totally, one hundred percent stripped off.
In the buff.
In their birthday suits. Nude.
There wasn't a girl who was not fluttering in her insides.