Sixty years ago I was serving an apprenticeship with a plumbing firm. The plumber I was working with was called Sid. We must have made a funny looking pair because I was over six feet tall and Sid was about five feet one.
At one time we got a job replacing old iron pipes with lead pipe. There were about two dozen rental houses that had been built on the cheap some time in the nineteen thirties and as part of the shoddy construction iron water pipes had been used. The water in that area was alkaline and the pipes had become clogged with the alkaline deposits until the water only dribbled out of the taps.
It was a pig of a job getting the old pipes out and the new ones in, and it was made more difficult because the residents were obviously living in the houses and they had to have water. So it was a sort on again off again process. It took us at least a week to re-pipe one house.
Sid was a crafty old bastard and was close to retirement. The boss never came near us, so I would arrive on the job for an eight o'clock start and Sid would come strolling in anywhere between half past eight to eight forty five. He was gone again by three thirty leaving me to work on until five.
I was instructed what I was to do after he left, and what I was to do before he arrived in the morning.
We'd completed five houses and then we came to the house occupied by Mrs. Mowbray. She was a buxom woman who looked to be in her forties and not bad looking in a hearty sort of way.
She made a bit of a nuisance of herself because she always wanted to chat with us while we were working. The subject of these chats was almost invariably her husband.
According to her Clifford (her husband) was a paragon. He was a sharp business man, a man nobody could ignore and I think she used the word charismatic, the meaning of which I didn't know at the time.
I only saw him once, and that was when he came out of the house just as I arrived. He got into his old ten horsepower Ford and went gear grindingly up the road driving right on the crown of the road.
From the brief glimpse I got of him he looked like a little weasel of a man with one of those horrible pencil moustaches that were popular at that time.
One morning when I arrived at the house it was to find Mrs. Mowbray no longer hearty, in fact I could see she had been crying. She couldn't contain herself and from the time of my arrival until Sid turned up, she regaled me with her woes.
In substance it came to this; she had discovered that her husband had been having affairs with a number of women, and had been doing so for a long time.
"I trusted the swine," she wailed, "I believed all his stories about having to work late and weekend business meetings." She went on and on in this vein until Sid arrived, and then she shut up. It was as if Sid wasn't to be included as a hearer of her tale of woe. She picked up the theme after Sid left in the afternoon.
I wished that she would talk to Sid and not me because I didn't know what to say. Not that my silence mattered much because Mrs. Mowbray clearly wanted to do all the talking, going round and round in verbal circles.
Like a lot of young guys in those days I was, by contemporary standards, hopelessly naïve when it came to things sexual; I'd only got as far as learning to masturbate which in those days was still declared to be a sin, and deleterious to the health. Apart from that I only knew that every time I got near a girl -- which wasn't often -- I got horny.
We were getting half way to finishing the work in Mrs. Mowbray's house when she changed her tune a little.
"Have you got a girlfriend?" she asked.
"Not at the moment," I said, trying to make it sound as if the absence of a girlfriend was merely a hiatus in my love life to be amended very soon. It was a bit like actors who say, "I'm resting," when what they mean is that they are out of a job.
Mrs. Mowbray looked interested and something akin to the light of battle came into her eyes that had hitherto been tearful.
