This story is dedicated to the memory of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), in appreciation of his book
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
, the first novel about a girl who fights to get what she wants.
[The sex in this story starts rather late, so be patient and enjoy the preliminaries first. The fun will eventually come.]
*****
Chapter One
Introductions
My name is Eleanor Butterfield. My father, Emeritus Professor the Rev. Charles Butterfield, did not marry until he was 48, so when I was 18 and about to go up to university, he was approaching retirement as a parish priest. We lived in the vicarage of a small country village and I attended a high-powered sixth-form college in the nearest town.
My father had had a chequered career. He had been educated at the University of Oxbridge, and when he graduated with a first class degree in theology, he remained to study for a Ph.D. He was appointed a junior fellow and on the basis of numerous scholarly publications was eventually elected a full fellow of his college. After a year's sabbatical in which he received the necessary hands-on training to become a priest, he was ordained to a Fellowship of the college, first as a deacon and a year later as a priest. He continued to distinguish himself as a scholar and a few years later became a professor of theology in the University of Camford. His title was Hardwick Professor of Divinity, and he was attached as a professorial fellow to Saint Boniface's College in Camford. During this time, he submitted his publications for a Doctorate of Divinity, which he successfully obtained.
There he met a 30-year-old PhD student with whom he fell in love and married. When my father was in his middle fifties, my grandfather died and left him a great deal of money, such that even after inheritance tax had been paid, he became a wealthy man. By now he was weary of the academic rat race and with my mother's encouragement he resigned his chair and moved as a non-stipendiary priest to a parish in the gift of Saint Boniface's College. The Bishop of Fitchey attempted to persuade him to take on half a dozen adjacent parishes as well, but my father was adamant that one parish was sufficient, as he wished to continue with his scholarly work at the same time as the pastoral care ("cure of souls" in traditional Anglican parlance) of the small village of Winksey in which we lived. As he was not on the diocesan payroll, the Bishop could not object to this. Dad's ministry was happy and successful: he attended all the community activities that made up village life in Winksey, and in turn the villagers supported him at his church.
I was an only child and to my father's surprise, I decided in my teens to follow in his footsteps and become a priest. Accordingly, it was to read theology that I entered Saint Boniface's, my father's old college in the University of Camford. I think I must have inherited his intelligence, because by the age of 16 I was joining in the discussions which frequently took place in our hospitable vicarage between my father and our numerous visitors, who were essentially academics, childhood friends and interesting people whom my father or mother had met in the previous 20 or 30 years. My father, though elderly, was by no means stodgy or old-fashioned. He fully approved of the ordination of women in the Church of England and was delighted that his daughter was going to follow in his footsteps.
In spite of all this rather old-fashioned-sounding background, my upbringing had been far from sheltered. Some of the guests who visited the vicarage were distinctly worldly, including actors and even a few politicians. My father in his private life never hesitated to use words that would be regarded by most people as unbecoming for a clergyman to say out loud, and although my mother put on disapproving expressions, she never objected to his use of coarse words within the family. She was just as clever as he was, but had to some extent sacrificed her career to his. However, she never seemed to regret this. What they both regretted, but were unable to do anything about, was the fact that they only had one child: me. This was in spite of what seems to me now (although as a child I never noticed it in detail but I suspected) to have been a very active sex life. It certainly seems that my father had decided to make up for all his years of celibacy, but to no avail! I was his sole success in the progeny stakes and all the more precious to my parents as a result.
I had had the disadvantage of attending an all-girls school up to the age of 16, and even in the sixth form college I was so busy working for my exams that I had little time to spare for boyfriends. So a motive that was one of my priorities when I went up to Camford was to meet members of the opposite sex.
Chapter Two
Eleanor's first Martinmas term at Camford
Winksey was not far from Camford and after a short train journey I arrived in Camford at the beginning of the Martinmas term early in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I found that I had been allocated a single room at the top of a staircase in the third quadrangle of Boni's, as Saint Boniface's College is known by most people in Camford. During the first week of term I signed up to join the college chapel choir. I had sung in the choir of Winksey church for as long as we had lived in the village and I had studied the piano up to grade 7. I had also at school chosen music as one of my A-level subjects.
Four freshmen joined the choir that year: two men and two women. It was with great interest that I examined the male members of the choir at the session in the beer-cellar that followed the first practice. One man who sang tenor in particular caught my attention. He had dark hair, worn fairly long, a nice clean-shaven face, was skinnily built and wore a commoner's gown. While the college did not stipulate particular dress for Sunday evenings, it was generally the practice to wear fairly formal clothes such as a suit, and shoes rather than sandals or trainers. This man was wearing an Italian designer suit. Later when he was wearing jeans I noticed that he had a significant bulge in the vicinity of his genitals, indicating that he might be well-hung! You might think that this is an unladylike thought for a clergyman's daughter to have, but I have already explained that my upbringing was far from conventional and that colloquial, even crude language, was in use in our household.
Freshmen in the choir were the only first-years allowed to go with the rest of the choir into formal dinner on Sunday evenings after we had sung Evensong. I contrived to get a seat next but one to the well-hung man, whom I heard his neighbour call Tommy. From the conversation, it appeared that Tommy was just back from Italy, where he had spent his third year as an Erasmus student. After dinner it was the practice for the choir as a body to take coffee in the junior common room before adjourning to one or other pub in the neighbourhood, where the rest of the evening would be spent. There were three rooms on the top floor of my staircase and the girl in the next room had also joined the chapel choir. As we walked to the pub, I asked her what her reaction was to the men in the Choir, both the new ones and the second and third years who were well established in the choir. "Well," she said, "some of them like Tommy Singleton-Scarborough are gay."
"How do you know that?" I asked. "You've not been here any longer than I have."
