Despite the widely-held reputation that ATS girls received for being romantically precocious, many of its members were in fact, at the outbreak of war, as innocent as babies. One of these such members was Susan Porter. Her arrival at Bletchley Park in 1942, at the time a spiritly girl of twenty-four who could as easily pass for a schoolgirl as she could a schoolmistress, led not only to a vast increase in the contact she had with boys of a similar age, but with girls also, as she had been homeschooled since she was twelve.
The homeschooling had proved, largely, successful, given a narrow understanding of the requirements of education. She was adept in several living languages, and two dead ones, had a broad understanding of all the sciences, and even dabbled in literature and painting and music. Her mother had not, sadly, instilled in her a love of culture, current or classical. Susan did not enjoy art; neither did her mother; neither of them, it pains me to say, understood that art was something one should enjoy, or even someone one could enjoy: it was to be studied and read and learned, the same as times-tables. This was, one might amusingly point out, a strange variation of
l'art pour l'art
.
She understood the workings of both the male and female bodies, their similarities and their differences, which she held in equal esteem. To her the workings of the penis, or the womb, or the breasts, were of equal importance to the gut, or the appendix, or the incisors. She understood what sex was, but not what passion was, or pleasure. The orgasm, as it had been described to her, was the giving of a man's DNA into a woman's body for the purposes of reproduction, and thus she knew nothing of its pleasurablity, or that a woman could have one too. Sex, she might have supposed, if she had thought about it, which she didn't often, was something that if one were lucky and fertile one had very little of, and if one were not, one might do away with entirely, forgoing the having of children, for they would not be worth the ordeal of frequent trying.
What this education had done was get to her Bletchley, where she would be afforded a very different education, away from her mother, her father, and the crippling solitary of her upbringing, which she was so ignorant of she didn't even yet know had been so lonely. Here she would spend time with some of the most intelligent people in Britain, people who would fill in the gaping holes in her education, and explain not with words but with actions some of the most important and enjoyable things one could experience on earth.
It was not however, as you might expect, the company of men that she sought out, or even accidentally experienced - not initially anyway. Despite the many myths spread about ATS girls, and their sexual proclivities, few actually spoke to the men, having little to no automatic contact with them, and being naturally afraid of them. The men in turn were afraid of the women, for largely similar reasons. Britain had very carefully created a system in which both sexes were convinced of the other's confidence and superiority, such that they doubted their own social abilities, which I'm sure was very helpful in reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Naturally the baby boom that followed required people to get over these anxieties causing the sexual revolution that Susan would go on to fully enjoy, having first had her own private sexual revolution within the confines of Bletchley Park.
Susan shared a dormitory with some twenty-nine other girls, in narrow, hospital-like beds, arranged in three rows of ten, with very little space in between. One could easily sit in the middle of one's bed and reach one's left hand to the middle of another, their right to a third, and their feet across to a fourth. Girls do, I hate to tell you this, snore, despite the various myths about them, and Susan would regularly find herself awake at night, worrying about the war, her family - particularly the men in her family that were fighting - and kept up by the general noisiness of the room. She stared into the semi-darkness, and one night, a couple of weeks in, she caught a pair of eyes staring back at her, not from an adjacent bed, but from one three over to her left. Susan was lying down, but Helen, who's glance she caught, was sitting up, and thus visible over the two slumbering bodies in between. Helen beckoned Susan over to her, and Susan, knowing as she did so little about social cues, obeyed, and was soon sitting underneath Helen's covers, bodies forced to be closely touching, though both still partly off the sides of the bed. Helen's thigh felt very warm against Susan's through their thin night-clothes, and
Having sat down, Susan went to introduce herself, but was stopped by Helen's quick acting hand.
'Careful. Anyone could wake up,' she whispered, her mouth so close to Susan's ear that Susan felt Helen's lips touch her flesh.
With that Helen took her left hand out from under the covers, retrieved Susan's hand, that was dangling off the right side of the bed, and held it tightly, resting on Susan's stomach.
'Thank you. I don't really have many friends,' Susan said, this time with her mouth close as possible to Helen's ear. With her right hand, Helen cupped the back of Susan's head as she spoke, and held it there afterwards, before turning her own head towards her, such that their lips were pressed against each other. This was not a kiss, not really, just the touching of flesh against flesh. Helen removed her hand from the back of Susan's head, though as expected Susan did not move back one inch. Susan was happy to be guided, and though Helen's movements were not authoritative they did beg to be followed, and Susan was good at following.
With her left hand Helen then guided Susan's right up to their breasts, and then down under the covers, across to Helen's lap, and down her pajama shorts.
Susan had not, in living memory, felt or even seen between another's legs. The experience she'd had with her own sex was limited. She had inspected it briefly over the years, as the folds on her labia developed, and were then slowly covered by a mass of black hair, though that was all. She felt under her fore- and middle- fingers the very top of the girl's vagina, it was wet to the touch, though not as though she had used the bathroom, it was a thicker wetness. Somewhat instinctively, and for the purposes of investigation, she moved her fingers downwards, pushing as she did so, causing Helen to arch her back and let out the quietest of sighs.
'Sorry, am I hurting you?' Susan whispered, panicking a little.
Helen shook her head, unable to speak, and then smiled, as if to say 'go on'. Susan continued to rub her fingers up and down the woman's vagina, from the top of the clitoris to the perineum. After a minute or so of this, as she began the move back up, she hooked her fingers round so as to enter the vagina, and Helen quickly grabbed her hand and pulled her out.
'You can't. I'm sorry, but you can't. I haven't... and I'll bleed, and, just... I can't.'
'Ok. Want me to carry on as before.'
'Actually, do you think maybe...' - Helen stopped, and went a little red in the face.
'Please, go on,' Susan begged.
'It's just. On my own, what I do...'
'Please...'
