Seeing you there washing the dishes from last night, I am instantly taken back eighteen years in time to when the bright morning sunshine made a fiery halo of fly-away auburn hair and highlighted the sumptuous movements of an unfettered body beneath a sheer nightdress. Back then the nightdress was made of white silk and the sun shone through the fine material, providing shadowy glimpses of subtly curved generous breasts and narrow waist, and the enticing, narrow inverted vee of the gap between shapely thighs. This morning the nightwear is brightly coloured shortie-pyjamas. Less revealing to be sure, but still not completely disguising the promised delights within.
It is happening again. The same massive contraction and thudding in my chest, the same wildly overwhelming, surge of desire in my groin and in my heart. Loosening the waist tie of my terry bathrobe I move towards you...
Melissa’s mother and younger brother were killed in a car smash when Melissa was only seven years old. My young wife of eight years and I had been in this country for just six months, having burned all our bridges in the Old Country and invested every cent we had and more in our small vineyard. We were going to make beautiful wines and many more beautiful babies. Then, when taking the children to school in our decrepit old Land Rover, a sharp bend and wet road conspired with a lance of low cast winter sunlight and a milk tanker emerging from a farm driveway to destroy two thirds of my happiness in a bloody instant. Melissa survived with minor scratches and bruises. My childhood sweetheart and my precious son died at the scene. I too nearly died, of grief, when the solemn faced young police constable knocked gently at our door with the terrible news.
That left just Melissa and me, alone in this hard new, unfamiliar land. Everybody meaningful back in the Old Country was gone, scattered, heartbroken by the savage internecine warfare that had destroyed our nation. There was no going back. In any case, the bank would swallow up all of my equity in interest due if I sold the property now. We had to stay, to rebuild our lives here. Melissa and the vines became my sole reasons for living.
In spite of the trauma of her mother’s and brother’s deaths, Melissa grew up to be a warm and loving, bubbly cheerful little girl, although she still had her quiet moments. It was particularly then that we sat together, cuddling and comforting each other - just Melissa and I against the rest of the world.
Soon after her eleventh birthday we had to face up to her budding womanhood, the purchase of her first bra, the painful, frightening onset of her periods, the distress of the puppy-fat that, in her eyes, made her look "gross", the awakening interest of and in boys. It was then that Melissa missed her mother most for the advice and guidance she would have given her. But we managed, tentatively overcoming our first natural reticence at discussing intimate details, but with growing trust and frankness, talking the issues through and arriving at self-knowledge and workable solutions. No subject was taboo, not even masturbation.
As a family, right from the start, my wife and I had always been casual about nudity around the children and this did not change when she was taken from us. Therefore, nakedness was natural between Melissa and I, and she still did not cover up, even when her body changed from flat-chested juvenile into curvaceous young woman. There were times my loins stirred when I unexpectedly came upon her fresh, youthful beauty, but she just looked with interest at my thickening appendage and made no comment. Eventually, we quite proudly felt that Melissa’s confident familiarity with the human body and knowledge about her own wants and needs, and the drives of a future partner, far exceeded anything her sex education class at school could tell her. All without her being prematurely violated like so many of her friends who were the same age as she was.
Then, at fourteen, came her first real dates with boys and with them intense practical questions such as:
"What should I do when Peter Highsmith tries to put his hand under my top and touch my breasts while we’re kissing?"
"How can I stop Wally Turner from undoing my jeans and trying to put his hand down between my legs without turning him off me?"
"Last night I let Wally touch me with his fingers... well I have been going out with him for two months now. His last girlfriend let him do it on their third date. Now he says he says he wants to kiss me down there. Should I let him? Did you do that with Mummy? What’s it like?"
"Dean Parker put my hand on his penis and made me rub him through his pants and he came and made his pants all wet and sticky. It was so funny; he couldn’t go home until they’d dried out! But, what should I do if he gets it out next time? What if he tries to make me ... you know, go down on him?"
Back in the Old Country, family honour would ensure that these three young men got severely damaged, if not killed. But we were now part of a liberal society where such things were an accepted fact of life. So we, I, had to bow to these different rules and we learned together how to cope with the problems they threw up. As a precaution I took Melissa to the doctor and put her on The Pill.
Melissa threw away her virginity at the age of fifteen-and-a-half. For six long months we had suffered through her desperate, unrequited infatuation with Jurgen, the young, tall, handsomely Aryan exchange maths teacher from Germany, who in earlier times would have been an officer candidate for Hitler’s Waffen SS. Then, when the icon of her sexual dreams for half a year devastated her world by getting caught in a compromising situation with three naked young boys, my daughter got into the back seat of his old Falcon with Dean Parker and opened her legs to him.
Dean delivered Melissa to our front gate, with the blood from her shattered hymen still wet on her thighs, and took off at high speed. With no anger in my being, or sexual stimulation at the sight of her lithe teenage woman’s body, I ran a bath and helped my daughter to strip naked. In her robe after bathing, Melissa sat in my lap and I comforted her in my arms while she wept and told me of her pain, her fear, and her feelings of humiliation and self-disgust. Dean had taken her swiftly and brutally, without readying her properly or comforting her afterwards. And when, fifteen minutes later she refused to ‘do it again’ when he was erect once more, he had got mad with her and dumped her off at home. We discussed it fully and felt no rage. It was not entirely Dean’s fault. He was just an ignorant, inexperienced boy who knew no better. And only one of the vast majority who would have done exactly the same.
My daughter never "slept around" but she did try two more sexual relationships in the two years following that awful night – neither of them very successful. Dean Parker’s impatient assault had put up a barrier in Melissa’s psyche that prevented her from achieving sexual fulfilment through intercourse. We talked it over and in the process asked ourselves how many young women there were "out there" with the same dilemma. I offered to pay for counselling, but Melissa refused saying that the vineyard was more important right then than her "temporary hang-up".
