Maggie Sullivan - Christmas on Coronation Street - The perfect Christmas read

‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ she gasped. She was about to add that he should take care as they weren’t hers, but fortunately she stopped herself in time, realizing how stupid it would sound.

‘Well, we’ve got them out of the way,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘Now it’s back to the serious business.’ His beaming smile made him look anything but serious. But when she felt his hand between her legs again she realized what he had meant. Elsie had let some of the local boys have a grope and feel before, but for the first time in her life she was transported, carried on a rush of longing that flooded her whole body. Elsie wasn’t sure what to expect but when Stan pulled down his own trousers and she felt him enter her, she gasped in surprise as the pain and the pleasure entwined deliciously around each other inside her body.

Afterwards he took off his jacket and wrapped it round her as they sat together on the boulder. But then she remembered something.

‘Where’s me drawers?’ They looked around them, and saw that the wind had caught the flimsy strips of cotton and carried them as far as the nearest small tree, where they’d caught on one of the branches and now hung flapping precariously. Elsie could only laugh. And she could see that Stan was laughing too.

Once her knickers were reinstated, Stan offered her a cigarette. When she hesitated, he showed her how to hold it between her fingers and to breathe in gently. She remembered how Deanna Durbin had done it on the screen and did the same. She felt very grown-up and sophisticated. And so she should. For hadn’t she now got her first boyfriend. A special someone who bought her presents and made her feel like a real woman and not just young Elsie Grimshaw from Back Gas Street.

Elsie spent the next few days almost dancing, feeling as if her feet were not touching the ground. I have a proper boyfriend, she kept saying to herself over and over, and no one can take him away. She was fifteen years old and she had at last found the kind of boyfriend who bought her presents. The kind who would stick around for a very long time. Stan had proved that, hadn’t he, when he’d asked her to go out with him again the following week. And hadn’t they been seeing each other whenever they could ever since. He must like her. And she certainly liked him.

After that first time they went back to the moors on Sunday afternoons whenever the weather held. Sometimes they rode together over to the other side of Weatherfield, up and down some of the hillier streets, to help her improve her skills. Elsie was quite proud of herself. Not only was she able to ride more smoothly as time wore on, but it wasn’t long before she was able to negotiate the narrow, unevenly cobbled streets and alleyways on the outskirts of the town without falling off. And she was no longer feeling sore whenever she mounted the saddle. She loved the freedom of getting out into the country, the feel of the wind in her hair, and she was happy to take any opportunity to get away from the foul air and grimy streets of her home town. Stan taught her how to control the bike properly and how to use the brakes to stop instead of dragging her feet along the ground.

‘Keep doing that and you’ll soon have no shoes left at all,’ he warned. Elsie tucked her feet away behind the pedals when he said that, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that there wasn’t much left of her shoes as it was, without them having to act as bicycle brakes.

She was so grateful for all his teaching, she thought she should offer him something in return. So she showed him how she and her sister often sneaked into the cinema for free of an evening.

‘I’m surprised you and your mates don’t know about it already. It’s somewhere to go when the weather’s bad.’

‘I’ve never been mithered to go to the cinema,’ he said. ‘Me mam took me a few times when I was little. But she only wanted to see soppy love stories. You know the sort. Lots of mushy kissing.’

Elsie stared at him, her mouth open. He looked a little sheepish as he grinned. ‘It’s one thing doing it, quite another having to watch others at it. So I stopped going.’

But once Elsie had introduced him to the likes of Billy the Kid and Roy Rogers, he changed his mind. Randolph Scott became his particular hero and after that he was happy to go with her to see pretty much any action film.

Whilst it wasn’t easy for them to find time to go out together, they did see each other every night at the Butcher’s Arms. Whenever she could, Elsie waited for him so they could stroll home together. If it wasn’t too cold, they would sit out on the Field for a while, smoking one of Stan’s roll-ups between them. One evening they came to the waste ground to find it looking quite different. Two or three small mounds had appeared that definitely hadn’t been there before.

‘What the hell’s this?’ Elsie asked, poking at one of them. Although it was sticking up quite a way out of the ground, when they peered inside it was possible to see from the light of the nearby gas lamp that it had been dug out of the mud so that part of it sloped down underground. It was dark inside and smelt of freshly dug earth.

‘It looks like it could be used as some sort of shelter in case there is actually going to be a war. They say the Germans have bombs that they would drop on us, if they can. I’ve read about it in the papers,’ Stan said.

Elsie was sceptical. ‘You bloody men, that’s all you ever think about. Why can’t you get it into your thick heads that there’s not going to be a war?’

Stan shrugged. ‘I dunno. We can’t be sure, Else. There still might be one. Then we’d all need one of these.’

‘If there was a war, I can tell you I wouldn’t fancy being holed up in one of them for very long,’ Elsie said. ‘You can’t fit many people in there, for a start. You’d need one for each of us or a bloody great big one for everybody in the street.’

‘I suppose each family could have their own.’

‘Oh yes, and where the hell would they put it?’

‘In the back garden.’

‘And who the hell’s got one of them?’ Elsie wanted to know. She was thinking of Back Gas Street and wondering where all the residents would go. In the midden off the courtyard?

‘That’s true,’ Stan said. ‘Not many folk in these parts have got that much room.’

‘Never mind that. The blooming thing itself is scary. It would make me feel like one of those animals that you see in books. Don’t they live in little tunnels like this? What do you call them? Is it badgers or something?’

‘It wouldn’t matter what it made you feel like, let me tell you if the bloody Germans did start dropping bombs on us we’d be glad of having one, even if we had to crawl into it.’

‘Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if someone bombed our house,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s about the best thing that could happen to it. It’s no better than a mudhole right now.’

‘Yeah,’ Stan said with a rueful snigger, ‘I know what you mean. It’s true of a lot of places round here.’

Elsie smiled. ‘Can you imagine – the kids would be like pigs in clover if these things started popping up all over the show! They’d want to be playing hide and seek in them all the time.’

‘True, and you couldn’t blame them.’ Stan went to investigate the little tunnel more closely. He ducked into the entrance. ‘You can just about stand up in it.’ He chuckled. ‘I can think of better uses than kids’ games.’ He stepped further inside, but not before he had grabbed hold of Elsie’s hand to take her with him. Then he pulled the tin door over the entrance.

Elsie was stunned into silence for a moment as they were plunged into pitch darkness. Before she could say anything, Stan covered her mouth with his own. She giggled as she sensed his hand groping under her skirt. Feeling him hard against her, she immediately began fumbling with his buttons.