Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

It was a disaster. Making love in a field is almost as difficult as doing it in a car, especially if it’s been raining the night before and you have a problem with pollen and what looked like soft grass turns out to be some kind of organic barbed wire. It’s probably just about possible if you’ve brought a groundsheet, a mattress, a blanket, some DDT and a scythe. Otherwise, forget it. Pretty soon Jack’s elbows and knees were in cowpats, Polly’s knickers were in shreds and something with two hundred legs and fifteen sets of teeth had crawled up his backside.

For the second time since they had begun their desperate groping Polly and Jack were forced to put their passion on hold. With Polly’s virginity still pretty much intact, Jack suggested a hotel.

“OK,” said Polly, getting up and putting what was left of her knickers back on. “But I haven’t got much money, so I’ll have to pay you back later for my half of the bill.”

Jack laughed, feeling a tremendous wave of affection sweep over him for this strangely intense girl. At that point the sun, which had disappeared into some clouds, came out again behind Polly and all of a sudden she was bathed and silhouetted with an almost luminous golden glow. She looked like some kind of pure and lovely teenangel and Jack’s conscience began to trouble him.

“Polly, how old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen,” said Polly defensively.

“Oh, Christ,” said Jack.

“But I’m a lot more mature than you, mate,” Polly added. “I know that it’s dangerous to play with guns.”

Seventeen. Jack had been hoping for at least nineteen, possibly twenty, although he knew that twenty would be the absolute limit.

“Polly. I’m thirty-two. I’m fifteen years older than you.”

Polly shrugged.

“Are you a virgin?” Jack asked.

“What if I am?”

It was worse than Jack had thought.

“I can’t do this to you,” he said.

Suddenly it was not the sunlight that made Polly glow but righteous indignation. Her cheeks reddened and her eyes took on a fiery glint.

“Listen, you patronizing bastard,” she said. “You aren’t doing anything to me. I do things for myself, all right? If I choose to go to bed with you – or in this case to a field with you – if I choose to use your body for my pleasure, then that’s my business. I am a woman and males do not have a say in my life. In fact, emotionally and politically I’m a lesbian. It just happens to be my misfortune that I fancy men, that’s all.”

Jack had never been overly receptive to radical feminism in the past, but he was warming to it. “OK,” he said.

They got back into the car and drove to a nearby hotel. It was a large, redbrick, eighties place, built on a roundabout in the middle of nowhere with toytown turrets and pastel-coloured Roman pillars in the foyer. Polly wanted to hate the place as a prime example of the reckless urbanization of the countryside, but she could not because in fact she found it all desperately romantic. This, considering that the hotel was really just a large carpark with a leisure complex, conference centre and executive miniature golf course attached, Jack found very touching.

There was some trouble at the check-in desk, not because of Polly’s age – she was, after all, perfectly legal and did not look particularly young. It was the T-shirt she was wearing that required careful negotiation, the objection being that it had a picture of a cruise missile on it that had been altered to make it resemble a penis. Polly explained that this was a comment on the masculine nature of war.

“I’m afraid that other guests might find it offensive,” the receptionist explained.

“Oh, and I suppose nuclear arsenals aren’t offensive?” Polly enquired.

“Nobody is attempting to bring a nuclear arsenal into the hotel,” said the receptionist. “Perhaps the gentleman could lend you his coat?”

Jack could not do this because he did not wish to advertise the uniform he was wearing underneath. Polly was clearly a loose cannon and a troublemaker and Jack did not want the manager phoning his colonel and complaining about the type of girl American officers brought to the hotel. In the end a compromise was reached. Polly reluctantly agreed to keep her arms folded across her chest while she remained in the public parts of the hotel, thus covering the offending political statement.

“I thought this country was supposed to have freedom of speech. I don’t think!” Polly muttered as Jack led her away.

And so began a relationship which very soon was to become an intense and all-consuming love affair. A love affair which, although in some ways desperately brief, would last a lifetime. Two people of different ages, different backgrounds and, most importantly, utterly different principles and values, were to be bound together from that ecstatic moment on.

Newton said that for every action there is an equal and an opposite reaction. Jack and Polly certainly lent substance to that observation.

A few days after Jack’s first encounter with Polly he wrote to Harry, angrily anticipating the sibling ridicule he knew he must endure.

“ Oh, yeah, ho, ho,” he wrote. “You think this somehow proves your piss-weak psychological theories, huh? You think that this girl is like Mom, am I right, Harry? Of course you do. You’re so transparent. Well, forget it. In fact before you forget it, shove it up your ass, then forget it. This girl is not a bit like Mom, or Pa, or you. She’s like me! Yeah, that’s right, like me, because she’s a fighter, the real thing, a two-fisted bruiser with poison for spit. OK, maybe what she fights for is a bunch of crap, in fact it is a bunch of crap. Quite frankly I hear less woolly thinking when sheep bleat. But so what? She’s got guts and she fights. She doesn’t sit on her ass smoking tealeaves like Mom. She doesn’t think that stuffing envelopes for the Democrats once every four years makes her an activist. What is more, Harry old pal, she hasn’t hidden away from life making dumb furniture which a factory could make better and at a tenth of the cost, like you, asshole! Polly is a soldier, she’s out there, punching hard and kicking ass for what she believes in. Besides which, she’s the sexiest thing I ever saw in my whole life, so screw you.”

When Harry read the letter he was pleased. Despite its abrasive tone it was by far the most romantic letter Jack had ever written. In fact it was the only romantic letter he had ever written. The only time Harry could remember his brother being even half as excited was when he had been promoted to captain at a younger age than any of his West Point contemporaries. Jack had never been enthusiastic about anything except sport and the army. He had certainly never talked about being in love and yet now his entire soul seemed to be singing with it. Of course Harry was happy for Jack, but in the midst of that happiness he was also uneasy. It seemed to Harry that his brother now loved two things – soldiering and this English girl. It did not take all of Harry’s intellectual powers to work out that these two things were not compatible. Harry could see that in a very short time the crunch would come and that Jack would have to decide where his loyalties lay.

It was Newtonian physics again; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Jack’s current happiness was surely storing up an equal quantity of unhappiness for someone.

“Polly? Polly! Are you there? Are you there, Polly?” The long-lost but still familiar voice breathed out of Polly’s answerphone. It was rich and low and seductive as it had always been.

“Are you there?” Jack said again into the telephone.