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Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
I couldn’t set pins with my arm in a cast, and I was surprised by how much I missed it, at least for the teachers’ league. There was a kind of camaraderie among the teachers, in which no one made anything of the wide range in their bowling skills. And I felt as if I were on the outer parts of their circle, kind of a pet pinsetter. I was Ewart’s boy, of course, and this bowling business was not the only occasion on which I got to see the lives of the school teachers from inside. They helped build each other’s houses, for example, and when they were working on our place, I shovelled sand and gravel and cement into the cement mixer along with Bob Fleming, the ambidextrous mathematics teacher. We knew that he was ambidextrous, because he had a habit of spinning from the blackboard and firing pieces of chalk at noisemakers, and you never knew which way he was going to come round.
I didn’t miss my regular league pin setting so much. I definitely did not miss being within firing range of Ritchie Schneider’s cannon ball. But I even went down and watched the teachers bowling, though I was not going to go home with my dollar and a half. I had to watch the art teacher and Miss Verge from behind the seats, so there was no question of looking up skirts. I made sure not to make eye contact with Miss Verge, and paid closer attention to the art teacher. During every frame her shirt would come
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untucked at the waist, and I could see skin. Once or twice I saw the elastic of her underpants. But that was it—I had no fantasies about getting anywhere with the art teacher. But before coming to the bowling alley I had put some of my sister’s white cream stuff on my pimples.
I can’t really remember how well-focused my fantasies were. What I imagined doing is not clear. I would be sort of a virgin for another five years, so I had no help from memory. In those days there was no hardcore pornography, and you never saw a bare tit in a movie. It wasn’t till 1960 that you thought you might have got a half-second glimpse of Capucine’s nipple in North to Alaska. Till then you had to be satisfied with Jean Simmons in a bonnet and lace collar.
I did like certain items of clothing on the girls in my class. Maybe I wasn’t aware of them as fetish material. Maybe I just thought that they were, as we would say at the time, neat. White bobbie sox and saddle oxfords would come first. They were the neatest and cutest, if I might use a girl’s word, items of footwear in history, and footwear has a great history. I didn’t care what the color was that went with the white, but I suppose that if I had my choice, my druthers, as we said back then, I would go for the dark blue. The hot colour for shoes those few years was oxblood. Even I had a pair of oxblood shoes, with dorsal fins on the toes. But saddle oxfords are nothing without white bobbie sox. The sox should be folded down once, and they should be white as can be. Sometimes you would see pink ones, or lace trim or even a little cotton bauble, but these were distractions that showed a failure of imagination.
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