Ramblings of and Old Man – Part 10 “Oh Maggie, Maggie-Mai…”

As an old man, in my seventies, who has been given the nod by my doctors that my days are numbered, I spend a lot of time looking back at my life. Recalling what I have done and achieved. Regretting the things I should have done and did not do. I do not suppose for a moment this is unusual, but when it happens to you, it takes it out of you, initially at least.

I never planned on these thoughts going public. It was just a few scrappy notes for my own consumption. The ramblings of an old man, as it were. But one of the individuals concerned saw those notes. They thought that others may identify with some of the situations and suggested I tidy them up into a story and post them on your forum.

And I do not profess to be a literary genius; so, if my writing style and grammar offend you, you know where the ‘close’ button is!

Part 10 – “Oh, Maggie, Maggie-Mai…”

If you’ve been following my journey so far, you’ll be aware that at the end of the last part, I had just completed my three year tour of duty, with the UK armed forces, on the Mediterranean Island of Cyprus. During the second half of that tour, I’d been in a committed relationship, or so I thought, with Julie, a ‘Lumpy Jumper’, who served with the same signals intelligence unit as me. Read Part nine if you want the full backstory.

A couple of months before I was due to return to the UK, to attend my advanced engineering course, I had proposed marriage to Julie, who was only halfway through her own deployment at that point. Though, as a married couple, she would be able to short tour and we could apply for married quarters together. However, she turned me down with a ‘not yet’; she still had things she wanted to achieve herself first, but gave me a strong indication that in time, we would marry.

So it was, that in the September of 1977, after a few weeks of overseas disembarkation leave, I found myself back at the training school, alone, and trying to conduct a ‘long distance’ relationship, effectively by post. Being professional signallers, we did manage to ‘steal’ the occasional voice call, over the radio networks; frowned upon, but generally ignored so long as you didn’t kick the arse out of it. These links were heavily monitored for security reasons though, so the conversations had to be very ‘matter-of-fact‘ and definitely not sexual in any way.

From almost the day we met, Julie and I had had a wonderful sex life. As we lived in separate single accommodation blocks (no mixed sex dorms in those days), it was not always easy to find a place to fuck. But we managed, and if anything, the clandestine nature of our couplings, made it even more fulfilling, when they did happen. I was missing that desperately already.

Julie was an absolute stunner, way above my league for sure! A blonde bombshell, with an incredible body, which she knew how to use to give me intense pleasure, whilst also wringing the maximum out of me for her own sexual satisfaction. Her appetite for all forms of sex, was greater even than mine. So it was probably inevitable that with 2000 miles between us, she would eventually need to seek gratification closer to her home, and not just as a solo artist.

The crunch came in the November. I’d written asking Julie to let me know her shift schedule over the Christmas and New Year period. I was planning to fly out to see her during my block leave, and wanted to arrange my stay to match as much of her time off as possible. When the reply came back, instead of her shifts, it gave me a list of ‘time slots’ when I could phone her. ‘We need to talk’ her letter stated. A proper talk where we could discuss things openly, and not worry about being eavesdropped by the monitors. It was blatantly obvious what the ‘talk’ was going to be about, so I booked a call for the first opportunity (no direct dial available to her at that time), wanting to get this over with ASAP.

When the time slot arrived, there was a bit of a delay on that international link, but after about an hour’s waiting anxiously, I was connected to Julie. Struggling a bit with the time lag on the line (satellite delay), we exchanged pleasantries, then I asked her directly what she wanted to talk about, as if I didn’t know. She didn’t beat about the bush either, and came straight out with it. She was seeing someone else; well colour me shocked!

I asked who it was. She wouldn’t tell me, but did admit it was another member of her ( my previous) unit, one of my former colleagues. I had my suspicions who it was, someone I knew had always lusted after her, and threw a name out, but she would neither confirm nor deny; that was as good as an admission to me.

It was her that initiated things, she told me. She had been lonely and horny and “…I just let it happen.” I was angry at the betrayal, by someone who, if I was correct, I had thought a friend. In retrospect though, I could not really blame him. By any measure, Julie was a goddess. And when a goddess comes on to you and wants to fuck you, no sane man, or woman, is going to turn her down. I certainly didn’t when it was my turn.

I tried, quite half heartedly, to convince her we could still rescue our relationship. I’d fly out to Cyprus over Christmas as planned. I still loved her, and wanted to try and sort things out. She was not having it though. She asked if I seriously thought, even if we did get back together for a week or so, we could hold out for over a year until she finished her deployment, and then there was no guarantee we would be colocated again. We would be if she married me, I told her, and stated my proposal stood.

“I’m not going to marry you Titus.”

No ‘not yet’ like before. This time it was a definite no, wasn’t it? I queried that is what she meant, which she confirmed.

She reiterated what she had told me previously, that she still had so much she wanted to achieve in her life. That although she had genuinely thought before I could be a part of that, our separation had proved that was not going to work. She couldn’t live like a nun, waiting for my letters to arrive. Apart from anything else, she loved sex too much for that, which is why she’d ‘cheated on me’ already, after just a couple of months apart, and would undoubtedly do so again, even if we briefly met up once more and managed to patch things up.

That was that then. She’d made up her mind that we were over and nothing more I could say was going to change that, so I didn’t try. It would have been pointless. I wanted to be furious with her. I wanted to scream and shout, and call her all the bitches under the sun for leading me to believe we had a future, when it was doubtful she had ever actually thought that.

But I couldn’t. If I was one hundred percent honest with myself, I’d known it was over the moment she first declined my proposal. From that moment on, we were simply going through the motions for sexual gratification. And someone else was fulfilling that need for her now. And good luck to him, she was awesome in bed.

We wound up the phone call, which had already cost me a King’s ransom. We could at least agree we’d both had a blast during our eighteen months together, and did not regret a moment of it. We even managed to wish each other the best for the future and, I at least, meant it. With that, I ended the call, and the era of Julie.

To try and bury my hurt, I threw myself into my studies, and even though I do say so myself, was achieving outstanding results in the tests and projects I completed. That part of my life was going well. There was one spoiler to bring things down though. When I’d arrived at the school back in September, there was a huge number of trainees going through. All of the ‘more comfortable’ accommodation blocks were fully occupied. To house us, several old style barrack blocks, that had been shut up for years, had been reopened. The bed areas were hideous 24-man dormitory rooms and the communal facilities (toilets, ablutions, baths and showers) were seriously outdated and in a poor state of repair.

I had just spent three years overseas in living conditions that, during my tour, only just improved from utterly horrendous, to totally crap. I was really pissed off that I was in that situation again, as were others. It was no surprise then when many of us jumped at the opportunity to ‘live out’. We could find our own digs off base, where we had to be self-sufficient. In return our food and accommodation charges would be refunded, (yes, contrary to popular belief, we didn’t live rent free or eat free, we had to pay for it, like everybody else!) I got together with three other members of my intake, and we found a two bedroom flat, in the local town to rent between us. It was nice to have virtually total freedom from the restrictions of barrack room living. Of course, I still had flatmates to consider.

When it came, I was really glad of the two weeks block leave we had at Christmas. I needed it to regroup and recharge. I spent that leave at my parents home, which pleased them immensely, as I had not done so for several years. It also gave me the chance to look up a few old friends from my teenage years. Sadly Gillian, who had taken my virginity, and I hers, the last time I’d spent Christmas ‘at home’, was now away at University, so any hopes I had of a repeat performance were dashed.

When we returned to school in the new year, I was chosen to lead a major project, to be conducted at another military establishment. The idea was that we would spend a couple of weeks conducting an audit of engineering practices at the location we were allocated, then develop a plan to make improvements. It was a training exercise, so they did not have to accept our findings, but in the past many good ideas had in fact been adopted.

To my total surprise, when the venue was revealed to me, it turned out to be on an RAF base in North Wales, Anglesey to be precise, where we would be auditing one of the resident aircraft squadrons. Aircraft engineering was totally alien to us, but that was largely the point; to take us out of our comfort zone, as well as giving a fresh perspective to suggest alternative possibilities to the hosts.

After spending a couple of weeks researching and developing our plan of attack with my team, we were ready to head off to Wales.