When we were at a caravan having a few days break, we were so pleased to be away from the neighbours & the local gossips. My mother took my sister & myself to this isolated place, a normal haunt of fishing people by a very calm river & very peaceful it was. On our first full day my sister & I stepped out to the river covered only by huge bath towels, cautiously we walked the riverside looking for a suitable place to enter the water, also checking to see that no fishermen were nearby. We weren't really bothered about being seen naked but being told off for disturbing the fish during some rural competition would be truly embarrassing. That holiday we completely 'chilled out' and began to think again rationally about a major move for our small family, my mother had arranged a possible move from our small village home to a larger house right in a big city. The draw for mother was that she would be returning to her birth town, going back to her roots. We had something to loose, the very roots that we had established in the small & cosy area of our birth home, the neighbours that were almost as close as family, school friends that had grown up with us to the impressionable age of 15.
We had some very interesting days during that weekend at the caravan, like when we decided to see how far we could walk along the river bed before it got either too deep (neither of us could swim) or the 'get out' places became impossible. We had got to a point where we were up to our waist and almost ready to get out. My sister started to get worried, in the near distance we could see a cyclist heading our way along the footpath, I said that perhaps if we stood still just behind an overhanging shrub we could escape being noticed by the biker. My sister (who was 13 and 'well developed') was really unsure, she said to me "You look like any other boy standing in water, I have boobs and he'll make a deal out of it if he see's me." Minutes later when the cyclist had almost passed us by he stopped! He got off his bike and sat by the river, he took off his shirt & trousers and wearing only quite large underpants and his socks!. When we thought he had dozed off, some ten minutes later, we carefully waded to the riverbank a few yards away. We knew we could walk the short distance back to the caravan ok. As we got near the man we walked slightly uphill away from the riverside, but that became our mistake. We had calmed ourselves and we chatted as we realized we had escaped the cyclist, then in a matter of seconds we were faced with two burly fully clad fishermen standing in our pathway. Intuitively we walked on saying nothing and not looking directly at these men. As our nude frames became the subject of their intimate gaze we quickened our steps past them. We just heard one man say, "By hell they must be f**king warm we no clothes on but that lass has some tasty flesh around her waist & arse!"
Mother never knew of that episode, or of other escapades we got involved in. We did eventually make a move to the city, but in our hearts we never left that village or the home that we had shared with our dear dad, but after his death the place felt lacking in something, something hearts rarely live without.
