Sixty years ago I was serving an apprenticeship with a plumbing firm. The plumber I was working with was called Sid. We must have made a funny looking pair because I was over six feet tall and Sid was about five feet one.

At one time we got a job replacing old iron pipes with lead pipe. There were about two dozen rental houses that had been built on the cheap some time in the nineteen thirties and as part of the shoddy construction iron water pipes had been used. The water in that area was alkaline and the pipes had become clogged with the alkaline deposits until the water only dribbled out of the taps.

It was a pig of a job getting the old pipes out and the new ones in, and it was made more difficult because the residents were obviously living in the houses and they had to have water. So it was a sort on again off again process. It took us at least a week to re-pipe one house.

Sid was a crafty old bastard and was close to retirement. The boss never came near us, so I would arrive on the job for an eight o’clock start and Sid would come strolling in anywhere between half past eight to eight forty five. He was gone again by three thirty leaving me to work on until five.

I was instructed what I was to do after he left, and what I was to do before he arrived in the morning.

We’d completed five houses and then we came to the house occupied by Mrs. Mowbray. She was a buxom woman who looked to be in her forties and not bad looking in a hearty sort of way.

She made a bit of a nuisance of herself because she always wanted to chat with us while we were working. The subject of these chats was almost invariably her husband.

According to her Clifford (her husband) was a paragon. He was a sharp business man, a man nobody could ignore and I think she used the word charismatic, the meaning of which I didn’t know at the time.

I only saw him once, and that was when he came out of the house just as I arrived. He got into his old ten horsepower Ford and went gear grindingly up the road driving right on the crown of the road.

From the brief glimpse I got of him he looked like a little weasel of a man with one of those horrible pencil moustaches that were popular at that time.

One morning when I arrived at the house it was to find Mrs. Mowbray no longer hearty, in fact I could see she had been crying. She couldn’t contain herself and from the time of my arrival until Sid turned up, she regaled me with her woes.

In substance it came to this; she had discovered that her husband had been having affairs with a number of women, and had been doing so for a long time.

“I trusted the swine,” she wailed, “I believed all his stories about having to work late and weekend business meetings.” She went on and on in this vein until Sid arrived, and then she shut up. It was as if Sid wasn’t to be included as a hearer of her tale of woe. She picked up the theme after Sid left in the afternoon.

I wished that she would talk to Sid and not me because I didn’t know what to say. Not that my silence mattered much because Mrs. Mowbray clearly wanted to do all the talking, going round and round in verbal circles.

Like a lot of young guys in those days I was, by contemporary standards, hopelessly naive when it came to things sexual; I’d only got as far as learning to masturbate which in those days was still declared to be a sin, and deleterious to the health. Apart from that I only knew that every time I got near a girl — which wasn’t often — I got horny.

We were getting half way to finishing the work in Mrs. Mowbray’s house when she changed her tune a little.

“Have you got a girlfriend?” she asked.

“Not at the moment,” I said, trying to make it sound as if the absence of a girlfriend was merely a hiatus in my love life to be amended very soon. It was a bit like actors who say, “I’m resting,” when what they mean is that they are out of a job.

Mrs. Mowbray looked interested and something akin to the light of battle came into her eyes that had hitherto been tearful.

“Really,” she said, “a nice looking and well set up boy like you, and you haven’t got a girlfriend.”

It seemed that my wish to sound like the local great lover had failed.

Mrs. Mowbray paused for a moment, looking at me speculatively and then asked, “Have you ever been…er…been…er…intimate with a girl?”

It just goes to show how utterly naive I was because I said, “Do you mean have I talked with a girl?”

“No…no…” she said, “I mean have you ever had…er…sexual intercourse with a girl?”

I was floored for the moment, but finally managed to gasp, “Ner-no.”

“Mmm,” she said, “have you ever thought you’d like to?”

“Well….er…I suppose…”

“Of course you have,” she said, “young guys like you are thinking about it all the time.”

I don’t think I thought about it all the time, but I admit I thought about it quite often, especially at night when I masturbated in bed. I think that apart from the natural drive to reproduce the species, I was curious about what it would be like, and how you went about doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I knew where the penis had to go, but I had never seen the actual place, and I had no idea what it would feel like.

I was about to stammer something about doing it one day when Sid arrived, and much to my relief that stopped the conversation.

Mrs. Mowbray was unusually quiet for the rest of the time Sid was there, but she did find reasons to hang around me, and seemed to need to constantly squeeze past me to get at something, and found it necessary to touch me. In addition her ample bosom kept coming between us, and this tended to get me a bit horny.

Of all days Sid announced that he would be leaving early — well as I’ve said, he always left early, but this was to be a special early. He said that his sister was suffering from a severe attack of the tummy wobbles and he had to go and see her. He left at around two thirty.

I was lying on the bathroom floor trying to connect the pipes to the taps, and a bloody awful job it was because the space between the bath and the wall was very narrow, and cunning Sid had left me to do the job. I was swearing and barking my knuckles when Mrs. Mowbray came and stood over me.

I glanced up at her and then did a double take. She was wearing a skirt and I could see right up it; she had no knickers on and I got a clear view of heavy thighs and a dark bush of hair.

My penis reared up in all its magnificence and I was in no position to hide this embarrassment and it became obvious that Mrs. Mowbray could see it.

I was not so innocent as to not know what was afoot and I started to get up, but Mrs. Mowbray pushed me back saying, “You lay there son, I know what young guys like you need and you’ve been horny for me all day.”

With that she knelt beside me and undid the flies of my overalls and pulled my penis out. Then she stood again, hitched up her skirt and stood over me her legs straddling me. I got a brief glimpse of engorged wet lips, and then she was lowing herself on to me.

I felt my penis become engulfed in a hot wet sheath that seemed to suck me in, and then she started to jounce up and down on me with short, sharp movements.

For a first sexual experience I might have preferred Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor but Mrs. Mowbray was what I’d got, and since she was doing all the work I made no complaint.

It was an amazing experience, feeling that wet, gripping tunnel pound up and down on me, but the part of the experience that took me most by surprise was when she started to have her orgasm.

At the time I knew nothing about female orgasm, in fact I didn’t even know the word, and so when she started to moan, “Ah…ow…ow…ohwa…you horny young beast…oh…ah…I’ll fuck you…ow…ow…to death…” I got a big surprise.

I didn’t have time to be put off by these outcries because I was about to shoot my load into her. I let it go and she started to yell, “Let it go…deep…deeper…ah…oh…eeeowaaaa.”

For a few moments she hammered me ferociously, and then started to slow down, her cries fading away, and then she stopped.

“Did you like that?” she asked.

“Yes…yes…it was…was…fabulous,” I groaned.

“Tomorrow morning before that old guy arrives, “she said succinctly, “get here as early as you can.”

I gathered that this meant there was to be a repeat performance. I was at her place by seven forty five the next day.

As you will realise I was at the learning stage where sex was concerned — and plumbing too for that matter, but I leave that aside.

We had what Mrs. Mowbray called, “A quickie” since we had to finish before Sid arrived, and I had to get the jobs done that he instructed me to carry out.

Unfortunately Sid didn’t have to visit his tummy wobbly sister that day, so we were back to the three thirty departure. After Sid left I worked like mad to get the jobs he’d left me done, and then Mrs. Mowbray got down to the next stage of sexual apprenticeship.

There was instruction on the lead up to the full bloom of penis plus vagina, which included kissing (tongue probing), nipple sucking (big brown nipples), and not that day, but the next day, cunnilingus and fellatio, (I learned those words later but at the time I thought of it as cunt licking and penis sucking).

In short, Mrs. Mowbray gave me a crash course in sexual practice.

Unfortunately we had only three days left in Mrs. Mowbray’s house, but as we moved on to Mrs. Howland’s place I visited Mrs. Mowbray every day as soon as I could after Sid left. I must say that the promise of sexual pleasure is a great motivator for getting an employee to become extremely productive. I might even write a paper on this subject entitled, “The Sexual Motivation of Unproductive Employees.”

That’s really the story of my first sexual encounter. Of course we eventually finished re-plumbing all the s and we moved on to other work.

I’d like to say that I was special in Mrs. Mowbray’s life, but I don’t think that would be true. I believe she was trying to boost her morale after the revelation of her husband’s infidelities, and any half decent young guy that came her way would have done. She certainly didn’t beg me to come and see her after we left the area, so I must have done what she wanted.

Certainly Mrs. Mowbray boosted my morale, and after she broke my sexual drought I had considerably more confidence with women.

As my plumbing years rolled on I discovered that there are plenty of sex hungry women only to happy to deal with my sexual needs. That’s why I’ve always preferred domestic plumbing ahead of industrial plumbing; it takes you into the place where the frustrated housewife lurks.

I’ve always remembered Mrs. Mowbray and been grateful to her for my initiation. Its strange thing, but I’ve always thought of her as Mrs. Mowbray, and in fact I never knew her by any other name.