London, the city of SEX! - Sex Stories

London, the city of SEX!

Tom was just 19 when he moved to London. That was back in the early 1970s. On the basis of a couple of years' experience with a jobbing printer in High Wycombe, he had somehow managed to talk his way into being taken on as a trainee by an advertising agency. Initially, he was going to be working as a sort of dogsbody in the production department, but his aim was to become a writer. 'London?' His mother was not convinced that moving to The Big Smoke (as she called it) was such a good idea. 'Where will you live?' 'I talked to Arnold.' (Arnold was Tom's older cousin. He had been living in London for three years.) 'He's going to New York for six months, and he said he'll see if his landlady will let me take over his flat while he's away.' Tom's mother continued to frown. 'I thought that Arnold lived in a rather ... well ... rough part of London,' she said. 'Notting Hill? No, not rough. A bit bohemian perhaps. But it's on the Central Line. It'll be good. Perfect, in fact.' The flat was on Portobello Road, above a bakery run by a French woman named Michele. At street level there was the shop: La Boulangerie du Nord - well, north of France anyway. The main bakery, with the three big ovens, was in the basement. Michele herself lived in a flat on the first floor and, above that, there was a small one-bedroom flat that was to become Tom's new home for six months. Tom moved in on the day after Arnold had moved out. 'I 'ope that you are a bit tidier than your cousin,' Michele said. Tom ...

... could see what she meant. The place was a mess. Every flat surface in the small living room was strewn with old newspapers and magazines. The kitchen sink was full of unwashed dishes. There were towels lying on the floor in the tiny bathroom. And the bedroom looked more like a bombsite that a bedroom. Michele started pulling the grubby-looking sheets off the bed. 'There's a service laundry just down the road,' she said. 'Tell Martha that you need it all back by the end of the day, and ask her to put it on my account. Now I need to get back to La Boulangerie.' Tom gathered up the bed linen, the towels, and some filthy rags that he assumed had once been tea towels, and headed off to the laundry where he was greeted by a tall West Indian woman. 'Hello. Are you Martha?' Tom asked. The woman eyed him up and down. 'Ah could be,' she said. 'Depends on jus' who wants to know.' 'Michele said that I should ask if you could do these by the end of the day and put it on her account.' The woman raised one eyebrow and tilted her head to one side. 'French Michele?' Tom nodded. 'OK. Come back just before six. And don't be late. I don't wanna be hangin' 'bout. I got things to do. Yeah?' Back at the flat, Tom filled the kitchen sink with hot water and left the dirty dishes to soak. Then he started tidying up the living room, putting the old newspapers into one pile and the magazines into another. The newspapers could be thrown away immediately; some of the magazines might be worth a quick scan - ...