DIARY OF A TEENAGE MILKMAN

When I was 12 I got a job delivering milk to households in an area not too far from my home in the small west coast town that I grew up in. I’d done this job for four years, delivering the milk in plastic sachets six mornings a week, on one evening a week I would go round all the houses on my route and collect the money for the cost of the milk plus delivery. Being the mid-seventies the pay wasn’t that great but there was always the chance of a few tips from customers when collecting the money, that plus the annual xmas tips added up and I was pretty well off for a boy of my age. I also had a little side business, the owner of the dairy always left more pint sachets than I needed every morning, to make allowance for spillages and the odd morning I would be stopped by a householder who wanted their milk delivered. I’d add them to my route, delivering theirs from the extra pints I was provided with and pocketing the cash they’d pay me when I went to collect, it added up if you had half a dozen such customers, each was only £3 – 4.00 a week but since I was only paid £6.00 by my boss it was worth the risk.
Like every teenage boy I had fantasies about scantily clad ladies opening their door early in the morning just as I was delivering their milk, no such luck, the best I’d get would be the man of the house in his vest and work jeans complaining that I was late and should have delivered his milk earlier so he could have his breakfast before leaving for work, how they thought a 14 yr. old could be bothered to get up at 6am so they could have their cereal before catching the bus to their workplace at 7am was beyond me ? All my classmates were still in bed at 8am, catching the 8.30am bus to school, I thought getting up at 7am was early enough.
I’d spent the several years on my route without seeing so much as a bit of thigh and only had a month or two left on the job as the summer and my 16th birthday approached, I had considered keeping the job if I was going back to school after the summer but circumstances dictated that I never returned to school and left there and the job to enter the workf***e before the summer ended. It was the week before my 16th birthday or  “LEGAL ” as we used to say, using all our male bravado when referring to a girl we found particularly attractive, boasts about how we would  “shag the arse off her ” once she was legal, empty boasts every one, but you had to at least play the part, besides, I wasn’t interested in girls my age, hard to believe I thought them immature when it was quite the reverse, we were the immature ones, sexually, intellectually, everyway ! But they held no fascination for me, the ones with big girl tits were just that, big girls, fat, I was barely 9st soaking wet myself. Others who were physically developed were not the most pleasing on the eye;  “growlers ” was one endearing term we used. No, I was more attracted to older women and by older I didn’t mean in their twenties or thirties, I was attracted to ladies in their forties and older, though to be honest I would have been grateful for any age  “from nae hair to grey hair ” as we used to say, and we were not referring to their heads. There was a few in particular on my route that had caught my eye over the years, I rarely saw them early in the morning but they were the one who would always answer the door and pay their weekly bill when I went to their door, but as this was always in the early evening they were always fully dressed. It didn’t stop me ogling their backside as they retreated back into the house to get their purse after answering my knock on the door, or trying to get a look at their tits as they rummaged in the purse for the correct money.
Chitchat was almost always kept to a minimum during such transactions, I was only the milk boy, grownup weren’t prone to becoming involved in casual conversation with someone my age and besides their favourite program was probably on TV or they were in the middle of their evening meal when I arrived on the doorstep. There was however a group of houses inhabited by families which for one reason or another always seemed to have male  “visitors “. There was an airf***e base a few miles out of town and at this time it was also used by American airf***e and Navy Seals, they used the surrounding area for training, it was always rumoured that the first stealth fighters had used the base due to our remote location, geographical surroundings and long runway. From time to time one or more of the doors I knocked in this stretch of homes would be answered by a young American serviceman, I always looked forward to such occasions as they were great tippers, from time to time the tip would vastly exceed the bill for the milk, it was not unusual to be handed a ten pound note for a four pound bill and be told to keep the change.
It was rumoured that at least two of the females of these houses were little more than prostitutes, not strictly true, yes they had sex with the Americans and yes the Americans were very generous to them but it wasn’t a cash for sex transaction for these ladies. There was a hard-core locally of a few dozen, were girlfriends of these guys, the relationships only lasted as long as they were stationed at the base but over the years dozens did marry and move to the states, more than a few are still married to this day some thirty years or more later, some married, left, divorced, came home, married again, then repeated the process, a few stayed stateside, a few, now in their fifties have returned home over the years after at least two failed marriages to servicemen. The girlfriends in question on my route did not interest me, for a start they were in their early twenties, some even older and secondly and more importantly they were not particularly attractive, some downright plain. No, it was the mothers who caught my eye.