Lovely story on Fictionmania (non Explicit)

[HeatherlovesPVC]

I found this on Fictionmania, hope Pollymeric doesn't mind that I cut and pasted it here. There is a lovely photo with it but it didn't copy here, if you want to read the original with picture you can find it on Fictionmania (under stories with images)

Love Heather XXX



A Cloakroom Revelation
By Pollymeric


A gentle tale of childhood discovery and adult encounter

The Cloakroom

It was a Tuesday in November when Edwin Marsh was sent out of class for the third time that term.

"Edwin." Miss Richards' voice was patient but firm, the kind of firmness that carried no real anger in it. "You and your conversation can wait outside until you learn that mathematics does not pause for gossip."

Karen giggled quietly into her exercise book. Edwin scraped his chair back, cheeks burning, and shuffled out into the cloakroom.

The door clicked shut behind him and the muffled sounds of the classroom settled into background noise , Miss Richards' voice, the scratch of chalk, the occasional cough. Out here it was dim and quiet, the November light coming grey and thin through the small window above the coat pegs.

Edwin stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, scuffing his shoe against the tiled floor. The cloakroom smelled of damp wool and rubber that particular indoor smell that school buildings always carry in autumn. Rows of coats hung along both walls, the boys' side and the girls' side, separated by an invisible but absolute border that everyone understood without being told.

He wasn't sure what made him look at the girls' side. Boredom, perhaps. Or the draught that moved through the cloakroom and shifted the hanging coats very slightly, as though they were breathing.

One coat caught his eye immediately. It was a mackintosh , tartan, bold greens and blues with a smooth red lining that caught what little light there was. It was Karen's. He recognised it because she wore it every day and had once complained loudly that her mother had chosen it without asking her.

Edwin stood looking at it for a long moment. Then, with a glance at the closed classroom door, he lifted it carefully from its peg.

It was lighter than he expected. He slipped it on over his school jumper and it settled around him , a little large, the sleeves coming down over his hands, the hem brushing his calves. He stood very still.

It had that peculiar, not quite nice but not repugnant , smell typical of a proper mackintosh. The lining was cool and smooth against his arms. He turned up the collar experimentally then the hood which slid smoothly over his hair and caressed his cheeks, he felt cocooned and safe.

He couldn't have explained what he felt, standing there. It wasn't something he had words for at ten years old. It was simply that wearing it felt right, in some quiet and private way that had nothing to do with Karen or school or any of the ordinary things of his day.

He wore it for perhaps four or five minutes. Then fear came, the practical fear of a ten-year-old boy to be found wearing a girl's coat and he took it off carefully, smoothed it, and hung it back exactly as he had found it.

He was back in his own corner, hands in pockets again, by the time the classroom door opened.

Miss Richards

At three-thirty the other children poured out in the usual rush of bags and voices and cold air from the main door. Edwin was gathering his things when Miss Richards spoke.

"Edwin. Would you stay behind a moment, please."

It wasn't a question. Karen shot him a sympathetic look as she filed past, tartan mac over her arm. He sat back down in his chair and waited while the room emptied and went quiet.

Miss Richards was not who people meant when they said spinster unkindly. She was somewhere in her mid-fifties, with grey-brown hair pinned neatly and reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck. Her face was kind , genuinely, consistently kind, the sort of kindness that isn't performance but simply character. She had taught at Morville Primary for thirty-one years and there was not a former pupil in the village who did not remember her warmly.

She pulled a chair from the neighbouring desk and sat down facing Edwin, which was unusual. Teachers usually stayed on their feet or behind their desks. Sitting down like this made her seem less like a teacher and more like a person.

"I want to ask you something," she said, "and I want you to know before I do that you are not in any trouble. Whatever you say to me stays in this room. Do you understand?"

Edwin nodded cautiously.

"I saw you," she said simply. "In the cloakroom, this afternoon. I came out to check on you and the door was ajar."

The blood left Edwin's face entirely. He stared at his desk.

"I'm not angry," she said. "I'm curious. Can you tell me why you did it?"

A long silence. Edwin picked at the edge of his exercise book.

"I don't know," he said finally, which was both true and not true, he didn't have words for it, which is different from not knowing.

"Did it feel nice?"

He looked up, surprised by the directness of the question. Then he nodded, very slightly.

"There's nothing wrong with that," Miss Richards said. "I want to be clear about that first. There is nothing wrong with you." She paused. "Can I ask you something else? Would you ever like to try properly, I mean, girls' clothes. Not furtively in a cloakroom .Do you remember a few weeks ago I asked the class if there were any girls who wished they were boys and several raised their hands including your friend Karen. Then to maintain balance I asked if there were any boys who wished they were girls,. Of course none raised their hands but I noticed you blushed bright red"

Edwin looked at her for a long moment. "It would be embarrassing," he said.

"Only if someone unkind saw. And I am not unkind."

She let that sit for a moment, and then she said something that surprised him again.

"Today is my last day, Edwin. I'm retiring. After thirty-one years I think the time has come." She smiled, and it was a real smile, slightly rueful. "I also know, and I hope you'll forgive me knowing , that your situation with the Hendersons is likely to change soon. I understand they're expecting a baby."

Edwin said nothing. This was true and he had been trying not to think about it, because thinking about it led back to the orphanage and the orphanage was a place he tried very hard not to think about at all.

"I have a farmhouse," Miss Richards said. "It's too large for one person and I have been thinking for some time that I would like to foster a child. I have already made enquiries." She looked at him steadily. "I am asking if you would like to come and live with me. And I am telling you that in my house, you may work out who you are without anyone making you feel ashamed of it."

Edwin looked at her for a long time. He was ten years old and he had learned, in ten years, to be careful about hope. But Miss Richards had kind eyes and had never once been cruel to him or to anyone he had seen, and the farmhouse sounded like the opposite of the orphanage in every way he could imagine.

"Yes please," he said.

The Farmhouse

The paperwork took six weeks, during which Edwin moved back to the orphanage, counted days, and received two letters from Miss Richards , Dorothy Richards, he learned, though he continued to think of her as Miss Richards for a long time, and she never minded.

When he finally arrived at Hawthorn Farm on a Saturday in January with one bag of belongings, she met him at the door in a wax jacket and wellington boots and showed him around with the matter-of-fact warmth of someone who had already decided this would work.

His room was at the top of the stairs, with a sloping ceiling and a view of the fields. It had a bookshelf already half-full of books she had chosen carefully, which told him something about how much thought she had given to all of this.

They settled into a routine that was steady and uncomplicated. She cooked well and taught him to. She kept chickens and a small vegetable garden and expected him to help with both, which he found he didn't mind. She drove him to school in her old Land Rover and was there when school finished. She asked about his days and listened to the answers.

The other thing happened gradually, and on his terms entirely.

There was a chest in the spare room that she showed him one afternoon about a month after he arrived, with no ceremony. "These were mine," she said simply. "From when I was younger. Some might fit you. Some won't. You're welcome to try anything, and equally welcome to never open it again."

He went back to the spare room that evening on his own.

The first thing he tried was a simple dress, dark green, which was too big but which he stood in for a while in front of the mirror with a feeling that was the same feeling as the cloakroom, but larger. Warmer. Less frightened.

Over the following months, with Dorothy's quiet and entirely unsentimental support, Edwin began to understand something about himself that had been there all along, waiting for the right conditions to become clear. Dorothy sourced appropriate clothes in his size. She used the name he chose without being asked twice.

Jennifer.

"It suits you," Dorothy said, when he told her. She was darning something by the fire, reading glasses on her nose. She looked up and smiled. "It does."

Jennifer grew up home tutored at Hawthorn Farm .With the help of certain herbs Dorothy knew about they were able to keep Edwin at bay until conventional medicine could intervene She was a bright student and a kind one, and Dorothy was proud of her in the particular understated way of someone who has never needed to be too demonstrative. They were family , a small and unconventional one, but loving and nurturing.

Dorothy Richards lived to be present at Jennifer's university graduation, wearing a new coat for the occasion. Jennifer changed her surname to Richards to honour her.

The Coffee Bar

Jennifer Richards was thirty-five, and the café on Clement Street was the kind she liked , independent, slightly worn around the edges, with good coffee and tables that weren't crammed together too tightly. She had a window seat, her stylish red rubber lined mackintosh was unbuttoned to reveal a smart cream blouse and matching linen trousers. Her laptop was open, an Americano at her elbow, and she was perfectly content.

The Saturday lunchtime rush had filled the place up without her noticing. She became aware of someone standing beside her table , a woman, roughly her own age, in a shiny black raincoat , slightly military but shaped for a woman . She was carrying a coffee and a look of mild hopefulness.

"I'm so sorry to ask," the woman said, "but everywhere else is taken. Would you mind terribly?"

"Not at all," Jennifer said, and moved her bag from the opposite chair.

The woman sat down with a grateful smile. She had dark hair cut short, bright eyes, and the easy manner of someone comfortable with strangers. She pulled off the raincoat and draped it over the back of her chair with the practised ease of someone who wears them a lot.

They existed in comfortable silence for a while , each with their own coffee, their own thoughts. Then the woman glanced up and said, with a slight frown of the kind that means recognition rather than displeasure:

"I'm sorry, this is going to sound strange but you do look familiar , have we met?"

Jennifer smiled. "I have one of those faces, apparently."

"No, I mean, did you perhaps go to Morville Primary? In, oh, it would have been the nineties."

Jennifer looked at her. Something moved, carefully, behind her eyes.

"I did go to Morville Primary," she said. "Though I left fairly young. We moved."

"I knew it." The woman shook her head slightly, smiling. "I'm terrible with faces usually, but there's something" She put out her hand. "Karen. Karen Barlow then and now, though I've been Karen Elliot in between ."

Jennifer shook it.

"Jennifer," she said. "Jennifer Richards."

They talked for two hours. It turned out they had a remarkable amount in common, both worked in design, both had complicated relationships with their families of origin, both had strong opinions about coffee , politics and rainwear, the latter of which became its own long and animated conversation when Karen discovered that Jennifer too had a coat collection that had got somewhat out of hand.

"My mum thinks it's an affliction," Karen said cheerfully. "She's very tolerant. I tell her it started young, it was her fault , there was this tartan mack she made me have when I was about nine or ten and I was furious about it at the time, but honestly I think it planted a seed."

Jennifer went very still for just a moment.

"Tartan," she said. "With a red lining?"

Karen stared at her. "Yes. How on earth?"

Jennifer put her coffee cup down. She had carried this particular piece of her history quietly for twenty-five years, not as a secret exactly , Dorothy had always encouraged her to feel no shame about it , but as something she'd never expected to have a conversation about in a café on a Saturday afternoon.

"Karen," she said carefully. "Do you remember Edwin Marsh?"

Karen's expression moved through several stages rapidly. Confusion first, then a dawning, and then something wide open and wondering.

"Edwin," she said. "My desk mate. He used to get sent out of class for talking to me, I really liked him and I always thought he and I would be a couple." She stopped. She looked at Jennifer with an attention that was new and full of understanding. "Oh," she said softly. "Oh, of course."

"It was your mack that did it, " Jennifer said. "I tried it on in the cloakroom and I realised I was comfortable. I'm sorry. I was only curious, I didn't..."

"Don't," Karen said. She was already shaking her head, already smiling, her eyes bright. "Don't apologise.I'm glad it helped."

She reached across the small table and put her hand briefly over Jennifer's.

"It's so good to meet you," she said. "Properly, I mean."

Outside the café window, November rain had begun to fall on Clement Street, steady and silver, and neither of them made any move to leave.

[Nylon macs]

I found this on Fictionmania, hope Pollymeric doesn't mind that I cut and pasted it here. There is a lovely photo with it but it didn't copy here, if you want to read the original with picture you can find it on Fictionmania (under stories with images)

A Cloakroom Revelation
By Pollymeric


A gentle tale of childhood discovery and adult encounter

Lovely story and enjoyed reading it .

[wetrainwear]

Very nice rainwear story.

[cammacg]

YES!!! A superb story, very good, and very close to my start in my love of mackintoshes. This is the true beginning of my rubber love.

I was born in 1948, and started school;, in the infants class in 1951 at the age of three. The school had two parts to it, with the infants being housed in a separate building to the main school. This meant, when my class ended at 15:30, I had to wait for my sister, who was in the 4th year of juniors, in the adjacent building. Back then, there were no parents of close adults picking kids up, and the school run had not yet been invented.

So I had to walk round to the appropriate entrance, and wait for sis to finish at 16:00. There was an entrance into a cloak room, then a separate entrance into the classroom. I was just about three or four years old, but I had awakened into that wonderful world of rubber awareness. Having two older sisters, and a mother all wearing rubber lined Macks, I knew the smell and indeed the feel of that delightful material, even if I didn't know what it was about. It was just so natural to want,.....need to touch that rubber lining.

I would enter the cloakroom, and come face to lining with several rubber mackintoshes, all waiting for their female owners to come out at 16:00. I would of course be wearing short pants. Usually corduroy, and baggy, I would pull my willy out of the leg hole, reach up and catch hold of the top rail of the coat rack, and with the rubber mack trapped between my thighs, I would swing to and fro, feeling that cold rubber lining giving me a wonderful thrill, that I did not know anything about, and wouldn't" know anything about for at least another 10 years or so.

With being in my 77th year now, I can truly say, I have been a lover of rubber mackintoshes for about 74 years, and have never wasted an opportunity to reach out and touch any garment I might have come across. It has been a wonderful ride, and I can only hope there may still be chances to come.

[Nylon macs]

Your a very naughty man can act

[Nylon macs]

Your a very naughty man cammacg.

[Jennifer987]

What a wonderful find Heather. I enjoyed reading it, just my sort of story. good work.

[HeatherlovesPVC]

What a wonderful find Heather. I enjoyed reading it, just my sort of story. good work.

Thank you

I don't visit Fictionmania very often now as I think it is a bit extreme and very samey, (not every crossdresser is a sissy and likes anal) but every now now and then you do find something worthwhile.

Heather xx