THIS STORY IS INTENDED FOR ADULT READING ONLY
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Liberating a city can quickly lead to some very liberated behavior . . .
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They say that Brussels is a dull city nowadays, full of Euro community bureaucrats. Well, I don't know about that, it's been a long time since I was there, but I'll certainly never forget the first few days I spent in the place. That was in September, 1944, just after the Guards Armoured Division had liberated the city. Not that I was a Guardsman, or driving a tank. I was only a very young Corporal working as a service corp clerk. It didn't matter to the Belgiums, they were so glad to get rid of the Germans that every British soldier was a hero to them. They couldn't do enough for us, which was a real change from the reception we'd received from the French.
Mind you, nobody needed to look far to see that the Belgiums had been having a bloody rough time under German occupation. The country might not have been actually starving but it weren't far from it. As for cigarettes, soap, booze, the only way to get any of that stuff in Brussels was on the black market, and if you needed to ask how much it cost you couldn't afford it. So when I put some highly desirable consumer items in a webbing pack one afternoon and went out looking for a good time, I thought I might be in with a chance. What I got was an experience of a lifetime.
I hadn't been on the tram for five minutes when two women came onboard who were dressed up to the nines. They were far more smartly turned out than any woman I'd seen in wartime England for a long time. Maybe they'd kept their best clothes for the liberation. One of them was tall, with close cut black hair, a trim figure, and wearing a pair of large pearl earrings. What caught my eye most though were her hat and her dress. The hat was round and flat, with a thin veil on it which came halfway down her face, and the black dress she was wearing had a repeating motif in white beads sewn all over it, a kind of Chinese style depiction of a cat or a long tailed dog. This must be the famous continental style chic I'd heard so much about. The other woman was wearing a close fitting tweed skirt and a matching belted jacket which was open down to the waist to show off a lot of lace on the front of her blouse. A blouse which seemed to have all kinds of interesting movements rolling around inside it like massive Pacific waves flowing into a tropical lagoon. To tell the truth the woman's figure was so sexy that I didn't even look up at her face as two pairs of gorgeous legs came teetering closer and closer to me on high heeled shoes.
I think it was that jacket which really had me gawping. The hemline stopped just above the Belgium femme's hips -- and speaking for myself, the first thing which crossed my mind was trying to imagine what she would look like without her skirt. The pair of them were both stunners and I wished I had the nerve to speak to them. But there wasn't going to be any chance of that, the tram was almost empty, so they would go past me to another seat. And when they sat down beside me, with the dark one at my elbow, I wouldn't have been more surprised if Himmler had come along in full dress uniform to collect my ticket.
"Hello," she said. "Isn't it a lovely evening?"
I finally picked my jaw up off the floor and tried to answer intelligently. The woman said she spoke English so well because she'd lived in London for a while before the war, and she'd been there because her husband was a banker. I could well believe that, considering the way she dressed and her commanding physical presence. She said her name was Monica and she introduced her friend as Philice.
You know how sometimes you're struggling to sort out impressions in your mind because things are happening so quickly? It was like that with me just then. I was looking at Monica's face behind her veil and I saw dark, intelligent eyes, a firm chin, a small smiling mouth with deep red lipstick setting off perfect teeth and a nose which was too big to make her beautiful but somehow seemed to reinforce her personality. And believe me, this was a lady with personality plus. Not to mention poise, dress sense, money and brains. Just talking to her made me feel like I was wearing a tux at the Savoy and getting ready to dance like Fred Astaire.
And then there was Philice, the other one, not saying anything but leaning around her friend to smile at me, and boy, was it a heavy calibre smile. Philice looked about the same age as Monica, about thirty, with blonde crimped hair and a round fair face with innocent blue eyes. OK, maybe her eyes were innocent but her smile was about as innocent as Eve selling apples off a barrow in a Soho back street. On top of her head was a kind of rakishly tilted scotch bonnet made of grey material with a single peacock's feather sticking up at one side of it. A smattering of freckles ran down her white neck and then trailed off down into that froth of lacework wrapped around a pair of tightly holstered thirty eights. I figured that explained that knowing smile -- no girl who had to defend that much frontage could be innocent about anything. But you can guess how I felt when I finally thought to look down at their hands and found they each had a full set of rings on their fingers. Sod it.
So, there I was, chatting to these two married ladies, both of them probably ten years older than me and I thought they were both being sociable and maybe Monica wanted to practice her English. Come the next stop I'd get off an go and find myself a girl without any glitz but available. And then Monica ran her fingers over the knapsack that was on my lap and asked me about what was inside it. I told her the truth: two bottles of whiskey, some English cigarettes and some bars of soap.