I was 11 in the autumn of 197_.
She came out nowhere and said she recognised me from school where she worked part-time as an auxiliary teacher, and I believed her even though I didn't recognise her at all.
She said she was twice my age which I reckon was about right.
We talked a lot in the woods and fields, playing games, climbing trees where we sat up high smoking fags and telling jokes.
Back down on the ground, she kissed me with a toothy passion and blew my mind - and more besides.
Then she said she had to go, and left me lying there in the grass hardly daring to believe what had just happened to me.

We met a few more times after that, always in the same woods at the same time but never in the same place.
"Just wander around until you see me - it'll be more romantic that way."
Then she'd appear, as if by magic, always more beautiful than I remembered, with her long brown hair and big blue eyes, her big braless breasts heaving away beneath hippy cottons and, teacher or not, she gave me a real education whatever the ethics of the situation.
Then we'd smoke dope and go into the estates and knock on doors and run away in a wild regime of total misrule.

Of course there's part of me that never did grow up.
Maybe that was the dope?
Or even the folk.
She was the one who got me to listen to folk music on a little battery operated cassette recorder on which she recorded the records she played whilst we made love endlessly in the long grass.
She said her favourite was called 'Hearken to the Witches Rune'.
She said she was a witch, and I believed her.
She said her name was Alison Gross, reincarnated, and she sang along to it as I gazed at the tree-tops reflected in her big blue staring eyes.
Then we go off, pinching the apples she'd cut up to do magic spells before throwing the left-overs at people's windows in the houses that backed onto the fields, and we'd piss ourselves watching them looking out and shouting into the dark.

After Hallowe'en she vanished and I never saw her again, not for some 30 years, when she came up to me at a folk festival and said hello and we sat in a seaside cafe where she told me her story.
Needless to say it was 100 times worse than mine, but even so I accepted it as reason enough, but hardly an excuse.

"Please forgive me." she said
"What for?" I replied.
"Because I stole your childhood - your innocence."
"I've always reckoned it a fair exchange myself, Alison," I said. "Though I could have done without the folk."
Then we laughed, and she linked my arm as we walked along the beach, which was very nice.