Anne Was Looking Through Her Collection of Old Bus Tickets

Anne's life had changed so much that earlier worries concerning custody of the picnic hamper and the tidiness of the tent interior had been forgotten. All she had now was an old Start-Rite shoe box containing things she felt were somehow important: an old copy of 'Bunty' with its back page which featured a cut-out doll and paper clothes bearing a handwritten addition 'We are lesbians'. She could not remember who had written it. There were several old bus tickets with the words 'Send Your Parcels By Country Bus' printed on the back of a few. A small well-thumbed booklet about hygiene in adolescence had an obscene drawing scrawled on the back cover with the name 'Peter!' added underneath. There was an almost exhausted orange-coloured lipstick in a tarnished gold-coloured tube with a broken push-up slide. It had a pleasant smell. Stuck to an oozing bar of Highland Toffee was a ten-shilling note. They appeared to be inseparable. And there was The Photograph. Snapped at Lulworth using Julian's expensive camera it showed George wearing a one-piece swimming costume crouched down by a dripping Timmy and smiling broadly. George could no longer get away with wearing just boys' swimming trunks, which irked him occasionally. Anne gazed at it often wondering did she admire George because George masqueraded as a boy, or was it because she knew full well that George was a girl. It was a mystery with the answer as yet unrevealed.