Maureens incredible baps

July 1974 it was, the day I left school and started work, left school on the Friday, started work on the Monday at an electrical contractors in Horsforth, about 40 minutes walk away, and I walked most days, even bought myself an executive style umbrella for those days when it rained.

I was apprenticed to the the company estimator, measuring cable runs from 1:100 scale drawings, pricing up the cable and guessing estimating the labour costs, it wasn’t too taxing on the brain, I got to run errands for everyone, was often banished to the stores for a stock take where I could sit and read the paper all day, and then I got to walk home again at the end of the day.

And there was Maureens baps to consider too.

The front office was home to two women, an old dragon called Verna who looked after the accounts, and the lovely Maureen with the huge baps who did the typing.

Happily married to a husband called Keith who always looked liked the cat who’s found the cream when he came to pick her up of an evening, Maureen was an outrageous flirt to every male who entered the building, and every male who entered the building made sure that he popped into the front office to say hello to Maureen and her baps, and then begrudgingly mention Verna in passing.

And there were a lot of men passing through that office, the company employed around seventy electricians and most of them needed to pop into the office for something or other at some point int he week, some needed to pop in on a daily basis, all of them needed to pop into the front office to see Maureens baps and say hello to them, then look up at her face and say hello again.

The wholesalers reps who came to see us always popped into the front office to say hello to Maureens baps and one dirty old bugger named Bob Coulter, who from memory is always dressed in a long brown raincoat and has black oily hair  slicked back on his head with copious amounts of brylcream, made no secret of the fact that Maureens baps were a source of fascination to him, he spoke to them constantly, never once looking at her face, I’m sure he could hear them talking back to him and he’d have to be dragged backwards out of the front office by the collar of his raincoat before snapping out of his bap-trance.

Yet Maureens baps loved the attention for rarely did they ever clad themselves in the sort of matron-esque style tightly buttoned up to the chin starched blouses that Verna wore every day to work, oh no, Maureens baps loved the limelight and would ensure that Maureen selected the lowest cut blouses from her wardrobe of many low cut blouses, low cut blouses were the only upper garment that Maureen owned and it was for Maureens baps that the phrase “If you got it, flaunt it” was invented.

And so in those long distant days before computers, even before electric typewriters, Maureen and her incredible baps would sit at the window, right next to the roadside, and she’d type all day long, typing long letters and long specifications from the tubes of a dictaphone stuck firmly in her ears and because it was an old fashioned typewriter and she had to hit the keys hard to make them work, Maureens baps would jiggle with every impact and when she had to strike the carriage return arm with a sideways swipe to start a new line they’d sway slightly from side to side, not that I ever watched or anything you understand, someone told me that bit.

And at the end of every dictated letter from Eugene the Estimator there would be a little secret message from him to her, normally something obscene, and her raucous, some would say dirty, laugh rang out around the front office at the final full stop and Verna would glance up from her work and ask “What has he said this time ?” to which Maureen would always reply “Oh nothing…” and blush for the rude messages at the end of every dictaphone letter were their secret, apart from me, I knew of course, because I was Eugene the Estimators apprentice and sat next to him most of the time he was dictating those letters – most of the rude messages involved Maureens huge baps and the fabled size of Eugene the Estimators willy, the fable being mostly in his head, you couldn’t beat a bit of  sexual harassment in the office in the 1970s, life was so much simpler back then…