When the specified Monday came along, Percy met Jenny at the tennis court as usual, and informed her of a small unplanned delay in the proceedings.

"Nan and Grandpa are running a little bit late. So we will have to wait for a while."

"Mother does not mind me coming around, but I have to go over the low fence just past the tennis court."

"Well I'll have to go through the bamboo on our side, so that I can show you how to get out into our garden."

Soon they were both walking towards the house, and Percy's grandparents were gone. He led Jenny across the courtyard and into the house, and they walked up the large western staircase. Jenny expressed her surprise upon finding another staircase at the eastern end of the house.

"I love it up here. Nan usually asks me up once or twice in the holidays, and it is great to have a happy couple of days here before I go back to school again - which I hate - but this time I can stay for two months. I don't know how  I shall cope afterwards, but let's not worry about that now."

He led her into his bedroom, and showed her some of the things that he had brought from home with which to amuse himself. There were his comic books, his models, and his box of disguises and costumes. This collection of clothing had accumulated from various family Christmas and birthday presents in the last year or so.

"Shall we put on some costumes and dress up?" was Jenny's request upon sighting Percy's second wardrobe.

"Why not? You be a princess. I think that you would look very beautiful as a princess, Jenny."

"I think," replied Jenny, "that I look very beautiful already."

"Well I actually meant that as well."

"But you've only got boys' clothes in this box."

"You can still wear what you have on now, and add one of the crowns, and some other things. If you're going to be a princess, then I shall be a knight."

In order to be a knight, Percy took out a shirt with a shield painted onto it and some plastic armaments, and the sort of boots that he thought should be worn by a young boy pretending to be a knight.

"And what should a knight and a princess do now?" queried Jenny.

"How do you fit all of those costumes in that box, Percy?"

"With the greatest of squeeze, Jenny."

The young pair chose to occupy the television room, still clad as a knight and a princess, in order to watch a romantic movie. Most romantic movies feature at least one scene, wherein the lovers collide their lips together - at varying speeds, depending on the movie - with a view to expressing amorous feelings towards each other; and the movie chosen by Sir Percival Knight and Young Princess Jentil was no different with regards to its uncompromising readiness to provide such arousing scenes of many splendored things.

And Percival and Jentil were aroused.

"Why don't you kiss me like that?"
"Because I've got a plastic ... err iron mask on my face."

"Then you will just have to take it off, for I wish to be given a chance to try out this new kind of kissing."

"I will not take it off. I am a knight."

"Then I shall chase you until you do."

"Fare ye well," said the witty young Sir Percival Knight, as he jumped up and ran out the door. He found his way to the western staircase so fast that he wondered whether princess Jentil would look for him in the house or the garden.

The chronicler wishes to assert that Princess Jentil was not always light on her feet, and something happened when she began to ascend the eastern staircase, which was not carpeted.

The thing that happened was this: Sir Percival heard Princess Jentil climbing the eastern staircase.

Quietly he ran back down the western staircase and made his way back to the television room and sat down to stare at the screen.

It took her ten minutes.

"Sir Percival, I've-"

"-been looking everywhere for me. Come and see the rest of the movie. Then we can have lunch."

Which they did.

After lunch they went for a walk to the station, and then walked up to Wahroonga Park, where they spent a solid three quarters of an hour on the swings, until the novelty began to wear off.

Then the two extremely young lovers kissed 'the way they did it in the movie', as they sat on the wall of the Wahroonga Park fountain.

"Start young, don't they?" said a man to his friend, as the two of them got to work on the gardens of the park in order to go about their jobs.

They walked home, and the day soon came to an end.

"Pity we can't have the house to ourselves all the time," said Percy, as they returned to the tennis court fence.

"Why don't we build our own little cubby house in the bushes just here? I've got a lot of father's unused wood at home."

The next few days were busy ones.

Piles of wooden boards were carried to a fence and passed over it. The same piles of wood were carried to a location in the bushes, where they were joined together in various ways, by means of a hammer and nails from Percy's grandfather's toolbox; and a rectangular prism supported by four wooden blocks had been constructed by the twentieth of December.

Percy took the eiderdown from his bedroom cupboard - which he would not need for the bed during the summer months - and used it to soften the floor of the cubby house.

"We'll have to use the fluorescent tube alternative of my torch as a lamp if we ever use this place at night. Now I can bring out what we need each day, so we can play chess or checkers, or dress up or whatever in here, without cluttering up the tiny house with heaps of stuff. It will be alright if I take it back at the end of the day."

The young pair failed to ever become bored with each other's company. Percy's grandmother never wondered what he had been doing. She was simply relieved that he did not seem to be bored. Jenny's mother was both educated and happy about the situation. On the twenty-third of December, Percy asked Jenny to come to the cubbyhouse - which they had ceremoniously christened Jentil Manor (after the play on Jenny's princess identity) - the following morning at ten o'clock.

Percy had saved his money and bought a Christmas card and a box of chocolates for his grandparents,  a box of large coloured hair ribbons for Jenny - who sometimes wore her hair tied at the back by beautiful ribbons, creating the prettiest of ponytails - along with a Christmas card, and some party food which he brought down to Jentil Manor at half past nine on Christmas Eve.
Both Percy and Jenny would want to be with their families for the preparation of Christmas decorations and other procedures in the afternoon. So Percy had planned a surprise Christmas party for Jenny in the morning.

"Percy this is wonderful!" exclaimed the part-time princess, as she entered the manor of her namesake.

They enjoyed their party, and Percy enjoyed his first Christmas at 66 Burnseid Street. The only new event to Percy was being there on Christmas Eve, because Percy's grandparents usually held large Christmas Day parties every year, and invited all of the family and relatives. The only people missing were Percy's parents. His cousins, aunts, uncles and various others were all there as usual.

His only concern was that some of them may venture far enough into the bushes to discover the location of Jentil Manor. However, he was able to keep the activity away from that area, although plenty of games were played on the large lawn nearby. If a ball ever strayed into the bushes, Percy would opt to fetch it out again, which made him very popular with the adults, because he was seen to be a good host keeping the games going, while doing the dirty jobs. His ulterior motives were justified. Jentil Manor was a private world for two, and he didn't want to explain its existence to anyone.

He did not need to.

Nobody found it.

He was fortunate.

Christmas passed them by, and there were new things to do, and new days in which to do them. Kissing was done in both of the methods previously attempted by Percy and Jenny. Sometimes they felt in the mood for collisions of the lips, and on other days, kissing of the cheeks seemed more appropriate.

It was always fun.

It was never violent.

It never needed to be.

Whatever they did, they were content. If there was potential for disagreement, one of them would think out a suitable compromise. The author almost considers it a regrettable shame that they chose to preserve the secrecy of their relationship, because the successful ongoing pattern of rendezvous made by those two youths would put a lot of unfriendly adults to shame.

However, there was something in Percy's mind which warned him, that if they told of their relationship to anyone, there would eventually be some unwarranted efforts to undermine it, which might possibly arise from the activities of adults.

When he had been seven years of age, Percy had once dreamt that he had saved an extremely beautiful princess from a threatening fate in the bushes behind his first preparatory school in Killara. Now he had his chance. The princess in his dream had also worn a blond ponytail.

Jenny really was his beautiful princess, and they had so far saved each other from boredom and loneliness.

So far.

There was another day, when his grandparents went out and left him by himself at the house.

It was an extremely cloudy day with rain pouring down every now and then. Percy invited Jenny around, and took out the water pistols which he had been given as  Christmas presents. The two of them enjoyed a riotous water pistol fight. They chased each other all around the garden, and up into trees, onto rooves, and anywhere else that they could reach, filling up their water pistols at separate taps whenever they had both the chance and the need.

At one stage, Jenny pursued Percy up into the oak tree, with a fully loaded water pistol, immediately after Percy's pistol had run out of water. He was too high up to jump and run for it, so he simply climbed higher, and Jenny climbed after him.

"You'll never get away Percy. I'll catch you."

Percy adored her.

Even in the middle of a wild chase, with a pistol in her hand,  Jenny was  able to produce a sweet smile on her lips, as she announced Percy's fate. He was realising that he had had a romantic capacity ever since he had been six years old. It had taken a girl like Jenny to help this tendency towards romance to hatch itself, so that Percy gradually became more and more aware of it. So there had been pretty ladies on the television. Why had he not developed this capacity for romance then? Subconsciously, Percy had acknowledged that he would never see those ladies anywhere, except on the television screen. So he had dismissed them from his mind as soon as they had left the screen, and gone back to reading comic books or finding other things with which to amuse himself.

There had also been times when he had met young girls. However, Percy was unlikely to be moved towards any act of romance with a collection of young girls who sat in a bus or a train and giggled together, probably for no logical reason. Here was a twelve year old girl who Had Fun and Made Sense.

But their time was rapidly moving towards expiry date.

This did not occur to young Percy Dale, as he made up his mind to climb further and further, higher and higher, out along the branches of the oak tree, heading for the end of a special branch, his safety branch. Percy had prepared for the event of his running out of water at the most crucial moment, by opening the upstairs doorway, which opened out from the western upstairs hallway to the upstairs courtyard. This special branch brought Percy to within jumping distance down to the courtyard.

It never occurred to him that Jenny's mother would be extremely displeased with a boy who had led her daughter to a tree branch six metres above the ground, with nothing but hard concrete to land on in the lower courtyard if she fell; but children are children, and children have underhanded fun sometimes, and they are ignorant, and the moral issues behind such facts are not necessary to the thrust of this story, so we shall omit them here.

Percy made his jump, ran into the house, waited for Jenny to land safely in the upstairs courtyard, and then closed the door, locking it tight.

He ran down the stairs and out into the lower courtyard.

"Percy, let me in!"

"Toss your pistol down to me first, and I'll go up and let you in."

"That's not fair."

"That's the fortunes of war."

She tried to squirt him from above a few times, but he was free to run to wherever he chose, and she eventually tossed the pistol down to him, and admitted defeat.

Percy climbed the staircase, walked down the hall, opened the door, and then ran to his own bedroom and prepared to defend himself with his pillow.

"Alright then," said Jenny, and went into one of the spare bedrooms.

"Alright then, what?" said Percy, relaxing on his bed with pillow in hand.

"Alright then this!"

Jenny ran into the room and initiated the first pillow fight that those two had ever shared in their brief acquaintance. The both fought furiously, swinging the pillows with the speed of squash racquets; but Jenny was overmatched, and she eventually called upon a previously unknown reserve of aggression, and swung the pillow wildly towards Percy, knocking his own weapon out of his hand, and brought her own down hard on Percy's chest.

"You're the cheekiest cheat of a boy I've ever met! You're .... hurt."

"Oh ....., " groaned Percy, caressing his stomach with his hands.

"I'm sorry. I'll rub it better. Oh my poor Percy!"

Percy giggled hysterically.

"You're not hurting at all!"

"No, but I'll bet that's cured your attacking me for a while."

"Yes I think it has," giggled Jenny, and Percy sat up and hugged her.

It was all part of the fun.

The weeks went on, until there was only one week of Percy's stay at 66 Burnseid Street left.

They had a long and special cuddle in Jentil Manor on the last full day - the day before Percy's parents came to collect him - at Burnseid Street.

Then Percy and Jenny said their secret goodbyes.

Percy's parents had brought him some souvenirs, and he still had a week of holidays remaining in his own home, but nothing seemed to be fun anymore. Jenny was to move house again that year, but Percy was not to know.

He returned to a life of unpleasant experiences of being bullied at school - "Misery Parlour", as James Hamilton had described it - without even the company of James to look forward to. It was a life of being bullied, and of teachers who always saw only enough  of the scene to take the side of the naughty ones. He could make a paper aeroplane. A juvenile delinquent could grab it in the playground and tear it into pieces. He could use the swings in the school playground. A group of demoralising boys could stand around and make less than encouraging comments, because he would not join in with the football games that simply had to be played, even in summer.

Whatever he tried to do only lived up to James Hamilton's description of the school that he (James) had left. Percy endured it all and pined for the brief period of his life that he had enjoyed with Jenny.

At that stage in his young life, he would eventually be sufficiently distracted by hanging out with male friends, television shows, comic books, and all of the things that had occupied his mind in the years before he had met her, so that he was not continually depressed. However his heart would always hold a special place for his tenth summer, spent at his grandmother's house, and the days and nights of that period in which he had been privileged to enjoy the company of Jennifer Winters. Somehow the thought of Jenny chasing him was not as prevalent as the chasing and mischief scenes had been in the dreams of Miss Newkin and the Wanderer of Wahroonga. Yet the sweetness of Jenny as a giantess seemed to compensate.