Berkshire; the other was a teacher at a London prep school. Henrietta looked a bit like a horse herself – long nose, large forehead – so perhaps she was the show-jumper.
Plus Mia, Ruby, Patricia and me. Mia had been persuaded into a plastic tiara and a bride-to-be sash even though she’d protested that she was wearing Erdem and the props ruined her outfit.
After the warm-up, Lewis skipped round the table again handing out sheets of paper and pens and telling us we needed to pair up.
Henrietta guffawed – she was definitely the sort of woman who guffawed – and held the pen out in front of her. ‘Look, even these have cocks on them!’
She was right. At the end of my pen was a very small plastic penis. I glanced at Mia. Her face had puckered with disgust.
Lewis’s sheets were illustrated with a detailed diagram of a penis.
‘You have to label all the bits,’ he announced. ‘And there’s a prize for whoever gets the top mark.’
‘Come on, darling,’ said Patricia. Since I was sitting next to her, she was my partner. It was like being at school; pairing up with the least popular kid to burn a small strip of magnesium ribbon.
‘That’s obviously the shaft. And those are the testicles although they look very small to me. Your father has mu—’
‘PATRICIA, I need to stop you there.’
‘And look, that’s the urethra,’ she went on, unabashed.
‘Chop chop, darling, write it down. How’s Rory, by the way?’
‘Fine,’ I said, my head bent to the sheet. ‘In Prague with Hugo.’ They’d left for the stag the previous night and Rory had sent me a selfie of them on the plane holding up cans of Heineken. Hugo was dressed as a woman, in a blonde wig with his chest hair poking from the top of a red dress.
‘So nice that they’re friends,’ said Patricia, patting my knee.
‘And I am glad he’s coming to the wedding. As is your father.’
I ignored this and wrote ‘foreskin’ in very small letters on our sheet. Around us was high-pitched shrieking. ‘It looks like a slug!’ ‘No, that’s not the prostate, this is!’ and so on.
Mia had partnered with one of her colleagues. Luckily, three Proseccos down, she was laughing.
‘How we doing?’ shouted Lewis. ‘We all finished?’
‘We have,’ cried Patricia, snatching the sheet and waving it above her head.
We swapped sheets to mark them like school spelling tests.
‘Which means in joint first place are Holly and Henrietta, and Patricia and Florence!’ Lewis announced a few minutes later, before handing us our prize: a lollipop shaped like a penis.
‘I will enjoy that,’ said Patricia, sliding it into her handbag.
‘Mum!’ reprimanded Mia.
Then came the final part of the class: a foreplay lesson using the rubber dildos. Lewis handed out bottles of lube, threw a packet of wipes in the middle of the table and sauntered around us, offering helpful tips.
‘No, Jessica, harder than that,’ he told one of the fashion lot as she ran her manicured fingers up and down her dildo. ‘That’s it, Mia, perfect! Your husband’s a lucky man. Well done, Patricia, that’s excellent technique. But, Florence, oh dear! What’s going on here?’
I looked up, my hand frozen. ‘What?’
‘You’ve got to grip it, not tickle it! Get your fingers right round it.’
I frowned at my dildo and held it more firmly. It was like being seven and back in gym class again when I couldn’t do a cartwheel and everybody else could. Except worse, because ropey hand-job technique was much more shaming than not being able to do a cartwheel.
‘There we go,’ Lewis said approvingly. ‘The penis is much more resilient than you think, ladies. You’re not going to break it.’
‘I wish I could break yours,’ I muttered.
‘What’s that, darling?’ said Patricia.
After the class, Lewis swept away with his box of props and we moved up a floor to a bar. The bottles of Prosecco continued and trays of canapés appeared.
‘Can everybody get ready for the knicker game!’ announced Ruby.
If you don’t know what this is, consider yourself blessed. I’d only been to a couple of hen parties before. One for an Edinburgh friend, another for an old schoolmate. But we played the knicker game at both since it’s become a hen party tradition. It will be mentioned in one of the 273 emails you receive before the event itself and the gist is that every hen has to buy a new pair of knickers for the bride to take on her honeymoon. At the party itself, they’re all