Chapter 1
I was born without one...
A strange confession, with which to begin a candid account of sexual experiences! Don't misunderstand me.
I was born with the usual five senses, all of them clean and keen, and some horse-sense to go with them; more than my share of curiosity, which a lifetime won't slake; the usual apparatus, in working order; but no sense of bodily shame. Not a shred, not a fig-leaf.
Now, this is a terrible deficiency! A moment's thought makes it obvious that all our society would fall to pieces if it was without shame. The clothing industry and the pin-up industry would be the first to fold. But the churches would soon have to follow. Lawyers an judges would be queuing in their thousands at the labor exchanges, and newspapers would reduce to half their size. One can't even be a savage without this heaven sent faculty, which I have been unaccountably denied
It was obvious to me as soon as I could think, or sooner, that society and I could never get along together in these circumstances. A hermitage in the desert seemed indicated. But we .know from the Decameron and the mediaeval painters what sort of worries the hermits have. So we had to do a deal, society and I. For my part, I mustn't make my weakness too obvious to others, particularly people who might be trying to teach me, rear me or employ me; and society would turn a Nelson eye as long as I kept my conduct comparatively private. This was English society, of course; and that's the English code.
Negotiating this curious treaty was not easy, as it had to begin so early in life: at the nipple, really. But I well remember the day we concluded our terms, society and I.
I was a youngish man at the time. I had recently given up wearing a napkin and had been promoted to brown velveteen knickers, as I was supposed to be "dry." I could walk and talk a bit; but paradise was already lost, my mother had produced a third son, I was no longer the baby, the apple of her eye. A little vomiting moist object of which I, if you please, was supposed to be proud and fond, got all the attention.
But in this little vignette of memory out of the darkness of the past I sense gaiety. I see a warm livingroom, full of fun and chatter. Even though my parents were fully occupied with my little brother, I was laughing.
I was getting some attention from another quarter, which soothed my vanity. My father's oldest friend, the Major, a military man with bristling moustache, was playfully bouncing me on his knee, making the insane gurgling noises that adults instinctively make to small children, and fondling my rosy thighs.
You would look far to find a more stalwart pillar of society than the Major. He had family pride (i.e. snobbery), military ideals (i.e. disguised timidity), conserva tive outlook (fear of ideas and of change), chivalry (dread of women), and a professed dislike of sentimentality (distrust of his own kind heart). All this I knew long before I could talk, from the set of his eyebrows and the dangle of his gold watch-chain when he bent over my cradle.
Bouncing on his knee I was riding the high horse of state, imbibing the sound ideals of this most respected upholder of the proprieties. It was a fine wordless lesson he was giving me.
But what, then, in the name of virtue, was his righ hand doing?
Gently but unmistakably it had crept inside my knicker-leg. His fingers had reached an adjunct which my parents had never mentioned, and for which I hac' therefore invented a name of my own. I said it nov* to the Major: "Owgypowgy!"
He smiled and said only "Goo-goo-goo!" He w, pretending that what he was up to was only the same i tickling my ribs or the palms of my hands. But somt how it was not the same. His index-finger was running lightly, persistently, round the tiny worm. I laughed more: he meant it as a joke, I saw that now. A nev kind of joke. What a funny feeling! Did I want t> make water on him to cap the joke? No, it wasn that. It was something else.
My little prick stiffened up. An exquisite pleasure coursed through my body.
Eros and Aphrodite had entered my life, through the tip of the Major's finger. I hope I have never since failed to accord those great gods the adoration which is their due. I owe them and their agents the deepest gratitude.
They have seen to it that I had a nice variety of experience, rewarding me in proportion as I brought no prejudice to mar or debar it. These anti-social deities were apparently pleased that I thought pleasure a good thing: they gave me pleasure with my elders and my juniors, with both sexes and the in-betweens, with love and without. I found it better with love, but good without; nearly always good, whatever the cost in the end.
But while I digress my Dutch uncle is advancing a little further, putting his finger into the crack between the cheeks of my bottom. I don't suppose it was very dry or clean. Probably he had something to smell, afterwards, for a souvenir; let's not begrudge him thatat least he wasn't fastidious, and to be fastidious in matters of love is a grave fault.
Now he drew back a little. He was playing with the small throbbing penis. He bent his head and kissed me on the mouth; I felt the prickle of his bristles and smelt his breath, laden with tobacco and wine.
My parents had turned, were coming towards us. The Major very dexterously took his hand out. He looked at me quizzically.
My immediate impulse was to cry "Look, Mamma!" and show her the big thing I had got. Let the world admire it, and emulate me, and share my pleasure!
But I did nothing so disastrous. A warning voice made itself heard. The look in the Major's eye, perhaps; still more, the way he extricated his hand from the dangerzone, let me know how society feels about these things. I knew all at once that we were fellow-conspirators. I continued to ride a very cock horse on his knee, and gave him, I am sure, a knowing smile. He kissed me again, very thankfully, before he left. He knew his hand could return with confidence to the same attractive spot in the future. It did, at intervals, till I was sixteen. I'm very glad I never betrayed him.
Of course it is possible he thought I would accept this first overture with perfect innocence; he could not know that I would be making my social contract that day. There is such a thing as childish innocence, in a certain sense of the term. I know a charming woman who has had a long and vastly complicated sexual career. I asked her, in an intimate moment, and to intensify my pleasure, about her first memory of the joys. She told me it was when as a child of four she was taken to the Zoo. A kindly attendant lifted her up to look at the animals, and wriggled his fingers inside her hole while doing so. Her mother and sister were close by, so his audacity was considerable. She remembered distinctly how hotly she enjoyed the sensation; how she sat tight, and made him carry her from cage to cage, the whole length of the cat house and back. He paddled his fingers in her baby cunt all the time. What a kind man, she thought! Only years afterwards did it occur to her that he might have done it for his own pleasure, rather than hers.
But she never told anybody. Why not? She did not know why not. Nor do I. Unless she, too, made a social contract of concealment and self-protection that day. Or possibly it did not even occur to her that there was anything worth mentioning. After all, it was a truly inward pleasure! She closed her baby lips over the warm memory. I imagine it revived in her unconscious mind, if not consciously, when the organs of a hundred males entered her, in after years, and enriched the experience with its wetness and heat.
The Major, I need hardly say, was a concealed homosexual; I always took it for granted that my innocent parents had no idea of the fact. They were such a pair of puritans, you wondered how they ever got as far as a fuck. But you never know your parents. Years later, a very sophisticated old man hinted to me that long ago there had been a secret love between my father and the Major. That was simply beyond my imagination, and probably untrue. I think the Major was incapable of loving in his own age-group.
He was very good for my ego, as I was the middle child. He was the first person to make me feel an object of excitement and desire.
The Major showed no interest in my brothers. I was "his boy," and he gave me presents, especially books, and taught me to paint in watercolours.
He learned to time his visits, for talks on current political affairs, with my father, to coincide with my bath-night. My mother remarked on how domestic he was, and what a shame he was not a husband and father-while his hand, under "the suds, was feeling between my legs, touching the little crinkled ball-bag, hardening the prick, pulling the foreskin back, and once putting the soapy tip of his finger right inside my bowel, till I wanted to shit right there in the bath. His broad back was between me and my hovering mother, and I abetted my seducer by holding the loofah and flannel across my middle to screen his hand from the view, if anyone had chanced to look.
There was a happy time when I did not need bathing, only supervising, and the Major was allowed to do that service, and to dry me, all by himself. He had a trick which he much enjoyed, of so manipulating the rough towel as to give me an erection without his having touched it at all. Then looking at me with mock reproach, he would exclaim softly, "Why, what's this?" and seize it, while I wriggled and laughed.
This, alas, gave way to a time when supervision was out of the question, I was expected to bathe alone, and I used to listen mournfully to the Major's voice, talking to my father downstairs, wishing (as I expect he was wishing, too) that he could find an excuse to come to the bathroom; but he did not dare. It did seem for a time as if all that was over.
There are many interesting things about him that I shall never know: mysteries he has taken to the grave. Had he acquired a taste for small boys in India or Africa, as so many English soldiers do? Was I the sole object of his attentions, or did he have a private life that I knew nothing about? (He surely must have had!)
As for the opposite sex, at the time of my first little adventures with the Major, I did not know there was an opposite sex. I had no sister, and my mother was a sexless goddess of maternity, like a Victorian statue. I must have been six or seven years old when a boy at school, exhibiting his own organ to me with understandable pride, told me the astonishing news that girls had holes instead of pricks: "Didn't you know that}" he said (he himself had just found out).
I was at once devoured by curiosity to see one: a desire by no means easy to satisfy. Judy was the obvious person to approach. I was sentimentally in love with Judy, who was my own age. She was very nice, and gave me sweets, and I had kissed her at Christmas. But I was too scared of the consequences to ask her pointblank to take her pants down and let me see what she kept inside them.
But my curiosity burned, distracting my thoughts from lessons. It became necessary to think of a stratagem: my first.
One day Judy raised her hand in class: "Please may I leave the room?" And she hurried out with great urgency, clutching herself between the legs because her need was great.
I put up my hand and asked if I might get a drink of water. "Very well. Be quick."
Quick? I had never shinned up those stairs at such speed.
The dame school was a converted private house. The upstairs W.C. was for girls, the one-downstairs for boys; so I was silent as well as swift. Judy had not troubled to latch the door. I pushed it and it swung wide, and there I stood and grinned, appealing and appeasingly.
Judy, a small rosy-faced brunette, with legs too short to reach the floor properly, was perched awkwardly on the throne, her skirt bundled up under her arms, her body bare from the navel down to her socks.
So it was true, what I had been told. Nothing but a little hairless cleft, under her pot-belly, making plentiful wee-wee. She looked at me incredulously, then uttered a scream, and down came the curtain of her plaid skirt. Jumping down, she reached for her knickers.
I ran, like any lover caught by an angry husband. I slid down the banister, and I was back in my seat in class when Judy's feet came pattering down the stairs. My face turned red, then pale, as I waited for the thunder.
Judy returned, her eyes like saucers. "Did you call out, Judy?" "No, Miss Farrell."
"But we all heard you. What did you scream for, Judy?" "I saw a spider."
But at playtime, Judy whispered to me: "If you do it again, I'll tell."
Our romance did not survive the blow. But I had fallen in love with cunt: was cunt-struck, thunderstruck with cunt, for ever!
Magnificent obsession! Cunt is literally nothing, a space between two walls of damp flesh; but it's also the fountain of life, and the pearly gates of the earthly paradise. It's no more ugly or beautiful, intrinsically, than a hand or a tooth; but how it rings all the bells!
Perhaps if I had had a sister and been used to seeing her naked, from infancy, a cunt would have been a commonplace thing to me. But perhaps not. Perhaps I should have found her cunt just as exciting and delightful as I thought Judy's, and later little Vera's, the first I actually felt, and all the others that followed. And there would have been a fine kettle of incest! I have never yet avoided anything just because it is forbidden. Call it greed, curiosity, impudence: they were father Adam's virtues.
Vera, since I might as well tell that tale here as elsewhere, was a sweet, cool, blond child, tall for her age, and slender. How clearly I remember her, and her golden party frock with white cuffs! I don't know our ages, exactly, when it happened. Anything between seven and twelve. I don't think she had the smallest bump of breast as yet: and she had compact, boyish buttocks. I had known her only casually; she was skipping-partner of a girl in our neighbourhood, whom I knew but did not like. Yet when that children's party began, and the heated atmosphere began to tickle me up, I knew instantly that Vera was the one, and I had only to wait for my opportunity. I thought she had the touch of shamelessness required.
The air smelt of scent and was full of giggling. We played toilet, spinning a bread platter and running to catch it. We danced, angularly, badly, not knowing how to hold each other, or quite daring to. I danced with Vera. The winter dusk had fallen, curtains were drawn close and lights were on. Grown-ups had left us to ourselves for a while. One of the boys turned out the light.
Instantly, without hesitation, and as though I had myself arranged for the light to be switched off, I reached down, lifted the hem of the golden frock, found the elastic top of Vera's pants round her slender waist, and slid my hand down her middle. With my left arm round her shoulder I held her close to me, so that when the lights flashed on again it could not be immediately seen what I was up to. But the same boy, or another, plunged us in darkness again almost at once, and kept it so for some minutes, while much struggle and din went on round the switch.
My hand slid down, as I said, over Vera's smooth belly-was there a trace of downy hair?-and for the first time in my life my fingers touched those tender lips. I was startled at the wetness between them: it was like putting a finger in a mouth. I did not know, in those days of innocence, that it was so wet because she was "giving" to me, she must have been excited in advance, too, and her juice was coming down. All I knew was that instead of pulling away, or screaming, or pushing my hand away, she just kissed me on the mouth, with her head turned sideways on my shoulder. My prick was nearly tearing my breeches open, but all I wanted was to feel and touch and explore that little hole of hers. I had been right: as soon as I saw her I had been sure she was the one girl who would let me, and would not make a fuss or set up a coy resistance. I don't know how I knew but I did.
After a couple of minutes, magical minutes for me, the lights did come on, and in the noisy confusion I managed to pull my hand out and she to pull her skirt into place undetected. One child's accusing voice said "I saw you kissing!" but that was all. I hurried out of the room and smelt my fingers, intoxicating myself with that salty, sweaty smell, animal and divine. I nearly swooned. I was unwilling to wash it off, but I was afraid that if I went back in the room with it everyone around me would smell it, for the odour seemed very pungent and penetrating. So I licked my fingersit tasted salty, too, and tingling-and wiped them on my handkerchief; so that I could privily smell my handkerchief now and then, and remember it all.
When we played postman's knock, I announced three stamps for Vera; she came into the passage to receive the kisses, which I duly delivered. In spite of the unreliable doorkeeper, who was liable to pry, I felt her again, and this time I felt the cheeks of her bum, too, squeezing the firm flesh and putting a finger between, as the Major used to do to me. What a pupil I was proving! But when I pressed Vera's hand on to my prick, even outside the clothing, she pulled her hand away instantly.
That is the last time I ever remember seeing Vera. God knows why. And I don't know, even now, whether she was scared and flustered at feeling my horn, or merely cautious lest the doorkeeper should spot us. It's nearly forty years ago, dear Vera, but I still remember the feel and smell of you, which is more than can be said of many a girl I have met since. Perhaps I was by no means the first boy to feel you, though I've always believed I was. Anyway, I salute your coolness, your nerve, your good sense, and the way you " gave." I don't remember your saying a single word, but you spoke with the lips between your legs! A liquid language to be understood with the fingertips, like Braille. You blessed me, unaware.
Which brings us, or may as well do, to my little cousin, Lizzy. It was an experience (like my first peep) that linked sex with W.C.'s; ah, well, "love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."
It was rather like the Judy episode, only I was older, and bolder, and I went further.
Lizzy was a bashful creature, with long ringlets, a little older than I was. She would be eleven or twelve, but had quite a figure, distinctly shapely calves and round rising breasts. We rarely saw our cousins and the appearance of this one, a person to whom I was related, next best thing to a sister, was an event. She seemed to me utterly fascinating. I was in love with her before tea was over.
We were living in the country, that summer, and it was a hot, drowsy afternoon. The garden was full of bees and not a breeze stirred the fruit trees and lavender-clumps. The grown-ups dozed in the summerhouse. My older brother, having showed off to Lizzy till he was bored with himself, went away for a bikeride with the farmer's son. I and my younger brother played with Lizzy.
We had a hiding game. I found her, crouching in a thicket.
"I like you, I do like you, Lizzy," I said, kneeling on the ground beside her. I kissed her. She laughed, jumped up and ran away.
We played another game. My young brother had to pretend to be ill, and lay on a wooden bench. It was my idea, and typical.
How hot it was! and how beautiful Lizzy looked, with her big soft eyes and long ringlets and the swelling bubbies inside her frock! I had caught a smell of her sweat, and it made me want to play naughty games.
"He's very bad, we shall have to operate," I said.
"Don't, you tickle," said eight-year-old Leslie.
"Look," I said, and with one rip of the finger I undid all his flies and exposed his little apparatus, flabby as a shrimp. He in his innocence did not bother to cover himself, but just said, "Ow, you hurt!"
But Lizzy said: "You are naughty!" and blushed. All the same, she had a good look, it seemed to me.
"We shall have to fetch some medicine," Lizzy said, walking away.
"Wait here," I said to Leslie. He obeyed, lying on the bench, vaguely doing up some of his buttons.
"Don't be long," he said.
I followed my cousin, calling, "Dizzy Lizzy!"
She was over near the house. "Where are you off to?" I cried. She shook her head and waved me away. "Won't be a minute," she shouted. Of course I then knew she was going to relieve herself. But as she had not said so, I could half-pretend I didn't know, and could catch her unawares: the stratagem came to me in a sexy lightning-flash. I went behind the hedge, then round the back of the house, stalking along unseen, like Deerslayer. I knew that fly-infested whitewashed earth closet, with its well-scrubbed seat; I knew the bolt that the grown-ups used, that was too stiff for a child's fingers; I used to keep the door shut with a half-brick.
But who would have the forethought to tell Lizzy about the half-brick? Nobody; and I did not believe the dear dim creature would think of it herself. I thought she would rely on doing her pee quickly and coming out again, seeing that the adults were all down at the summerhouse, and that she might assume (not knowing me) that I would not pry.
I saw her go in, I waited a minute to give her time to get herself settled, then, just as with Judy years before, I simply gave the door a good push, and it swung inwards.
"You can't come in, I'm busy," Lizzy said. Perhaps she really thought I had gone by mistake, for the same purpose as herself. "Busy Lizzy," I said.
I was not so lucky this time, her frock was down over her knees and I could see nothing, except her drawers (for those were the days of white frilly drawers) round her ankles.
I had an idea she was doing more than just peeing. She had a tense, strained look, and the word "busy" was often used in the childhood realm for "shit."
"Go away!" she said. "What do you want?"
"Let me see yours, and I'll let you see mine." A fair offer?
"No, I don't want to."
I had stepped in close to her, and actually shut the door behind me. Our voices were low and trembling. With one hand I had unbuttoned myself and dragged out my stiff prick. With the other I reached under her skirt, though she fought and pushed me away. But she was only half-hearted; and I knew what to make for.
A thrill ran through my fingers: she had a tuft of pubic hair, soft as her ringlets. I felt remarkably grownup, to be touching such a mature person.
I slid my hand right under, and the last drops of hot water ran through my fingers. I put my hand still further under and my first finger encountered something sticky: she had been doing both. I heard the bit drop, as I took my hand away again.
"You are rude," she said, grabbing a piece of paper and wiping herself vigorously.
I did not feel "rude," though I could not explain my shamelessness, but I had now withdrawn from the assault, a bit frightened at my own daring, aware of the possible consequences. There was nothing for her to do but pull up her drawers. Why, instead, did she hesitate ?
It was very hot and still and suffocating. A bird was singing outside, sleepily. I still had my erect penis out. An inspiration:
"You've got some hair, I haven't any yet, look!" I said.
She did look. I took her hand and she let me make her touch, too. She gave a little shiver, and took her hand away.
"It goes like this," I said, drawing the foreskin up and down. "Show me yours, Lizzy, be a sport!" A powerful word, that.
"Well, hurry up, then, what do you want to see? You are awful!" she exclaimed breathlessly, pulling up her skirt again, propping herself on the edge of the seat and pushing her thighs forward. Holding the hem of her frock under her chin, she put her fingers on each side of her twat and opened it like a flower for me to see inside. The light was dim, but I seemed to see a corridor of lips.
I pushed myself, almost fell, on top of her, and for a moment my inadequate, pale: prick was throbbing against its goal. But I did not know how to make an entry, and she, thoroughly frightened, cried "Get off me!" and shut her legs up tight.
Now she did pull her drawers up, breathing hard. I watched her, thinking how wonderful to be a girl and have that delightful organ, a cunt, there in one's possession all the time!
"Put your thing away!" she said. She added with sudden curiosity, "How ever do you keep it in your knickers ?"
She knew less than I did, that girl! "It isn't big and stiff all the time, it goes small, like you saw Leslie's,"
I said. "But it won't while you'n looking at it," I added. However, I buttoned it away as best I could, and we scampered away from that closet as if we had left a skeleton in there.
Leslie met us, wailing, "Where have you been? you're mean!" We did not tell him.
That little cousin, you'd think butter wouldn't melt in her soft mouth. But when Leslie's back was turned she whispered to me: "If you don't do what I want you to, I shall tell... Climb that gate and jump off the top."
Happy to be blackmailed, I did it, though I fell on my face and made my hp bleed. Lizzy came and wiped the blood away, and whispered, "Get hold of Leslie's thing!"
I was astounded. This was an unexpected command. But I wanted to obey. I shouted, "Can't catch me!" to my brother, dodged him, tripped him, wrestled with him on the grass, and in a few moments had him stretched on his back, the leg of his shorts up to his crotch, and his "thing," as she called it, exposed to view, held between my triumphant finger and thumb.
Cousin Lizzy was looking down, smiling saucily. Leslie was yelling "Dirty beast!" at me. I let him go, and even let him win a wresding throw, to pacify him.
At that moment we heard the voices of the grown-ups, and Lizzy's whole appearance and manner changed.
"Here's mother, I shall have to go now," she said, demurely.
"Haven't the children been good!" my mother exclaimed.
We shook hands at parting, nice and polite. Then I thought to myself, with mortification, after they had gone: why didn't I make her show me her tits, too? What an idiot I was to be content with so little! But
I glowed at the thought of how much, all the same. I was gazing at my hand. The end of one finger was tipped with yellow.
"What were you doing all that long time?" Leslie asked me when we were alone.
"Having a fuck," I said.
"I don't believe you!"
"I did it because she asked me to," I boasted. "Liar!" he said. "I'm going to tell you said that. I'll tell Sandy."
Sandy was the other brother, eight years older than I.
"You daren't," I answered. But I only hoped my words were true. Sandy was tall, and strong, and might be very cross indeed.