Chapter 3
Above the desk, I read, as a duty, a poem that said, "She was a phantom of delight." Below the desk, I read a poem scribbled on ruled paper, passed from hand to hand. It concluded:
Mary said O what a whopper Let's lie down and have it proper.
I had already begun to learn that every world has an underworld. I did not mean to miss half of life by sticking to the official, respectable part.
There was giggling at my right, along the row. I saw that my exhibitionist neighbour, Eric, who had passed me the rhyme, had his cock in his hand and was playing with it gaily, while the English master' talked about the phantom of delight. The ink on Eric's fingers had come off in streaks on the knob of his penis. I grinned and whispered a remark. The teacher looked up and ordered me out of the room for talking. I thought this an awful injustice, knowing what Eric had been up to. But Eric was a favourite anyway. He once told me that that particular teacher, a brawny Somerset man, had taken him and another boy to his home and given them glasses of port, and played the gramophone to them.
"Did he toss you off?" I asked, with a sudden hunch.
"No," he said. "O no." But from the way he said it I didn't believe him, I just assumed he had been sworn to keep mum, and I did not want to make him break his promise. I felt a pang of jealousy: why couldn't / be a favourite? So I began to go about saying I hated favouritism.
I loitered among the clothes-pegs, waiting for the English lesson to end. Soon I was joined by Eric, who had asked if he could "leave the room"-go to pee. "Come on," he said to me, "let's go and have some fun."
I knew what he meant, of course, and off we went to the place appointed, which smelt like a stable. We pissed, then drew some large diagrammatic pictures of prats and pricks on the wall, wrote slanders about our friends and added a few insults to our teachers. After this exercise in art, we shut ourselves in one of the closets. Eric took his trousers down-we had gone into long trousers, now-and sat on the seat. I played with his prick, hardening it for him, and he did the same for me, as I stood there close to his knees. We talked about girls.
"Have you ever been out with Sally Wells?" he asked me.
."No, but I've heard of her. I saw her at the pictures with Johnny Buxton."
Everybody had heard of her. Sally's name was written on the walls of all the school lavatories. She was a plump girl of fifteen, wonderfully notorious among the boys.
"She lets her father do her," Eric told me. "When he found out she'd been shagged by Johnny, he said, 'I might as well try you myself,' and that night he got into bed with her."
"Does her mother know?"
"Course not!"
"How do you know?"
"She told me herself, she tells everybody. She doesn't care!" Eric said. "Here, let me stick this up your bum." "No fear!" I said. "It's too big." "Let me feel and see if it is."
"Wet your finger, then-" I didn't want to be hurt.
He sucked his forefinger and pushed it into my bottom. My erotic feelings surprisingly increased. So apparendy did his. We both began to rub quicker, and though he had decided not to try to bugger me he kept his finger there, while he frigged me with the other hand. I rubbed him between finger and thumb and we splashed off almost at the same instant.
This cheerful boy Eric became my most regular partner for masturbation after that. But he told me that "the best wank in the world," for him, was when he stole one of his sister's sanitary towels, made a hole through the soft gauze and cottonwool, and pushed his prick through that. It was years later that I saw the incestuous meaning of it. I asked him to bring one of the towels to school and let me try it, but he quite jealously refused.
I wonder why he did not try his sister himself-or did he, later on? There's more of that than meets the public eye. It occurs to me, by the way, how much more lively interest we should have taken in our English lessons if the teacher had told us the poets were not plaster-saints, that Wordsworth had a daughter by a pretty French girl, that Shelley slept with his sister, and Byron gave his half-sister a baby! to say nothing of Wilde and his boys.
I was now fourteen: my voice was breaking, my skin was pimply, my limbs were clumsy, brown hair was growing round my prick and balls and I tended to contradict everyone. I tossed off, alone or with others, every day and night, till I got to eight times a day; then, being pale and shaky, I cut down (like smoking) to twice a day, by effort of will. At the same time I was getting soulful about girls and other matters. I wrote unsigned love letters to an attractive, haughty girl who lived in our street. She took no notice of me. I went to dance classes on a Saturday morning, and fell in love with first one sweet-powdered partner and then another. In a little drawer in my bedroom I kept a lace handkerchief one of them gave me, and a snapshot of another with "kisses to remember" written on the back.
I also at this time fell in love, for about six weeks, with a sloe-eyed boy, the same age as my younger brother. He was smooth-skinned and lithe as an eel. But I never spoke to him and only once touched him, when we brushed together accidentally in the crowd going into school and I trod on his toe. He smiled very forgivingly at me. But I never thought I had a chance of his favours. I heard, years later, that he was at that time already a fully-fledged homo, known to his schoolfellows as "Lily," and in the habit of picking up men. But I had no inkling of it.
I had a religious spell, and was in love with Jesus for a year. I never missed a Sunday service or a Sunday school class, and was the minister's pride. But it never occurred to me to amend my ways, or even to consider that masturbation and sexual thoughts ought to be avoided. I had made a hole in my trousers pocket, a trick which Eric taught me, and could frig away in comfort all through Bible readings and prayers, just as I did in school lessons.
However, I fell out of love with Jesus at the end of the year, and in love with learning. I studied prodigiously and began passing exams. But I did not lose interest in my favourite subject, even for a moment.
It was at this period that I came as near to incest as I ever have done: I had sexual transactions with both my brothers.
The first was with my younger brother, Leslie. When I been initiated into the love of Mrs. Palmer, the Fivefingered Widow, as the sailors call masturbation, and had had a wet dream to show that I could come, I naturally wanted to initiate someone else in my turn, and exhibit my powers. Who more natural than my brother ?
The idea came to me in a flash, when I walked into the bathroom to wash my hands, one night when he was bathing. I took a long time, washing and re-washing my hands, making conversation, looking covertly at him, wondering how to broach the subject. Nothing had ever happened between us except the time I had exhibited him as a "sacrifice" to my cousin Lizzy, and that had been no thrill for him.
Presently he stood up and began to dry himself, as the water ran out under his feet. He was slender, hairless, amiable-looking but decidedly stupid. I was a bit afraid. But curiosity and desire were rising in me, and I determined to go ahead.
"That's a big one, for a young 'un like you," I said, touching his penis playfully. It was, too, though a little swollen by the hot bath.
"Don't," he said.
"I bet you can't make it any bigger."
"Course I can, if I like."
"Shall I show you how to toss off?"
"No."
"I can fetch spunk." Bet you cant.
I pulled out my prick and began rubbing it up and down. He got out of the bath and sat on the bath side to watch. In spite of himself, his own prick got hard. When I touched it again, he did not say "Don't," and pretty soon I was frigging it for him, and myself with the other hand. Then I stood between his legs, weighed his little balls in my hand, pressed and rubbed his prick, and pressed my own on his damp, steamy body. When I felt my climax coming, I turned sideways, guided his hand on to my prick, clasping my own fingers On top of his, and shot my white jets into the bath.
When I felt discontented with solitary pleasures, after that, and had nobody else available, I used to make the often unwilling Leslie my sex-playmate. I don't think he ever really liked doing it with me, except -the time I gave him his first come: he was overjoyed when that wet splodge warmed his legs and ran on to his Bedclothes (for I had crept into his bedroom that night). He hugged and kissed me, that time, as he used to do when he was a little boy. Otherwise, there were no caresses in our affairs together.
But my experience with Sandy, my elder brother, was a big surprise to me. We were at the seaside, and I had to share a bed with Sandy, a thing I had never done before. It was hot summer, we were pleasantly tired with sea-bathing, and I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, in spite of the strangeness of Sandy's great length of flesh and warmth alongside.
Sandy, by the way, was grown up: an exceedingly handsome young man, who had been engaged once, and jilted. There was nothing feminine about him; to me, he was rather paternal, and I looked up to and loved him.
I dreamt that a big dog was licking my knees, then my balls and prick. I both liked and hated it. All at once I became conscious.
I could hardly believe it was happening. But yes, Sandy had rolled over close to me, and was gently fondling my parts, drawing the foreskin up and down. When he realised I had woken up and was not resisting him, he led my hand to his own weapon. It seemed very big and thick and rose from a forest of hair. I was scared by its size, but I felt very flattered by Sandy's intimacy.
I came quickly (he had touched exactly the right button, the point of maximum sensitivity). My drearhy state, the memory of the big, bad dog, and the thought that this game was even more likely to be frowned upon when it was between brothers than with strangers, all helped to bring me on. Sandy closed his hand over the end of my prick so that he could receive it all in his palm, really feel the jetting forth. Then he lathered my come over his own prick making it slippery under my hand. He took longer to come than I did, though I knew how to do it well enough and give him pleasure. I would have liked to rest, but duty is duty. I frotted away for him. He folded me to him, panting and sighing, then clasped me tightly between his long thighs and with a sudden heave emptied upon me. We lay quiet a long time, not worrying about the hot puddle on our hands and bodies, and I fell asleep in his arms, feeling naughty, triumphant and satisfied.
Had we been French, I suppose that Sandy, and I too perhaps, would have been frequenting brothels and gaining experience of another kind: our sex-life would have become what's comically called "normal" already; and what we should have missed!
During my masturbations I always had (and still have) images before my mind's eye. Some people do it mindlessly, thinking of nothing. After I had seen the naked Venus on the beach, she nearly always assisted in my nightly one-handed love-scenes. I wonder if she picked up my mind-waves and had erotic dreams of her own? If so, they must have been good ones: the things I made that exquisite girl do!
In these years of puberty, I had one other episode with a girl-not a success, but significant, later on. We were in the country again. I was one of a party gathering blackberries. At this time I was fourteen. The girl, a rosy-cheeked country lass who had rocked me in my cradle, was eighteen. Quite suddenly I became aware of her physical attractions, her sturdy legs, her round bouncing breasts, her red lips. I contrived to be alone with her, out of sight of the rest of the pickers, behind a massive prickly hedge.
Ruby climbed a gate and reached with a hooked stick for some fat berries above us. It was not so much the sight of her lacy underwear as the whiff of cunt catching my nostrils that made my ever-ready prick begin to twitch and stir. I stood right underneath her and looked up, hoping the legs of her knickers would sideslip and let me see the crack. It didn't; and becoming aware of my manoeuvres, she climbed down. As she did so I pushed my hands into the voluminous petticoats, trying to grab a feel.
"Bobbin!" she exclaimed, flushed and furious: "how dare you!"
I kissed her, but she turned her mouth aside and my lips went on her ear instead. I tried to get at her breast, but she was bodiced up in an old-fashioned way that gave me no opening: I tore the collar, which made her angrier than ever.
She kept saying, "Stop it! I'll scream for the others!"
I was fighting hard, like a maniac, for a triumph that could hardly have been a pleasure. I got one arm round her waist, held her like a wrestler, and yanked her frills up with the other hand, trying to get my fist between her legs. But she did not mean to yield. She was a strong countrywoman, and I only a slim awkward boy. I bruised her thighs, and she gave me what was almost a knockout slap across the face. I realised I was no match for her and gave up the fight. My face smarted, tears came into my eyes. My prick had given up hope, too, and was drooping again.
Ruby's indignant anger melted all of a sudden, and she called me silly in a cajoling way, and put a dewy dock-leaf against my burning cheek. We went back like mother and son, she with a protecting arm round my shoulders, and I with a bewildered suspicion that I should never understand women.
I thought to myself: "She didn't scream for the others, after all. Now, why not?" And I couldn't think of an answer.
But I had a wet dream about that fight, and very often found myself thinking amorously about Ruby in the next two years. For it was two years before we met again.
In the year after the Ruby episode I read voraciously, played a lot of tennis, swam, grew taller, frigged myself silly, and got as much sex fun as I could with my brothers and friends.
Leslie was sulky and positively jealous-such is human nature-when one day on a picnic in a quarry he came round the rocks and found me tossing off a schoolfriend of his. Only the tact and charm of the schoolfriend, who coaxed Leslie to join in and make it a jam session, saved the situation. We did it all standing up, I remember, three little conspirators huddled together in a coign of the cliffs, while the larks sang above us. I made up a legend about the flowers that would spring up where my seed fell on the ground, and how everyone who smelt them would be sex-mad and would fuck with everybody he or she met that day. The other two took this story up with delight, and applied it to the people we knew, teachers, parents and all.
Sharp little Leslie said, "And the Major would smell it, and he'd come after you'' for which I smacked him on the head. I wonder how many different brands of jealousy that boy suffered, where I was concerned!
Aside from such remarks as that, all our sex-talk was of girls, usually those older than ourselves, "women." So much we craved, so little we knew.
The autumn brought parties, and now that I and my schoolmates and girl friends were fifteen years old or round about that age, parents would often allow more latitude, would kindly absent themselves for hours, leaving .the young to fumble their way towards experience. It was a year of violent quarrels, passionate loyalties, cliques, absurd intrigues. At the parties, we would sit for whole hours in the dark, playing squelchy games, chewing one another's lips, whispering scandals and smoking perfumed cigarettes. Yet there was no copulation: fears and conventions still held all in check. But the joys of exploring were tremendous; the triumph of getting a hand down the neck of a struggling girl and squeezing her half-grown breasts, subduing her to quietness and coaxing her small nipples to stand erect like tiny pricks; or pushing a finger into a tight vagina, hearing that sharp, "Don't!" of fear and pain as you pressed on the unbroken hymen!
At one of the parties I met at last the notorious Sally Wells. She was a turbulent redhead, seventeen or so, and played jazz on the piano. I can't remember how I came to be at a party of my elders, but I was certainly the youngest there, and there was some illicit drinking of gin and beer in the bathroom. I had a tooth-mug full of gin and sodawater, a vile mixture, and felt wild but a little sick. Sally, probably to flout some older admirer, made a fuss of me, asked me to dance with her, and even sat by my side on the stairs, while others pushed past us or jeered from below. At length they went away and we were all alone; my tipsy head lolled on her shoulder. I put a tentative hand between her legs and she did not resist; she quickly put practised fingers into my fly and played a little with me, at the same time streaking her scented mouth back and forth across my lips. But when I tried to change our positions she resisted quite firmly; she knew cxacdy what she was prepared to concede; she was well aware that she was Sally Wells, and that it was a renowned privilege to touch her cunt, though a privilege enjoyed by many.
I was full of curiosity about her and questioned her boldly.
"How old were you when you first let a boy do this?" "Seven," she said.
"How old when you first let a boy go through you?" (an odd term, that, for fucking). "Eleven," she said, composedly. "How many times have you done it?" "Hundreds, why?" "Is it true your father does?"
"Yes, of course." This was said so smoothly, carelessly almost, that I did not know, and still do not, whether it was true or not
"Will you let me, Sally?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Instead of answering she gave me a kiss, and pushed her tongue into my mouth, exploring under my tongue with its soft tip. It was the first "French" kiss I had had, I think; at any rate, the most intoxicating. I almost came in her hand. Then, immediately, she broke away from me, at all levels, ran down the stairs and went back into the noisy room. She had, at small cost or risk, done what she set out to do: added another slave to her retinue, made another propagandist who would help to spread her sexy reputation. I could hear them teasing her about her absence, and her barbed replies bringing shouts of laughter. I crawled up to the W.C. and vomited my gin. How dissolute and heroic I felt, that night!
Then the wild bells rang in a new year, and I was sixteen.
Behold the transformation! My pimples had vanished, my limbs had taken on proportion, my puppy-fat had gone from my cheeks, my chest had expanded and my belly flattened. I bought a razor, though I hadn't much need for it yet. I was a slim, light-footed youth, with a soft skin, who never walked when he could run or dance. My voice had become deep, I had brown pubic hair, a prick of modest size, with outsize balls, it seemed to me. My body pleased me, I was happy to live in it. (Now that it's middle-aged and spreading I have to content myself with the efficiency of its functions!)
Here I was, a young man ready and well equipped to do the "act of love," who had never done it. How we could come so near to it and not do it, beats me, when I look back. There was an enormous amount of sitting about in the back seats of cars, and standing about in alleys, after dances and parties; no end of being pulled off in a handkerchief by your girl-friend of the moment, or thumbing her clitoris in the pictures. There was even, at a party of fourteen and fifteen year olds, a demonstration fuck by two youngsters, both virgins, I am sure; fully clothed, he on top of her, going through the motions as they imagined them to be. It was all hilarious, a great joke. The girl was a chubby brunette, for whom I had a strong desire myself, and it gave me quite a pang-why couldn't I have been that lucky boy ?-he was a cheeky-faced youth, with a lock of ginger hair falling over his eye. They lay down on the carpet, we stood round in a circle making mocking remarks or giving advice; one boy keeping cave at the door. Her legs were spread wide and he knelt between, resting on his elbows; but her skirt remained down, and his trousers, fully buttoned. Though it started as a joke, it got more serious, for him at any rate, and he really began to get a rhythmic beat into his motions, and seemed to be closing his ears to the things we were saying. The girl, too, stopped answering back and looked at him wonderingly. Somebody dropped a book on his backside. He got up abruptly, with a sheepish smile, and went out of the room. Another boy tried to get on top of the girl, but she pushed him over and struggled to her feet, laughing and blushing. I do not know whether her co-demonstrator had come in his trousers: there was still a visible bulge there when he got off, so perhaps not. We thought the whole thing huge fun, strange young animals that we were.
In the spring I saw the Major for the last time, though neither of us knew it would be so. He was going abroad on his doctor's advice. There was a good deal of joking about that, behind his back. My parents and friends thought he fussed far too much about his health; but he went to Switzerland and died there. I felt inarticulate grief and anger when I heard of his death.
He seemed quite his cheerful old self when he came to say goodbye, that bright spring day. He brought a bottle of wine and I was allowed a glass or two, which made me merry. He gave me a parcel of books, chiefly French: Voltaire, Rabelais, Mirabeau, in soft leather, from his library. I talked everybody's heads off, and at eleven was ordered off to bed.
The wine gave me an intuition: I thought, "He'll come and see me"; and as I wanted to be admired, I put no pyjamas on, but lay nude in bed, gently playing with myself and daydreaming.
Perhaps twenty minutes later I heard his footsteps, heavy on the stairs, and heard him go to "pump ship," as he would say.
Sure enough, he presently popped his head in the door of my bedroom:
"Are you too old to like being tucked in?" I smiled assent, and he came to the bedside. He sat down.
"Are you warm enough, Bobbin?" he asked, caressing my bare shoulders. He tucked the bedclothes round my body. He smoothed my back, felt the not very muscular arms, ran his palm over my chest.
Then he simply held me tightly and I listened to the thud of his heart. The moon shone in through the window, golden and glorious.
"I suppose you're too old for kissing," he ventured.
"Not when it's you," I said, and held my face up to be kissed. He pressed his closed lips very hard on mine. Then he fondled me with both hands, but all above the waist. I took hold of his wrist and boldly drew his hand under the covers, down to my erection, which was pulsing away there in its own excitement.
"O my God!" he murmured.
So for the last time he did the little things he had always loved to do, caressing my prick, drawing the skin silkily up and down, weighing the ballbag in his palm, and putting his finger-tip into the hole of my bottom. He did not make me come. He said, "Let me look at you!" and I threw back the covers and stood up proudly, a gleaming young body in the moonlight, my pole sticking out in from of me like the horn of a unicorn. He looked his fill, turning me round and about, then clasped me to him and kissed me again. Perhaps he had an orgasm, I hope so, for it was the last pleasure I was ever able to give him. One last prickly kiss, and he hurried away.
I conjured up a picture of Sally Wells being fucked by her father, whom I imagined in the likeness of the Major, and made myself come in my handkerchief. Then I went serenely to sleep.