скачать книгу бесплатно
‘It would have been a little sister for you,’ he said. ‘But God took her away again at the last moment.’
After that we were more devoted than ever to Ann. Neither Nelson nor I would have put it past God to take her too.
Our little town boasted one superior kindergarten, run by a Miss Matilda Unwin, and to this I was sent at the age of five. Nelson was almost ready to leave and go on to grammer school.
Kindergarten was satisfactory enough. We bullied and were bullied, but nothing very terrible. I was immediately attracted to several of the girls and, although most of this attraction was entirely undeclared, it was generally reciprocated in some degree, which contributed considerably to the pleasures of school, since seats were scarce in the youngest form and we had to sit two at a desk. So I was able to cuddle against Sheila, in her lovely golden-brown cord dress, which reminded me of wallflowers. It had a white lace collar, and white socks went with it. Her legs were pretty, but I believe I loved her only on the days when she wore that fetching little dress.
I was continuously fond of Sonia, who had attractively short-cropped fair hair. She was a tough and adventurous little girl and we used to play together out of school. At one time we planned to marry, but then she was sick in class, right – splash! – into her desk, and I turned my affections elsewhere.
Even in those days, just like adults, we thought of little but sex, although it took diffuse and childish forms. We invented a lovely game to play in the playground: Farmers and Cows, it was called.
With our heel, we scarped outlines for sheds in the playground gravel. And with sure instinct the boys were the cows and the girls were farmers or dairymaids, coming to milk the cows. This meant they had to give a really good squeeze and feel of our tiny genitals. It was the best game we ever invented!
Innocent fool that I was, I ran home and told my mother about it. She flew into a terrible fright, trotting round the room and seizing up Ann before her to cuddle – whether to protect the child or herself, I don’t know. I was forbidden to play Farmers and Cows again.
But the old serpent of sexuality was rampant on the playground now. The girls naturally wished to know more about the strange udders of their cows. Behind Miss Unwin’s house, beside the water-butt, by the tatty privet hedge, I unbuttoned my fly-buttons and showed my rosy little wee-wee to Sheila and Hilda.
They were interested but sceptical. Hilda, darling girl, reached out and touched it and said it was nice. Sheila was more cautious. Already our grown-up selves were foreshadowed there.
The next picture I have is of a slight advance. The water-butt again, scene of happiness and depravity. Sheila and Hilda there again, and a smaller girl, name forgotten. Again I open my trousers and exhibit. Again they stare, with none of the maidenly modesty that will afflict them in a very few years.
Hilda and the little girl look very closely, getting in each other’s way. Sheila stands back, half-leaning against the wall.
‘It’s nice,’ says the small girl. She makes no attempt to touch. ‘You can come and play in my garden after school, if you like.’
She lifts up her dress and takes her knickers down; Hilda follows suit. Both show me what they have, and the little girl giggles a lot and flaps her skirt up and down. I concentrate on Hilda’s thing. It looks pretty and chubby. Her stomach and thighs are pleasant to me.
I say to Sheila, ‘Let me see yours too.’
‘Some other time,’ she says, lolling from side to side, smiling into the distance, confident possibly that I would enjoy what she kept concealed. As far as I recall, she never did show me.
After school Hilda and I decided that we would go into the little girl’s garden and play, the assumption being that we could then have a better look at each other. But the little girl was met at the school gates by a nanny and led away firmly by the hand, while we were shoved away.
Time went by, the endless congealed time of children and lunatics. Basically, cricket and Red Indians interested me more than female wee-wees. They seemed to possess more potential in those days.
The slump was on. Father went about with a long face, predicting that the bank would have to close. ‘Money has dried up,’ he said. Money has dried up – a marvellous phrase! I pictured it golden, damp, congealed, like beaches as the tide leaves them.
We were seeing something of beaches at this time. Taking advantage of a customer’s bankruptcy, my father bought from him a small bungalow on the North Norfolk coast. We used to drive there for summer weekends – a long boring drive that grew interesting only when we got through Spalding and King’s Lynn and could smell the sea. The bungalow was on the dunes just outside Hunstanton. The tide went out for miles, leaving all that congealed money, and I never got over the wonder of it.
The sea air was supposed to ‘do me good’. I suffered much from bilious attacks at the time, greatly to the bafflement of our family doctor and my parents. Nelson called me a dirty beast, but I was always scrupulous about never being sick anywhere but in the right place.
It is clear enough to me now what ailed me. I was emotionally upset by my mother.
She was no disciplinarian. Father would take a stick to Nelson and me when we were naughty; it was a painful punishment that left no after-effects – only Father’s habit of insisting I shook hands with him directly afterwards, as if to absolve himself from guilt, faintly annoyed me. But Mother’s way of inducing goodness into us was altogether more deadly. She threatened that she would not love us any more, and that she would run away from home, taking Ann with her.
Perhaps such threats would mean nothing to an insensitive child, if there is such a thing. To me, who had experienced separation from my mother at birth, they loomed enormous. I was frequently sick because that would keep Mother at home; she pampered me marvellously when I was ill in bed. (At the time, of course, I had no inkling of my own thought processes.)
My mother was capable of actually carrying out her threats. On one occasion, when Nelson and I had done something of which she did not approve, she put Ann into her coat, hat, and leggings, stuffed her in the push-chair, and was off. We had the terrible mortification of seeing her from our bedroom windows, heading for the market place, Ann howling with apprehension as she went. If my memory serves, this was the last occasion on which I saw Nelson cry. We cuddled together against the bed and wept, ‘She’ll never come back! We must try to be better boys!’
No doubt Mother’s treatment of us had much to do with her mysterious nerves, which the seaside was expected to alleviate. Sometimes, Grandfather and Grandmother came down with us for the day, to look after the children while Mother went for one of her walks along the beach. In covert misery I used to watch her tall figure dwindle in the perspectives of the shore, wondering whether she meant to return, or whether something mysterious and terrible would happen to her as soon as she was out of my sight.
Sometimes she would take one of these seashore walks with ‘Uncle’ Jim. Uncle Jim Anderson was a smiling man with cold red hands who made rare and ambiguous intrusions into our family life. He and Father were always very hearty with each other. When Uncle Jim appeared at our bungalow he would bring amazing things to eat at picnics – game pies and pineapples, I remember – and was welcome on that account. But he would also accompany Mother on her long walks; then Nelson and I became strangely uneasy and refused to swim, even when Grandfather shouted at us.
‘Do you think he and Mum are up to something?’ Nelson asked. We suspected they were, although we had not the vaguest idea what people did when they were up to something.
When Nelson was going to grammar school he became more remote from me. In my own little animal world I formed a tentative pact with Ann. Although Mother mothered her vigorously, Ann was by no means her slave, as I felt I would have been had I received such smothering kindness. Ann reserved her independence. This meant that she was not entirely a reliable ally; anything I did which she disliked was reported at once, and loudly, to Mother. Yet she plotted against Mother in her own right and, of us three children, she was the most subversive. She was a clever and inventive child, and together we used to stray far from home over the common. Once we saw an old tramp take his trousers down and shit under a gorse bush, which embarrassed us both greatly.
We invented a fascinating and perilous game in the back garden. It began, I believe, after Mother took us all to the circus in Nottingham and we had seen some acrobats, performing.
Ann and I were tightrope-walkers. The clothes-line lay on the lawn, and we walked along it, pretending to sway perilously and occasionally fall off. Later we acquired a length of thick rope. With Nelson’s aid, this was stretched tightly between two apple trees, a foot or so above the ground. Ann and I soon learnt to walk along this with our shoes off, so that we were able to raise the height of the rope.
At its most developed, this game became quite professional.
The rope was stretched from the corner of the garden shed to our biggest apple tree, perhaps a yard above the ground. Sometimes we were in the jungle, escaping from wild animals, but more often we were kings, tightrope-walking above England; we could have as much of it as we could walk over without falling off. This must have presaged a later and more megalomanic game to be mentioned in due course.
Despite the gloomy predictions of our parents, I cannot recall that Ann and I ever hurt ourselves at this game, except on the final occasion we played it. We had tied one end of the rope to a vertical drainpipe running down the side of the shed; the drainpipe came away from the brickwork when I was on the rope. Falling, I did no more than graze a knee.
The craze was over, just another of the crazes of childhood, like marbles or hoops. I cannot recall ever trying to tightrope-walk again. Other attractions claimed me; among them was Hilda.
In my last year at the kindergarten I was in love with Hilda. She was my age, pretty and slender, with curly brown hair. Her father was a hairdresser; he also ran the local amateur dramatics group with his wife. The theatrical streak lay in Hilda also. She would tease me, but captivatingly, and dance for me. Her mother was always buying her pretty dresses, of which I thoroughly approved.
Hilda and I spent a lot of time together. She cured me of my final Red Indian craze. We used to go and play with a pallid boy-cousin of hers, Ronnie, because Ronnie lived in a huge house with lots of agreeably derelict outbuildings. We could always scare Ronnie by pretending we had seen a ghost in the stables. On the other hand, Ronnie could scare us by saying he saw ghosts in the house. I’ve often wondered about this interchangeability of roles, which occurs in adult life too, for our characters are by no means as fixed as we like to think. In this particular case there was an immediate explanation: Hilda and I knew the stables were not haunted, but we suspected the house was, and were easily alarmed by anything that tended to confirm that suspicion. Ronnie, knowing the house to be haunted, would naturally expect ghosts in the outbuildings.
But I have seen boys at school, miserably bullied one term, turn into tough little bullies the next; and the sloppiest soldiers, given a stripe, are transformed into bullshitting corporals. Cowards turn into heroes, heroes into cowards, according to circumstance rather than nature.
Hilda and I turned into lovers. We used to kiss each other a lot, though I never kissed her as much as I wished. Kissing her was absolute delight; I never wished for anything better. When we had scared Ronnie we would walk in the dead passages or climb into the old lofts, playing our tiny games. Once, I was taken to see her perform on the stage. She sang two songs: ‘An Apple for the Teacher’ and ‘Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day’ (only she sang, ‘Little Girl, You’ve Had a Busy Day’), and I clapped furiously.
We inspected each other’s bodies and rather politely kissed each other’s behinds. The look of her body was a delight to me. But we did not know what to do except look. I stood against her, touching her, but I believe that was only once or twice. We used to watch each other pee.
It was Margaret Randall, however, who gave me my first erection.
Miss Unwin divided her flock into Little ’Uns and Big ’Uns, or Little Unwins and Big Unwins, as we said. The Big ’Uns went into an upstairs classroom. Margaret Randall was one of the biggest of the Big ’Uns, due to leave at the end of term; I myself had only a couple of terms to go. On this momentous occasion, when Miss Unwin was momentarily out of the room, Margaret locked the door of the classroom, jumped on to the table, called to us all to gather round, and began stripping off her clothes.
Children take things for granted. We enjoyed the show without being surprised. Margaret had an attractive face, with big blue eyes and long eyelashes. A nice girl, good with the Little ’Uns. As she pulled her knickers off, we saw with delight – surprised perhaps at the inevitability of it! – the crisp black hair that seemed to curl from between her legs.
She danced seductively on the table, making her small breasts bounce. I was entranced; I believe we all were. As she leaned backwards, legs open, I saw the pink inner lining of her vagina. For the first time I fully realized the thing would open, and my flesh gave a flip of delight. The wee-wee was giving place to the penis.
There was furious hammering at the door as Miss Unwin tried to get into the classroom and failed. Margaret gave one final waggle of her hips, jumped off the table and climbed back into her clothes. I forget what explanation was offered to the headmistress; I was far too preoccupied with what had happened.
Margaret Randall left at the end of term. Soon I also left and went to the grammar school, an old and crumbling building where lessons at first came very hard. Nelson was far above me in the school and embarrassed by having his kid brother hanging about waiting for him every afternoon. He thumped me a good bit, to prove to his pals that he was no cissy. I was punched in the stomach by a boy called Ian Barrett, whom I thenceforth feared and loathed.
Worse was in store. Hilda had to have her adenoids and tonsils out. After the operation she became rather fat. She went to a new school and became terribly lady-like. Her cousin Ronnie, too, was becoming less chicken-hearted, and insisted on looking when Hilda undressed. I was cross about this, particularly as Hilda obliged for him with no sign of ill will. I remember he once asked me to take my trousers down for him. I refused.
So I ceased actively to love Hilda. We had grown apart.
At home, things were no better or worse. I still hoped that my mother might grow to love me. The more she said she did, the more I doubted it.
There was reason. Mother had many acquaintances with whom she was always taking tea or playing whist, including Molly Hadfield, whose husband owned the town’s biggest grocery. Before meeting Molly, Mother would be all complaints about her and how awful she was. As soon as they met, Mother was sweet as pie – just as she was with me when in good humour – and paying Molly all sorts of compliments. Molly, liking this treatment, would respond with all the scandal. I cannot remember a word she said, being merely a captive audience and bored with the whole visit. After she had gone, Mother would instantly tell whoever was about – Ann or me, if nobody else was there – just what a nasty, back-biting, insincere little piece-of-goods Molly Hadfield was. Nelson, Ann, and I heard this so often, and winced when Mother went into her charm act before other people. She did it to the end of her days. It never ceased to be painful to me.
Home-life, however, was not all bad. A child’s life, in any case, is more compartmented than an adult’s. My bilious attacks were now fading out, giving way to fits of anger, which frightened me almost as much as they did everyone else. I was regarded as ‘a difficult child’, and my father became even more distant than before (which probably intensified the anger fits if they were, as one might suppose, signals for help). Poor Ann had to bear most of the brunt of these fits – most, that is, after the furniture – but this in no way altered our somewhat sporadic affection for each other.
We had a new game in which Nelson occasionally joined. We had found a huge gold-mine in India (my grandfather had spent several years in India) and, with its contents, Ann and I had bought England and shipped it somewhere else. I’m not quite sure where, and wasn’t at the time; the details were deliberately left vague. Everyone in England was on our side and adored us. Everyone else in the world was against us, and kept trying to steal the country from us. We were so famous and so loved that motion-picture cameras were trained on us all the time, even when we went to the lavatory; these films were rushed to cinemas all over England, to appease the population, who sat in the cinemas most of the time, gloating over our niceness in the dark, cheering when we beat off the crooks or farted or waved to the cameras. (A new cinema had just opened in town.)
I was getting good at cricket too. Every game, I was playing for England, nothing less.
God knows to what lengths this self-aggrandizement might have gone. But we found another game, a sex game.
Nelson was thirteen when he got me in the garden and showed me how to masturbate. It was extremely interesting. Later, he showed me again in the bedroom, where we could get a good look. Although I had seen his penis for years, without thinking it of any particular account, I now observed how well it had developed. He urged me to try rubbing my prick; with the promise of similar development, I tried there and then, with no effect. Was the sensation even pleasurable? I forget.
Memory is an elusive thing. It stores episodes well, but misses out intervening passages of time. Some months must have passed before I was tempted to try again. With Nelson’s help I was then more successful.
This episode took place in Ann’s bedroom, which doubled as playroom, Ann being out at the time.
Nelson’s contribution to our England game was to build huge and strange edifices out of Ann’s and our old building bricks. The fantasy was that we inhabited these palaces. They were his first flights as an architect, elaborate structures as high as Ann, which incorporated old boxes and bits of toys; sometimes they had Ann’s dolls imprisoned in their rooms and staring helplessly out of windows. When we had built one of these fine erections between us we went on to the wanking game. He brought his penis out, made it stand, and made me produce mine. He worked at it, and it also became erect.
What excitement and delight!
At once I wanted to bring Ann in on the new game. Nelson was more cautious, recalling that she ‘will only tell Mum’.
Ann did not tell Mum, however. She enjoyed the game too much. I introduced the idea rather carefully, when we were both getting dressed one Saturday morning and running between each other’s bedrooms. Producing the mystery object from my pyjamas, I held it in my hand and invited her inspection; it gave her the traditional pleasure females derive from the sight.
We persevered. Soon it would stir and rise at her touch. The idea of rubbing it came naturally to her.
Life also had its less enjoyable side. I was involved in fights at school, mainly desultory punch-ups on the way home in the afternoon. One day, however, I again fell foul of Ian Barrett. He ganged up on me with a crony of his, jostling me in the lane behind the school. I hit him and he hit me back, on the nose. I lost my temper in the same wild way I did at home. I waded into him, swiping wildly, entirely out of control. Barrett’s crony ran for it. At first, Barrett punched back, but I was too enraged to be stopped by pain. He fell over. I kicked him and then fell on him, still punching, yelling, and snivelling.
A group of boys came up and dragged me off, staring at me in awe. Barrett just lay there.
I ran away, half-believing I had killed Barrett.
My nose was bleeding. The blood was all over my clothes. I did not dare to go home in that state: Mother would have deserted us for good and all. Miserably, I slunk along side streets full of hostile houses and windows, crossed the railway, and made my way over the common to a pond on which we used to slide when it was ice-covered in winter. It was the only place I could think of where I might wash unseen.
As I cleaned up, shame came over me. That Barrett was bigger than I, and older, I could not accept as an excuse. I was also sorry for myself, feeling I ought to be able to run home to sympathetic and even admiring parents. Wretchedness overcame me as I mopped my clothes, knees, and face. Yet a saving streak of humbug allowed me also to glory in my wretchedness.
Cold and dread finally drove me home, bespattered now with mud as well as blood. Mother was frantic with worry. I was sent straight up to my room, told to await my father. Ann and Nelson stared at me as I stumped upstairs. Neither dared even wink at me.
When my bedroom door opened, it was Beatrice, the maid. She had brought me a slice of cherry cake in her hand. I grabbed it, and the door quickly shut again. I was too miserable to eat the cake, and hid it under my pillow.
When Father came up he looked very stern, closing the door behind him and standing against it as if he were facing a firing squad.
‘Mr. Barrett phoned me. Ian ran straight home and told him what you have been up to, fighting like a common little guttersnipe. Mr. Barrett was furious.’
‘He hit me first, Dad!’ And the little sniveller had blabbed! But at least he was not dead, as I had feared.
‘That’s no excuse. Mr. Barrett was furious. You have got to get cleaned up and then go round and apologize to him, and to Ian.’
‘I won’t! I won’t! And you aren’t going to make me!’
‘We’ll see about that, my boy!’
Time-honoured exchanges! But my father did not see about it. Even as I defied him, I comprehended that inwardly he was on my side. Mr. Barrett might have alarmed him, but I had won his sympathy.
Relenting slightly, he said, ‘Well, let’s get you cleaned up first. You are in a mess! Look at your clothes!’
I started shivering and blubbering. He helped me out of my filthy little suit and came with me to the bathroom to supervise a general sponging-down. We discovered several cuts and bruises under the dirt. On to these my father dabbed iodine – an ordeal in its own right.
Eventually I was allowed downstairs, feeling very small. My mother was taken to one side and spoken to, while Nelson and Ann gazed at me.
‘You really bashed old Barrett up,’ Nelson said.
‘Yeh.’
I could hardly eat high tea. But nothing more was said about going round and apologizing to Barrett or his horrible father.
My world seemed greatly to have changed. Curiously enough, at home and at school, things went on as ever. Nobody realized how gravely I had scared myself by completely losing control of my emotions.
Nelson and I now held regular wanking sessions. Soon we took it as a matter of course that Ann should be present. She insisted on being present, threatening to make a fuss if we would not have her – for I had not long been able to resist telling her that Nelson had an even bigger one than I.
At first she was content to watch. Later she began to insist on doing it to one or other of us. We had to admit that this was more enjoyable than doing it to ourselves.
She also did it to us both at the same time, a penis in both hands, but this seemed rather clumsy. Although it was scarcely true to say that we looked on what we were doing as wrong, we certainly took good care that our parents did not discover us at it.
Ann had a nasty school friend called Rosemary. She asked us once if Rosemary could attend a session – ‘not touching, just looking’ – but Nelson and I refused; we disliked Rosemary. Nelson told Ann that some boys looked different because they had skin over the ends of their cocks; there were boys at school like that. She begged Nelson to bring someone of that kind home, so that she ‘could have a go with it’. Nelson told me later that he had approached a boy he knew and suggested it, but the boy refused.
This ur-sex with our sister was entirely a one-way transaction. We took it for granted that she had no instrument, and there was an end to it; she seemed to labour under the same delusion. Neither Nelson nor I, to my recollection, ever tried to examine her crack, although we both had enough knowledge by then to grasp that that crack represented a decided presence and not just an absence. But we weren’t interested.
No doubt our own little cocks seemed far more fascinating than anything Ann could offer, for at this age we were passing through a proto-homosexual phase often noticeable in the boys. But I believe there was something more to it than that: the question of personality entered, personality of which sex is only a part. Children respond instinctively to each other’s characters, often in a way baffling to adults, who will cry plaintively, ‘But Jimmy’s such a nice little boy, dear!’, or ‘I do wish you could find a better playmate than Freddie!’, in their inability to see the real nature of Jimmy and Freddie.
For all the frequent sex-play between Nelson, Ann, and me, our relationships were in fact formal and carefully guarded beyond a certain limit – unlike the relationship between Hilda and me; Hilda and I loved each other, as far as our immature personalities were capable of it; we were intimates.
Hilda apart (and by now she was well on her way to plumpness and her new school manners), sex in those days had little to do with love or affection; curiosity was the basis of it.
Roaming through the fields with a couple of my pals one day, and stopping for a pee, I saw that one of them had the other kind of prick, with skin. When we were alone I asked him to let me have a look at it.
He brought it out willingly. It seemed a very strange object, somewhat long and pale, with the skin coming right over the red knob and ending pink and pursed almost like the bud of a small flower. He let me finger it. When I rubbed it a bit for him, nothing happened. I believe I asked him if it would open and he said no.
That time of life is a curious mixture of knowingness and complete ignorance. In the summer term I played in the school cricket team, and gained a reputation as a fast bowler. We were all sitting behind the pavilion, smoking – sharing two fags between the group of us – when one of the bigger boys, Peter Adamson, a good bat, told us that he knew where babies came from. The Adamsons’ maid had told him. He said that they came from ladies’ cracks and that, before they came out, pricks had to be stuck up the crack.
The notion struck us as both repulsive and unlikely. Peter insisted that the maid had shown him how it was done, demonstrating with a finger up her own crack.
Infuriated by his persistence in such a lie – such a disturbing lie! – we seized him and beat him on the behind with his own bat!
Peter’s preposterous tale lingered in my mind. So did my interest in uncircumcised penises. When a big plump boy called William offered to show me his, I was eager. William, by his own account, ‘flapped himself’, as he called it, every night. His penis felt pulpy and peculiar, and was covered by a very thick skin, which I touched. It became erect in my grasp and he let me draw the skin back, to reveal his glistening knob brightly coloured. I wanked him for some while until he shuddered and groaned and gasped and cried ‘Faster!’ to me.
That was exciting. Although I did not greatly like William, his home was fairly near ours, and so we returned from school in the same direction. Just out of our way stood an old semi-derelict farm which the farmer had half-converted into a filling station. One of those gaunt old petrol pumps of the thirties stood there, and old broken cars, and a shiny metal sign advertising ‘Pratt’s High Test’ – a brand of petrol. William got me into the back of these premises through a hole in the hedge, and we there investigated each other.
I did not much like his holding my penis. But I had the notion, before his grew too large, of inserting my knob under his foreskin. In this unusual position we proceeded to wank ourselves off. It excited me as much as it did William. Eventually he broke loose, rubbing himself briskly and crying ‘Here it comes!’ I was mystified, and not unmoved, by my first glimpse of anyone undergoing orgasm.
No sense existed then of urgency, or of the need to follow up one thing with another, such as one feels as an adult. The phenomena of life were isolated. There were so many phenomena; it had to be left to chance to see which connected to which.
