by Brian Aldiss
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 kno
b 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.
For all that, my interest in sex was growing. I confided in neither Nelson nor Ann about my activities with William, perhaps because they disturbed me too much. It was the contortions he went into, as well as the mystery of that extra piece of skin. He rubbed me also, on two occasions – enjoyable for me, but he was annoyed that ‘nothing happened’ to me, and after the second occasion I would not let him do it again, though I continued to manipulate his foreskin whenever the idea entered our heads. Each time he went shuddering off into climaxes I could not understand.
If this sounds inconclusive it was inconclusive in a deeper sense. I knew from my limited experience that sex was pleasurable; I could not know that it was more pleasurable than I had experienced. Of orgasms, I comprehended nothing. William’s pleasurable writhings had no meaning; perhaps I regarded them as a kind of affectation on his part, a facet of his rather unpleasing character.
This record is predominantly sexual in its emphasis. In my life, and more especially in my childhood, it was not so. This truth, while it affects every page, cannot be repeated on every page.
Ann’s interest in sexual organs was as great as mine. She had not abandoned her plan for introducing her nasty school friend to our sessions.
Rosemary’s nastiness lay mainly in the eye of the beholder. She wore plaits with ribbons in and was somewhat pallid, but that was the extent of what Nelson and I had against her. At this period I was still undergoing my ‘girls are soppy’ phase. (Ann, as a sister, did not come within the girl category.)
Because her hold over me was firmer than her hold over Nelson, Ann managed to get me alone with her and Rosemary in her bedroom.
‘Show Rosemary your cock,’ she said. There was a lack of finesse in those days!
I brought it out, cradling it protectively in my open palm while the girls inspected it. Rosemary was an only child; she had probably never seen anything like it before. Although I was happy to assist in her education, it was irritating to submit to investigation. The two girls had been colouring some pictures. With a crayon, Rosemary prodded my prick, trying to make it turn over.
‘I’ll show you how to work it. Watch me make it grow big!’ Ann said. Kneeling down by me, she cradled and stroked my prick as if it were one of her guinea pigs. She whispered to it encouragingly, tickling and rubbing it underneath, enticing it, while Rosemary awaited the miracle. Under her stony stare, the pet would not come to life, and I slid it back into my trousers.
Only a few days after, Rosemary was playing in the house when I came home. I ran up to my bedroom to dodge her. She followed me in and said, ‘Can I get it out?’
‘Get what out?’
‘You know – your thing. Your little plonk. Please!’
‘You don’t like it,’ I said, sulkily.
‘I do like it. Really!’
‘I suppose you can, then.’ I wasn’t keen for her to do so, but it seemed uncivil to refuse. The parents had been careful to instil rules of hospitality in us.
I stood there while she clumsily unbuttoned my flies, looking down at her head and her plaits. She had a neat white parting, unexpectedly pleasing. Amateurishly, she felt in my trousers, fumbled gently to grope her way into my pants. Sensing her approach, my prick flipped up to attention.
She drew it forth. ‘It’s awfully big today!’
Admiringly, she traced round the rim of the glans penis with a finger.
‘You can rub it if you like,’ I said loftily. I showed her how to do it. She started, but Ann called her, and she ran away.
When she had gone I remembered how her parting had looked, and wished I had asked her to show me her crack. It never occurred to me to ask her another time.
Life went on. Nelson was now working hard for exams. He wore spectacles and was more remote from us. For all that, our wanking sessions were still held intermittently, more secretively; Nelson began to prefer Ann not to attend. He said it was ‘bad for her’.
He crept into my bedroom one morning and said, ‘Horace, boy, I can come!’ Opening his pyjamas, he showed me his penis, hanging large and limp; he had just masturbated. Above the root of it, downy hair was growing: not much of it, but decidedly hair! I had heard that what we then called spunk came out of the ends of full-grown penises.
‘Show me!’ I said. He began rubbing his organ, pressing it back and forth with his fingers until it struggled into an erect position. Then I took over from him, kneeling up on the bed to get at it properly.
‘Bathroom’s free!’ my father called, thumping on my door as he passed.
‘Just coming!’ I shouted back. Nelson jerked away at the sound of Father’s voice, but I grabbed hold of his prick and worked away excitedly, rubbing my own with my free hand.
‘Oh, here it comes!’ Nelson gasped, pressing his palms against his thighs. I redoubled my efforts with both hands. Bubbles appeared on the end of his prick, quite a few, nothing more.
‘There was more stuff last time,’ he said – but neither of us was disappointed. This was the first time I realized that sexual activity had a positive visible climax. Although I continued to rub myself when Nelson had left the room, nothing similar happened to me.
Over these years we children were left surprisingly much to our own devices, once we were over the stage when Mother took Ann out for a walk every afternoon. She returned to a round of committees and afternoon teas and card games while the maids saw Ann to and from school. Father was down in the bank, often returning only when it was time for us to go to bed.
The maids had almost as much freedom in the afternoon as we had. For most of my childhood we had a maid living in, another maid who was at the house all day, and a washer-woman and boot-boy who came only in the mornings. There was also a nurse-maid while Mother was slowly recovering from her still-born child. The maids wore uniform, which included little lace caps and aprons. If it all sounds very Victorian, the English provinces in the thirties were still labouring under the shadow of the old queen. My grandmother was still washing her painted wooden venetian blinds, her anti-macassars, and her bead-curtain while Hitler’s divisions were entering Prague.
If maids also feature largely in Victorian sexual anecdotes, well, such eminence was surely justified. Lucky the son whose family boasted a nice maid.
Beatrice was certainly interested in the whole matter of sex – painfully interested, one might say. At one time I had been rather violently interested in Beatrice. The maids shared a separate lavatory with the boot-boy, in the back of the house, next to the scullery and the boot-hole. I managed to dash in there several times and catch Beatrice with her knickers down, peeing. She was always furious, and the final crushing threat to ‘tell the Missus’ cured me of the habit.
That episode was a couple of years past by the time she caught me tossing myself off.
Our Beatrice was a bit of a spy. She was a quiet girl, with pleasant and rather flat features, small-built, and with a crop of brown hair which was generally worn done up in a bun. She put her quiet habits to good effect by creeping up on us unawares. Thus it was that she overheard Ann talking to Rosemary about what Nelson and I did together. She then kept watch to see what happened.
In the afternoons when Mother was out I was careless. This particular afternoon was in the summer, just before school broke up. I had been swimming with some other boys, and came back to find the house deserted, although I could hear Beatrice in the kitchen preparing tea. I went up into my bedroom and, without even bothering to shut the door properly, flung off my sc
hool uniform to change into other clothes.
Catching sight of myself in the long wardrobe mirror, I began to posture lewdly at myself. I stood on my hands and let my penis dangle down my stomach. I stuffed it between my legs and pretended I was looking at a girl. I tried to push it into a thin-necked vase. I embraced the mirror.
The object of my attentions raised its head. I started to rub it, drew up a chair and sat there, leisurely stroking it and gazing at it admiringly in the mirror, wondering why my parents had seen fit to rob me of my rightful foreskin.
When my prick was as stiff as a little rod, a noise made me turn my head. There stood Beatrice, looking mighty peculiar, her face telling me at once that she had been watching.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
‘I’ll tell your mother, you doing that to yourself!’ she exclaimed.
She came forward, almost despite herself. I shut my legs, stood up, put my hands over my weapon, and faced her, aghast, unable to say anything. The room seemed to be full of silence.
‘I’ll tell your mother!’
She pulled my hands away. My prick was still standing at an angle, jutting out. She touched it. She gripped it.
‘If you’ve got that far, you’d better go on, Master Horace. Go on! Let me see you do it!’ She insisted as I hesitated. Unable to bring myself to do it in her presence, I leant away from her.
She took hold of my prick again and began rubbing it, muttering, ‘Oh, you naughty naughty boy! You shouldn’t rub it yourself! You shouldn’t!’
Her other arm went round my back and she dropped on to one knee. She was working away, her face flushed. She held my prick, rather daintily between thumb and two first fingers, with her little finger cocked out straight, in the genteel fashion she observed while holding a tea-cup. I already had enough sense to know Mother would never be called. I was still speechless, but now with exaltation. Although I was still in my anti-girl phase, Beatrice was somewhat too old to be exactly classed as a girl, and the pleasure was exquisite.
‘Lay on the bed,’ she said. As I did so, she closed the door. Then she climbed on with me.
