Once the girls turned against me, I was often lonely and miserable. My mother sent me carefully wrapped packages with food inside and letters about life at home, news of my brothers, Francis and Ludovic. My sister, Sarah, was at another boarding school, Bedales, where she excelled. The letters were written in a neat hand which often got less neat as the letter progressed. They were witty and descriptive and always filled with her obvious affection for me. The anticipation of these letters and packages, and then their arrival, bringing as they did the reassurance that somewhere out in the cold and unexplored world was at least one woman who loved me constantly, enabled me to survive the gloom and anguish caused by girls my own age whose love was as jagged and uncertain as broken bottles.
My first housemaster was a small, bearded man in a tweed sports coat whose larger and more vibrant wife performed the role of housemother. Both drearily vegetarian, they were also ardent devotees of homeopathy and I remember arsenic being freely dispensed for certain ailments. The house was divided in two, one side being for the girls, the other for boys. My dormitory contained six boys in three two-tier bunk beds.
Masturbation was endemic but because the bunks were old and made of metal, they squeaked noisily. As a result, just as you were about to achieve orgasm, someone would always make a joke or complain they couldn’t sleep and you’d have to start all over again. As all the boys except one were dedicated wankers, I suggested we drop the furtive aspects of the sport and adopt a more communal approach: mass-masturbation, timed to commence as soon as the lights went out. The suggestion was accepted and so the next night we all set out together, each in our own bunks, squeaking and groaning, all our little hands feverishly at work, the beds shaking and rattling, until the last boy finally came and we all went to sleep. Only one boy remained uninterested in the activity. He had a great love of lederhosen and racing bikes, but absolutely no interest in sex. After a few nights, he began to be a problem.
‘I just don’t get it,’ he’d suddenly say at some crucial point in the endeavour.
‘Shut up!’
‘No, but what’s the big deal? I just don’t get it.’
‘Please! If you don’t like it, just be quiet, we’re begging you.’
When that didn’t work, when he continued to complain and interrupt, we tried to tempt and provoke him.
‘Just close your eyes, put your hand on your willy, and imagine … Imagine your hand inside Sally’s shirt … Or imagine Cora’s legs … her buttocks … imagine long thighs … big tits … Imagine you’re under the stairs and Jane goes by and you look up and you can see right up her skirt!!!’
‘So what?’
It was shocking how sexless he was. We even tried to tailor fantasies for him which would integrate his own obsessions.
‘Okay, lie back and dream … Pink nipples, drop handlebars, soft thighs, ten speed gears, your hand in her knickers, racing wheels, pudendahhhh!!!!’
‘Uuugh!’
It was hopeless. Perhaps we should have crammed Jane or Sally into lederhosen and beat them with bike chains, but we were young; our limited imaginations could think of nothing sufficiently exotic to arouse this doughty little cyclist. Eventually, the chummy community of spermy boys disbanded and each of us slunk back into the frustration of muffling the once-again solitary vice. Several of us experimented with a new erotic technique in the hopes of bringing about orgasm more quickly. You would lie on one of your hands until it went numb and then take hold of it, wrap its insensible fingers around your penis, and jerk it up and down with the other hand, the idea being that as the hand felt nothing, you could imagine it belonged to someone else.
In the morning, we’d be woken by the bearded housemaster, who would herd us into the boys’ bathroom. Here, in summer or winter, a cold bath awaited us before the morning walk. You had to get into the bath and then lie down in the icy water until it covered every inch of you, including your head. Then, and only then, could you surge out and dry yourself. The bearded one would sit on the edge of the bath, fully dressed, grinning his sanctimonious grin, to make sure you complied with the total immersion rule and if you did not, just as you rose into the relative warmth of the room, he’d push you back down. He was a harmless enough man, but I didn’t like him. There was no beating at the school, but there were other ways to make your life miserable. In retrospect, some rules verged on reasonable, like the prohibition against smoking, but some still seem manifestly goofy, like forcing you to cut your hair a certain length or this cold bath routine.
One day, after I’d been there about a year, I entered the bathroom and saw his nimble, tweedish figure perched on the edge of the bath. I had developed young and, at the age of twelve, was strong and quick. Suddenly—and it came out of nowhere, no plan, not a moment of decision—I felt inspired to give the little man a dose of his own medicine. I gave him no warning. He was completely unprepared as I lunged at him and with a single shove, sent him floundering backward into the bathtub. He flailed around, scrabbling to extricate his scrawny arse from the freezing water.
He didn’t like it.
He punished me in some irrelevant way, but no serious trouble came of it. I suspect he was so embarrassed at his loss of dignity he didn’t want to advertise it further. I was a hero for a week until my tendency to revel too cockily in my successes undercut my admirable achievement.
My longing for sexual contact of any kind increased with every day. Shortly after my dunking of the master, a boy whose claim to fame was that he could dangle a massive flashlight (including large square battery) from the tip of his erect penis, discovered that if you climbed along a thick branch of a nearby tree you could get an unimpeded view into one of the girl’s dormitories. As I was always lurking about at night in search of romance, I was the first to catch him crouched up in his masturbatorial roost and quickly joined him. The clarity and closeness of the view was exquisite beyond words. There they all were in their fluffy sweaters and skirts and jeans, moving around and chatting like in a silent movie, except this movie was in glorious colour. Before long, the sweaters started to come off and down dropped the lower garments and there they were in their snappy little brassieres and pretty knickers. Then they came off revealing all the beautiful pinks and whites and little fuzzy bits, and up went the arms and on went the nighties—and oh!
Well worth my allergic reaction to the tree bark.
To the boy’s considerable irritation, I told William about the carnal pleasures of the bough and the next night the three of us were up there, perched in a row, studying the mysteries of female development. Here was the girl from India with hair so long it reached her slender buttocks, a princess it was rumoured, who on the first day of school crashed to the floor after grace because no servant had pushed her chair in for her. How svelte and elegant she was with her tiny breasts and her beautiful light brown skin. Here was the one from Egypt with breasts so large they swayed from side to side as she moved. Standing awkwardly to one side was Sally, a sweet, chubby girl fumbling to release her Playtex pantygirdle. Here was pretty Lucy with her firm, protuberant breasts and long, athletic legs. On a bed sat Gaby, rolling down her stockings, a pretty, soft-fleshed girl, up whose skirt my hand would be a year later when the news of JFK’s assassination came on TV (God forgive me, but I still remember my annoyance at the interruption). And finally, here was lissom Jane, a slightly older girl who could (and would, if asked nicely) make farting noises by sucking air in and out of her vagina.
This voyeuristic gold mine was more than any boy could ask for. It was heaven. It was too good to keep secret. Soon there were four of us up there, then five, then six. When an army marches across a bridge they break step because if they march in unison the bridge cannot endure the stress. We did not know this and one night our little fists must have fallen into synch, because suddenly there was a loud crack! and the sturdy branch—which had not so much as groaned before—snapped and crashed to the ground. Six scratched boys, clutching six shrivelling penises, limped an
d scurried off into the darkness, pulling up zips and cursing.
Those girls … Having seen them, how I missed them. How I longed for those bodies. Just to glimpse them even for a second, the indescribable perfection of them … It was beyond lust, it was love. I loved the sight of them. Had I been old enough I would have married any one of them on a simple promise they’d stand naked on a plinth and let me walk around them. I was in awe. It was a welling up of the deepest feeling, an abdominal surge of transcendent adoration and insatiable curiosity.
Study? How could I? How could anyone with all this magnificence prowling around or sitting at the next desk, plump bottoms flared on chairs, breasts resting on desks, and the whole thing veiled by a mere wisp of cloth?
What would they look like naked? How would they feel? How would they behave if we were alone? How would they smell? How would they taste? If I listed all the memories I have, memories that are as clear today as they were thirty-five years ago, of all the kisses and caresses, the furtive glances, the tastes and smells, of matches struck in dark places to illuminate an unleashed breast, of tight hugs and creeping fingers, of ears and necks, of cheeks and slippery tongues, this book would be a thousand pages long. If I listed all the fantasies I had of all of the above, it would be a million. Knowledge? Facts?! What for? Who needed them? I was an explorer waiting for a journey to begin. I wanted love and flesh and sensual and romantic oblivion. I wanted intercourse. I was twelve for Christ’s sake! I was in my prime.
And no one would accommodate me.
It was agony, double agony. If I could have separated lust from love, it would have been far easier, but at that time if anyone let me touch them anywhere in any way, my gratitude was so profound it became love.
Eventually, I could resist temptation no longer and scaled the fire escape outside the girl’s dorm. As soon as my eager face appeared in the window, a girl saw me and called the others over. To my astonishment, I was invited in. For one marvellous minute the sheer novelty of having a boy in their room so confused them that no one ran for help. I sank into the saturating, voluptuous scent of the place, my eyes feasted orgiastically on the teddy bears on the pillows, a bra hanging from a hook, photographs of mums and dads, the slippers and the slips, the pad of naked feet, calves and knees, thighs disappearing at the swaying hem, the swell of hips and buttocks, the narrow waists, the round bounce of satin-covered breasts, the giggles of the bolder ones, the brush of long hair against my face, the smiles and the blushes … And then a little Puritan snuck out, a vegetarian was tipped off, and here came outraged wholesomeness personified.
When my mother died, the following letter from the headmaster was found among the few mementoes she’d kept of my childhood.
Dear Mr and Mrs Chapman,
I think I should just report that Matthew is spending a week as my ‘guest’ at Arunfield because he has been rather a lot of nuisance at Arunwood, particularly with regard to night time visits to the girls’ dormitory. As you probably know this is one of the rules we do insist on being kept, even as young as Arunwood, and as Matthew is still very much in the process of finding out how to get along sensibly with the girls, I think it is as well to take a firm line with him about this from now on …
I do not remember my parents being particularly upset. In fact, I don’t think they did anything to hide their amusement. Get along sensibly with the girls!
We were allowed home every few weekends and I would usually go. My mother’s drinking was less of a problem for me now than at almost any other time. I was too old to be a victim and not old enough to be attacked as an adult. I was a teenager, egotistical and cruel, and far more interested in developing into a man than worrying about her. When I brought a friend home, she was welcoming and warm. As soon as we entered the room, she came toward us with her arms open and embraced first my friend, ‘Ah, my dear William. How are you?’ and then me. As my friends tended to be delinquent boys from dysfunctional middle-class families where physical contact was rare and expressions of affection muted, she was adored. When she got drunk around them, it upset me, but it didn’t seem to bother them. She was a heavy drinker. She closed her eyes when talking. So what? And, no matter how bad things got, I loved her.
When I returned to the dorm after my stay with the headmaster, the fire escapes were painted with purple dye and every morning before breakfast my hands were inspected. I suppose you couldn’t blame them for trying, but like all prohibitions on personal desire, this one was doomed to failure. There were other things in my life apart from sex, but all were coloured with desire. I would play sport and play it well, but refused to do it on weekends because that would cut into my romancing hours. I had some bikes, including a tandem, and loved to ride around on them, but on every trip out into the country, I hoped I’d meet a girl or catch a peek of illicit lovers in the back seat of a car.
My friendship with William was the only security I had. A far better scholar than me, he had a bitter, nihilistic air about him and read Sartre and Camus and despised convention. One time he read something—something Buddhist I suspect—about the nature of experience and for a while insisted on eating his food in silence, with his eyes closed. As girls tempted and withdrew, fell in love with me and then fell out, often leaving me in such anguish I’d sob myself to sleep while masturbating, the eccentric William remained my good and constant companion. Sometimes he’d even spend the holidays with me. His mother was dead and his father lived alone in the New Forest and I sensed it was a gloomy place, although I never visited.
Not all the boys came from rich homes. I remember two boys who didn’t, both of whom were friends of mine from time to time. Nigel was a short, wiry boy, a great footballer and an exceptional pisser. We once put him on the jumping-off mark of the long-jump pit and found he could piss an incredible eighteen feet, a phenomenal arc of urine. (Bet he can’t do that anymore.) Throughout the three years I was there, he and I were at times rivals for the affection of a girl named Nina. He did better than me, until I did better than anyone—and got expelled for it.
Then there was Andrew. Andrew was also a good footballer. He was handsome, or would have been had his face not been a galaxy of leaking pimples from which his narrow, aggressive eyes stared out. Like William, he was a good student but unpredictable and savage. He’d punch you without a second thought and then finish the job swiftly and without flourish, like he’d done it many times before. He, William, and I were probably the toughest kids of our age and, apart from the nerds, the brightest.
The Sixties were beginning and black, elastic-sided boots with Cuban heels were in fashion. I desired a pair with almost fetishistic passion, convinced, as one can be at that age, that if I had them, everyone would look at me differently, and life would change completely and forever. I biked to a nearby town where rumour had it you could get these boots. I found a pair with three-inch heels and was biking back when I got a puncture and had to walk the rest of the way. My feet hurt for a week, but I continued to wear the magic boots which were not magic. Soon after this, William, Andrew, and I managed to convince the school we were spending the day with my parents and jumped a train to London to go visit Carnaby Street. Carnaby Street was the street, the place to be in all of England, in all the world. I was wearing my boots under jeans with inverted Vs sewn into the sides below the knee so they flapped rakishly around my calves as I walked. William was similarly dressed. But when I looked down at Andrew’s feet, I saw he was wearing a pair of tartan bedroom slippers. I was appalled. He didn’t care. Some years later, having taken a lot of acid, he jumped off a bridge and killed himself.
After a year, we all moved on to another house. We returned to Arunwood only when we learned the bearded one was departing. On his last night, William and I went over there and urinated extensively into the petrol tank of his van. The next day we were told he only got to the bottom of the drive before the vehicle spluttered and died.
I can’t remember much about the next house, except for the night Presiden
t Kennedy was killed. It was in the evening and we were all watching TV. Gaby was wearing stockings with a suspender belt and her flesh bulged softly from the tops of them. I had my hand between these legs. When the news came on, the hand was ejected and was never invited back.
Two new girls came to the school. One of them was Rebecca. She had dark hair, big eyes, a long nose and a wide mouth. There was something exotic and gypsy-like about her. She was by far the coolest girl of our age, slender, sophisticated, and beautiful. I fell in love with her instantly, but she was from London, Hampstead, I think, and although I went out with her for a short while during term-time, I could not compete with the big city boys, older boys mostly, who were already smoking dope and screwing. We had a brief romance and kissed a lot. She let me touch her here and there, but I was too possessive and insecure and we broke up. There was one time, one time when I could, I’m sure I could, have made love to her.
We had broken up, but I never stopped wanting her. By now we had moved to the dormitories of the main school building. There was a dance in the assembly hall and I persuaded her to leave it and come and smoke a cigarette with me in a loft above the pottery classroom. We had a cigarette and then lay down and started kissing in the darkness. She was adept and willing. Her lips were huge and lazy and hot. Suddenly, her long-wristed, long-fingered hand scurried down inside my trousers and felt me. I put my hand up her skirt and felt her. She opened her legs. She was wet. I was wet.
Trials of the Monkey Page 19
