Later in my teens I suffered depths of social and moral agony trying to fuck girls. They wanted it, they knew I wanted it, but everything was against us. For a start, they had been taught to say ‘Oh, please don’t do that!’ and ‘Oh, no, Horry, you mustn’t!’ and so on – phrases which brought some fellows on well, but only damped my enthusiasm.
Then there was trouble about where you went to do it. Boys and girls alike, we had no money in those days, only a feeble bit of pocket-money carefully designed to keep you a kid as long as possible. You couldn’t buy a hotel room or anything – and probably would not have dared to if you had had the money, because the hotel owners would instinctively have been against you, against life, against fun, against pricks, against cunts. England was a filthy little hole to grow up in in the thirties – bitterly impoverished for the poor, bitterly repressive for the middle classes.
Repression: it is part of civilization, very necessary in society, particularly middle-class society which, my scanty historical knowledge instructs me, only levered its way up into money and respectibility by postponing for the first years of its maturity such pleasures as sex. This is one of the attractions of war – the repressions can be shed.
Those horrid middle-class repressions operated strongly in the Stubbs family. The younger Stubbs boy felt them badly in his teens, the time when sexuality is highest. At Branwells there were many boys, like me, who masturbated two or three times every day and gave themselves a treat on Sunday. Digby claimed to do himself every Saturday night until his semen dried up – six or seven wanks one after the other.
And many of the boys were worried to distraction about what they were doing to themselves. They had got the word, often from their fathers, that masturbation would ruin their physiques or send them mad. The warning did not stop them. It often made them do it more, since the subject was more on their minds. Sometimes it forced them into peculiar habits. Beasley wanked himself almost to the point of climax every day and then stopped; only on Saturday night did he allow himself proper satisfaction. Spaldine, who tried to run away from Branwells his first term there, used to press a finger against the base of his penis so as to have orgasm without wasting semen.
In that respect I was lucky; nobody ever represented the pastime to me as anything but enjoyable. I lay back and enjoyed it. But ever since the happy day when Beatrice caught me naked before the mirror I knew there were better things.
The better things, as I say, were hard to come by from girls of my own age and class. They had had a dose of middle-class morality even more severe than the boys.
There was, over everything else, the problem of babies. If, by some miracle of perseverance and guile, you managed to dip your wick, the girl would be screaming all the while that she might have a baby. Working-class girls were much better in that respect. Their drawback was that they always seemed to have in the background big tough boy friends who would jump out with big tough buddies and attempt to bash you.
The baby problem could be overcome, at least in theory, by using French letters. But French letters had to be bought. It was not just the cash. It was stepping into the little barber’s at the end of Chapel Road and actually asking for a packet for a friend. The only time I dared to go in was one day when I thought I was on a sure thing for the evening, a rather plump girl called, so help her, Esmeralda, who belonged to the tennis club I did. I spent about an hour of indecision, riding past the barber’s shop and round the corner on my bike, at various speeds. Finally I did go in and buy a packet of three Frenchies.
Esmeralda’s parents were common but rich. Nobody had a good word to say for them behind their backs; everyone toadied to them to their faces. I did not like Dad greatly, but Mum was a fat and loving lady, who could call me Horatio as if she took the name seriously; she was rather grand, in her way. They had a big ramshackle house, and Esmeralda and her mum both played the piano and sang – rather well, I thought. They performed all the jolly and rather bawdy music-hall songs, like ‘Then her Mama Went Out, De-Da-De-Da-De-Da-De-Dee’ and ‘Who Were You With Last Night?’ and ‘Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend?’
I was pleased with all that sort of liberal-minded stuff. But on this particular night there wasn’t going to be any singing, or anything but screwing, because Esmeralda’s mum and dad were going to be in Nottingham and Esmeralda had given me the green light.
She was a cuddly, happy-go-lucky little thing, Esmeralda. I envied her her temperament. She enjoyed a bit of kissing on the sofa, liked it when I tickled her feet and felt and admired her legs.
I slid my hand up farther and whispered, ‘Let me have a look up there, love!’
‘You can have a look. That won’t hurt either of us. But I may as well tell you now, love, that you aren’t going to get anything more than a look.’
‘The sight of it may drive me mad!’
‘That’s up to you, not me!’
I patted my pocket. ‘You don’t have to be frightened. I’ve brought some things.’
The announcement did frighten her. She saw I meant business. The trouble was, I was also frightened, and didn’t know whether or not I meant business. I had never worn a French letter.
So I dropped that line of approach and got her friendly again. Bless her, she did let me have a look, a good look, and I dipped my fingers in it and rubbed her, although I had no idea about whether I was tickling the right thing. She didn’t even ask for the light off, for which I was grateful. It was marvellously liberating to be able to see.
But I could feel my hard-on going soft. I extracted it from my flies and started fumbling with the French-letter packet. I got one out, pushing the other two back into my pocket. I balanced it on my glans penis and began awkwardly to try to roll it down. Esmeralda had been lying back in a languorous posture. She sat up and watched with interest.
I got the damned thing on, wrinkled and repulsive. My hard deflated further. I began rubbing it to keep its spirits up, furious and yet also half-amused at the sight.
She laughed rather contemptuously, and put her hand on it. I let her take over, gaining courage, thinking she was more experienced than I had expected. In a moment I was ready to slide it in. Esmeralda leant back, and was all honey, and her plump thighs wonderfully moist. We were both nervous. It would not go in.
I did not actually know where to put my penis in that chubby pink pocket. I didn’t know enough about female anatomy. I had never explored my sister. I pushed and sweated, and the damned French letter meant I could not feel her pleasant parts.
‘You’re hurting me, love. I’m a virgin – I think you’d better give over!’
Did she invoke that middle-class spectre of virginity to save my face? I don’t know. But I was glad enough to desist, and pulled the French letter off in exasperation.
My prick hung limp and ludicrous. Something seemed to expand within me until I believed I was about to choke, remembering that I was soon due to go back to bloody Branwells. With a tremendous effort, blushing red, I managed to say, ‘Toss me off, Esmeralda, please!’
Whether or not she had heard the words before, she understood what I meant.
‘Come and snuggle by me,’ she said. She put my hand on her fanny and grasped my weapon, which immediately showed fight. I kissed her both passionately and lovingly. She was a fine girl. I would have died had I had to return to school without shedding my load in her darling presence, however it was done.
Into the brickwork at the back of the squash courts at Branwells was carved a legend. The lettering read merely ‘A. K. DANCER’, and underneath the letters was a boldly stylized outline of prick and balls. Behind that rather flashy and mysterious name, Dancer, lay a story known to every one of the three hundred boys at Branwells, its repetition guaranteed by the unknown memorialist.
Dancer had been expelled about ten years before – some years before even the oldest boy had arrived snivelling for his first term. But the name and memory and the legend of Dancer stayed green. For Dancer was the boy w
ho had been caught fucking the matron. He was beaten and expelled. The matron had left too. Dancer had married her, and they lived happily ever after, with several kids.
Has any public school ever had a better or more telling myth?
If Dancer had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. He represented the secret hopes of all of us that we would somehow escape the awfulness of school to a natural life. Not unscathed, of course (that was the symbolism of the beating), for every public-school boy very soon becomes a realist. And the expulsion was also a meaningful ingredient. Dancer was sacked; he could never revisit Branwells. We knew that those old boys who came back after they had left school, to lecture and boast of worldly success, were really bores and flops, and probably crypto-homosexuals too, sniffing again the scents of old prowess. We knew that school was a prison. Only suckers returned.
We had one of those plodding school songs, built about the school motto, ‘Study and Stand Fast’. A wit had written in an extra verse dedicated to Dancer’s exploit:
‘In Derbyshire’s dull dorms,
On beds and desks and forms,
When lesser souls abused themselves, outclassed,
Our Dancer, saint and patron,
He upped and tupped the matron—
He shafted and came fast!
He shafted and came fu-u-uck-ing fast!’
It chanced that to me fell the opportunity to become a second Dancer.
The short and sergeant-majorly old school sister retired. In her place came a woman of a very different kind, Sister Virginia Traven. ‘When she arrived, they called her Virgin for short but not for long,’ ran the immediate school joke, for, in that castle of acute female-shortage, it was recognised that she was not exactly incredibly old or incredibly ugly.
Sister Traven was slightly built. She had indeterminate-coloured eyes, which did not always manage to look at you. Her hair was short and tawny, she carried her head rather attractively on one side, as if half in sly jest about life. The old sister had never been in jest about anything.
A mystery surrounded Sister Traven, how the headmaster passed her as safe for a boys’ school being the first one. Not that she was less than thirty-five years old, which is a staid old age to schoolboys. She spoke in a rather sibilant and allusive way. And she never came out on to the rugger pitch to cheer the first fifteen; the old sister had never missed a game.
The sister arrived at school at the beginning of what proved to be my last year at Branwells, just when I had secured the position of hooker in the first fifteen. She attracted me from the start, perhaps because it so happened that she was returning to school from a shopping expedition by the same train on which I was reluctantly arriving, and she invited me to ride the two miles from the station to school with her in the school car (I had carried her bag to the car). If I was struck dumb on that ride, it was chiefly because she was registering on me.
I wanted to register on her. Playing in the first fifteen was the ideal way to do it – until I found that she never bothered to watch the game. This made her very unpopular with most of the school. We had a vote on it in the sixth, to which I had now ascended, and it was carried by a narrow margin that, since her gesture was more insulting to the headmaster than to the boys, she was okay. Nobody was rat enough to suggest that she might not be interested in rugger.
During a vote taken only a week later it was decided that she was already being screwed by the music master. Nobody was rat enough to suggest that she might not be interested in sex. (‘But dear old Chopin is as queer as a coot, darling – I’d have thought you boys were sharp enough to see that!’ – thus Virginia, when I put it to her a few months later.)
Slowly we pieced together a bit of news here and a rumour there. Sister was arty. Sister had actually been seen sketching, all wrapped up and sketching bloody fucking Six Sisters. Six Sisters was a hated local landmark, six – actually five by that time – miserable stunted trees to which we had to run once a fortnight, exposed to all the inhospitable gales of Derbyshire. And Sister wanted to paint them! Her stock fell even lower in the junior school. I joined the art club.
I was one of the school slobs, rough but not aggressive (despite occasional bouts of old enemy temper), plodding rather than clever, jocose rather than witty. My friends and I formed the sporty and philistine side of the sixth, still reading Frank Richards’ stories about Greyfriars and St. Jims – because, we said defensively, we were amused that the smoking and drinking (and, by inference, the pulling off, for who could imagine Tom Merry with a hard-on?) which went on at those colleges was always done by slackers, whereas at Branwells most of the venery was committed by the stars of the first fifteen. We were on good terms with the arty half of the form, even though they read Conrad and that ass R. L. Stevenson. But it was felt by everyone, including myself, that I was an incongruous figure in the art club.
Despite the incongruity, I did rather well. I discovered I could paint. During my second term in the art club I was out painting the Six Sisters myself, when not playing rugger. By then I was big enough to belt anyone who laughed.
In other ways my horizons were widening. I became interested in socialism, and that in a curious way.
Most of my sexual liaisons were with fellows of about my own age. But a much younger boy called Brown had caught my attention. Brown was in my dormitory, and had distinguished himself by being the youngest boy ever to make a pilgrimage round the beds – generally, the younger members were more sinned against than sinning. Brown, however, was keen. Keen on everything and sex most of all. He had bright ideas, with a natural flair for the erotic; after I had spent a couple of hours in bed with him I felt was destined to go far – and downwards all the way.
He confessed to me that he was in love with another boy in the sixth. Torturing him by threatening to leave him on the brink of orgasm, I got from him that this boy was Webster. I burst out laughing, because Webster was someone whom none of us took seriously. He spoke with an affected ‘upper-class’ drawl – I believe it was affected, although he never entirely dropped it; he could increase it in class, in order to infuriate masters. His parents were known to be well heeled – his father was someone high up in Imperial Tobacco. But Webster was a socialist, or a communist, for neither he nor we were too sure of the difference; he had a catch-phrase, and used to preach to us that things would be different after ‘the absolutely bloody revolution’. It was hard to visualize him as Brown’s ‘lover’ (a word, incidentally, that transgressed the Branwells code).
Through our mutual interest in Brown we got together for an ‘insurance’, the three of us. This was behind an outbuilding at Rowe’s Farm, a couple of miles from school. With rubber bands, we coupled our pricks together, Webster’s and my turgid black things on the outside, Brown’s elegant pink-and-white weapon in the middle, like a grotesque sandwich of cod’s roe between two salamis. Webster’s tool had been badly scarred by the rite of circumcision, and we were all scared temporarily by the rubber bands before we were finished. On the way back to school, Webster chatted about all the injustices in England, how wrong it was to have servants, and so on.
‘One glorious day, laddies, the down-trodden workers of Britain will arise and free themselves, and the skivvies of England will dashed well knife their masters in their beds.’
‘Will the skivvies jump into the beds of the young masters?’ Brown asked.
‘Yes, and cut off their little rigid plonks!’
What fascinated me even more than that particular vision was the fact that Webster actually knew working men, and showed no particular antipathy for them, although, with his accent, he would surely have been one of the first to go under when they rose on the day of absolutely bloody revolution. His outlook was novel in my experience. I knew only the distaste and fear with which my mother and father and their friends regarded the workers. Even Liberals were bad enough, but the workers … Father hated to see them drawing the dole, believing that the principle of giving money away w
as wrong. He had been heard to call the destitute of the town, ironically, ‘Our non-banking friends’.
‘Non-washing, you mean,’ Mother said. It was not their financial so much as their hygienic habits she loathed.
Now here was Webster saying that these blighters might get the upper hand some time. My parents would be the first to go.
I thought over what Webster said for a long while before asking him, some days after the rubber-band experiment, ‘Supposing the workers do revolt, surely the upper classes won’t let them kill off all the middle class?’
He chuckled, richly and patronizingly. ‘Stubbs, old man, the upper classes and the aristocracy absolutely hate the bloody guts of the middle classes!’
Art. Sex. Socialism. And the greatest of these was sex. But even sex was changing now. England had recently enjoyed (or suffered) the spectacle of their king relinquishing the throne to marry the woman he loved. For many, the issues arising from this crisis in the monarchy were complex; at Branwells it signified only one thing: that the adult world outside our stony walls was as mad about sex as we were, whatever it hypocritically pretended. And our discussions centred round whether or not Mrs. Simpson was attractive.
The abdication also focused the attention of the older boys more sharply on women. Whatever we did with other boys, faute de mieux, it was women we thought about, women we talked about, given a few exceptional boys. Women, we could see, were what we needed, as surely as we lacked them.
Although my father remained aloof from me, never interesting himself in what I did or said, I had by now seen enough penises – ‘a clutch of penises’ was the agreed collective noun – to persuade me that my circumcision, however barbaric, had not been directed at me. It was something bank managers had done to their sons at birth, a sort of caste mark; while the postman’s son, a Branwells day-boy, was allowed to keep a foreskin like the end of a fire-hose.