Читать книгу The Hand-Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss - Страница 5

On the one occasion that Sister Traven came to tea with us we were all in confusion beforehand, and my mother was the organizer of the confusion.

She darted here and flounced there, using what she called The Light Touch to bring me or Beatrice to heel – that is, saying in a Tone of Charm something more acceptable delivered in an ordinary voice. ‘No, Beatrice, dear, I think we won’t have our ordinary serviettes, if you don’t mind. Let’s have some of the special ones, shall we, the paper ones, out of the bottom drawer of the sideboard. Or I’ll get them, shall I? I’d better get them!’

Beatrice was not ruffled. She had been our maid for several years and was used to Mother’s ways. She was now married and no longer ‘living in’, but she still came in the mornings, when an older married sister looked after her increasing number of children. Today she was obliging and coming in the afternoon also, as she did on these special occasions. Among the alarms of setting the tea table I watched her with interest. A rather ordinary girl – not bad!

How faithful I am, I thought. Here I’m seventeen and she’s got two awful brats and must be at least twenty-five, and I still fancy her a bit!

‘Darling, have your found your tie? You’d better hurry up, or she’ll be here, won’t she?’

‘Do you think she’ll mind if I haven’t got my tie on, Mum, really?’

She surveyed me, smiling hard. ‘She must have seen lots of little boys without ties, and without more than that, Horatio! But, after all, she is your guest, and I think you might try and help me just a little.’

The ‘little boy’ grated as much as she must have known it would.

‘You wanted her round here, Mum – I didn’t!’

‘Sweetie, try not to be too aggravating just at this moment when I’m trying to help you and Beatrice and Ann. You know we’ve asked her for your sake. She’s your friend, isn’t she? And perhaps one day she’ll ask us up to Traven House to have tea with her, and her family.’

As I sneaked upstairs to look for my tie, I passed my sister going down.

‘That’s all she thinks about – that Sister Traven will ask us all out to her place to tea.’

‘I’m not going. I can’t find my dratted shoes,’ Ann said. She was then thirteen, one of the classic shoe-losing ages.

Even when I was in my bedroom I could hear her shouting at Mother. She was far more vociferous than I.

When I was dressed, tie and all, I sat on the edge of my bed, tentatively reading a magazine. Thus Mother found me when she came upstairs.

‘Ready, darling? Well, why don’t you go downstairs and be prepared for your guest? Wouldn’t that be nicest? I’m going to do my hair again – I must look like nothing on earth! I feel absolutely exhausted before she’s even arrived. I do hope she isn’t too fussy! I wish Daddy’d been able to fix the blackout properly in that room.’

‘You look fine, Mum.’

‘Thank you, darling.’ She came nearer to me and hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘You’re a good boy, darling, a very good boy. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to grow up, will you? Let me just put your tie a bit straighter. So glad you found it. I wish I’d borrowed Auntie Nell’s tea service.’

‘Why? Is ours broken?’

‘You know how cracked and chipped it is.’ She stepped back and surveyed my tie critically. ‘Your collars never look right. I bet they have really lovely tea services at Traven House, don’t you? You did say her father was an admiral, didn’t you?’

‘Rear-admiral.’

‘Good. Now you go downstairs, darling, and I’ll just tidy my hair and be down in a minute. And, Horatio …’

‘Yes, Mummy?’

‘Do try not to talk too Leicestershire!’

‘I’ll try, Mummy.’

‘Watch those long “u”s then.’

Rolling the magazine and cramming one end into my pocket, I went downstairs and glumly joined my sister. We sat one either end of the sofa. She did not blame me for our present constraints, for which I was grateful. She was playing chess with herself, as Father had taught her.

Like me, Ann was munching a cachou. Mother ladled them out to us on such nerve-racking occasions as the present, when we were about to be presented to someone of importance. Perhaps they effectively heightened our charms, though I have no recollection that our breaths needed sweetening.

On these occasions Mother always took a cachou herself, as she distributed them out of a tiny cardboard box. I loved their meretricious perfumed taste, even if they were associated with nerves and straightened ties.

My mother was a tall thin woman, several inches taller than my portly father. He was ponderous where she was bird-like. His reputation (somewhat unearned) was for never giving way to excitement; she (more justly) was known to be nervous. Our doctor had recommended fresh air as a restorative for my mother’s nerves and at this period of my life she was always out walking in the streets or the nearby countryside, sometimes with Ann and, less often, with me and Father lagging somewhere behind.

‘You’re too slow to catch a funeral!’ she would call back. Father, with an elaborate display of dumb humour, would stare about, searching highway and hedgerow for sight of the hearse.

The guest whose appearance we were now so anxiously awaiting behind our perfumed defences was the nursing sister of my school, Miss Virginia Traven. I say ‘my school’, but by this date I had determined that school was over and done with as far as I was concerned.

Several reasons existed for this determination, chief among them that I was finding my manhood, and that this was a good time to find it. The time was mid-September 1939, when Great Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for something under a fortnight. My older brother, Nelson, had already disappeared into the Army, and was – according to the one letter we had received from him – messing about in a barracks in Aldershot. Beatrice’s husband, a husky young man who cleaned our car once a week, was reported to be training with the infantry somewhere on Salisbury Plain. My father was going through agonies of indecision about whether he should volunteer or not, and what the bank would say if he did. And I was sitting there on the sofa, picking calluses formed on my hands by the shovelling of great piles of soil on top of our air-raid shelter in the garden.

The doorbell rang. My mother cried from above, ‘There she is now!’

Beatrice went to the front door. Against instructions, I followed. I wanted to get a private word in first.

Sister came lightly in, wearing her worn but tidy light tweed coat. She smiled at me with her head held slightly on one side, and quickly put her small hand into mine. Something lit in her face at the sight of mine lighting.

‘Hope you won’t be too bored,’ I whispered. Mother was already bearing down the stairs, making little sort of preliminary tuning-up sounds. I stood back for the overture.

Meals have changed since then. They changed almost at that precise moment in time, as far as the Stubbs family was concerned. Perhaps that was the last of the rather lavish teas that my mother liked to give for her friends, sitting at the top of the table, with the teapot and its accessories by her side on a separate folding table, talking amiably to all and sundry, addressing each of her guests in turn so that none should feel left out, pausing now and then to give low-voiced instructions to Beatrice.

My poor mama! She was always happiest in the past, and this present spread was an attempt as much to stop the clock as to impress the visitor. In the recent declaration of war, boys of my age had already smelt change, and trembled; my mother’s generation doubtless did the same – but their tremblings were far less pleasurable than ours.

Perhaps for this reason she decided to address Sister as if the two of them were of the same generation. I must admit now that there can have been less than ten years between them, but that gulf appeared to be infinite at the time.

Over the jelly and cream, the dainty slices of brown bread and butter, the jams in their glass dishes inside silver holders, the sponge and fruit cakes, the buns and biscuits and chocolate éclairs that were there mainly for Ann’s benefit, Mother cheerfully talked of Sister’s future, about which she knew even less than I.

‘I must say, I think it’s jolly brave of you to throw up a safe job and join the war effort! You’ll have a wonderful time, lots of boy friends and admirers! Oh, I know!’

‘I’m hoping to get posted to France,’ said Sister.

‘Lovely, what fun! Go to Paris! Such a beautiful city. Notre-Dame! The boulevards! Robert and I love Paris, especially in the spring …’

‘You were only there one day, Mummy!’ Ann said.

‘A beautiful spring day – eat your bread-and-butter properly, Ann, and sit up straight! You’d like Paris, I know, Sister.’

‘Yes, I do, very much. I have connections there.’

‘Family connections, no doubt? I expect you know most of the capitals of Europe … I should like to do my bit for the old country, but I’m not as free as you – three children and a husband …’

‘You wouldn’t actually call Nelson a child, would you, Mum?’ I asked. ‘He’s in the forces and he’s grown a moustache.’

Mother smiled at me and held out her hand. ‘Pass your cup nicely if you’d like another cup of tea. Beatrice, I think if we could have some more hot water … Nelson looks so silly with a moustache, Sister! Of course, you’ve never seen him. They’ll soon make him shave it off. He’s at Aldershot; Robert was there in the Great War. He’ll always be my child if he lives to be sixty. I hope he’ll do well in the Army. I believe your family are some of them in the forces, Sister, aren’t they?’

A small foot kicked me under the table, and Ann made a face at me over her cup; we could almost feel Mother forcing the conversational-tone-improving word ‘Admiral’ to materialize in the air above the table.

‘Try and drink more like a lady, Ann,’ said Mother, catching the movement. ‘Aren’t they, Sister?’

Sister was sitting at table eating demurely, half-smiling in a way she had. She looked, I thought, rather like a dutiful young daughter, except that her face was faintly lined. Her short hair, some strands of which were quite fair, was neat and beautiful. She was so – well, you could see she was the product of upper-class breeding.

‘My father and his brother were in the Navy.’

‘Oh, the Navy, the senior service! And I expect they were both very successful, weren’t they? Let me cut you a slice of sponge.’

‘I wouldn’t say successful. My father’s brother, poor Uncle David, was drowned at sea.’

‘You poor thing! I’m so sorry. Horatio never told me!’

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I never heard of Sister’s Uncle David.’

‘No, of course, you didn’t,’ Sister said, giving me a little secret smile. ‘It was rather a tragedy. It happened in 1917. I was crazy about my uncle, although I was only a tot. He was so brave and so handsome. His ship was sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. He was in the water for some incredible time, clinging to a spar. At last a British merchant naval vessel picked him up and – do you know? – he hadn’t been aboard an hour before that ship was also torpedoed by a U-boat. It went straight to the bottom, Uncle with it.’

‘War’s a terrible thing,’ Mother said, causing a plate of cake to circulate.

‘We’ll soon beat the Germans,’ I said. ‘Their tanks are made of cardboard. The Head said so.’

There was a pause for silent patriotism and fruit cake.

‘But your father’s alive and well still, I hear,’ Mother said.

Sister nodded. ‘He’s a rear-admiral. Retired, of course. Now he talks about closing down Traven House and getting back into harness, if the Admiralty will have him.’

We all smiled. Mother said, ‘Rear-admiral … A pity the way our grand old homes have to close.’

Father had looked up Sister’s home in an old Baedeker the previous evening, and found: ‘3 m. farther NE, Traven House, Georgian, fine Vict. orangery, once the home of Sir Francis Traven, Gov. of Massachusetts Bay, 1771–9.’ We were all delighted, and wondered if Sir Francis’s descendants still grew oranges there.

‘Have you got any ghosts?’ Ann asked. ‘I’d be quite terrified! Do you have battlements, with phantom men in armour clanking about?’

Sister laughed, a very charming little display. ‘No, no ghosts, no battlements.’

‘But Horry told me …’

‘Eat your cake,’ I said. ‘You’d be terrified of the mere thought of a ghost.’

‘Don’t bully her, Horatio, and do just brush your hair out of your eyes. That’s better!’

‘Mummy and I would love to come and see you at Traven House,’ Ann said.

Our visitor looked askance. ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be at home much longer, Ann, otherwise I’d love to show you both round.’

The words sank deep into my heart. Although I continued to munch gloomily at the cake, I ached inside. She couldn’t leave! I needed her. I loved her. She could not realize what she was doing to me or she would never go.

There were four females in the room with me. Excluding my mother, I had had sexual relations with all the others. But the need was now for Sister, entirely for Sister, only for Sister, among all the women in the world.

Should I stand up and declare my feelings? Would they laugh? What would Mother say? But Mother at this point, having poured herself a last cup of tea, was doing her party stunt and declaiming some poetry learnt as a girl:

‘Old Holyrood rang merrily

That night, with wassail, and glee.

King James within his princely bower

Fêted the chiefs of Scotland’s power,

Summoned to spend a passing hour.

For he had vowed that his array

Should southwards march by break of day.

Well loved that daring monarch aye

A banquet and a song.

By day a banquet and at night

A merry dance, made fast and light,

With dancers fair and costumes bright,

And something loud and long

This feast outshone his revels past.

It was his biggest and his last.

‘And so it goes on – I forget what comes next. It’s the court bit from Sir Walter Scott’s “Marmion”. I learnt it at school. Oh, I could spout it for hours! I tell Ann and Horatio they ought to read more poetry. Are you a great poetry-reader, Sister?’

Sister made some suitable reply.

After tea Ann slipped away to play in her bedroom. I hung around while Mother entertained my guest.

‘Well, darling,’ she said at last, turning to me. ‘Fetch Sister Traven your latest paintings. He really does show promise.’

‘I haven’t done any more since I saw her last.’

Smiling, shaking of head. ‘He’s done several, Sister. He’s far too modest about them. I’m a great admirer of the British artists, Gainsborough and Hogarth, and others.’ For some reason she pronounced Hogarth as if it had two “g”s: Hoggarth.

‘It’s “Hogarth”, Mother. One “g”.’

‘I can spell Hogarth, darling. And pronounce it. A fine artist. We used to have a butcher called Hogarth at home, in the old days. Anyhow, Sister, it’s been very good of you to take such an interest in Horatio, and to take him out as you have done. …’

Truer than she thought, I said to myself. I watched Sister as she rose to leave; not, if you were strictly honest, a great deal of figure. But I could discern her breasts under the jumper, and I knew how sweet they were, how pink the nipples, when you disengaged them gently from the brassière … Steady, you sod, or you’ll be getting a hard on …

We all stood up. Mother lightly patted down a curl of hair on the back of my head, and then squeezed me affectionately.

‘I tell him, if he were a girl, I’d get a slide to that piece of hair. How it infuriates me! But he’s a good boy. I sometimes reproach myself that I neglect him, bless him. Yes, I’ve been very lucky with my children.’

‘Oh, not that again, Mother! She says that to everyone, Sister. She forgets what little horrors we were.’

‘I’m sure you were,’ Sister said, smiling. It amazed me at the time that she was not at all put off after seeing me treated as such a kid.

‘When this one cried as a child, his father got so mad at him, he used to take him to the window and threaten to throw him out! But he was a good boy, on the whole. Well, Sister, it’s been so pleasant … Horatio, go and get Sister Traven’s coat, where are your manners? Yes, I do hope we’ll see you again soon …’

As they moved to the door, I got there first, opened it, and edged myself half out before saying, ‘Mother, I’ll just drive down the road with Sister. There’s something I want to tell her.’

‘Tell her now – you’ve been quiet enough up to now!’

‘No, it’s all right. I’ll tell her on the way, Mum. Then I can drop off to see William. I shan’t be long.’

‘Yes, all right, dear. Don’t be long. Your father will be home soon.’

As Sister and I made our way down our five whitened steps and along the front path, I took her arm and led her to the car. Mother stood waving as we drove away; I hoped she had noticed my gesture.

‘Let’s go up by the cemetery.’

‘You mustn’t be long!’

It was generally quiet in the lane that ran by the side of the cemetery. She stopped in a suitable place without any mucking about. We turned and looked at each other. There was no sign on her that she had been through the ordeal I had. We kissed each other. Not exactly a passionate kiss – I knew I would not get that kind from her at this hour of the day; the passionate ones, and even the ones before the passionate ones, which were her way of testing her own mood, only materialized after dark. But certainly a loving kiss. Again I was amazed that she was not put off by Mother’s attempted demonstration that I was just a kid.

‘You were very nice to Mother,’ I said presently.

‘She was nice to me.’

Better not explore that subject! I asked her if we could drive about until it got dark. She knew what I meant.

‘I must get back to Traven House, love. The family solicitor is coming over specially this evening, to sort out some of my papers. I have various bonds and other possessions, and a little not-very-valuable jewellery, that I am going to leave in his safe-keeping until the war is over.’

‘God, how I wish you weren’t going, Virginia!’ I ran my hands over her body, but she would only stand a certain amount of that in a semi-public place. In a safe room it was another matter. Once, after dark, in the dark, she had let me undress her and I had run my hands all over her body, and then slipped a finger into her fanny and began to frig her gently. That little secret organ of hers! But there could be nothing like that on this occasion.

She had made me grow up, made me see that there were other things than immediate satisfactions – I would not have dared ask her to toss me off, as I might have done with another girl; for Virginia was teaching me immense ideas about sexual organs – ideas that I learned only reluctantly, ideas that went against all my early training: showing me that love had to be there somewhere, and that against the recurrent isolation of life the hastily snatched orgasm was not the only antidote.

Firmly, she held my hands.

‘There’s a war … People get separated. I learnt that in the last war, when I was younger than you.’

‘I can’t bear to be separated from you, Virginia, darling! We’ve only just got to know each other.’

She looked very searchingly at me, then said, so quietly that I could hardly hear, ‘You can always write to me at my Nottingham address. I shan’t be off to London yet … And, Horatio – I must tell you … You really don’t know me at all.’

I rested my head on her shoulder.

‘Oh, Virginia, I want to, I want to know you better. You’re so wonderful for me, and I love you so much.’

She never said she loved me. But she stroked my cheeks and looked at me in what for her was a wild sort of way.

‘Virginia, I want to know you …’ The eternal cry of lovers. It was eventually by getting to know her that I lost her.

‘Sweetheart, you are a child!’

‘You never said that to me before. Why say it now? I know you don’t mean it as an affront – as Mother does when she calls me a child. But I’m sick of childhood. I’m finished with it, I hate it! It’s so sordid – you’ve showed me – Christ, you’re the one who has brought me out of it!’

I choked on the words. We just sat there in the uncomfortable car, touching and looking at each other. She never even said that she needed me, but I had always been secure in that. I knew she needed me; it was one of the things I understood about her without the necessity for words.

We parted there by the bloody old cemetery, in which my grandfather had been only recently buried. I walked back, hands in pockets, saying to myself over and over, ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck it all, fuck the whole shitting issue!’

And as I went along, I resolved that my childhood could be closed, after all, if I really wished for it. Did I really wish for it? What would being an adult entail? That was unknown. What had being a child entailed?

All very mysterious. It had not meant a lack of sex. I was introduced to the delights of masturbation early, and had never looked back since then. You might say I was a hand-reared boy. Perhaps I should have been ashamed of all that; I was not. People pretend to be so enlightened about sex these days; they talk happily about copulation and such subjects, about adultery and homosexuality and lesbianism and abortions. Never about masturbation, though. And yet masturbation is the commonest form of sex, and tossing off the cheapest and most harmless pleasure.

Of course, as I grew older I graduated to more fashionable delights.

Shortly before I was born, my father was promoted manager of a branch of Barclays Bank Ltd. in the East Midlands. It was a small dull town then, in the early twenties, and is a large dull town now. For a reason I forget, we did not go to live in the accommodation the bank offered, but instead took over a large house on the edge of the town which had been an inn in the prosperous days, a century earlier, when the stage-coaches flourished.

One of my first memories is of the smell of beer which the floor of our living-room released whenever the sun shone on it or the room was warm – ancient beer, which had soaked into the wood for decades, and could never be eradicated, however my mother set her series of maids to polishing. Could I somehow have become intoxicated by those benevolent fumes as I sprawled on the floor? Did they have some loosening effect on my infantile moral sense? Sophisticated fellows might answer yes. But I believe the maids themselves were more to blame for my failings!

Of those maids, and in particular of Beatrice, we will speak later. First I must describe the family.

My father was a small and aloof man. He could be cold and sarcastic, to his wife as well as his children. He feared his father, my grandfather, until the day the old man died, and I believe this relationship did much to blight his pleasure in life. When my grandfather and grandmother came to stay with us, as they did all too often, my parents suffered a good deal.

My mother, on the other hand, was thin and clinging. Although far from passionate, she demanded love from her family and returned it by spasms. Terribly moody herself, the highest praise she reserved for other people was to say, ‘So-and-so is always the same!’ She cosseted me often, devoting much attention to me where my father devoted almost none. Yet I never doubted that he loved me deeply, just as, from a remarkably early age I doubted whether she loved me at all.

My elder brother, Nelson, was born in 1920. He grew tall and thin and dark where I was chubby and fair. I always admired him and he tolerated me with what I regarded as marvellous good nature. He hit me a good deal, as I suppose bigger brothers do. He loved animals and once tried to stuff a dead cat with wood shavings – his only venture into taxidermy. Nelson was a fairly clever boy, clever enough to be always slightly rebellious; he was secretly planning to become an architect, and drawing fantastic buildings, at an age when I was tamely following Father’s suggestion that I should go into banking and ‘work your way up’.

I was born three years after my brother, with my fists – so claimed the midwife – clenched in my eyes. 1923 was not a good year to be born. There were dock strikes in England and coal strikes in America. The French were occupying the Ruhr, Hitler was tunnelling away in Munich, like a mole under Germany’s troubles. A mighty scene was already being set for my late and trivial adolescence. On the day I arrived in the world there was a severe earthquake in Japan.

My mother was always secretly frightened of men. I say ‘secretly’, but a mother has fewer secrets than she imagines from the young innocent tagging boredly and apparently unobservantly at her skirts. The way in which she was all friendly condescension to the tradesmen, the way she skirted the dole queues which afflicted the Midlands – and perhaps much more subtly the way all her appeals and coquetry towards Father were framed – spoke of her terror of the male. Although both her parents were dead long before I arrived howling on the scene, they had been a formidable couple by all accounts; her father; whose old farm we sometimes drove past in our tiny black car, had been a tyrant of the Victorian school. No doubt he, and the stern nonsenses with which he could fill a small girl’s head, were sufficient to give her a scare for life.

Marriages (I was told as a kid) are made in heaven. In fact, they seem to be made in a tiny, dim, shuttered, undiscovered room in the brain, where some fiendishly clever little hunchback of a genius sees to it that we get the marriage partner we really want, whatever we think we want, and however we rail against his choice later.

I believe that, much though my mother suffered from my father’s coldness and his sarcastic tongue, she chose him because he was aloof and did not ‘trouble her too much’.

Since I do not go far with the psycho-analysis, I’d better drop that line of reasoning. It makes sense to try to make sense of our parents; it is part of the process of understanding ourselves. As far as Freud helps common sense, he is welcome. I suppose he might have agreed that, for whatsoever reason, my mother was happier in the company of her own sex.

For that reason she badly wanted a little girl. If Nelson was a disappointment, Horatio was a greater. Not being a maths wizard, she must have felt that the chances of the second baby being a girl were twice as great as the first time. My father, who, as a banker, could no doubt have enlightened her on that simple excursion into the realm of probability theory, characteristically did not. Mother went into what was euphemistically termed ‘a nervous breakdown’ and took several months to recover. Perhaps it was in some sort of revenge for that that they called me by the unfortunate Christian name I bear; or perhaps, had I been a girl, they had been intending to christen me Emma; when my father read a book it was about British heroes – preferably Nelson.

Anyhow, the mother would not look at the new baby, or was advised by the family medico not to look at the new baby. A wet nurse was found for the new baby, and he went to stay in her house for the first two months of his existence.

Was it that early exile that tipped the sexual scales? I ask myself … but no longer very fervently!

Legend has it that my father came every evening after the bank closed to inspect his second son and to see that the wet nurse was looking after him. The action sounds hardly characteristic of Father, although the story sounds characteristic of Mother’s tales.

What she suffered then goes unrecorded – like most suffering. She could never afterwards entirely decide on her behaviour towards me. Should she blame me because she ‘nearly died’ on my arrival? Or should she make it up to me because I had been sent away at once? She never solved the problem.

A partial solution arrived four years after I was born. In the summer months of 1927 she achieved her long-awaited daughter. Caroline Adelaide Ann Stubbs opened her eyes upon the world, and found it good. She also found it good that a devoted mother awaited her every behest.

The birth of Ann, as the baby was called in the family, brought a measure of happiness to us. We were glad that Mother was glad. Nor was this particularly unselfish; it gave Father more peace, and it gave Nelson and me the chance to play with less supervision. I believe we really loved Ann, almost as much as Mother demanded we should. True, my brother did drop her once while carrying her round the garden, but I recall the sincerity of his penitence after, which had nothing to do with Mother’s tears or Father’s chastisement!

Mother’s success with Ann went to her head – or womb, rather. Two years later she bore another little girl, but this baby was still-born.

I recall poignantly the news of its arrival. One of the maids was keeping Nelson and me amused; she kept running out of the room and coming back, telling us, ‘You’ll hear it cry presently! It’s coming now!’ I remember leaving our toys and going to kneel on the wooden window seat; I stared through the panels of yellow semi-frosted glass that flanked our windows and wondered what it felt like to be a child that as yet was nowhere – listening eagerly for its cry and hearing instead a cuckoo, asking myself if there was a connection between mysterious bird and mysterious baby. Then Father came and told us – he took our hands – that the baby was dead and Mummy was very sad.

‘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.