Owning Up: The Trilogy (26 page)

That it should remain a secret we knew instinctively. A certain guilt about our privates had been inculcated since we were toddlers, although without any explanation as to what we were meant to feel guilty about. Even my mother, with her advanced views on nudity within the family, would tell me and Bill not to touch ‘our obies’ if she saw us doing so. I’ve no idea why she called the penis an ‘obie’ but she did. Alternatively it was known as a ‘dumbelow’ although this, she told me, derived from a misunderstanding of Uncle Fred’s when he was a little boy. The Griff, while giving him his bath, would tell him, having herself washed everything else, to soap himself ‘down below’, and he misheard it as ‘dumbelow’ which he concluded to be a name for his ‘arrangements’. Of course this demystification of the privates by the use of whimsical names was not confined to the thirties and persists even today. You hear even the most progressive mothers refer to their child’s ‘willy’.

I soon discovered, although I found it less exciting, that I could ‘rub up’ myself, and this explained to me why my mother sometimes rushed into my bedroom and whisked back the sheets and blankets with a cry of, ‘Where are those handymits?’ The myth of the evils and dangers of masturbation was universal then.

An orgasm, while the means to achieve it was new, was an experience I remembered from a dream I had when I was only five or six. I found myself as a pig in a dirty sty at Uncle Percy’s farm and derived enormous satisfaction from rolling and wallowing in my own dung. I awoke to what I now recognised as the same feeling I got from ‘rubbing up’. I’d also been very interested in my privates. I once dreamed, but believed it for many years to be factual, that I was sitting in the nursery and had discovered a way to remove from my testicles the two hard little balls I could feel under the skin. These turned out to be brightly coloured beads of a curiously electric puce, and I spent a happy time rolling them about the green cork floor before realising, in a panic, that I’d no idea how to put them back. The beads at least were real, part of a game in the nursery cupboard, and it was one of them that Andrée had swallowed and on which she had nearly choked to death.

At Parkfield we were entirely unromantic about our sexual partners; that was to come later at our public schools, but we did develop purely physical crushes. These led to curious liaisons across the usual lines of interest. Warren himself, for instance, captain of cricket and a brilliant ‘all-rounder’, became a close friend through this shared interest whereas before it would never have occurred to him to spend his time with ‘a rabbit’ who couldn’t throw overarm. There was a certain amount of selective rejection too. There was one boy I liked very much but refused to engage in sexual activities with because he had plump, wet hands, was overweight, and wore pebble glasses. Equally it took me a long time to persuade a very randy and in truth rather neolithic-looking boy, the son of a timber merchant, to have anything to do with me. Another mystery: why did I find him attractive? He had a low forehead, small eyes and a heavy jaw. All I knew was that I did.

Taking a leaf from the ‘oiks’ book, I invented a parody of the title song of a film in which George Formby played the gormless lead. Both the song and the film were called
It’s in the Air.
Holding an imaginary ukelele and assuming Formby’s innocent grin and Lancashire accent I sang:

It’s in the dick

That funny feeling that’s so quick

To tickle like the heck

At the back of the neck,

It’s in the dick.

This became something of an anthem to the rubbing-up brigade and we would hum or whistle the tune publicly about the school with looks of knowing complicity.

With all this going on, it was only a question of time before Twyne found out, and when this eventually happened I was a witness. At the back of the school was a small quad, a patch of grass with a conservatory along one side. Overlooking this area was a basement which formed the lower changing-room, whereas the conservatory was used as the upper changing-room.

I was in the lower changing-room, usually a hive of sexual activity, and while changing into my hated flannels I happened to glance out of the window only to spot Twyne tiptoeing across the grass. He stopped outside the conservatory and peered in. There was a moment’s delay before he jumped in the air, banged on the window, and rushed into the body of the school yelling, ‘Ring up the school doctor!’

I guessed, of course, what had happened, and it was confirmed during the game. Warren, who was in the upper changing-room and, as I’d expected, involved, was fielding opposite me. At each over, as we crossed on the pitch, he managed to tell me the story in single sentences. Apart from his request for the school doctor, an instantaneous reaction which he had not followed up, Twyne had done nothing: no hairpulling, no slippering, simply the order to get changed at once delivered in a neutral if icy tone.

After tea the staff left the dining-hall in a rather self-consciously casual way, and the whole of the lower changing-room were ordered to take the few very small boys who went home half-an-hour earlier, to wash. Later I asked Warren what Twimbo had said. ‘Oh, that we’d go blind, and lose a vital fluid out of our backbones and stop being able to play games well,’ he told me. Nobody believed this, and quite soon we started ‘rubbing up’ again only with rather more circumspection. The only thing which puzzled me was why Mr Twyne imagined that vice was the sole prerogative of the upper changing-room.

For a surprisingly long time, until I suppose I was about ten, I made no connection between ‘rubbing up’ and procreation. My knowledge of sex was non-existent. Maud, when I’d asked her about how babies were born – for Tom played no part in answering any of our more serious questions – didn’t try to fob me off with storks or gooseberry bushes, but her answers were ‘The Daddy,’ she said, ‘loves the Mummy so much that a baby starts to grow in her tummy. It’s there for nine months and then it’s born.’ Perfectly correct as far as it went, but I believed in consequence that all that was involved was an act of will. My ignorance was eventually dispelled, not at home but at school, by a very serious boy called Rice. He was as hopeless as I was at cricket and Twyne, in exasperation, had told us to go to the nets at the far end of the playing-field and practise batting and bowling. Ever the proselytiser, I was questioning him as to why he took no part in our sexual activities. ‘Because,’ he said, bowling a wide which would have brained the umpire, ‘I believe sex should be used for its true ends – the making of children.’ He could see from my face that I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, and he proceeded, with admirable scientific detachment, to enlighten me. Frankly I couldn’t believe him. Had Tom done
that
to Maud? Had all the Parkfield mothers and fathers done it? Had the Griff done it, and Gangie and Gampa? No, it was impossible. It was my turn to be censorious.

When I got home I asked Maud outright and she, who had read or been told that you must answer such questions honestly as they came up, confirmed everything he’d said, only stressing that what was important was the presence of love.

‘Is it nice though?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, rather wistfully. ‘It’s also very nice.’

I went to bed in such a mental turmoil that I didn’t even bother to rub up.

It didn’t take me long to make the various connections. Men and women did it because it gave them ‘the funny feeling’, but you didn’t have to do it with a girl to get that although it must be best if you could. I also discovered that most of the boys whom I hastened to enlighten already knew about it, and the various jokes they told, which I’d laughed at but hadn’t understood, suddenly made sense. Having broached the subject, I questioned Maud endlessly, and gradually extended my sexual knowledge into quite esoteric byways. She told me about gays and lesbians, why some of her men friends lived together, and so on. She preached tolerance and understanding and revealed, although involuntarily, her own largely unfulfilled sexuality. A lot of things began to fall into place: what Douglas Byng was actually singing about, many of the references at the music-hall. Of these areas the boys at Parkfield knew nothing. I was in a position to enlighten them and, always delighted to be the centre of attention, didn’t hesitate to do so. It was even more satisfactory than going on about Maud and Tom letting us see them with nothing on.

15

As a result of all this rapidly acquired and mostly ill-digested knowledge, I began to have crushes on girls. Most of them I recognised to be fantasy figures: film stars, actresses, lady acrobats, whom I would never meet but who could be thought about when ‘rubbing up’ – for by now this was no longer sufficient unto itself. I had to have a scenario. Much more frustrating were the girls I knew who were in their late teens or early twenties, for I had no interest in my giggling or snooty contemporaries. I became obsessed with several of them, but realised at the same time that they were unlikely to be remotely interested in a boy of nine or ten.

Of these perhaps the one who gave me the most anguish was a tall twenty-year-old Irish beauty with very white skin, jet black hair and huge blue eyes. Her name was Miss Simpson and she had come to teach at Parkfield as a replacement for Mr Taylor. She didn’t stay very long, perhaps only a year, but during that time, whatever perils the day might hold, I actually hurried to school with an eager heart. Nor was it only at Parkfield that I saw her. She would sometimes come to the house. My mother collected pretty girls, whom she called collectively ‘the young lovelies’, to ‘fill up’ her straight dinner parties. She had met Miss Simpson at a school sports day and my father, whom Maud always liked to please, admitted to finding her ‘decorative’. She was asked once and, having ‘scored a hit’, joined ‘the young lovelies’ on a permanent basis. Tom called her ‘the Duchess’, pinning down her employment at Parkfield to 1936, the year of the Abdication, which would mean that I was ten years old.

For me a side benefit of the Duchess’s success as a ‘young lovely’ was the rage and anguish it caused Twyne. He mistrusted and disliked my parents and for one of his staff to be invited to their dinner parties seemed to him an outrage. I made sure he knew of it, too. Maud would ask me to see if Miss Simpson was free the following Wednesday, and I deliberately invited her in Twimbo’s hearing. ‘Sure,’ said the Duchess in her soft brogue, ‘wouldn’t I be delighted.’ Twyne could do nothing. His staff were free to spend their evenings as they wished, but he could later be heard muttering that ‘nobody could be expected to do their jobs properly if they spent their nights in dissipation.’

Miss Simpson accepted my worship with tact and charm. Once I tried to declare myself. We were sitting in adjoining deckchairs watching a school match with Bishops Court, a Catholic establishment from Blundellsands. (I never minded school matches because I was not in the team and there were special buns for tea coated with sticky white or pink king.)

‘Miss Simpson,’ I said in a fake blase voice, ‘perhaps you don’t realise this but boys my age, not all boys perhaps but some, have strong sexual feelings.’

‘Is that so now?’ said Miss Simpson without displaying either excessive interest or dismissive indifference. ‘Well, it’s unfortunate for them, but then haven’t they got their lives ahead of them?’ She gave me a sweet and understanding smile which didn’t help much. ‘Hadn’t we better pretend to take an interest in the game, boring as it is. Twimbo’s got his eye on us, and we’ll both be in his bad books.’

I ate a lot of sticky buns for tea and was fascinated, as always, by the way boys from Bishops Court crossed themselves before sitting down.

It wasn’t all Wackford Squeers or Wedekind at Parkfield. There was also friendship and enmity, the discussion of films seen in the holidays, hobbies, games in their season, smuggled comics, the usual traffic of small boys everywhere. Comics, or ‘penny dreadfuls’ as Twyne, with typical archaism, chose to call them, were banned and I usually read mine at home. Defiant in spirit, I was very cautious when it came to breaking rules. Unlike some boys, I never went to the pictures during the term, but then I did live very close to the school. I doubt if I would have done so no matter where I lived, because I believed that, like God, Twimbo would find me out.

Leaving aside my own personal obsession with
Mickey Mouse
Weekly
, the most generally popular comics were the
Beano
, the
Dandy
and
Film Fun.
Fond as I was of Big Eggo (a greedy ostrich), Keyhole Kate, Desperate Dan (who ate whole cow-pies with the hooves and horns sticking out), Lord Snooty and his Pals, and Pansy Potter, the strong man’s daughter, all of whom appeared in either the
Beano
or the
Dandy,
my favourite was definitely
Film Fun.
Apart from its link with the pictures, it gave double value in that it was possible to follow the stories by racing through the balloons issuing from the characters’ mouths over breakfast, reserving the more expansive text printed under each frame until I returned home. Then I could read at leisure and with a clear conscience for there was one great advantage about Parkfield: although we came out later than most schools, Twyne did not believe in homework.

Laurel and Hardy took up the front and back page of
Film Fun.
Inside were other single-page adventures featuring, among others, Schnozzle Durante and, more esoterically I would have thought, as their films were generally only released in the North of England, George Formby, Old Mother Riley (and her beautiful daughter Kitty), and even Frank Randle.

The stories were more often than not concerned with what the text described, with almost Twyne-like elaboration, as ‘temporary pecuniary embarrassment’, solved, after several vicissitudes, by a rich uncle handing over a five-pound note with ‘£5’printed boldly on it. This was inevitably spent at either ‘The Hotel de Posh’ or ‘The Hotel Stuffem’, two establishments where the cuisine appeared to be limited to a turkey (or was it a very large chicken?), a huge dish of mash with sausages sticking out of it, and a bowl of fruit with a prominent pineapple. Laurel and Hardy usually shared their good fortune with two identical girls dressed, unfashionably, in the ‘flapper’ style of the twenties. Nobody ever ‘said’ anything in
Film
Fun.
They ‘chortled’ or ‘guffawed’, ‘growled’ or ‘yelled’. The background detail was also worth studying. When the characters were still ‘broke’, there was usually a thin cat somewhere in the picture gnawing ravenously at a fish reduced to its head and skeleton.