hardly be called “pi” and which he himself described as “man to man.” We were both at the
age when boys have normally discovered the
pleasures of masturbation, and if that delightful pastime can be overworked, no doubt we
were overworking it. probably we both looked
a trifle yellow, and my father thought the moment had come for a friendly chat. The precise way he approached this delicate subject
i don’t recall; i am sure he did it as decently
as could be done in the circumstances—the
circumstances being that he had left it all
rather late. The ground for such intimacies
needs some preparation, and in common with
many english children of our class and time,
our education in such matters had been totally
neglected. Worse than neglected, i, at least,
had been misled and reached my preparatory
school supposing that i had been delivered to
my parents by a stork, a naiveté that won me
the ridicule of other boys. indeed, considering
what i afterward learned of my father’s behavior, and of the license and impropriety of
his relationship with my mother, i think it a
trifle dishonest of them to have excluded me
so completely from that freedom of thought
in which they themselves seem to have indulged. at any rate, by the age of sixteen, such
knowledge of sex as i had gained i had gained
for myself, and it had become tinged with slyness and guilt.
My father had sent my brother and me
to rossall school, preparatory and public, in
lancashire, his own territory, partly because
he believed it to be a good, healthy, roughish
school where we would get plenty of exercise
and have “the corners knocked off us,” partly
because his own north country friends sent
their boys there, partly to put us out of reach of
the “mollycoddling” influence of the women. i
was a cherubic little boy with large blue starry
eyes; my first nickname was “Girlie,” and at the
public school older boys soon began to make
advances to me. in my very first term there, the
head of my house, who seemed to me more like
a man than a boy, used to sit on my bed in the
darkness, night after night, begging to be al-
lowed in and whispering into my ears things
that terrified me almost to tears. he never got
his way with me, whatever his way may have
been, and for long after he left, happily for me
at the end of that term, i continued to hate his
memory and think of him as the devil. i don’t
remember when i started to masturbate, but
this was my first introduction to love. later,
a ginger-headed boy used to crawl across the
dormitory floor to my bed after lights out and,
lying on his back on my strip of carpet, beseech
me in whispers to let him in, or failing that, to
stretch down my hand. him too i resisted for
a time, but he was more my own age than my
Govern a family as you would cook a small
fish—very gently.
—Chinese proverb
previous wooer, less alarming, and i was eventually cajoled into stretching down my hand. i remember that i found the touch of his hot flesh
and the smell of his stuff on my fingers more
repugnant than exciting; for a long time i disliked the smell of semen, unless it was my own;
i have never been able to enjoy other people’s
smells—farts, feet, armpits, semen, unwashed
cocks—as i enjoy mine. later still i became
more accustomed to the prevalent depravities
of this excellent school, so discerningly selected
by my father, in which i was never bullied or,
when my first too-mysterious and monstrous
wooer had gone, unhappy.
This, then, returning to my father, was
one of the young minds to which he addressed
himself in the billiard room of Grafton house
in 1912. he admitted, i remember, his own
early participation in the practice in which he
thought it advisable to counsel moderation,
then took occasion to add—getting it all off his
chest in one, and providing for the future as well
as the present—that in the matter of sex there
was nothing he had not done, no experience he
had not tasted, no scrape he had not got into
and out of, so that if we should ever be in want
of help or advice we need never be ashamed
