The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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hated me, seeing me as a threat to his enjoyment. He would not answer my anxious questions. On one occasion he did drop this hostile attitude when he discovered from Beatrice a piece of news so galvanizing, and at first so incredible, that he was forced to share it with me.
According to Beatrice, when we were all at the seaside my father screwed Brenda every day. Brenda was our other maid, an older girl who did not sleep in. How old was she? Ancient to us, but considerably younger than Father – probably in her late thirties.
It was not Brenda who interested us: it was Father. We had never considered him capable of screwing. We had no evidence at all (our own existence was so permanent a thing that we could not include it as evidence) that our parents knew anything about sex. And now, here was Father taking his trousers down and kissing … more than kissing … old Brenda … Amazing! If it was true …
So it was with a great deal of covert interest that I regarded my father when he appeared next weekend. Supposing it was true that he did it. Perhaps Brenda made him do it to her! Perhaps she had some secret hold over him! Perhaps she owed the bank an incredible amount of money, and had threatened not to pay unless he shagged her regularly every lunch hour. Or perhaps they did it in the evenings. Before or after high tea. I visualized it as a very formal affair, with neither speaking to the other. Sometimes I pictured them doing it in the bank, on top of the counter, bedding down on lumpy moneybags.
Father appeared much as usual. You could never tell with adults. He came down on to the beach with us, changed into his fierce black-and-red-striped bathing costume, and swam with us, and later drank tea out of our bakelite cups and ate squashy tomato sandwiches that tasted elusively of the greaseproof paper.
In the evening, when the oil lamps were lit, he took me into my bedroom, saying he wished to speak to me privately.
My heart somersaulted in my breast. Beatrice had told him of my sins! He was going to preach to me.
Or – far worse! – he was going to tell me what he had been up to with Brenda, man to man!
Or worse again. He was going to do both. ‘Young man, I know what you’ve been up to with one maid, so I’m going to tell you what I’ve been up to with the other. I’m going to tell you in such revolting detail that you will never look at a woman again. For a start, I don’t have a cock like your silly little thing. I have a much bigger one, made of flesh and cork, which I screw on …’
It was nothing like that. He had to tell me that he was going to send me away to boarding school next term. It was for my own good.
I found myself crying and saying that he didn’t love me and Mummy didn’t love me, or they wouldn’t send me away. He said that was entirely untrue; they loved me very much, and it was because they loved me very much that they were sending me away, because at boarding school I would learn much more than I did now, and so would be able to be a success in the world in later life.
Being a success in the world in later life sounded to me as repulsive as, and somewhat similar to, climbing out of one’s grave and going to be judged on Judgement Day. I pleaded that I would do whatever they wanted, that I would work harder, that I would never have a temper fit again, and so on, if only I might be allowed to stay at home.
Father was much upset. He made me blow my nose and told me not to be a baby. He hates scenes; he hated to see his children sad; but he had already booked a place for me at a large grey public school up in the Peak District, not too far (so he said) from home.
It must have been in his mind that neither Nelson nor I were doing very well at school; nor had our grammar school a very high reputation. While it was too late for change in Nelson’s case, there was still a chance for me to enjoy a better education. He loved us and wanted us to do well, just as he had done in his modest way.
To me, the matter looked very different. The fact that I was being sent away when my elder brother wasn’t, told me enough. With my guilt-laden conscience I decided that they just could not stand me any more. Hadn’t Mother always wanted to go away from me? Wasn’t this just a clever way of detaching me? On this point I dared not confront her directly, but I made a direct assault on her emotions, weeping and sulking and being sick and having tantrums, and begging her not to let me go.
She was as patient and sweet as could be with me. But there was nothing she could do to alter the march of events. Daddy had decided it would be good for me to go to Branwells, and to Branwells I must go. I had better be a man about it. Once I got there, I should enjoy it. Besides, there would be lots of boys to play with …
The delights and horrors of English public schools have been thoroughly explored before now. Not that that would deter me from writing an account of my own experiences. But boredom confronts me at the whole prospect. The four years I passed, not too uncomfortably, at rainy, draughty Branwells in stony Derbyshire, were not a period of any real sexual development. Although I was never greatly ill-treated, and never greatly ill-treated anyone, the experience as a whole, in its negativity, had a depressing effect on me. So, except for one cherished episode, the whole period can be passed over in summary.
At first I was utterly crushed by the newness of everything: the newness, the size, and the discomfort of everything. There were three hundred boarders at Branwells, living a prison life without appeal to any code of justice. We were beaten, often violently, by prefects and masters. We formed little gangs among ourselves, we insulted each other, we cheated in class, wanked in the dormitories and fought in the corridors; only on the rugger fields did we play fair, because fairness was one of the rules of the game. Not until we reached the peace and sublimity of the sixth form was it possible to become a little civilized and form something like real friendships. By the time I got to that haven, Neville Chamberlain was flying about calming Adolf Hitler and we were digging useless trenches behind the sanatorium in case of air raids.
At first, I was almost glad of the relief from sex which the hectic school routine provided. This feeling wore off as term progressed. I only gradually became aware that there was a tremendous amount of furtive sexual activity in progress all round me.
Comparing notes later in life with other survivors of the public-school system, I realize that Branwells was a fairly humane institution. Sexual bullying was none. Nobody ever forced me to do anything I did not want to do; although a group of prefects once made me bare myself for inspection, and one of them stirred my little weapon with the end of a cane, they did not abuse me.
Sex activity was limited almost entirely to masturbation or mutual masturbation (known as ‘insurance’ after the Mutual Insurance Company, who had an office near the school, to the general edification); sodomy and buggery never seemed to enter anyone’s head, and would have been frowned on; fellatio was known, but it was regarded as almost as unmanly to be the sucked as the sucker. The code for behaviour in masturbation was also strict, and an interesting sidelight on British middle-class life it affords, for it may be expressed thus: one does not wank one’s friends. Possible wankees were drawn in the main from three groups: one’s neighbours or near neighbours in the dormitory, however poor or even hostile one’s relations with them were during the day; one’s neighbours in the form room, however poor or even hostile one’s relations with them at other times; and the youngest boys.
Considering that almost everyone wanked someone, the amount of discretion involved in these activities was considerable. One’s friends were not to be wanked; they might be used as repositories of wanking confidences; but strict followers of the unwritten code remained silent upon all vital wanking issues – that is, how often one wanked and when and with whom. To be caught in solitary masturbation was a disgrace.
As soon as it was lights-out in the dormitories, an intense but resonant silence fell. It was not considered good form if one allowed one’s bed-springs to creak, although there were a few unfortunates with bad beds whose springs always creaked; these boys invariably lost face, or took to exercising their rampant genitals at other times of the day. There was none of that free-and-easy camaraderie that exists in certain barrack rooms in the Army, where the lance-corporal, as he switches off the lights, yells jovially, ‘Pricks – Atten-shun! Take up wanking positions! On your marks, ready, steady – go! Them as can’t