The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

Sister caught Harper Junior naked in the dormitory once, flapping his prick against his stomach.

‘Put that thing away at once, Harper!’ she said, and passed on unperturbed.

She was the only female allowed in the dormitories, a small hard plump military figure that even the most randy senior boy could never hope or wish to seduce. Sometimes she marched through the changing rooms where dozens of boys were stark naked and nobody paid any more attention than if it had been the gym instructor, an old army sergeant.

Some might say that more attention should have been paid to the gym instructor. But I never recall any cases of boys being seduced by masters or staff – had it happened, the news would have spread round the school at once. Mutual masturbation was rife, but homosexuality was virtually non-existent; perhaps the elaborate codes guarded against it. Certainly the codes, with their embargo on emotion, helped to damp down affectionate attachments that might lead to later disturbances; on the other hand, they tended to promote coldness of temperament and concentration on the organ, as they did in my case. For all that, within the insane context of a public school, I believe they acted to protect the maximum number. Of course, they could not protect the oddity like Harper Junior. I’m sure he came to a bad end – a bad but, from his point of view, probably enjoyable end.

The negative aspects of public-school life extended their influence into the holidays. Holidays were brief in comparison with term-time and this formed a barrier to making friends for anyone who tended to be shy, as I increasingly found myself to be. Relationships with old girl friends like Hilda and Sheila were difficult to establish. The casual ways of childhood had been lost.

One holiday, in desperation, I approached Margaret Randall, the kindergarten stripper, who now wore high heels and worked in the branch of F. W. Woolworth’s just opened in town. I took her to the cinema to see a sloppy film of her choosing, and held her hand in the darkness. Afterwards, when I tried to kiss her, she told me to clear off. I never had the nerve to remind her I had once seen her flashing her pretty little cunt on top of the schoolroom table; probably I should have done; it might have worked wonders.

Some interfering idiot saw me with Margaret and reported it to my mother. She was very sweet and gentle with me, while making it clear to me that in ‘our position’ I must not be seen out with a girl who worked in Woolworth’s. She did not really like my going into Woolworth’s at all. It was a cheap place. And besides – well, I was a bit young for girl friends, wasn’t I? Why didn’t I try and be better company for Ann?

Okay, if she wanted it that way. I let my sister toss me off again, although by now I felt this was slightly childish. One morning I made her do it three times straight off, which greatly impressed her. With Nelson I was more contained. He was very withdrawn now, studying for an endless succession of exams that lay between him and his chance of being an architect. He was courting a very dull girl called Caroline Cathcart, whom I thought as stupid as her name. Happily, she did not last too long. Nelson and I entered into no confidences about her sexual proclivities. Naively, I wondered if Nelson had forgotten about sex; something in the forbidding aspect of Caroline Cathcart encouraged this illusion.

‘Are you still bashing your bishop?’ I asked him once, but he told me not to be cheeky. As for the maids, Beatrice was engaged to be married, and Brenda had left. According to Ann’s report, Brenda left without any rows or dramatic disclosures, so we never knew whether Father had been lucky there.

Dramatic disclosures were something of which we stood in great need. All unknown to us, our thirsty souls needed art and revelation. In this respect, public-school life, with its constant minor crises, was to be preferred to the dull security of home.

‘Your father’s trying to listen to the documentary,’ Mother would say reprovingly in the evening, as Ann and I grew noisy over a game of cards. All Father’s art and revelation came through the B.B.C. He did like a good documentary. While he was being educated we were being repressed – by his pained looks and Mother’s indignant ‘Ssssh’s!’. We hated documentaries, and the News, and the Fat Stock Prices – to which Father, when at home, would listen absorbedly.

Ann’s hate and mine were uninhibited. Nelson, as elder son, veered between taking our side and taking Father’s. He could occasionally be tempted on to our side, and we would all three burst into helpless giggles. Sometimes he would stalk out in pretended anger, and sneak round to the pub for a half-pint of bitter.

Apart from the B.B.C., there was nothing. Nothing except the cinema. We visited it whenever we could, under Nelson’s charge. There was our art and our revelation; it never entered our heads that it might be bad art and false revelation. Everything that those giant slow-moving grey figures of myth did was amazing. Under their spell we learnt how the big world turned, how the wicked never prospered, and how women had to have flowers and moonlight before they would let you get near them. But from them too we first learnt to listen to the marvellous unafraid noise of jazz and relish the extraordinary faces and sounds of black musicians. We never had enough of the cinema, because we were never allowed too much of it.

At that period, and for long after, I was desperately grateful to Hollywood for opening up life and art to me. Now I’m less sure. They got the perspectives all wrong. The world depended on them, and they flogged it a lot of sentimental middle-class humbug!

The one bit of broadcasting we all enjoyed as a family was ‘Music Hall’, which came on every Saturday night. Mother used to bake a big coconut cake, which we settled down to guzzle as the band struck up ‘Back to Those Happy Days’. The comics were my favourites, particularly the filthy ones like Max Miller, though it was agony to sit there bursting with laughter while outwardly looking stupid, as if you didn’t see the jokes. If it became too bad you could always pretend you had choked on a crumb of cake.

As I grew up, the girl problem grew, if anything, more acute. The pride and delight we experienced at school when we first managed to generate semen proved something of an illusion in the big world. If there was one thing girls dreaded it was semen. Semen was the devil. By natural association of ideas, this dread seemed to spread to pricks. What a girl can innocently enjoy at ten, she stands in horror of at fifteen. Or such was my experience in our snobbery-bound little bourgeois circles in the thirties. The Pill has changed matters nowadays.

All the girls I was officially permitted to mix with had been scared by nonsense tales. They and the boys were fobbed off with bunkum about not touching anyone you weren’t engaged to. The language of warning was vague, and perhaps the more powerful for that. Also, with the pernicious influence of the cinema, everything was supposed to be done ‘romantically’, which meant talking and courting and taking ages over it and hanging about for full moons and so on.

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 who 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: