The Good Boy Page 11

  Since my introduction in Grade Five to the pleasures of poetry and literature in general I had become very attracted to books and reading, although whether this interest could be turned into a career of some sort I did not know. We had always been read to as very young children and I knew the alphabet and was able to read before I went to school. I used to devour the school Reader, which was supposed to last for a whole year, and would have finished it within a week or so of getting it. Ditto for the monthly School Paper. The family always gave us books as presents at Christmas and for birthdays and we were encouraged to join and use the local library, beginning with the children’s section. I fairly quickly progressed from the Boys’ Own type of story to the William books of Richmal Crompton, to outback and wild west stories (Ion Idriess and his Lasseter’s Last Ride and The Drums of Mer come to mind), ship stories (E. Laurie Long was one of my favourite authors), mystery stories (the Dr Fu Manchu series of Sax Rhomer intrigued me), detective stories … and romantic or adventure stories such as W.E. Johns’s Biggles series and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur. For years I dreamed of joining the French Foreign Legion and of discovering my heroic qualities out in the Sahara and the scorching deserts of the French colonial empire.

  Books and reading had, I suppose, become my escape from the aspects of daily life which were apparently necessary but were to me unattractive … like sports at school and playing in the backyard at home. I could not get out of sport afternoon each week at school but was so lacking in skill or motivation at cricket in summer or football in winter that I was always seen as a quite useless team member. I remember smarting at this rejection by my peers but I understood that it was a quite reasonable response to my lack of even basic ball skills or of any real interest in chasing a ball around. When I moved to St Kevin’s in Grade Six I did for the first time receive a little sporting instruction in that we had one period a week of Physical Education with Mr Hart, a gymnastics instructor. I really enjoyed that, partly because I was no more inept at gymnastics than the average boy and was able to learn the routines as quickly as anyone. Throughout my secondary school years Mr Hart’s classes remained one of the highlights of the week for me, and at one stage (Form IV I think) I went along every Friday evening with a few friends to extracurricular gymnastic classes organised at a suburban gym. But on sports afternoon at St Kevin’s I spent my time counting the minutes until the games ended and I could get back to reading my current novel in the train on the way home.

  I was in this way able to lead two lives, one that of the dutiful and hard-working student son and the other that of a romantic dreamer escaping from humdrum reality to the deserts of the Sahara or the storm-swept Atlantic or the opium dens of Shanghai. But while my mind was able to roam free, my body was subject to the normal patterns of growth for a young male … including puberty.

  It both intrigued and irritated me that from a quite early age I was constantly being asked by fond relatives and family friends, and later on by teachers and even slight acquaintances, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ Being what I was there and then was problem enough and working out what to be in the future at times seemed just too hard. Did I have to change? Did I have to grow up? Could I not continue forever in the comfortable and loving family I had around me? Unlike nearly everyone else, my parents never once put the question to me and I do believe that well into my teens I still had no real plans ever to leave home. In the year my father died, when I turned sixteen, there was talk in the house as to what my sister would ‘do’. She wanted to become a doctor like our father but my mother, I think (and I merely overheard these discussions, never being part of them) felt the course and the life ‘too hard’ for a girl. Just what that really meant I don’t know but in the end a compromise was reached in that it was agreed Marie would begin a degree in science at the university and at the end of the first year would be able to switch to medicine if she still wanted to.

  My father’s death in the middle of my sixteenth year changed my aimless floating, and the dreamy distant future suddenly became the quite alarming present. An Anglo-Indian teacher friend of the family took me aside and spoke kindly of the new burdens I would have to bear, as the ‘head of the household now’. She urged me to forget about doing subjects I liked and to start thinking about how to earn an income for the family. This perhaps quaintly Victorian Raj view of life struck a chord with me, a romantic rather than a realistic chord, and added to my general confusion.

  My father the breadwinner of the family was indeed gone. We would have to sell the family home to the doctor who purchased the practice. A new home would have to be found. There seemed to be an opening for a hero (me?) to appear and save the day. My mother as executrix of my father’s will had the choice of spending the limited assets on rent, food and clothes, or of going back to work to earn the money to bring us up. She decided to invest the capital in buying a house which she could eventually pass on to us, and to find a job which would bring in enough money to cover the expenses of daily living. What was I going to do to help, I wondered? My aunt Nell took me aside and told me to stop my talk of leaving school and getting a job, any job, to help bring in some money. She said that I would be upsetting my mother rather than helping her, and that what I must do was stay at school, work hard, get good results at the end of secondary school and then look at a career path and at helping the family. I accepted this advice … it was really more a ‘talking to’ or ‘dressing down’ than advice – the only time I can remember my aunt being almost severe with me. By the end of the year I was certainly thinking very hard of what I was going to be! Perhaps the question was changing, evolving … it was in fact becoming more a matter of what did I want in life, in this life, leaving aside those confusing considerations of the next life which until then I had been taught were more important.

  Six: Sex and Sin

  It may seem a strange thing to say, but at the age of nine or ten I had no idea what ‘sex’ meant, and indeed may not by then have even heard the term. ‘Gender’ I did meet: it was a term used in one of our English Grammar textbooks in Grades Five or Six. I learned that there were two genders, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and I delighted in learning off by heart lists of matching terms set out in the book: king and queen, duke and duchess, earl and countess, marquis and marchioness, abbot and abbess, prior and prioress and so on. These were, however, just words to me, tricky terminology which I enjoyed grasping quickly so that I could score top marks in English tests.

  I saw and read about and heard of people performing various roles (priest, bishop, nun, angel, father, mother, train driver, soldier, sailor, airman, etc.) dressed in various ways (trousers, skirts, uniform, priestly vestments, the angel’s toga etc.) but was never told that I might aspire to some lifestyles and some forms of dress, though not others. I was constantly being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, yet did not know that boys were supposed to do some things, and girls other things. Although the first three years of my schooling were co-educational, Kilbreda was essentially a convent and girls’ school, where boys were accepted only up to Grade Two, and where both in the classroom and in the playground boys and girls were in fact kept apart. I never wondered why and accepted it as simply one of the many incomprehensible rules imposed by adults. So the children I played with were always boys, and none of them ever, at least in the primary grades, raised the subject of sex or told jokes about sex or proposed any sort of remotely sexual game or experimentation.

  From as early an age as I can remember I was attracted by beauty … a beautiful countryside, picture, house, cake, piece of material, item of clothing, book, jewel, person. On the other hand, I certainly learned to value a person for the beauty of character before I became interested in the person’s physical beauty. I loved my family and aunt and maternal grandmother and our maid Vera for themselves, without any consideration of their appearance. In retrospect, however, I can see that this love of beauty was unusual in a boy. It seems to have replaced a
ny interest in things mechanical or sporting or practical. I was given an Indian tent and a cowboy’s hat and pistol one Christmas but quickly found them boring. A cricket set of bat, ball and three stumps fared no better, even with my father making the effort to find time to play cricket with me in the backyard. I never had, or wanted, a pair of football boots or running spikes and really had no interest at all in which team beat which at school or on Saturday afternoon in the big league.

  The year before my father died, when I was about fifteen, I began to go to an occasional football match on a Saturday afternoon with my father. He more often spent Saturday afternoon at the races with my mother and I now suspect that these trips to the football with me may have been linked to my parents’ perception that I was entering puberty and needed some male bonding and male role models. Vera knitted me a scarf in the purple and gold colours of the local team and Dad and I would walk to the football ground and sit or stand with the crowd of local supporters. The visiting team was often jeered and the umpire was not infrequently booed. Dad of course never took part in that sort of behaviour, so neither did I. He had played football for St Pat’s in Ballarat and I think he actually enjoyed watching these games. Having never really played and knowing virtually nothing about the game, I was bored stiff although I did like being there with my Dad and tried to appear interested. I did, however, discover an emerging interest in the individual players, in their physical prowess and especially in their physical appearance, their trim bodies and muscular thighs and in some cases their good looks. I think that my idea of the perfect male body grew out of these afternoons at the ‘footy’.

  When I was twelve or so years old our Form Master at St Kevin’s had puzzled me (and perhaps others) by one day devoting the entire Christian Doctrine lesson to a talk about what he called ‘wet dreams’ and ‘nocturnal emissions’. As I had not by then experienced the phenomenon I literally did not know what he was talking about. I think he summed up by saying that it was a natural bodily function, that it usually started to occur in boys at around age twelve or thirteen, that we should not be worried by it, that it could be quite pleasurable, that we should never seek to bring it on (that would be a sin of ‘self-abuse’) … and that we should not discuss the subject with our classmates in the playground after the lesson. None of my schoolmates did raise the subject afterwards and I continued in my state of ignorance until one day some months later.

  And so it was that my very first experience of sex involved sex with animals … not that I really began my sex life with a burst of bestiality, sometimes joked about as a novelty for the more depraved urban dwellers or as a desperate substitute for lonely shepherds … but simply that it involved the family cat. A well fed and not very athletic ‘tom’ known as His Highness, he was, however, neither the victim of, nor even knowing participant in, the scene (he had, after all, been ‘cut’ at a tender age).

  I had just returned from a family outing to the beach and was still in my damp swimming trunks. My father had parked the car safely in the garage and I was following the others across the garden to the house for a shower and change when I espied His Highness curled up on the garden seat. Already last in the queue for the bathroom, I decided to wait in the garden for a while and to play with him. I sat down beside him, picked him up, put him on my lap, and started to pat him. His Highness began to purr happily and soon started, as cats do, to knead the lap it was sitting on. Some cat psychologists say that this harks back to kittenhood when the contented kitten kneaded its mother’s belly to extract more milk from her nipples. In this case, however, what His Highness was kneading was not his mother’s tummy, not Great-Aunt Maud’s lap, but my penis and testicles, thinly covered by a wisp of damp swimsuit … and what he extracted was not his mother’s milk. To my surprise, my penis started to stiffen and extend, pushing against the fabric of my togs and even risking an encounter with His Highness’ claws. The sensation was strange but pleasurable … and grew more pleasurable until my penis was bigger than I had ever seen it and so stiff and so swollen that it seemed to actually burst, spraying sticky whitish goo over me. What on earth was going on? … and then my Form Master at school and his little talk on nocturnal emissions and self-abuse came to mind. Is that what had just happened? Could you have a nocturnal emission in the afternoon? The time of day involved seemed unlikely to be critical to the description of the act, and indeed it was already evening, almost nocte, and this certainly was an ‘emission’ and certainly a good deal of pleasure had been experienced by both me and the cat. In the cat’s case His Highness’ involvement in the crime had really been unwitting if not involuntary, and the burden of guilt, if there was any, undoubtedly fell on my shoulders. What should I do? Whom should I ask? Whom should I tell? I began to wonder if perhaps it was after all just some sort of freak accident and had nothing to do with nocturnal emissions, self-abuse and sin. If it never happened again then it probably was just an accident. If I could repeat the experience, with or without the help of His Highness, then perhaps there was a connection with the Forbidden Pleasures and I would have to discuss it with somebody.

  Pushing His Highness aside I stood up, swinging my beach towel over my shoulder and letting one end fall loosely in front to cover, as best I could, the telltale wet patch on my bathers, and went inside for my turn at the shower. With calls from the kitchen to ‘hurry up in there, tea’s ready’, I had no time to try to repeat the experience but I did notice that as long as I thought about doing so my penis persisted in swelling slightly and looking reddish and thickish in a way I had never previously known. And it seemed a bit longer. And it sort of felt good …

  That night, after kissing my parents goodnight, saying my prayers by the bedside and climbing into bed, I turned out the light and settled down to a bit of experimenting under the bedclothes. In no time at all, just thinking about the idea and merely touching my penis produced the swelling and stiffening so pleasurable in the afternoon, and then I found that a couple of rubs with my fingers brought on the emission of the whitish goo, accompanied by an indescribably intense and good feeling of pleasure and release and relief. This was then followed, alas, by what the novelist François Mauriac called l’antique tristesse34 which almost inevitably quickly follows orgasm, the sense of knowing that something wonderful had just ceased to be. As the song so rightly says:

  Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

  Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie!35

  I got my handkerchief from under my pillow and cleaned up the sticky mess on the bedclothes and on my pyjamas, threw the handkerchief under the bed to be collected in the morning and taken to the laundry basket when an opportunity to do so unobserved arose … and quickly fell asleep.

  So that is when I became a great sinner, enjoying the pleasures of masturbation almost every day, often several times a day, and then heading off to Confession every Saturday so that I would be able to go to Mass and Communion with a clean slate and pure soul on Sunday morning. Each week I would make a great effort not to start again but rarely held my resolve beyond Monday night. It now seems surprising to me that my parents never said anything about sex education to me, and I can only suppose that they had ‘passed the buck’ to the school or else that they regarded puberty as a natural phenomenon that I should be left to discover for myself. Given my father’s reasonably firm religious convictions, I suspect that the former was his view and that he endorsed the school’s advice that masturbation was a sin … though perhaps, given his medical training, not a very serious one and more of a bad habit (like biting one’s finger nails)! My mother, on the other hand, may well have taken the latter view and I greatly doubt that she saw masturbation as sinful or as a serious problem. One day she surprised me in the very act, down in the privacy of the woodshed, and she retreated with an ‘Oh, you’re in here!’ faster than I could stuff my cock and clothes back into my trousers. Whether she told my father about the incident I don’t know … it was never mentioned by anyone, and after the initial
shock of being discovered, I continued with my pleasureseeking, though probably a little more carefully and discreetly.

  The strange thing is that by the end of secondary school, all I knew about sex was that masturbation was of course free and was fun but was, alas, the sin of self-abuse. I never wondered whether girls also could masturbate, had no idea as to how the female genitalia differed from that of males, had never been told about procreation and the ‘birds and the bees’ and, having grown up in the city away from the enlightening behaviour of farm animals, I knew nothing about intercourse between male and female. I had never wondered why my parents slept in the same bed and had never wondered or asked where we children had come from. In my all-boys secondary school, none of my schoolmates ever discussed sex in my hearing, and never told jokes about sex. While I kissed both of my parents goodnight every evening and my female relatives on meeting them, these were chaste little kisses on the cheek or forehead, and I knew nothing about the thrills of kissing on the mouth … playing around with girls was never discussed in my gang of school friends. I can remember being rather bored at the cinema when romantic interludes appeared in films, and when Cary Grant worked his way up to kissing his leading lady on the lips, I used to wish they’d hurry up and get back to the main story of the film. At that time, Hollywood adhered to a fairly strict code of censorship as far as sex was concerned and there was never anything to indicate that passionate kissing was a prelude to even more pleasurable activity. It was, I think, referred to as the ‘one foot on the floor policy’: petting and pashing were permitted between the stars of the film (heterosexual stars, of course: pace Cary Grant and Rock Hudson et al.) provided they remained clad and, if reclining on couch or bed, kept one foot on the floor. Thus far and no further! And yet I sensed that there was some sort of sexual activity engaged in by men and perhaps by women (but not by my own parents, of course!) and that selfabuse was a sin and a bad habit because it in some way frustrated proper sexual function. But I had no idea of what ‘proper sexual function’ actually was. It now seems extraordinary to me that it was possible in an Australian city in the 1950s for a boy to reach his teens without any knowledge of sex and to then be taught just one thing about it … that it was pleasurable but sinful.