The Good Boy Page 16

  I was shown into the quite luxurious living quarters of the house and showered and then found that a place had been set at table for me and a very fine lunch which included a dessert of fresh strawberries and cream (in mid-winter) was to be part of the deal. All three Londoners were very pleasant fellows, a little bit condescending to a mere colonial, but that was understandable and even tolerable, as I was paid handsomely for a very pleasant morning’s work. There was no sex and, more disappointingly still, it was made plain that they had ‘got the tan’ and that there would be no more work for me in the foreseeable future!

  Back at my hotel I counted my money and thought over the morning’s adventure. Was this the sort of life I wanted to lead? Would I like to be, in my sixties, a wrinkly old bachelor with lots of money and a fine house and no wife, no children and no sex other than ‘the occasional Wellington’? All things considered, no. Choosing the gay life, let alone the life of a porn model, seemed likely to bring more long-term loneliness than happiness and so once again I decided to try to follow the good old doctor’s advice and ‘choose to be normal’.

  But, a little like St Augustine of Hippo and his famous struggle to renounce the sins of the flesh, I wanted to be normal … ‘but not just yet’! I had answered a second ad in the magazine bought at the kiosk in Victoria Station, another ad for a male model, contacted the advertiser and arranged for him to meet me in the reception area of the hotel the following afternoon. I decided not to cancel the arrangement and so next day when the Reception Desk rang my room to announce a visitor I went downstairs to meet him.

  To my surprise he was a very personable chap not much older than me; he said his name was Thomas and to call him Tom. It took him very little time to decide to offer me a few hours work if I could be available that very evening. I agreed, and a few hours later took the tube to Sloane Square and walked to Tom’s mews flat, a small but comfortable place off Eaton Terrace. This time my employer made it plain that the photo studies were for his own collection rather than for any sort of circulation, though how a model could hold an employer to such an agreement I neither saw nor cared. I quite liked the chap and would probably have been happy to call around and ‘work’ unpaid.

  The large ground-floor living room of the flat was almost blindingly white: white ceiling, white walls, white doors and architraves, heavy white linen curtains and thick white carpet. There were no paintings or photographs or decorations of any sort on the walls. There was a shiny black grand piano at the baywindow end of the room and in one corner behind it, an incongruously large aspidistra on a shiny black plant-stand. A jumble of photographic gear lay on the floor and a tripod was positioned next to the piano. At the other end of the room there was a quite tall set of chrome steps and behind it a black and silver folding lacquered screen. It looked much more like an artist’s or pianist’s studio than a living room and I wondered whether there were more comfortable living quarters upstairs.

  When he opened the door to me Tom was wearing black silk trousers and a white silk shirt. Without further ado he motioned for me to go into the small bathroom under the stairs and ‘leave your things’. I did as I was being paid to do and then joined him in the living room where he was fiddling with his camera and lights. He took me through a series of poses, explaining in detail how I was to stand or kneel or lie in front of the lacquered screen, and then another series where I was to lean against or climb up the set of steps. It was more complicated and more difficult than I had expected, and all very business-like – not at all erotic. I felt I was being deployed like a piece of furniture or an aspidistra rather than as a hunky male model and I remained flaccid or barely half-hard all the time. Finally he seemed satisfied that I had understood what was expected of me and, leaving me posed on the steps, Tom picked up his camera, adjusted the lighting and started clicking. We must have done twenty or so shots with the steps before I was directed to move across to the screen and to assume my first pose there, one where I was to half-sit, half-lie on the floor in front of the screen, my right foot under my left buttock, my right arm bent at the elbow with the weight of my torso supported by my right forearm, and my left arm lying on my left leg. As I moved across the room Tom tossed a black silk kimono towards me with the instruction ‘Put this on but don’t tie the sash’. I did as I was told and made myself comfortable on the floor. Tom adjusted the lighting, came over and rearranged the folds of the kimono so that the black silk on the white carpet highlighted the tan of my body, made sure that I was comfortable enough to hold the pose … and clicked away, taking shots from different angles including from halfway up the set of steps.

  Unlike the other two photographers, Tom worked quietly, almost silently, with just a ‘Next pose’ every few minutes. Once posed on the floor, however, I did not have to change pose or move at all: it was the camera, the angle of shot and the lighting that changed. Suddenly there was a new and by then unexpected instruction: ‘Now play with yourself with your left hand and show me that erection’. I obliged of course and with a ‘Now stay like that,’ Tom put down the camera, sat at the piano and started to play. He played very well. He had dimmed the lights and played without sheet music, swaying gently to and fro, looking towards me all the time but seeming at times to drift off to some less substantial world. I realised that he was playing Debussy’s ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ and wondered whether I really did look something like a faun there on the carpet. The thought was quite erotic, as had become the whole scene, and I was not surprised when at the end of the Prelude Tom stopped, stood up and moved over towards me. He dropped his silk trousers as he walked, revealing his own arousal.

  My mercenary mind started asking: ‘Was this part of the deal?’ and ‘Are you a model or a hustler or both?’ Tom was on his knees beside me, shaking off his silk shirt and brushing his hands across my chest and belly as they came free of the fabric. Cocks cannot lie and both were now rock-hard. An instant decision was needed! As Tom moved his hand down to my groin I brought my left hand into play, protecting the crown jewels and said softly, ‘No, I’m sorry. Photos, yes, but sex, no.’

  The effect was as if I had touched him with an electric cattleprod; he jerked back, rolled away from me and started to get up, as did I. ‘But why did you answer my advertisement, why did you come here and flaunt your sex in my face if you are not willing to play? I’m paying you the rate we agreed. Do you charge more for sex than for photographs?’

  It was all so confusing. The dim lights, the beautiful music, the simple, masculine setting and Tom’s trim body were indeed quite erotic and I wanted to have sex with him. But something seemed to warn me against accepting money for sex. Off the top of my head I answered: ‘If we have finished the photography, pay me for those two hours and that’s the end of the work. If you’d like me to stay on for sex between friends, I’d love to.’

  ‘Friends!’ he almost shouted. ‘You’re not a friend, you’re a prostitute. You answered my advertisement and I’m paying you by the hour. What on earth is the matter with you to think that we could be friends! Take your money and get out!’

  Bewildered by the change of mood I retrieved my clothes, dressed quickly and headed for the door. Tom held out a handful of banknotes which I quickly saw did cover the agreed rate for the two hours. I accepted them and he immediately withdrew his hand as if fearing I might attempt to touch (or subserviently kiss?) it, opened the door and almost ejected me from the flat.

  I decided to walk back to my little hotel near Victoria and set off down Buckingham Palace Road. It was cold but fortunately not raining and I thought carefully as I walked along. What had happened there? If I had not interrupted him, Tom would probably have kept me on for another hour or two, or maybe even longer, and then have paid me cash in hand for the number of hours worked … whatever kind of work had been involved. I was quite happy to be paid for the modelling but had rather impulsively resisted the idea of being paid for sex. I had wanted the sex but had wanted it to be sex between friends rather
than between employer and employee, between client and (I shuddered at the word) prostitute. How could he call me a prostitute? Well, he could not have known that he was the very first person who had offered me payment for sex (give or take the Viennese photographer in Melbourne and the Moroccan photographer in Paris) and so I forgave him his mistake.

  But was he mistaken? If I had stayed on and had accepted his further payment, then there would be no denying that that would have constituted prostitution. Was I ready for that career, perhaps on a part-time if not a full-time basis? I was not yet 30, in good shape and apparently not unattractive, I was keen to get a good share of sex in my life and was not really averse to being appreciated in cash or in kind. Many successful and respectable marriages were built on such a foundation, I had come to realise. But while I found it difficult to identify moral objections to working as a prostitute, I saw several physical ones. For a start, it was illegal in many countries and so arrest and imprisonment were possible consequences. Secondly, it could see one run the risk of physical harm, whether from brutish clients or from street gangs or vigilante groups. And a gay prostitute seemed to be in a more vulnerable position than a straight one. Thirdly, it seemed to increase the health hazards faced in life and fourthly it was likely to be a socially damaging and isolating choice of career: many a prostitute had come to grief once deprived of the support of socially well-placed clients … Mme du Barry’s rendezvous with the guillotine came to mind!

  It had been a strange evening: I had made some money, had been called a prostitute, had had a long walk and some useful exercise … and had made some little progress in working out what to do, or what not to do, with my life!

  Eight: Choosing Straight

  After a few more days in London and no teaching job offers, I took a Saturday morning train north to Birmingham where, I was told, there was an acute shortage of casual/relief teachers. I found myself digs in a B&B in Handsworth run by a cheerful Irishwoman, and unpacked. After living out of a suitcase for six weeks or so it was nice to begin to feel ‘at home’. I did some washing and, in preparation for job interviews on the Monday, hung a good white shirt on the line on the Sunday morning, which was bitterly cold but quite sunny. Again in penitent mode, I walked the twenty minutes or so to the nearest Catholic church for Mass.

  When I got back after a couple of hours, I found the shirt still on the line, not dry but as stiff as a board. It had frozen on the clothesline! My head and shoulders were lightly powdered with snow, the legs of my trousers were damp, and my shoes were soaked through from squelching along the slushy streets. Fortunately I had dry clothes in my room and after a hot bath (a shilling extra), a toasted sandwich and a mug of tea (two shillings and sixpence extra) I was feeling better. My white shirt was dried in the ‘airing cupboard’ under the stairs where the hot water system was located and I eventually got it ironed and everything sorted out for a fresh start on the Monday morning.

  Next day I reported to the local education authorities and, sure enough, was offered an interview on the following day for a position teaching French and English on the staff of a suburban Secondary Modern School. That evening I headed for the Turkish Baths in Handsworth. I was still feeling half-frozen by the Birmingham winter and I had heard somewhere, probably in the London photographer’s studio, that in England Turkish Baths on ‘Men’s Night’ were often very gay-friendly. The Baths were housed in an interesting old purpose-built Victorian building of vaguely Moorish design and of polychrome brick construction. Inside was warm and steamy, a dimly-lit labyrinth of rubbermatted floors, tiled walls and terrazzo-domed ceilings, inhabited by white-towelled male figures appearing out of and disappearing into the steamy gloom. I had never been to a Turkish Bath before but quickly found that there were plenty of habitués happy to show me the ropes. Swimming naked in the heated pool was a joy and the vigorous massage with warm oil and soapsuds was surprisingly relaxing. I was then stood in a corner and hosed down with a powerful jet of cold water, then wrapped in a large warm towel and invited to curl up and snooze a little in the warm, dark ‘Recovery Room’.

  That was, I discovered, where the gay-friendly side of things was and I soon found myself chatting to and then cuddling with an Englishman of my own age who worked as a clerk in central Birmingham. While we were both being careful and went no further than synchronised masturbation, I found myself telling him all about my mixed-up life and about my exploits with the photographers in Paris and London. I don’t know why I confided in this way in a total stranger, one whom I never did see again, but I still remember feeling that he was a nice chap and a sensible fellow. His comment at the end of my story has stuck with me ever since. ‘Sounds like an impulse towards self-destruction,’ he said of the adventures with the photographers.

  Tucked up in bed that night and reviewing the day, I felt that he had been correct: there had been at least one suicide in the family and my experimenting with the gay life and with the porn industry (which is what the first two of the three photographers were really about, if in a rather mild way) could indeed lead to disaster. I had better stop there and then and remember the good doctor’s advice that the choice was mine to make. Was I choosing gay or straight? Was I going to lead a homo or a hetero life? Was I choosing the teaching profession … or the oldest profession in the world, i.e. the sex industry? I resolved to stick with teaching and was determined to join the Catholic bourgeoisie in Melbourne … and therefore to choose ‘straight’.

  The next morning I took a bus out to the school for my interview. I had never been to the Midlands or to Birmingham before and I was appalled by the drab ugliness I saw from the upstairs windows of the bus on the way out to the school, by the dreary monotony of the city and its soot-caked suburbs. I found that ‘my’ school was a large, new, co-ed Secondary Modern School on a new ring road on the outskirts of the city proper, just beyond the ugliness and almost in the green belt that had been left around the city in the then still incomplete reconstruction twenty years after the end of World War II. The whole suburb was a new development that had not yet degenerated into a concrete and plastic slum. I seem to recall a few trees planted here and there.

  I was interviewed by the Headmaster, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman, the Senior Mistress, a diminutive and sharp-eyed Scot, and the French Mistress, a smiling young Irishwoman … and was offered the job, starting the next day and teaching French and English to some rather unwilling students in Forms I, II and III. One complained to me that he would never meet any Frenchmen in Birmingham and saw no use in learning the language, as he wanted to join his brother and work in the local butchery. Another complained to a school pal, but within hearing of a teacher who laughingly passed it on to me, that he did not want to be taught English by a ‘kangaroo’.

  E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir With Love had been published only a few months earlier and I had read it on the ship on the way to Europe. The similarity of my school to the one in the novel was striking. Class control, like playground duty, was quite a challenge for all the teachers including the quiet young teacher from Australia, where schools and schooling were still held in much higher general esteem than they were by the students in the UK’s Secondary Modern system. But I coped. I remembered a professor of education in Melbourne once saying to a group of teacher-trainees that had included me that discipline in class was a mysterious thing: in many ways it could not be taught to trainee teachers … you either had it or did not have it. He recalled seeing a strapping young teacher who was a star on the football field but absolutely unable to control a class of noisy fourteen-year-olds, while another young teacher, ‘a mere slip of a girl’ as the professor put it, was able to walk into the same class and instantly have absolute control. I was neither a football star nor a slip of a girl but I suppose that an Australian was a bit exotic in Birmingham and a French teacher who had just arrived from France had a certain cachet. So discipline was less of a problem for me than was the feeling that there was indeed little point in teaching French to kid
s who had already been sifted and sorted by the English ‘Eleven Plus’ examination (since abandoned) and labelled ‘not academic’.

  The Headmaster, a very decent fellow, waited for a few weeks to see how I performed and then, presumably satisfied with my work, asked me if I would like to teach for two half-days a week in a nearby Grammar School ‘where the situation would be very different and where you would have a very different kind of experience’. I jumped at the opportunity and so, thanks to his kindness and to the cooperation of his friend, the Headmaster of the Grammar School, I soon had a quite different impression of the education system in the UK. At the Grammar School (a boysonly establishment) the French class was slightly larger but was made up solely of boys who had chosen to do French and who had been selected by the Eleven Plus examination as being academically and intellectually suited to go on through secondary and even tertiary study. They were eager to learn, never missed doing their homework and lessons, and competed with one another in their efforts to show how well they had been studying. My questions would be met with a forest of raised hands and cries of ‘Sir, sir, ask me, sir’ and so on. The difference between the two schools was a stunning demonstration of the way in which society in England was then still class-riven. The children of the lower socio-economic classes seemed condemned to lives like those of their parents; to get out and up one needed either results at the Eleven Plus exam good enough to earn a scarce scholarship to a grammar school or else one needed parents rich enough to pay the grammar school’s fees. Bettering oneself and helping children to better themselves seemed to me to be much easier in Australia.