Here is chapter 2 of The Good Die Young. I hope that the reader will enjoy these tales of school in an age now long gone. If you do, please don't forget to make a contribution to Nifty, so enable people to enjoy this wonderful website for many years to come.
The Good Die Young
Chapter 2
Peter. That was his name. Peter Silversmith, to be precise, and he was English. Mr Thomson made me sit beside him, and that was instant tongue-tied bliss! However, in the occasional few moments when we weren't singing, Peter and I began to get to know each other. He lived in one of the more expensive parts of town. His father was a tenor in the back row of the choir. His elder brother James was deputy head chorister, second in command to my friend George. Our friendship developed very slowly at first, since we were in different classes at school, I lived out in the country, and we only saw each other at choir practices and services. That changed eventually, however.
Spring was coming round, and that meant the Music Festival. Mr Thomson traditionally entered a boys choir in the appropriate class and traditionally always won the trophy. As I said before, he really was an exceptionally good choir trainer. So I found myself selected for his boys choir which had to rehearse at lunchtimes. Fortunately, in those days the lunch break was more than an hour long, so we had time to grab a bite to eat then make it to choir for a good thirty or forty minute practice. Of course, all the church choristers were included, so that was another opportunity for me to be in Peter's company. It made perfect sense for those of us who were rushing to choir, two or three days a week, to eat lunch together. As time went on, Peter and I gravitated together a bit more.
The Music Festival was great fun; there were so many different instrumental and vocal classes with Academy pupils taking part, that for the week of the event we had virtual carte blanche to skip classes and go to the Festival -- whether we were actually taking part or not! Of course Mr Thomson's boys choir won and were invited to take part in the prize winners' concert which traditionally ended the Festival, and was the hottest ticket in town. Did I mention that, apart from boys and men, there were three ladies who sang in the church choir? Two sopranos and an alto. Their presence was only just tolerated by the very conservative Rector of the church, and they had to sit behind the tenors and basses in a third row of stalls where the pulpit and its stone pillar hid them from most of the congregation. That's how things were in those days! Anyway, those two sopranos were sisters, private singing pupils of Mr Thomson, and one of them won the overall supreme award in that year's Festival. It was a great thrill to see someone I knew appearing as the ultimate star of the show! I was sitting beside Peter as she received her trophy to great applause. As it happens, it was her sister who continued with singing to make it a career, and she eventually became quite famous as a solo singer of traditional folksongs and light music -- but that's another story.
May came along, and with it Peter's birthday -- his thirteenth. I was delighted to be invited along with several others to a birthday party at his home. Although I didn't know all the other boys (there were no girls invited!) at least I knew the other choristers, and we had a wonderful time. Peter's garden backed on to the cricket ground belonging to the local amateur cricket club, and being Saturday afternoon there was a match in progress. We were able to get through a gap in the fence and watch the cricket for a time without paying. Once again, the fact that I was in Peter's company made that rather special for me, and it was the start of a lifelong love of the game. In spite of having no other sporting skills, the following year I "went out for cricket" (as they say in America) and managed to hold down a place in a team for the remainder of my time at the Academy.
Then of course there was the party tea, purveyed by Peter's mum, who was a very good cook and knew how to feed growing boys. Wartime rationing had not long ended, and sumptuous meals were still not at all common, at least not in the village where I lived. I was deeply impressed, not just with the food, but with the house itself. It was a modern detached villa of a very expensive type. There was a grand piano in the sitting room! I felt that I had moved into a whole new stratum of society. Peter's father played a few popular songs for us after we had eaten. Little did I know then that one day I would own such a piano myself! But that, again, is a different story.
Things moved to a new level that summer, for two reasons. One was that the Academy included me in the end of year prize list and promoted me from 1B to 2A. That meant that from then on I would be in the same class as Peter.
The other was the annual week's camp arranged by the Rector of St Kevoca's for the boys of the congregation. It had been running for years and it was rather taken for granted that all of the choirboys would be going. I actually had to work quite hard to persuade my parents to let me go, since they had no previous knowledge or experience of such things. Camp had always been somewhere in Scotland before, but that year for the first time it was in Eskdale in the Lake District.
The journey to get there was quite exciting; three changes of train, the last on to the Ravenglass and Eskdale narrow gauge railway. When we reached the camp site, which was just a random field on a farm, we found that the camping equipment had arrived by lorry before us. We spent the first day or so building a dam in the small stream that ran past the field to make it deep enough to swim in. The water was absolutely freezing cold, but we didn't mind! Kids were tough in those days.
My education was about to be enhanced! Swimming was fun, mainly because in those days all boys wore the skimpiest of swimsuits, the kind that would be called speedos today. No-one had heard of board shorts or anything like that. I noticed that one of the boys, called Gavin Robertson, a Canadian, was obviously wearing swimmers that were too small for him. Perhaps they were last year's and he had grown, particularly in the genitals. His bulge pushed forward taking the material out from his legs and I could see darkness and something much larger there than what I had. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but a group of us including Gavin got talking about our progress through puberty. Speedos were pushed down and comparisons made. Gavin's cock and balls looked enormous to me.
"Can you make spunk yet?" was the question for everyone.
"I bet I can get some," said Gavin and proceeded to demonstrate to us how to masturbate. I rather think that none of the rest of us had reached that stage; I certainly had not. Eventually Gavin slowed down his hand movements and a string of white fluid came out of his cock and dripped to the ground. That was my first encounter with semen and I was fascinated. Several of the other boys rubbed their penises for a bit but no-one else came. I noticed that, like me, Peter stayed very much in the background and said nothing. We did have our cocks out but that was all. We were both rather shy, it seemed.
Another thing that happened during that camp was that a group of us went hill climbing. Nothing too strenuous or too far from the camp, but far enough away for there to be no adults around. We were all wearing khaki shorts, and I remember a conversation where we all agreed that we liked our shorts to be as short as possible. Basically down to crotch level and no more. This meant that Peter, being the tallest of us, had long bare legs completely on show. I struggled not to stare the whole time. I wish boys still wore shorts like that today! A point came where we all needed to pee, and that was when I found out a really interesting thing about Peter. He could pee further than anyone I have ever known, before or since. Standing on that open hillside, he took out his penis and sent a stream of urine at least seven or eight feet forward from where he was standing, whipping it from side to side as he did so. It really looked like a garden hose watering a lawn. It was amazing, as all of us other boys told him. Peter just shrugged his shoulders, and said he'd always been able to pee like that.
Throughout all of that first year at the Academy and that summer, Peter had never treated me as anything other than just one of the gang. He can't have known how much I was besotted with him then, and in fact I don't think he ever did.
It was quite soon after I got home from camp when one evening at home I was having a bath and I spotted for the first time that my own penis was much larger than it used to be. I suppose it must have been growing, but I didn't notice till that moment. I played with it and it got hard. I played with it some more and eventually the most wonderful feeling happened. Nothing came out, but that was my first ever orgasm. Compared to the likes of Gavin, I was quite a late developper, I suppose.