When I Were Nowt But a Lad 13
J. H. P. Cash, 367
As I start posting new chapters of these memoirs, I will be including, at the end of each chapter, separate little anecdotes and observations which don't really fit into the main story. These I'm calling "Little Spurts". Thanks to my lawyer friend for that suggestion and for many other very helpful contributions to the writing of this story.
When I Were Nowt But a Lad 13
There was a small, but definitely purposeful, knock on the door.
Robert reached for his pyjama bottoms. Andy and I just looked at him. Perhaps I made a small attempt to scramble for the top sheet.
Guy pushed the door open.
Bemused relief all round.
The little homesick vicar's son stood there in his blue-and-red stripy pyjamas with his fair hair tousled and his eyes squinty in the light, his feet bare. Had he been dragging a teddy bear by the arm behind him, he could have stepped straight out of a story-book illustration.
Robert said, "Um, Guy, look... Um... You really ought to..."
"Sorry if I'm interrupting," interrupted Guy, "but I think some noise or something must have woken me up and I can't get back to sleep and..."
"For fuck's sake, Guy!" Said Andy. "Don't you know to wait for permission when you knock on a door? What's the point of fucking knocking if you're just going to stroll in away?"
"Andy!" said, Robert, putting on his pyjama bottoms. "Don't be nasty!"
Tears welled up in Guy's eyes.
Andy sighed. "I'm sorry, Guy. It's just, well... It's kind-of inconvenient? Go back to bed. I'll come and see you in a minute."
"Andy, I think that's my job!" suggested Robert.
Andy rolled his eyes: "Fine! You go tuck him up and we'll stay here and, urr... tidy up." He smiled cheerfully: The Willing Helper.
This seemed a good idea to me. After all, Robert and Andy had both spunked twice in either end of me, and I still hadn't even come once.
"No. Back to bed, all of you," insisted Robert. "Guy, I'll be with you in a minute."
Guy was still looking at Andy and me lying naked on the bed. He looked, not shocked, but definitely wondering - and a little interested, in fact. Robert put both hands gently on his shoulders and turned him round, urging him out of the door. He came back for his pyjama top and looked at us. "I mean it you two! Get back to bed."
And before Andy could point out that were already in bed he added, "Your own beds!" He stood at the door as we dressed and left, then went to see Guy.
Were we worried that Guy would be freaked out by what he had seen and shop us to our Housemaster - or, at least, to all the boys in his dorm? Simply, no. Well, perhaps a tiny bit. But, see, Guy liked and admired Robert, who was sweet and kind to him when he was homesick. And Andy was his best friend and was helping him settle in as a boarder. He knew that Andy and I "chatted" after Lights Out with me sitting on Andy's bed, next to his. He probably knew that we wanked each other too. But he probably didn't know what to do or say about it. When he came upon the orgy (you know what I mean) he wasn't going to shop to the authorities two people he liked and who were protective and friendly to him. And anyway, if Robert was doing this stuff, and Robert was a decent guy, then...
I think Guy was just suspending judgement, absorbing new things in his new life. I mean, for fuck's sake: on Thursday afternoons we had gangs of boys of 13 and up doing target practice out on the dunes, shooting real bullets from admittedly ancient .303 Lee Enfield rifles. These days we don't tend to approve so readily of "child soldiers". There was plenty of strange stuff to get used to. Perhaps, for Guy, what he'd seen in Robert's bedsit was just another new tradition with which he had to deal.
And, finally, and this is something that perhaps I should have mentioned earlier: even older, much more settled boys who might be quite happy to casually mock someone as "queer" and generally behave both knowingly and censoriously in public would not know what to do if they walked into the Drying Room alone to find two boys wanking each other. If they had a couple of mates with them, then it would be easy to mock, tease, or bully. On their own, it might have been less easy.
So, Guy wasn't going to sneak on us to anyone.
I have written that Dab and I were both naturally "bottoms". However, that didn't stop both of us starting, at least, to develop aspirations to become "Big Boys" ourselves. Although the Big Boy in a partnership would normally be the more active and the Little Boy take a more passive role, this wasn't really, in my experience, always the rule. For most Big Boys, I suppose, Little Boys were simply substitute girls, and thus if any penetration occurred at all it would be the Big Boy doing it. For some of us, however (oh, alright, for Dab and me anyway) the attraction of Little Boys was not (only) about sexual roles. It was about their physical and sexual attractiveness, of course, but there was at least something like a protective, caring impulse, as towards, say, a younger brother. A younger brother you fucked up the arse. Or who bum-fucked you. (OK, given the cool relationship I had with my brother, perhaps I should say "favourite cousin" or something.)
This is all to say that: just because we were bottoms, it didn't mean that we didn't want to follow in the natural progression towards having our own Little Boys. The sexual roles involved didn't have to come into it that much. Dab had started our 'O' Level year hoping for a Sixth Former, but when I told him about my experience with Robert and Andy he seemed a little surprised that I had let Andy bum me. At first. Then he was intrigued.
"Oh, God, Dab! You're not going to let yourself be bummed by some new bug, are you?" asked Charlie. "It's bad enough with him there doing it with half the masters in the place." I gave him a look. I had enough of that sort of comment from others. I didn't expect it from Charlie. It wasn't something I wanted to have to deal with here, in my study. Charlie shrugged, half-apologising.
Charlie was referring to nasty rumours that were going around about me at that time. They suggested that I was having some sort of "affair" with one specific master (not "half the masters in the place" - that was mere hyperbole). By this point in my school career I had a fair number of good friends, but I was still quite widely disliked for being "swotty", having a posh accent, being a "wog" (albeit a posh, white wog), not supporting a football team and not liking rugby. Most of these were proven symptoms of being "a real queer". I was editing a Junior school magazine and this was regarded as "sucking-up" to the master in charge of the magazine. ("Sucking-up" meant being over-anxious to please.) So, the rumours suggested that the little queer "suck-up" must be queering with the master. There was absolutely no foundation to these rumours.
Well, except that they were true. But, I mean, nobody knew anything concrete about the whole thing at the time. I hadn't even told Dab or Roger. I haven't even told you, dear reader, come to that. Which we will, in time, I promise. For now, however, I just scowled at Charlie and then Dab tactfully glided us over the remark by saying to Charlie...
"You're the one always going on about how we shouldn't be... what was it?... 'constrained by convention'?"
"I was talking about resisting the oppression of bourgeois society, not bloody queering with Little Boys," Charlie replied.
"Yeah, well, anyway. It's not that so much. It's just, well, they are quite sweet, aren't they, some of them?" Dab suggested.
"I wouldn't know," Charlie said, smiling.
"You can see them though, Charlie," I said. "Even if you're not queer you can see..."
"I can see, sure. But, see, I don't look. Bunch of little Lord Fauntleroys, the lot of them."
"Oh, that's not fair! Andy's not like that at all! He's as much a grockle as you are!" I objected, pleased to take a swipe back. "Now, Guy, yes..."
"Guy! Yes!" said Dab.
"'Hullo clouds! Hullo flowers!'" mocked Charlie, quoting from the then-popular Molesworth books: descriptions of British prep school life as if written by a slightly disaffected, very inky, not enormously bright (but, in his own way, wonderfully perceptive) pupil, Nigel Molesworth. Basil Fotherington-Thomas, the school aesthete and, according to Molesworth, "a gurl", tends to skip around appreciating nature with phrases such as those Charlie quoted. As any fule kno.
"Dab! No!" I said. "Not Guy! He's, well... he's taken."
"Not yet, he's not," said Dab. "I told you before: you can't baggsie anyone, you know."
"Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" Charlie started chanting.
It wasn't so much a fight between Dab and me as a race. And I had a big advantage: Robert was in charge of Guy's dorm. At first this just meant that he kept both of us away from Guy, on the grounds that he was too new to boarding and still wasn't completely sure of the names of the masters' wives, children and dogs (even after nearly a term), let alone prepared for more advanced learning.
"But you let Andy bum-fuck me!" I protested.
"Andy, as my granny would say, is 'no better than he ought to be'," said Robert.
"And what does that mean?"
"Not sure. But you know what I mean... Anyway, just 'cos you and Andy started young, there's no reason to get Guy going unless he starts anything himself. Remember you didn't get me going 'til just last year! Give him a chance to settle in. He's not even been here a full term yet."
But I was used to subterfuge. One had to be, to be a successful queer. I don't know quite how to explain this, but I guess it must seem to readers as if it was pretty-much "anything goes" at my school. It wasn't. Even amongst what I suppose you could call "the players" there were boundaries. And, well, lies. If you sensed that your partner would be put off if you admitted to liking being bummed, for example, you would pretend that you too found the very idea disgusting. Yes, there was some traffic between dormitories and bedsits and, yes, boys were sometimes not in their own beds, but you at least had to make an effort to move on tip-toes. You couldn't be too blatant. That would just be taking the piss.
Dab tended to be chased out by Robert if he was even found in the Junior Dorm: automatically assumed, because I'd told Robert of his interest, to be targeting Guy. I, however, was allowed to sit on Andy's bed and chat with him. And then I could quietly include Guy in our conversation. Once Guy was brought into my chats with Andy the subject could be moved towards sex. Guy wasn't an experienced boarder, but he was 13, after all. It wasn't exactly difficult to get him interested. One night I mentioned what he'd seen in Robert's bedsit and Guy just giggled.
"I'm really, really sorry. Honest, I didn't know what was going on before I came in. Andy's explained it all now. I'm sorry if I spoilt things."
"Nah," said Andy, "we were finished anyway."
I remembered Guy's face as he had looked at Andy and me naked on Robert's bed. I wondered exactly how much Andy had told him, but couldn't think of a way of asking him without Guy hearing. I remember feeling incredibly frustrated. I couldn't suggest to Guy that Andy may not have been telling the truth by asking him outright what he'd said. And I didn't want to say anything to Guy that might have revealed that more was going on than he'd been told. I wanted simply to say, "Well, would you be interested in that sort of thing, then, Guy?", but was worried that he'd say, "What? 'Naked Scrabble'?" if that's what Andy had said was going on. Of course, as I've said, Guy had been in the next bed when Andy and I had wanked each other off on several previous occasions, so he couldn't be that naive. Could he? Sometimes it amazed me what people didn't see, or didn't choose to see, or didn't understand but still didn't question.
I went to bed. My own bed. I wasn't due to see Robert that night and so I wanked myself off fantasising about Andy and Guy sucking each other in their little "two-stud". (Most studies were for three boys, but there were some smaller ones that were for only two.) Andy didn't actually live on the Moors, but he could easily have been a little prototype Heathcliffe. And Guy did have that slightly lost, pale, fragile look to him. By the time I spunked, Andy had Guy bent over his desk, squealing as the rough, dark lad bummed him mercilessly.
The next day, after Games, I asked Andy if he'd told Guy about everything that had been going on in Robert's bedsit.
"Not everything. He's a vicar's son, for fuck's sake!" Andy replied.
"They're the worst! Dab's Dad's a vicar." I said. Andy looked at me. He didn't know Dab as well as I knew him. "Um... have you, um... done any stuff with Guy?" I asked.
"He's my study-mate!" said Andy, shocked.
"So what, you mong? That's all the better. You've got a two-stud," I pointed out.
"I'm sort-of meant to be looking out for him, though, aren't I?"
"So?" I said. "Show him a fun time!"
"Look, I like him an' all, but well... he's a bit of a wimp sometimes, you know. And it's not, well, sexy, is it? If you had to share a study with him swotting away all sweet and goody-goody, you wouldn't want do stuff with him, I can tell you. "
"I think he's dead nice," I said. "And sexy!"
"Well, if you're really hot for him, let's see if we can't do something about getting you two together. You're welcome to him, far as I'm concerned."
By this point we were in the Junior Changing rooms. A few Fifth Formers had been promoted to the Senior Changing Rooms (I have no idea on what grounds this privilege was granted, but I suspect that it might have been something to do with sporting prowess). I had at first been annoyed that I was still in the Junior Changing Rooms. But not any more. Andy and I stripped off our tracksuits and rugby kit and went into the bathroom. It was already crowded. As I think of it now, it provided a fair sampling of different types of early-to-mid teens boys, wreathed in steam like a scene out of some Passolini film. There was, as I was just beginning to realise, a bit of an over-representation of the, well, prettier type of boy. I don't know why. Brothers and even cousins tended to be put into the same House, so perhaps that had a little to do with it. At the time, we were either too rushed between Games and afternoon lessons to really notice much or, sometimes, on half-holidays or in especially appalling weather, blessed with time to play with a select few of our fellows. Quite why so many of them were hot little sprogs wasn't too much of a concern.
I said "bathroom" and I have sometimes said "shower-room". It was both. There were four baths and, along the opposite wall, a line of five shower-heads. The whole room was tiled to at least half-way up the walls. Hot water was amazingly unlimited, enormous boilers somewhere working away to give OPEC its stranglehold over what we then called "The West". Teenaged bodies, steam, carbolic soap and the slight whiff of well-worn rugby boots from the changing room: those were the fragrances. No fancy 'Lemongrass, Thyme and Balsamic Vinegar 2-in-1 Relaxing Gel' for us, me lad. We may have sucked cock, but we were no nancy boys.
Guy was crammed up at the tap end of one of the baths, with two other, slightly older, boys hogging most of the limited space. I know that North Americans tend to think of the British tradition of washing in baths as quite disgusting, and I supposed that this view could only be reinforced by the swampy condition of the bath water in that bathroom after a trio of mud-splattered boys had washed themselves off in it. I was still a Junior, but senior to most other Junior boys. I quickly persuaded Guy's two bath-mates that they had probably been bathing long enough, drained the bath, and suggested that Guy rinse off under a shower as I re-filled it. He made to leave after showering, but Andy and I coaxed him back into the fresh, clean water of the newly-run bath.
We all three sat together sideways in the bath, our legs dangling over the sides. Guy was between Andy and me. It was very companionable and we chatted as we washed ourselves. Well, Guy was already clean, of course, but Andy and I were soaping ourselves while Guy sat there, perhaps wondering a little why we'd got him to stay. When Andy and I stood up in the bath to complete soaping ourselves we were both on jack. Guy giggled as he looked between us. Andy made a show of soaping and then washing his cock and balls very thoroughly. A couple of voices told him to stop "showing off", but he merely responded with cheerful double-handed 'V' signs.
"Matron at my prepper always said to make sure to wash behind our... balls!" Andy told Guy.
"Ears!" laughed Guy. "Always wash behind your ears!"
"There too, of course!" admitted Andy, "but cleanliness is next to Godliness!" He turned and, bending forward a little, demonstrated both cleanliness and Godliness. His soapy fingers ran into his crack and down to behind his balls.
"Gahhh!" said Guy, mock-disgusted by the display.
I decided that I should get more naughty too. I sat down and reached into Guy's groin, asking as I did so, "Are you sure you're all clean down there, Guy?" I expected a little struggle, if not complete and immediate rejection. But Guy just fell quiet and watched me "wash" his genitals under the water. He was stiff in seconds. Guy sat down and slapped water over himself to rinse off. It was crowded in the bath, and Andy, of course, had to reach between Guy's legs to scoop up water onto himself. His hand and mine met and briefly tussled until we sorted out who got the cock and who the balls.
One of the boys under the nearest shower had a good view of what was going on. "God, queering again, you two! Leave him alone!" Before either of us had a chance to respond, Guy got out of the bath and rushed out to find his towel in the Changing Room. Andy and I looked at each other, perhaps a little worried that we'd gone too far. Andy scowled at the boy who'd intervened.
We finished bathing quickly and went to find Guy, thinking that he would have dressed quickly and disappeared. But he was sitting on one of the benches that ran along the walls, still with just his towel wrapped round his waist. His hair was still damp. He was just sitting there. As we emerged from the bathroom he looked up and smiled. "Hi!" he said. Andy just said, "Hi!" back, but I remember feeling relieved that we'd obviously not upset Guy. Equally obviously, Guy wasn't going to take the initiative. He wasn't going to run away, but he wasn't going to blatantly offer himself up. He was just waiting
"You'll catch your death, sitting there all wet," said Andy as we headed for the Drying Room. Guy got up and followed us. There were a couple of Senior boys in there and we just dried off and then chatted, enjoying the intense warmth of the Drying Room. It was a half-holiday afternoon: we had time to linger. The two Seniors left and Andy took his towel from around his waist and put it over his shoulders. His dick was hard (Still? Again?). I followed his lead and then Guy, after a little pause, did the same. We stood there, and so did our dicks sticking out. Guy's was small and had virtually no hair above it, but its extreme hardness was beautifully obvious. I reached for it and, almost without any hesitation, Guy reached out to both Andy and me
Vicars' sons, eh?
Guy was now eager but nervous. We tried to tell him not to worry about people coming in, but he still couldn't relax.
"Let's get dressed and go to our study," Andy suggested.
Once in their study Andy did really seem a little uninterested. He'd helped start things off, and that seemed to be, at first, as far as he wanted to go with Guy. I unbuttoned my trousers and pulled them and my underpants down, and then did the same for Guy, who was just looking at my stiff cock in a slightly dazed way. I don't think that he was actually dazed, I just think that he was still absorbing what was going on. I don't mean to suggest that he was thick - quite the opposite: he was thoughtful, and thought things through rather than just responding instinctively. But his dick responded instinctively.
I encouraged Andy to get his kecks down too, but he just said, "Nah, you two go ahead. I'll just watch," and sat down on his chair. I was actually a little pleased by this - no danger of Andy providing more competition for Guy. I knelt down to take Guy's dick in my mouth. He just said, "Ahh?" a little uncertainly, but let me get on with sucking him. I wetted a finger and reached round into the crack of his bum. He pulled my hand away.
"Let him," said Andy. "It's okay. You'll like it".
But Guy wouldn't let me put my finger in him. "Can't we just wank each other for now?" he asked.
Andy let out an exasperated sigh, but I didn't want to take things too quickly and scare Guy off, so I just said, "Sure!" We leant a little awkwardly against the top of Guy's desk unit, one of our arms around the other's shoulders and our other hands working each other's dicks. I was on the right, and so Guy was using his left hand on me. Still nervous anyway, using his less-favoured hand made him a little clumsy. Guy was definitely getting a better wank off me than I was off him. Andy, sitting watching, started to rub himself through his trousers.
Guy was watching my hand on his dick when he said quietly, "Do you bum?"
"He gets bummed!" snorted Andy.
"I bum too!" I protested.
"Oh yeah, who've you bummed then?" challenged Andy.
I wasn't sure whether I was being slightly disloyal, but I told them anyway: "Dab. Before. Not now. When we were sprogs."
"Dab?" said Guy, a little wonderingly. "He's nice, he is. He was nice to me when I was upset once."
"Oh, fuck!" I thought. "Now he's going to end up wanting Dab!"
"Who's bummed you?" Guy asked me, again very matter-of-factly.
"Hah!" said Andy. "Everybody! Even I've bummed him!"
This was getting worse and worse. I wasn't really coming over as great potential Big Boy material. Guy stopped wanking me and said "Really?"
"Just done it when you came into Robert's bedsit that time," boasted Andy.
"Wow! That's really weird," said Guy. Weird good or weird bad? Or just, hey, weird, man?
I turned slightly towards Guy and took my own cock in my left hand while I continued to wank him with my right. Guy fell quiet again, staring down at my hand on his dick and starting to move his hips slightly and breathe a little faster. I knelt down again and sucked him, still wanking myself. Guy said, "I'm going to... Wait, don't..." and spurted his thin but surprisingly plentiful spunk into my mouth. I came on the carpet.
I swirled Guy’s spunk around my mouth as I went to get a wet rag and when I returned Guy was sitting on his chair, his trousers and underpants still round his ankles, just staring vaguely into space. No, not vaguely. He was concentrating. Thinking things through. He smiled up at me. Andy was doing some work but looked up when I'd wiped my spunk up off the carpet and made to leave. He saw Guy sitting there and said, "Guy, pull your kecks up, for fuck's sake!" I swallowed Guy’s spunk and returned his smile.
Little Spurt 01
The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate
The American television comedy sketch and gag show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was one of the very few TV programmes that we allowed to watch regularly in my Junior House. In my first term I was in a small dormitory of eight boys and there was one boy who invented his own version of the show's "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate". This was a section of the show in which random public figures were warded a prize of a golden, pointing finger statuette for particularly stupid or strange behaviour.
In Howard's version, he would lie on his bed naked, throw his knees round his ears and stick his finger up his bum. Then he would chase other boys around the dorm, threatening to touch them with his "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate". This was after Dab and I had started wanking each other off, but we had not got much further than that. I didn't even fully understand the sexual potential of the arsehole, despite, I think, having heard references to "bumming" and "bumboy". I had sometimes put a finger up my own arsehole when "wanking" against the bottom sheet at home, however, so I I found Howard's little game intriguing rather than shocking. The consensus response, of course, was "Urrrrgh!", but much laughter as well, since 11 year old boys tend to find anything to do with bottoms hilarious. I found it exciting as well as funny.
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