Chapter Eighteen - Gay By Association.

Warning; like the previous chapter this chapter contains frank descriptions of under age and un-consensual sex between boys. To anyone reading this, the central character here survived living it so you can survive reading about it a lot easier than he did. If you have experienced anything like what happens in this chapter, but never said anything to anyone about it and the experience is a burden to you, then find somebody to trust and lighten your load in your own way. It is hard to say which is worst with rape/sexual assault; the event itself or the confusion that remains with the suffer long after because of the way other people prefer to deny that it ever happened because it is generally not known to happen to anyone they know. The worst part is the long term amnesia as the brain shuts down around the experience afterwards. But brains/minds can recover also. Mine has, and to a far greater extent than ever I thought it could. End of warning .

The fourth dormitory move that school year happened in March of 1973 and it was the worst. The dormitory to the far right of the top floor was a small room for three. The doorway into the room was hidden at the back of an arch into an empty space bigger than a box room. Between the arch and dormitory door were several empty wardrobes where the boys suitcases were stored when not in use, inside the arch the lighting was poor which added to the intimidating effect of the space between the arch and the dormitory door. This was deep Middle School territory, increased privacy and a lighter, more distant, supervision by the staff. As the room that was farthest along the corridor it was also the farthest for the staff to go to check on us.

Colin and Peter were in good favour with the staff. They were helpful and seen to be good workers. Their natural sportiness also scored well with more sporty school staff members. They gave the impression of being able to look after themselves. The staff seemed blind towards the secret terror that Colin and Peter had created in me. They thought of the three of us as friendly, no hostilities or awkwardness. Unlike Colin and Peter I loathed sport and naturally did badly in it. I hated cross country running, and I always felt that whatever the competition I was there to lose, so that other boys would win and might feel better for winning. I would have felt bad as well if I had won then my trying to win was a waste of effort. With his Latin education the head master would have said that 'he lacks Esprit De Corps'.

Perhaps the more sporty staff were the ones to tip the balance in the decision to put me in a room with Colin and Peter. Such staff thought that Colin and Peter might 'mentor' me and improve my co-ordination and confidence, in sport and in life. If they thought that, then they could not have been more wrong. Colin and Peter were going to push me into being the ultimate misfit. The staff who put me in a room with them was going to make sure they made a good job if it. With the move Colin and Peter got absolute license within the limits of the schools schedules for repeating and exploring their ideas of 'horseplay' with a macho sexual element. That horseplay included a kind of banter where they would deny there was anything competitive or sexual about and yet it was laden with sexual innuendo and sarcasm towards my weaknesses combined in such a way as I could not verbally gainsay them. If Colin and Peter had contrived the choice of having me in a dormitory with them then the staff must have been more gullible than anyone could have guessed.

I was safe during the day. The early evening routine was the danger point. That was when we changed out of day clothes, put them away, went to the showers wearing just a towel and returned to our rooms to dry ourselves before getting into pyjamas and dressing gown and going down to the common room before the second bell for evening roll call and supper rang. The time I was least safe when the three of us were in the room post shower, before putting on pyjamas and getting downstairs. The time drying ourselves after the shower in our room was where my trail by innuendo started. All they needed was to see me go in the room first and then follow me in and close the door to make me feel trapped. They had learnt that their closing the door would make me freeze, mentally, and liked the effect.  However predictable their behaviour was I could never stop myself from starting to freeze the moment they were both shut the door behind them. They would see me freeze, through the change in my body language which to them became the invitation to sexual banter and showing off whilst half dressed or undressed. Somehow between the talk and being half undressed their play became physical. Because it was physical, wrestling whilst naked on the bed or whatever, they could deny that it was ever threatening or directly sexual. But they must have known how sexual it was, particularly when one of them or the other insisted on wrestling me on the bed and they both got erections as one of them yet again sat on my chest his crotch so close to my face. Between the talk, some of which was aimed directly at me as if I wasn't there, and their being undressed I felt trapped in their private world. The school with all it's distancing and supporting rules and protections seemed far away.

In the wrestling I always lost to them, often to Peter more than Colin. The more they pinned me down the more charged and sexual the atmosphere became but the more they denied that this was sex even though very clearly they were insisting I sexually service them, either through forced oral sex or me masturbating them. There seemed to be a cat and mouse effect as if they knew how far they could go whilst keeping it all secret from the staff. Part of the cat and mouse effect that hurt me more deeply than anyone-even me-knew was how one sided their sense of pleasure was. It was a point of honour or them that I submit to them, and touch them when and where how I was forced to. But there was to be nothing in it for me. If they did not go as far as oral sex or masturbation every night they went that far often enough to completely shred my nerves over the remainder of that term.  I felt that if I cried out then it might be worse for me because of how they might react, and for being at one end of the building I had no surety of being heard anyway.

Eventually during one sexual scuffle whilst they were wearing only pyjama bottoms that was yet again getting their way which meant that I was psychologically defeated. But this time they were just noisy enough that as a member of staff passed close enough for him to hear the noises the three of us were making. None of us heard him open the door. There the staff member saw me pinned down underneath Colin and both of them with erections. Mr Jackson was the staff member's name and I am still grateful for him being in the right place at the right time, finally.

As he looked at me, stricken and trapped underneath them, they could not react fast enough to get off me or look sheepish enough whilst trying to hide the degree to which they were clearly sexually aroused. I made some apologetic noises to the staff member about what they were doing. I had to if I wanted to survive them both. Saying nothing or telling the truth was out of the question. My excuses for them must have been as weak as I looked at the time. It was clear enough to the staff member that they were orchestrating the activities and I was not enjoying it, and that I should not be enjoying it if I were.

My final move of dormitory that school year happened rapidly, after Mr Jackson had opened that door. He  saw how I was in myself like no other staff member had up to that time. It was to another three bed dormitory, in early June. Because of what Mr Jackson saw all the staff finally had an explanation for how easily irritated I had been that spring/summer. I went from feeling uncertain but okay to being very thin skinned, and even more easily upset. I got into scraps, rather than proper fights, with boys who the staff thought were friendly towards me. They were my friends, but friendships in the school required a sense of balance and strength that I lost with Peter and Colin doing what they did in private/secret. I lashed out because the friend's support hurt even when it was meant to help. The closer the friend the sooner I lashed out. It was a repeat of the behaviour that had got me put on the  adult strength anti-depressants in primary school, now made worse by the state my head was in after that course of medications had stopped.

The school was part way down a half mile length of private road, which after the school ended at a farm. Where the private road met the main road was nearly a mile outside of the town. That private road became my breathing space outside the school when I wanted to have arguments with other boys I could not have, and got near to having fights I would have lost. For at least half a dozen times during the time of sharing the end room with Colin and Peter I felt so angry and sick of the place, so close to tears, that I wanted to walk away and never return.

Kevin with whom I played 'The Rubber Game' whilst eating the heavy cake would look out for me a lot during these times. Nearly every time I wanted to walk down that drive, and beyond where we were not permitted to go, to get away from the pressure in my head Kevin walked with me and won me into returning with his show of concern. He would be the one to sufficiently tenderly point out the perils of being seen to be missing for not being present at next roll call. 

We both accepted  that there were two ways of leaving the school prematurely. The first was being returned to our parents full time, which we never discussed. But we intuited that given the nature of us 'being maladjusted', or having some undefined mild mentally illness, that meant that if our families had the choice it would be to keep us at the school. The second came to me first when during my period of uncertainty I asked a staff member where the boys would be sent if they were not here.  'Borstal' was his brief reply. I dared ask what the word meant, because the punishing tone in which he said it, and the fact that he was walking away from me, stopped me asking anything more. His answer implied that the boarding school was, relatively speaking, the sweet spot between a unwillingly shared life our parents and punishment in Borstal.

To put the choice presented to me in religious terms, terms which the school would vehemently deny even the internal logic of, Heaven was a parental household where we were that welcome that schools like ours need not, and did not, exist. But for reasons beyond our understanding we had been ejected from such a Heaven, and our understanding taken away with our exit. Borstal was Hell, a place that for good reasons punished all who went there, whether they thought they had earned such punishment or not. Hell would cling to those who had gone through it after they let out it. The school was a place of purgatory and part of it's purging effect was that we were not to know what we were being purged of, but we had to accept that Heaven was impossible, and Hell was horrible We were stuck between the two. 

Find Chapter 19 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.