Warning; the following chapter contains frank descriptions of illegal, under age and un-consensual, sex between boys too young to be offered or received in consent. The central character written about here survived the experience. If you are reading about it and you have never read about the sexual assault of one boy another first hand, then you will survive your reading it better then he did living it. When consent seems so essential to human autonomy, then enduring sexual abuse/the loss of consent as a child is a heavy burden. Surviving buried memories of the abuse as an adult when it happened as child is one of the more common and smaller miracles of our times. The many adult survivors in the world can prove this. But one of the aspects of surviving a darkness is that said darkness does not tell you when it is going to end-it is not in the nature of a personal darkness to let it's sufferer know how they will outlive the secrecy of abuse in advance of them doing so. But I have found life after, and continue to do so. End of warning.
The next dormitory move to the right was announced not long after Colin and Peter had secretly visited us in my second dormitory, mid-March 1973. With mid-term dormitory moves we were told early in the evening at the last possible minute which dormitory we were going to and we did not know who we would be with. We had to take our bedding, our clothes and the contents of our locker to the new room. There we sorted out between us who would sleep in which bed, who had which draw and what space we got in the only wardrobe in the room. Where we put things mattered less than that the fact that it was all agreed, which was most important for us to be seen to be settling there.
This third move was to a five bed dormitory. I was moved to share with two other boys, and Colin and Peter. After settling which bed to occupy, making it, and putting our stuff away we were all preparing to go to the showers, which naturally meant being naked before putting a towel around our waist. In previous rooms nakedness had several meanings. One was nothing, another was a distant and jokey horseplay around rolling up our towels into whips and keeping other boys at a distance with them. This game was called 'scorpions'. Perhaps the nascent machismo of 'scorpions' hid some sort of evasive denial of what was might prove to be homo-erotic attraction. If 'scorpions' hid the homo-erotic motive then it did it so that well that I had no clue as to what being kept at a distance by a rolled up towel symbolised.
All I knew was that after I'd chosen my bed and put my things away then I saw Colin naked. He was the bigger of the two of them. He was pale half-caste, clearly very athletic, and clearly very well endowed. He radiated a confidence in his physicality that had the same effect on me as the television wrestling had in my parents house. The difference between Colin, live and in front of me, and the wrestling was that whilst both got me hot and bothered the television wrestling was relatively safe; television was not real and the 'family' atmosphere in which I watched it made me kept my thoughts very much in my head. Colin was clearly live and in front of me his physical appearance mentally drew me towards him.
I got an involuntary erection the moment I saw him naked and it would not go down for a good twenty minutes, by which time I was in the showers and on my own. The moment I got this erection I blushed deeply as I tried to hide it from everyone in the room. I was very grateful for being on my own in the showers soon after. But any relief I felt was too little too late; my reaction marked me out-merely for light ridicule at first. The other boys knew my reaction was at the sight of Colin and knew why I had reacted so. I would not be surprised if they too had a reaction to seeing him naked, but they were more in control of how they reacted and surely grateful for the distraction that I created from their reactions. They could then kept their reactions within their minds, betraying nothing of what they thought. For me there was no denying it, silently or otherwise. Nothing happened for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. Then I made a mistake.
The evening routine, post tea, was that we should clean our shoes, tidy up around us where ever we were, and go to our bedrooms to shower. Once in pyjamas and dressing gown we had to stay downstairs together, ready for the roll call before supper. Intermediates and Senior boys might be able to go their room until the supper bell called them but no rank below that. So I was not meant to go to my room on my own after getting into pyjamas and dressing gown. Another rule was that we were not meant to use the front stairs without permission. I knew these rules and for a brief moment did not reason what they were there to stop or to encourage. Also the staff disliked explaining to individual boys why the rules were there-if they did we might demand individual explanations too often. This spring evening I had forgotten something I wanted and I broke both rules with one journey up the front stairs. I expected that if I were caught by a member of staff I would be let off lightly. I was prepared for that.
I was in my room looking for what I wanted, say a chess set and board, and Colin and Peter came in on their own, in pyjamas and dressing gown. There was nobody else about. I did not know why they were there but I immediately felt tense, almost completely frozen. Before I could react they pushed me onto the bed nearest me, Colin sat on my chest, full weight, and then opened his pyjama trousers and stuck his stiffening cock in my mouth. His friend look on, laughing, playing with himself and lewdly encouraging Colin, who didn't need any goading. Colin said to me whilst sat on me, 'You know you like it, come on have some more', the obvious 'joke' being that I was in no position to either speak or to refuse his offer. His weight and the pressure of his actions as he leaned forward made sure of that. I don't know how long they were there, but just as easily as they started they stopped. Either they heard a noise from down the corridor and feared a staff member approaching or they thought 'better be down in time or roll call'. They probably left down the backstairs to discreetly rejoin everyone else.
I don't know how long I was sat on for, or how many times his cock forced itself past my lips. I was in shock from the moment Colin walked forward to sit on me. Somehow I got up when they left, forgot about what I came to find and left the room by myself. When later I rejoined everybody downstairs I stayed well out of eye contact with Colin and Peter. But over the days and weeks that followed it was as if something in my brain had exploded, or more likely woken up. I was somewhere between frozen, appalled, angry, and tearful. Even now I have no idea what the staff observed and shared with each other of my changing responses. In some obscure sense I was secretly thrilled. Frankly, Colin and Peter were very handsome muscular and confident young men, if I had known the term 'alpha male' it would have fitted them better than they knew. But there was no such code or language. At another level what they did hurt me so deeply I did not know I had such a place in me where I could feel that much pain. It was because I was smaller and weaker than them that at some level I was drawn towards them physically. But that gave me no clue as why their actions had to be so horrible whilst they were still so physically attractive?
I did not want them to do what they did and I did not have a name for it. I blamed myself utterly for what Colin and Peter did. It would take me 37 years of living out my own hinterland of sexual guilt and utter self doubt before I could say to anyone that I had suffered forced oral sex, or rather gross indecent sexual assault as it is technically known, and a greater length of time to believe that it was both absolutely wrong and not my fault.
The contents of the one sex lesson we had been given, evasive as they were, were meant to keep us 'on the straight and narrow'. If there was any direct question I might have had about sex in that lesson then the direct answer to me would have been 'Ask somebody else when you are old enough to get married'. This straight and narrow was self evident to the staff but it utterly baffled and trapped me. Nothing in that one lesson could have prepared me for the shock of what Colin and Peter did. After the rape/assault by Colin and Peter I was so far from the staff's ideas about what the straight and narrow meant that the straight was now paved with guilt. I was so deep in shock that did not know that I was in shock. It seemed that nobody else thought I was in shock either.
What Colin and Peter knew, when they repeated what they did the first time, when time and an apparently unobservant duty staff permitted then to do it. Any resistance on my part was something they liked; it gave them a kick when they broke it down, they felt much more powerful than they generally were. Finally if they believed that I thought them attractive then to them it justified what they did all the more. Thankfully because it was five bed dormitory, time disallowed them secrecy with me very often. When it did happen it also happened because they were good liars. They were so clever that seemingly the staff utterly misread how appalled I felt and further misread the situation between me and them.
I could not explain to myself the situation I was in with them. I had two explanations, neither of which told me much. The first came from family, where what was public was still limited, what was 'private' was often treated as if it were secret out of 'discretion'. What was 'secret' had clearly never happened even when it had, and it could happen again. What Colin and Peter did was only ever acknowledged when it was repeated. It was never to be acknowledged outside of them and they were better at lying than I could ever have been at telling the truth. Another explanation was that I had been over-promoted and should have stayed as a junior for longer, I was being punished for being over-promoted. But I did not choose the promotion. But had I been more deferential I would not have been promoted to Middle School and this horrible new situation. With words like words like 'please' 'thank you' and 'sorry' my attitude was younger than my age, I was still too tender.
The next dormitory move was the worst. Like the previous moves I was as blind going into it as the staff were to the effect of their decisions. I did not see it coming until it hurt me, very deeply. There was no escape.
Find Chapter 18 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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