Chapter Sixteen - Sex And Hierarchies

 Warning; the following chapter contains descriptions of some eleven and twelve year old boys discussing sex as they understood it, when they did not know that what they discussed was illegal, under age and even mere discussion about it could never be seen as consensual by any adult to whom it was reported or known. The central character written about here survived the experience. If you are reading about it, and you have never known of such talk first hand, then you will survive your experience of reading it better then the character did living it. If you have experienced similar and never talked about it then read on, and in your own time be brave and talk to somebody you can start to trust about your experience. Back then enduring sexual abuse/the loss of consent as a child was one thing. Surviving the way adults taught boys to mis-remember such events as not being abuse was far worse. Surviving mis-remembering is one of the smaller miracles of this life. There are many adult survivors of abuse in the world who can prove this. End of warning.

The hierarchies of the school were guided by our age, and when we were moved to different dormitories. The hierarchies came in the form of different names,  Junior, Middle School, Intermediate and Senior, each with different duties and freedoms attached. When I first went to the boarding school I was a traumatised 11 year old with a highly uncertain sense of time and attention span. I was a Junior. When I first went to the school we were meant to leave at age 14, so the school did not want us to remain Juniors for long. I spent one term in the close observation five bed dormitory as a Junior, before remaining a Junior but being moved on one dormitory to the right where the four of us were all less closely observed. That first move at the start of my second term, with the next intake of new boys in January 1973.

I wished I had remained under closer observation for longer. My short time in that second dormitory was not the best. Since I had joined St John Ambulance they had tickets for a raffle that they wanted sold. I did not tell a member of staff since they directed the flow of conversation with the boys and I did not know how to get their attention to tell them that I wanted to sell some raffle tickets to other boys. I sold plenty of tickets, 10p a ticket, and kept the money in a draw in one or two piles of 10p pieces when I should have got a member of staff to keep it for me. Half the money got stolen and it was not my money in the first place. What was stolen was more than a half term's pocket money for me. The St John ambulance were gracious enough to accept the money that there was left and take the ticket stubs from me. It was a sharp lesson to learn, though sharper lessons were coming soon. 

Being Junior meant sleeping on the top floor and being under the heaviest supervision whilst being the least aware of the levels of observation that you were under. The other rank on the top floor was Middle School, for boys age twelve or more. They got a little more privacy and trust. The middle floor was where boys of thirteen and fourteen slept. The latter were named 'Intermediates' and 'Seniors'. There were seven dormitories on the top floor with twenty three beds in them. Eleven of the beds, in three dormitories, were places for Middle School boys. There were a further two rooms at either end of the corridor which were for the staff to stay in when they were on night-watch on that floor. 

As pupils we were there for being under-developed, and 'maladjusted'. The place felt and acted like a care home; a place where staff seemed detached but were watchful of the boys. The place seemed to work most effectively for the staff when all knowledge and mention of the boys' physical and emotional development was only on staff terms. Not that they could actually retard any boy's sexual development. But when the staff stopped all talk of how a boy might  'grow up' to nil the staff made it appear as if all the boys were frozen at whatever age they were at the age they were when any previous open talk had stopped. But we were never as frozen as the language acceptable to the staff described us as being. Even the youngest boys touched themselves, sexually, in their beds. That they never talked about it did not mean they did not do it, and they were tapping into strong feelings when they did touch themselves. Private slang and cheap jokes were the acceptable, rather throw-away, shorthand for airing and sharing these feelings. A common theme to our made up jokes was deliberately misunderstanding what sex was and throwing away something, anything, that we thought was dirty, or unclean. 

All the boys in that second dormitory wanked in their beds at night, regardless of what did or did not come of the activity. The activity went far enough in their heads for them to feel happy for doing it. I was one of those boys and I am sure now that my strong erotic thoughts came from memories of watching/hearing the television wrestling in the parental house. I covered up my thoughts the same way the other three in the room covered up theirs, through silence and denial. My feelings seemed all the stronger to me for my pushed deeply into myself for once having being put on adult strength anti-depressants for seven months, then taken off them. I was still in the 'withdrawal stage' of coming off the drugs, not that as far as I know anyone acknowledged how powerful the drugs were or how long it as taking me to recover from having taken them.

When I was on the medication and dad insisted the television wrestling be on every Saturday afternoon, the men in trunks being apparently rough with each other was hypnotic. There was much more tactility on the screen than ever there was in real life, I could not comprehend why such tactility came laden with baying crowds and aggression but they too had a sort of 'imaginary voyeur' erotic effect. My family approved of the show of calm I made whilst being near hypnotised by the men on the screen.

This is what I replayed in my bed in the second dormitory at night. The tactility and noise came to me in the quiet and I could neither negotiate, adjust, nor switch them off, merely pleasure myself because it seemed natural to do so. The noises were almost auditory hallucinations, and they became more persistent as time and my physical development proceeded.

The control the staff had over the boys was an illusion that for the most part worked extraordinarily well. Only klutzes like me failed and we were seen to fail ourselves more than the school. The staff controlled the boys through language, through the rules, and through the activities we repeated day after day. But the language did not rule our thoughts, it made the boys partially avoid how they felt, and it fed into a natural 'emotional cover up' mode of thinking which we did not know was how the adults coped with us and with each other. 

There was even a widely shared very dry joke about never listening directly to the pupils. Corporal punishment was rarely used. But it's potential as a deterrent for maintaining order was still valued. In the headmasters office there was a varnished plywood paddle with a shaped handle for putting adult fingers around where one side neatly fitted the palm of a staff members hand. It was for beating a boy on the bottom, with their trousers on, if the staff member thought he deserved it. One member of staff had written the word 'psychotherapy' along the length of the baton in neat black marker. The humour of being directly listened to being a form of aggression went through the school like a virus. In a Christmas review the song 'On first day of Christmas' was adapted. The line 'And a partridge in a pear tree' became 'And a stick called Psychotherapy'. How we laughed.....

For being naive I was honest to the point of open weakness without knowing where this might lead me. When my weakness led me I still did not know where I was. The staff were meant to stand in for our absent parents and so ultimately I hold them responsible for what happened to me. What label I lived under, and whether it was real, accurate, or totally false does not matter now. What was genuine, and probably unrecognised, was the longer term effects of the medication that I had been forced to take to make me 'easier to manage'. This is where the story starts to take a darker turn.

One late January night when the staff were clearly not looking out for noise or misbehaviour on our floor two boys appeared in our room. They were new boys. I will call them Colin and Peter. They were not just older, they were also physically advanced for their age. They had come to the school over a year later than most other boys did. They walked taller than other new boys. They had a height and physical presence which took me right into the unspoken feelings I had around television wrestling. They remained fully clothed in their pyjamas throughout the time they were in our room. They said they had come round to inspect whether we were wanking or not, presenting it as a joke. But there was something the insistent in the tone of their voice that made me squirm. They milked the joke, so to speak,  rather too literally for our comfort. They made suggestive comments to each other about our sexual naivety too, as if we were not there and they were the measure of sexual opportunity, if not maturity as well. Since we were meant to be quiet because it was after lights out we did not contradict them. But as quietly as possible we denied we were wanking. Because I squirmed most, mine was the bed whose blanket and top sheet they pulled back, revealing the evidence to contrary, nobody else's. Then they went away. The staff were never told and I never found out if they tried the same stories in in other boys rooms when they should remain their in own bed in their own dormitory. I can only remember them visiting once. But given their guile and obvious interest then, lack of staff permitting, they surely visited us more than once, and visited several of the other two dormitories for juniors on the top floor, apart from their own.

Find Chapter 17 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.