Warning; the following contains material of a sexual nature where underage boys have un-consensual sex. It happened as written but the names have been changed. As with many such historical accounts it is a lot easier to read about than it was to live out at the time. The experience proved more survivable than the silence that built up around it after. That silence lasted for decades and left a lot of confusion in it's wake.
I was sat on the settee watching television with family in the early evening, late July 1973 in the parental house. We were settled into watching an episode of 'Cannon' on ITV. I have written previously about dad's weakness for macho television. 'Cannon' is a very fat, very American, private detective. His hair is like his moustache, thin, greased back, and dyed an clearly fake shade of black. The plot is less than credible, it is the usual 'woman in peril' cliche, the continuity of which seems to be disjointed at best. What the show lacks in logic it more than makes up for in self important men men driving around in very big cars. The point of the series was the surely the blatant product placement, as provided by Ford cars.
The detective drove a light green Ford Lincoln Continental, the U.S. equivalent to a Rolls Royce. In real life they have the same fuel consumption as a Rolls Royce too, around 7 miles to the gallon. Since we don't have a car then watching a screen where somebody repeatedly gets in and out of one of the biggest cars in the world impresses us rather more easily than it should. We rarely see Cannon drive the car. It is Dad's television set; he is the driver. There are three gears, sorry channels, and he has chosen for us and himself the raciest material, the gear that makes what surrounds us, the furniture and fittings seem most staid by comparison. It is his house, he needs us to be happy with what makes him happy, we have to accept that his choice is our choice made for us.
My parents know nothing of what Peter and Colin did to me in the boarding school, nothing of the silence the school chose to keep about it, and nothing of my new feelings that I am gay and I was upset from my being sexually assaulted. They don't know that the school absorbed the short term damage done to me. If there was anything to say to tell them then the school would have reported it to social services. There a small committee would report to the Dept of Education, where the sexual nature of the behaviour would have been euphemised beyond belief to mask how a rogue element had arisen in their system. Nearly nothing would be said to my parents. The less they know, the less they can be rightly alarmed.
The book on sex education that Mum had given me at the start of the holidays had no real people in it. The figures outlines of figures, like I saw in the diagram for the muster point for an emergency exit when on a school trip we were taken across the Humber Estuary, from Grimsby to Hull and back, on a ferry. I now knew from three separate sources, the school sex lesson, the sexual assault, and Mother's book, that sex is some kind of emergency or crisis. Though the book leaves a mystery who it happens to and how. It has never happened to those who teach me and the people who teach would deny that it could happen to me. But I don't even know that I am still partially in shock so what can be sure of? Not a lot. I had plenty of examples of adult detachment from which I was expected to form my own safe and detached adult, and disguise being a needy child the better to be an outwardly asexual adult.
The street outside was narrow, wide enough for one vehicle for drive down as long as there were few vehicles parked on the pavement either side, relatively few people on the street had cars. We heard a van park upon the pavement outside, close to the house. Then there was a knock at the front door. The person nearest the door and most free to respond got up and answered this unexpected call. At the door is Peter, from boarding school. I had no idea he had my address. Eventually Dad gets up, leaves the television on at the same volume and Peter asks him if he could 'Borrow Malcolm for the night'. We are all in something of a torpor for watching the fat detective taking seemingly random actions to solve this weeks case. After I have confirmed that I know who Peter is Dad says 'Yes, take him.' to Peter, and say to me 'Enjoy yourself.' as I leave with not even a toothbrush. I lost regular contact with Peter one room changes and the break could not come soon enough for me. I wished I'd lost contact with him sooner, and for longer. I knew that he lived over twenty miles away from me because he was one of the boys on the five hour school minibus run. Peter looks seriously older than his probable nearly 14 years, and he sounded confident with it. This was partly why he took my dad in. Though with the television being on what Dad actually recognised is anyone's guess.
His mate the driver is in the van and is in his late twenties. He is a Roma, a gypsy. I forget what he called himself with me but I am quite sure it was not his real name. He was medium height, quite lean, muscular and tanned. The first thing that happens is that I am thrust into the middle of the two seats passenger seats. Peter takes the passenger seat nearer the door. The engine is noisy which limits conversation but the gypsy seems okay. When Peter talks he goes straight for what happened in the end dormitory before the staff changed the rooms and put an end to Colin and Peter's 'fun'. I don't want to hear it. Nor do I want to look at, or feel, his growing erection, even when he guides my left hand towards it after undoing his flies. I do not want to be obliging when he gets his right hand behind my head sufficient to bend/pull my head down towards his crotch so that I am forced not just to look, but feel and smell his growing erection. I did not want to, but I do, suck it too when I am forced to. This show of force is for the benefit of the driver who is also mildly aroused at seeing the proof of the stories Peter must have fed him before they both collected me. I am also coerced to feel up the driver as he drove, which in itself does not feel as invasive, but it passes as my proper introduction to the driver. I don't know where we went and how long we drove for, but we drove until well after it was dark. I would estimate now that we could have been driving for three hours total. Part way through the drive we stopped at an anonymous greasy spoon cafe and each had egg and chips and a mug of tea.
The conversation stayed at mild innuendo level, as in Peter saying to me over the meal 'I'll bet you want something firmer than a fried egg. Don't you? Don't worry, you'll get it soon.'. If it was seduction then it was seduction done though sheer crudeness. For the first time I see the driver's face clearly under the fluorescent strip lights of the cafe. He is handsome in a rough way. More happens after we arrive the gypsies house in the dark. His house is deep in the country side. I could be anywhere, all roads are narrow with high hedges both sides which makes all roads seem alike, particularly when I am being driven at some speed in the dark. There are a few minutes of introductions and turning some side lights on in the house and then it is it time for bed. This is not my first threesome, that was the repeated assault. But it is the first threesome in somebody's house. Because it is in a house and and threesome involves the owner of the house it feels different to the previous episodes. This is happening by the rules of a real home, rather than within the narrow confines of the routines of an institution. My engagement is more required here, as is evidence of my enjoyment of the sex. I still did not want to be at the centre of a this very sexual scene. The Gypsy recognised how little I wanted to be sexed up faster than Peter did with Colin, he made Peter be less demanding. For it all being less urgent it is also looser, less structured. The gypsy has some degree of tenderness towards me, and yet openly still wants his sexual needs met. I almost like him for him being both clear and openly awkward about what he wants. As the gypsies guest, the more Peter is involved the more it is clear that his role is relegated to a side role. This is a big relief to me. The night ends in a messy but okay way. I slept reasonably well after.
There was tea and toast in the morning. Both the sheets and pyjama bottoms I was given the night before were soaked to remove the come stains, they were hung out to dry in the sun later. When I walked out of the house I went into a scrapyard. The gypsy owned it. Peter and I were left to look around whilst he set to work with his digger moving scrap metal around for a couple of hours. The real surprise was parked close by, a Ford Lincoln Continental car exactly like the one I saw on television the night before. In the scrapyard the atmosphere between us all is light, no more suggestions of sex or putting pressure on me. In the afternoon the gypsy takes Peter and me for a short ride in this huge american car-it is a vast and comfortable thing to be driven round in. Then we all get in the van and it is time to take me back to the parental house.
Nothing was asked about where I have been when I got to the parental house. I fit back into the routines, no questions asked. Would they have believed me if I had said I had been driven round nearby county roads in a car exactly like the Frank Cannon had on television last night? Life for us was in Black and white because the television on which we saw the car was in black and white, the television coloured how we saw each other. That I had seen a Lincoln Continental and it was pale green would be about as believable as me telling them I'd unwillingly endured what might have been 'bad gay sex' that in circumstances that were more thoughtful it would still have been illegal, but it might have felt more okay. Perhaps I should have been more thankful for the lack of curiosity than I was at the time. I was thankful that Peter never appeared at the house again.
Up to a point, the not asking what where I had been was like was normal. It was part of the compartmentalising of family experiences where when the experience of one of us did not directly relate to the others then nobody asked and nobody told. There were other reasons my parents were so incurious and laissez faire towards me; Mother was not well. She said that she was not ill, but she had to double down on getting the basic work done around the house, such that all other questions went by the board. Mother went to the GP with symptoms centred around her feeling itchy and enduring high temperatures which was not to do with the usual random cold or flu. 'Something is odd down below' was her way of phrasing it to the doctor. He told her in a similarly non-medical language that she was to have a hysterectomy at very short notice. Her hospital stay was arranged to start ten days after her visit to the doctor. The operation would be performed soon after that with ten days of relative rest and being observed by the staff.
The notice was too short to plan for the care of me and my sister. It is too short to even give enough notice for one us to stay with our grandparents. Mother made sure my sister and I could boil a pan of potatoes and other veg, and that Dad knew how to use the grill, the oven, and the frying pan. We would cope without puddings for the fortnight. She assigned friendly gardeners to water her allotment and take what produce they could use before it bolted. She packed her bag and got on the train by herself for the main hospital in the nearest city. The only local hospital was small. It was built in the 1920's and was a cottage hospital. It was mostly used for temporary respite for the local elderly after falls and the like. When she left it was the longest she had been away from the house, or her own, all the time she had lived there. It is not a holiday, but probably the nearest she would get to one for at least another decade.
For the first two days dad rang the hospital from the local phone box, and reported back to us the Mother was fine. He was also quite careful to do as he had promised her he would around the parental house. The first day that we could visit after the operation my sister and I visited her. For the first time in my life Dad gave me a set of keys to the house and a watch. I could not say to him how much having that watch made me feel like a grown up, it would have revealed how small I felt before I got it. All he wanted was for me to make sure my sister and I did not get lost in the city, and did not need him. Every day I was given the fare money to take my sister aged 8 and I on the train and get us both to the hospital for visiting time early in the afternoon. The train we always caught always arrived in the city too late for us to search for a bus to take us from the train station to the hospital, and dad never gave us the money for the bus as well as the train anyway. Since we were the family was built on thrift I made my sister walk the 30 mins journey from the station to hospital. My sister would have liked us both take the bus there and back but walking was a key part of life for us then.
When we first saw Mother in the hospital she was on her hospital bed decently half dressed pretending she was cycling as an exercise, she said, that was to help repair and strengthen her stomach muscles after the operation. Pretending to cycle was the nearest she would have got to a bike, she did learn as teenager but supposedly fell off the bike and into a large patch of nettles and she was allergic to nettles stings. But the journeys and the time we had with Mother were much more fun. Her playful side came out in the hospital. She found some board games from the store there and we all played them on her bed. She was funny and light and told some nearly new jokes. The return train after the hospital visit was very old it went very slowly. We both thought it would never arrive. Dad visited Mother in the evening with his brother who took the two of them in his car, which also carried the changes of clothing and anything personal she wanted. I child minded my sister while dad was out with his brother.
With everything we needed being in the parental house there was no need for us to go food shopping, or to the allotment, so we never went. The train journeys with my sister on our own of an afternoon to see Mother were all the travel I wanted, the autonomy was our treat. Dad made some meals, but mostly I ended up cooking for my sister and I. What I made was as agreeable as it was uninspired, still way better than one of dad's ideas. Curried minced beef was just that, and nothing else-no onion or any other veg cooked with it. It was vile, he was surely drunk when he thought of making it, not that we had the guts to say so. It got thrown out. Dad ate apart from us quite often when we could have eaten together if I had done the cooking, but he refused. The problem was that he was meant to be the best cook, the best at everything, and yet my sister and I had tasted the proof of how bad a cook he was. Telling him he was a bad cook, and we preferred him to share with us when I cooked was not possible. He ate with one of his sisters or called in on the chippie more.
My sister and I usually ate together after the afternoon hospital visit. Washing up the plates and dishes always got done, the pans we used were often washed too, but our dirty clothes were just left in the laundry basket. The house was not cleaned much either. The cat was fed and happy for us being about. I felt that we fended for ourselves reasonably well. We missed Mother but didn't know what we missed most, her housekeeping skills or her malapropisms. On our own time seemed light, my sister and I we found different ways of creating open space between us. Summer holidays always became a battle between fractiousness and time before they were done, this holiday any such battle started very late. Normally part of the solution the boredom was television, but with Dad away seeing Mother in the evenings and my sister and I home alone, like Mother did with the just the two of us we played board games as I child-minded her. The television stayed off.
The stay in hospital was the longest she had ever been on her own, without us. It was also the longest time she had been away for twenty years. Last time though, in the 1950's, she went with female friends to Paris and Belgium. This had been a much less glamorous escape. A Parisian street artist made a sketch of her when she was 19. Would that such a thing were offered in the hospital, she had time to sit still for the portrait and it would have been an odd but fine momento to have, particularly if it flattered her when she needed her confidence renewed most.
Mother returned to the house on Saturday afternoon. All seemed well at first. She was simply glad to be back. After making the Saturday night fry she went to her allotment. On the Sunday morning when my dad and sister were out she looked in the pan cupboard for pans for preparing a Sunday lunch with. The meal required the full medley of pans, with three veg, two different potato dishes, meat and gravy. The pan cupboard was floor height. The first thing that hit her as she cautiously bent down toward the cupboard was the smell of cabbage. She decided that every pan in in the cupboard, from the very back to the front, had to be cleaned. She volunteered me to help her clean the pans, volunteered in the same way that raw recruits are volunteered in the army, a Sargent shouting 'You, you, and you' at privates who by then are too conditioned to question anything. I was the only person about who could reach floor height comfortably, Mother was still too fragile to bend down that often in a short period of time. The housework that never got done when she was away got done after she returned, with my support being key to it all.
Dad was the one who did never washed the pans after he used them. He took no notice of us when either of us said that that pans needed more than a rinse and a wipe. I did wonder as I toiled whether, if she could be this clear and well organised, Mother had missed her vocation for giving orders, not that she could ever issue orders to dad-nobody did that.
Left to her own devices Mother preferred her radio set over the television. Breakfast with Wogan seemed good, and the noise of daytime radio was restful. I had good memories that linked Mother with listening to the radio on our own. Her radio was quite distinct, it was oblong, about the size of a man's hand with a gold effect grill at the front, a red plastic casing at the back and sides, and a leather cover/strap with a handle. It took a small 9 volt battery which usually lasted a long time and it received Medium and Long Wave signals. Because it was so small the tuning dial and on/off volume control were small to the point of being fiddly. It was too small to be very loud, so we had to listen quietly when it was on. That radio was one of the few things in the house that seemed personal to her. One of 'my jobs' was take the back off and change the battery for her when it needed it.
I remember listening to the BBC children's comedy 'The Clithero Kid' on it whilst having a bath in the tin bath in the kitchen, aged five, the last time I could get in that bath comfortably. At the end of bath time there was always the hair wash that ended with Mother pouring water with malt vinegar in it to make sure she got rid of all the soap. The malt vinegar smell stayed in my hair for ages after. Sunday lunch was prepared to the sound of 'Two way family favourites' and it seemed perfect at the time. 'Waggoners Walk' was a comfort too. As banal as some of the programmes were, the radio was a far better comforter than television was, for all that television was, with it's sight and sound, utterly absorbing. Dad ruled the television when he was in the parental house. His idea of entertainment often oppressed me more than it impressed me, or actually entertained.
I was more pleased than I could say when Mother presented me with my first portable radio to take to school. This was my reward from Mother for the work I'd done in the house that she could not have done. The late summer raids on the Cancer Research Charity Shop for school clothing that fitted me that was cheap enough were still more of a duty than a joy. But the stick of obligation seemed to be balanced by a sense of reward and good work done, more than previous.
In early September the school minibus appeared at the end of the street and a boy from school I was happy to see appeared at the front door and knocked, to collect me, my suitcase, and my new radio for the new term. The journey was the same five hours as before. But my arrival at the school seemed to be about getting a fresh start....
Find Chapter 21 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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