by Dirk Bogarde
As he turned from replacing the mirror, and as I stood to indicate that he might now unwrap me as soon as possible, I could see that he was speaking, but only a blurred mumble came to my bandaged ears and it was with some rising degree of alarm that I found myself clutched firmly in his arms and dumped on my back in the middle of the brass bed. I tried to struggle and yell out, at least to sit up, but I was totally rigid and the only sound I made was smothered in yards and yards of thick white gauze. Putting his beige face very close to my ear Mr Dodd said that it seemed a pity not to finish the job and make me a full mummy from head to foot, that would complete the Effect.
My shoes and socks were wrenched off and thrown under the bed, then my trousers, and to my silent screams of protest, he ripped off my underpants and I was stark naked before his eager, now red-faced, gaze.
Swiftly and with the expert precision of a born embalmer, he rolled me about the bed in a flurry of bandage. I was wrapped like a parcel, rolled this way and that, on my back, on my side, every which way until I was reeling with giddiness and terror. I was wound tightly into a cocoon as a spider rolls a grasshopper. Helpless, inert, more a dummy even than a mummy, I lay rigid as Mr Dodd, his mouth stuck with safety pins, tucked in the loose ends; when this was done, and with great strength he manoeuvred me off the bed, stiff as a telegraph pole, and set me upright on cotton feet to see my reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door. Peering desperately through the eye slits I could see that he had made a complete and thorough job. Boris Karloff wasn’t half as convincing.
Unable to stand by myself I was forced to lean against the serge shoulder of my host whose face was bathed in pleasure. Surely my heart could not beat so quickly with terror and I should still live. It had leapt from my chest and now pumped and throbbed in my throat. It stopped entirely when my horrified eyes saw, pathetically thrusting through the swaddling rags, my genitals, naked and as pink and vulnerable as a sugar mouse.
Mr Dodd placed his mouth to my ear again and said that he thought he had made a very good job of things and hoped I was pleased too, and without waiting for any kind of reaction, which I would not have been able to make in any case, he swung me, like an immense skittle, into an arc of 180 degrees, so that the whole filthy little room whirled round my head, and I was back down on Mr Dodd’s bed; and in Mr Dodd’s hand, inches from my eyes, was a pair of scissors. I tried to faint. I heard him say that in Real Life They Cut That Off—and lay supine waiting for Death. Gently his hands caressed my helpless body, kindly he whispered that he had no intention of doing such a cruel thing for how else, otherwise, would a boy like me be able to masturbate? He said that he knew that all boys enjoyed masturbating and that he was much too good to deprive me of the rights. My mind had become a mass of solid jelly. Nothing flickered there apart from deadly terror, shame, and grief at my wickedness. I couldn’t rationalise. I closed my eyes and said three or four “Hail Mary’s”.
If I prayed surely, this time, God would hear? The anxious, firm, slippery fingers caressing and annointing me splintered my whole being into a billion jagged fragments. I was only aware that if they didn’t stop something terrible and horrifying would happen.
Which it did. And I knew.
The unwrapping, which followed, was a slow, forlorn, deadly affair. The wretched stuff peeled off me in long swooping swathes, littering the grubby bed and the floor around it. I had been blubbing, snivelling in a silly useless sort of way like a girl, and Mr Dodd was worried and apologetic and kept reminding me over and over again that it was all all right because he was a Medical Student and understood these things.
Dressing hurriedly, stumbling with teary cheeks and snotty nose, falling into pants and trousers, lacing up shoes, yanking up socks and fumbling with my tie, I was unable to speak or even look at the bobbing figure scrabbling about among its merchandise. He handed me a comb and I raked it through my disordered hair; he said that he would see me safely home.
We didn’t speak in the train all the way to Bishopbriggs. He pointed out, as we left the train, that it was not really very late and that he would come and explain things to my aunt. In horror I said that she was ill and could not be disturbed. I led him miles across the Estate, away from where I lived, to a completely strange house where a lamp glowed through a lowered blind. He waited at the gate as I rang the bell, and just as the door opened, fortunately he turned away and was lost in the gloom. The woman who opened the door was pleasant and I apologised for making an error but she smiled and said the houses were all so alike it was no wonder. Springburn Terrace, she said, was “‘way round the back”.
For some time I lived in fear that Mr Dodd would come back or find where I lived. Once, on my way to the station, I thought I saw him hovering about near the Railway Arch. But I don’t think it was … and I never saw him ever again. Neither did I ever set foot in a cinema alone for many years to come.
A few days later a letter arrived from my father to say that my mother was coming up to Glasgow within the month. She would stay with my grandmother. And had an appointment with Dr Steel at the school for the 28th. Nothing more was said. My uncle looked uncomfortable, my aunt defensive.
What could Dr Steel say to my mother that they could not, for Heaven’s sake? she wondered. It seemed a waste of good money to trail all this way for nothing. She declared that she didn’t know what to make of it at all. And neither did I.
Chapter 12
Neither did the irritated Dr Steel as it turned out. Or my bewildered mother for that matter. Clearly my uncle and the headmaster did not see eye to eye on the subject of my education, and while the latter admitted, with bland candour, that I was not the brightest pupil he had ever had in his Technical School but showed distinct abilities in other subjects, the former seemed to have given me up for lost.
Steel suggested that it would be the gravest folly to remove me from the place where I had already been for two years and in which I had fought to remain against quite high odds, and that for the next year I should merely concentrate on those classes which would be the most useful to me in my later life, and at which I showed some signs, at least, of promise. I was to forget Chemistry, Physics, Maths etcetera, and if I cared, only follow the courses in English, Languages, Art, and all the varied handworks from Pottery to Bookbinding. Football, Hockey and Cricket were out and I was to be left on my honour to attend whatever classes I wished.
He wondered, mildly, why I had even been sent to a Technical School in the first place and said that at the end of the year I should be enrolled into a College of Art somewhere, for my future lay in that direction and in no other as far as he could see.
My mother’s worried heart lifted; mine whipped up like a kite in a gale. Both parents agreed with the wise counsel of Dr Steel and also with the College of Art part to come later. I was transported to Heaven. And removed, very tactfully, from Bishopbriggs.
Clearly my unhappy aunt and uncle had reached the end of their patience and endurance. They wanted, understandably, to return to the calm and peace of their life as it had all been before my advent into their bewildered middle-aged existence.
Nothing was said in, as they say, so many words, but a Family Gathering was called at my grandmother’s house. The long and short of it was that yet another of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Hester, adopted me and took me off to live with her in a different part of the city with her husband and two children, and I spent the last year of my school days in a very happy “family atmosphere” where I was able to play the piano whenever I wished with no fear of the people Upstairs, and read every book I could lay hands on from Trollope to Austen without ever once feeling the slightest tremor of guilt that I should be dubbing my soccer boots, oiling a cricket bat, or ploughing through the miseries of Fractions or Logarithms. It nearly went to my head.
I bought a half-belted overcoat and began to talk like Ronald Colman. I graduated from “By the Chapel in the Moonlight” to “Sheep May Safely Graze” all by ear and with the bass pedal screwed
to the floor-boards. I started to smoke “Black Cat” cigarettes in the train coming home from school, learned to skate, and fell deeply in love with my elder cousin Jean.
The only reason that I learned to skate was because of her. I adored her with an unthinking passion, and bought Family Planning magazines which had chapters headed “Can Cousins Marry?” “Cousins Marrying Causes Imbecility?” When I had read all I could understand I was brave enough to mention it to her while we were skating round and round the rink at Crossmloof one evening. I have never forgotten her look of total astonishment as she pulled her steadying hand from mine and fled across the ice to a large Canadian hockey player who, covered in pads and cages and maple leaves, was her real true love.
However she agreed to accompany me to the rink from time to time, but always left me when Canada arrived for his evening match. I was sad, of course, but thought that if I was patient she would come back to me in the end. Which of course she never did. I skated miserably about the place, close to the edge, for I was not all that good on my own and her adored hand was more than just a comfort. It was a stabiliser. Together we collided round the rink with all the elegance, and overt familiarity, of mating toads. I hoped that my sad devotion would show. Which it did. In a face like a squashed muffin. I hoped that people would be moved by my nightly vigil … the mournful, brave boy sliding about on the perimeter while his beloved one, golden hair flying, kilts swirling, spun about centrally in the arms of a great, uncouth, goalkeeper. But no one took a bit of notice. And once, in desperation, when I did try to slide across to them and take her tiny hand, I landed flat on my back and skidded with a sickening crash on my half-belt overcoat into the barrier.
I gave it up after that. There is nothing like a public loss of dignity to restore a sense of proportion. I put away the skates and took up my pens and pencils. Warmer, safer, cheaper and, in the end one hoped, far less dangerous than a marriage between cousins.
Life had changed radically. The Late Developer was starting, and not before time, to offer tentative shoots of manhood to a singularly uninterested world. It really didn’t worry me very much that no one seemed to care because I cared myself; deeply. I was enormously interested in the change, and studied myself daily with satisfaction and an awe only equal to its smugness.
I knew, of course, early on that I would never be Handsome like my uncles or one or two of the cousins. Standard Beauty was not to be my fortune. But, I reasoned, I had height, good eyes well placed, and a pleasing smile which I encouraged daily in the bathroom mirror, ranging it from Winsome to Brave. A series of exercises which, if forced to watch today, would surely make me vomit.
Even though I was hopeless at skating, at Sports of any kind or at any single thing which needed any form of co-ordination—even in my piano playing the left hand was constantly at variance with the behaviour of the right—I felt that in my half-belted overcoat, my good blue suit, a florid silk scarf pilfered from someone, and my green felt pork pie hat with a feather, I was approaching my golden future with some degree of courage and confidence.
Not to mention conceit. Nothing, up till then, had come along to freeze the tender greening shoots of my April growth, except perhaps my cousin’s clear preference for a Canadian hockey playing goalkeeper. On skates. That, to me, simply showed her acute lack of sensibilities.
Perhaps for the first time in my life that third year in Scotland had at last found me “driving my own coach”. The Postillion was on the lead horse. It was a sharply pleasurable feeling.
Of course there was always the Lightning.
During this exhilarating time changes had taken place at home. My father, more and more exhausted by the demands of “The Times”, by constant minor ailments, by his deep dislike of what he called the “Orientals” who had suddenly invaded his Hampstead streets far from the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Hamburg, became more and more desperate to remove himself and his family far into the country away from them all and settle into “the country house”. Pressured thus by almost constant colds and chills, delicatessens springing up in the High Street, and the growing of the storm mounting in slow-building thunder-clouds over Europe, he started his search in deadly earnest.
This eventually led us all to a big, ugly, redbrick and gabled house in three acres of overgrown gardens in the middle of a common seven miles from Lewes in Sussex.
It had been for sale for a very long time since no one wanted to attempt any work on such a hideous, sullen, uncared-for lump of tile and gargoyles, therefore he bought it cheap, ignoring protests and doubts from my unfortunate mother, and moved us all in, cat, cupboards and cooking pots, at the beginning of 1936.
I was enraptured. Enraptured by the stained glass front door, a stork standing in bulrushes, enraptured by the high rooms, the solid doors, the wide staircase, the overgrown orchard, the silted up pond with a rotting punt, the bamboo grove and the magnolias pressing glossy leaves against almost every window. But best of all, everywhere miles and miles of rolling common blazing with gorse and heather, lizards, slow worms, rabbits, a secret patch of vivid Gentians and a stark white windmill on a ridge. Never better than the Cottage but the next best thing.
In a very short time everything was stripped out: painted white from floor to attics; the stained glass door, to my regret, replaced with oak; the lawns mowed, trees felled here and there, bushes pruned and the pond, my job, cleaned, and the spring which ran through the orchard unblocked. The house, after so many years of neglect and abuse, seemed to breathe and took on a new lease of life. So did my father.
Of course all things have to be paid for. Lally decided that a total Country Life was really not for her. A couple of months in the summer, the Easter and Christmas holidays, that was acceptable. But a whole solitary existence in the middle of a common and seven miles from a reasonable town was asking too much of her patience and love. And in any case, as she pointed out, we were all growing up … and needed her less and less … whereas her parents, Mr and Mrs Jane, were getting on a little and she would be better occupied looking after them in Twickenham.
The improbable baby, now called Gareth, was already banging about on two legs and had both my adoring mother and sister to look after him. All we needed now, she said tactfully, was a nice Village Girl who would come in and take over, now that she, Lally, had set us all on the way.
She left quickly, and without sentimentality, which was not her nature; and with long and earnest promises of holidays in Twickenham she went as quietly as she had arrived in our midst all those years ago in 1925 when she came to us as a Girl Guide with a whistle and her white lanyard gleaming.
In her place a Rubens shepherdess. Elsie Brooks from Barcombe. Auburn hair, sparkling eyes, cherry red lips and a skin like gently flushed alabaster. She was eighteen and turned my head completely. She lived in a little room at the top of the house with a window which looked out on the orchard. I spent many pleasant hours crouched in the branches of a Granny Smith watching Elsie change from her Blue and White into “something pretty” for her day off. In the halflight, half shade of her room, I could see the firm rounded arms above her auburn head, the full, pale, breasts, the lips puckered in a soundless whistle. Ignorant of my yearning love, my muddled fantasies, she shoved in her Kirby-grips, buttoned up her blouse, shrugged into a coat and went off to catch the two-thirty bus from the crossroads for the excitements of Haywards Heath.
Once I summoned up the courage to ask her to let me take her photograph as she was hurrying down the drive to the front gates. Sweetly she sat on the arm of a garden seat, set her hat a little more jauntily, crossed one leg over the other and thoughtfully raised her skirt so that her pretty knee, gleaming in silk, blinded my lens. I asked her to smile, which she did, and with a jolly laugh gave me a wink before she hurried off for her bus. I was so overcome with adoration that a short time afterwards, wandering about in a haze of mumbled poetry, I walked into a tree.
What saddened me more than anything, more than the secr
et love in the Granny Smith, the longed-for touch from her hand at breakfast passing the sugar, the cherry lips caressing the rim of her tea-cup which I longed to feel pressed against my cheek, apart from all these delicious denials, was the fact that while I had clearly noticed her she had never, at any single moment, ever noticed me.
“Girls like older boys,” said my sister scornfully. “You are much too young and you can’t even dance or anything like that. No girl likes a boy who only builds birdcages and mucks out rabbits. You see if I’m wrong.”
I decided that I would now learn to dance.
“I have met the most delightful woman on the bus today,” said my mother happily. “Mrs Cox. She was an actress, just like me, they live in the next village and she has three children who are just the same ages as you all. Isn’t that extraordinary?”
Elizabeth and I were po-faced with disinterest. But she hurried on assuring us that we would all like each other, and that we needed to have young people about and that Mr Cox was very rich and owned the Village Hall where they put on plays twice a year. That slightly shook my indifference, but not enough to want to have to meet the wretched children. However that had been fixed. They were all, not just the ex-actress mother, but the entire family, coming to have tea with us the following week. I said that I was busy building my new Studio, and my sister said that if they came she would go and hide on the common until they left. My mother, undaunted, said we were to please ourselves. If we wished to absent ourselves from our guests she would explain why but she considered it a great pity since we all shared the same interests, were all the same ages, and also, she added, wandering off to the vegetable garden which she now cultivated, if I wanted to dance there was no better way to learn than going to the weekly “hop” which they gave every Saturday night in their Village Hall. However if we wished to be impolite and foolish that was up to us both. Taking her trug basket and a small hand fork she left us thoughtful.