Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  I can remember the monologuist who brought the certainty of art into my life. I can even remember his name; it was Mr. Montague. A large, florid, middle-aged man wearing the kind of checked suit of which characters in English novels say, “No gentleman would wear a suit like that.”

  He came to our house for tea. He was a flamboyant and welcome change from the usual pursed and mealy visitors such as Sanitary Inspectors and Church Stewards. Across his paunch was a looped gold chain. His voice was boomy and fruity. He called my mother “Dear Lady,’’ which I thought was very grand, and he called my father “Sir” and he asked me if I found shaving painful. When offered a ninth or tenth scone, he patted the wide check of his waistcoat and said,

  “Spare, Dear Lady, these grey hairs.”

  We later conducted him to the church hall. Everything was ordinary; the same boys and girls, the same ladies of the church who made much of me because I was my father’s son, the same stage curtains that didn’t quite close, a stage familiar to me because in dressing gown and tea towel headcloth I had trodden it as Third Shepherd or Orient King.

  But Mr. Montague, when he appeared, was a Mr. Montague quite different from the Mr. Montague of the tea table. He was wearing mutton-chop whiskers, violent eyebrows, and what must have been a smoking jacket. He did different people by moving about the stage in different voices. There was a lady’s voice and a terrible, stern father’s voice, and a younger man’s voice. The story, I had been told, was called The Barretts of Wimpole Street. It seemed magical to me that when he was the father you could see quite clearly the non-existent lady he was speaking to, and when he was the lady you could see him standing where he’d been before he’d moved to become the lady.

  I was entranced. Any sense of being in an audience vanished. Only he and I existed. Suddenly he began to pace and shout terribly at the lady who was frightened too, and I felt so frightened I felt sick. Then I was. On Miss Moseby. Then I fainted clear away.

  I was carried out and revived and afterwards I was taken back to the closet where the hymn books and extra tea cups were stored, and which he was using as a dressing room. Beads of sweat were standing on his face. I watched him peeling off the whiskers and wiping off the grease paint.

  I don’t remember his saying anything to me or my saying anything to him, but I knew from that moment on that when I was grown up I would be like him, become other people, be applauded, be magical. I didn’t know how this would happen or what had to be done to make it happen, but standing in that cramped closet where his smell of sweat and vanishing cream was stronger than the smell of the maroon hymn books I was filled with certainty that happen it would.

  * * *

  Every five years or so my father was required to move to a new church and usually to a new circuit. Shortly after Mr. Montague, we moved from the north of England to the south, from baths pronounced “baths” to “barthes,” a more gentle climate.

  These years were marked by other transitions, from elementary to secondary school, to an intensification of the warfare with my mother, to the first counter-moves of my self-shaping.

  Because my father was a Minister of Religion (the words I had to write on forms at school, or worse, say in front of the class) I was forced to demonstrate that I was not easy prey. I was perhaps the only boy in the schoolyard who never pulled a punch; I once tried to finish off a fallen opponent with a rock but some older boys grabbed me in time. Nor was this wickedness merely assumed; I seemed drawn towards all that was bad and sinful. The word “drunkard” had the same sort of allure for me that the word “buccaneer” might have for a normal child.

  As complaints trickled in, fist-fights, raids on fruit trees, smoking, goldfish speared from an ornamental pond, my mother wept and prayed and assured me that I had been born for the gallows. At the end of each tearful session, she made me kneel with her and pray aloud for salvation.

  In sexual terms, these years from nine to eleven were marked by an increase in masturbation and guilt. Sin had claimed me utterly. My most intense desire at that time was to be able to ejaculate. I have vague memories of group masturbation though this had no particular homosexual overtones. Certain older boys would demonstrate for those younger but much in the spirit of an old-timer passing on wisdom to a greenhorn.

  My two most vivid memories of those years are both rather odd. One is of a boy called Malcolm, two or three years older than us, in the second form of the grammar school, who for a fee—candy, a penny, a general whipround—would demonstrate how when he came, sperm appeared not only from the tip of his organ but from a hole in the side halfway up.

  When released from chores, homework, and other such nonsense, all the boys in my area took their bicycles and foregathered in a small wood about a mile from my house. There, by the ruins of an old house, we smoked cigarettes, practised throwing our sheath knives into trees, wrestled, gossiped, set fires, and swapped stolen merchandise. Malcolm smoked cheroots.

  Regularly, about every three days, the local pervert appeared, much to our joy. What benefit he derived from these performances was beyond our comprehension but we were grateful to him.

  The place where we played was in a clearing about halfway down a steep path. The top end of the path was close to the main road; the bottom end, screened by bushes, led out onto a quiet residential street. The path itself was a winding, beaten track, bumpy, crossed by tree roots, rutted. It was dangerous at speed and one of our more frightening games was to time bicycle runs down it.

  The pervert’s ritual was unchanging. He would trudge down the path wheeling his bicycle until he was about a hundred yards above us. Then he would prop his bicycle up on its little stand, turn his back, then turn again, mount, and pedal furiously down the steep hill. Just before he was level with us, he would swerve from the track onto the grass at high speed, coming to within five yards of us. By this time he was steering with one hand on the handlebars. In his other hand he gripped his member, which he attempted to wave.

  Then he would veer back onto the path and wobble down the hill to crash down through the bushes at the bottom and debouch onto Gladstone Avenue.

  His progress was unsteady and hazardous, rather like the charge of an inept knight whose visor has suddenly obscured vision.

  When he neared us, we’d shout,

  “Let’s have a look at it, then!” and “My sister’s is bigger than that!”

  And as he careered away from us almost out of control down the bumpy hill, he’d yell, “You bastards!” and then, faintly, Rotten bastards, and then the crash as he engaged the bushes.

  * * *

  Had there been any truth in the myths about masturbation, I and all the other boys I knew would have been blind, deaf, dumb, hairy as the Ainu, and so debilitated as to have needed hospitalization. We dismissed these bromides as fit only for Boy Scouts. It was, however, an article of faith among us that an emission was the equivalent in exertion to a ten-mile run. Some boys did a hundred miles a day.

  We masturbated, not for fun, but from overwhelming need for release. At school, and by now I was in the first form of grammar school, boys masturbated at recess, lunch hour, during the welcome darkness of educational films, some even, driven by indescribable urges, during lessons. A glance revealed those so engaged, their faces red from exertion and frustration. It was difficult to sustain the necessary rhythm and increasing speed and concentration if some fool decided to pace the aisles or ask questions about the staple products of China.

  Those who had achieved success were also immediately recognizable; their faces softened into that dreamy expression which I’ve noted in infants who are completing a bowel movement.

  Masturbation was known as “wanking” or “wanking off”; one young master endeared himself to us by pretended pedantry. He affected not to know the meaning of “wank” and always addressed a boy called Stoughton, a frenzied self-abuser, in the following way:

 
“Stoughton. Your attention, please. Can you enlighten us as to the nature of the feudal levy? Or may I, as your chums appear to do, address you as ‘Wanker’?”

  This compulsive masturbation was not, as far as I can recall, related to any external object; it was not accompanied by sexual fantasies or even imaginings of sexual intercourse. It was more in the nature of a raging unscratchable itch.

  Some idea of the state might be suggested by observing a colony of monkeys.

  At home, and in privacy, apart from the usual masturbations before going to sleep and on awakening, we all devised more elaborate forms of gratification. Some boys coated their penises and hands with a rich soap lather which was pleasing but had one drawback; soap was likely to enter one’s organ so that ejaculation was accompanied by a stinging pain much like getting soap in one’s eye. Other boys used Vaseline but it was difficult to remove afterwards. Pond’s Vanishing Cream and hand-lotions were other favourites.

  But as time went by, these solitary acts were turned to focus on sexual images of the outer world. Our main source of these was a magazine which could be rented for three pence per lunch hour from a newsagent’s near the school. The newsagent was called Mr. Albert. The magazine was called Health and Efficiency and featured photographs of ungainly, nude people having picnics and playing ping-pong.

  It was, perhaps, these images which drove us to the desire to stick our members into things. Vacuum cleaners were widely discussed and I went so far as to switch ours on one day when my mother was out shopping, but the roar and pluck of it against the cloth of my trousers frightened me. One boy I knew described to me putting his organ into a thermos flask full of warm tea. He had done this while his member was only semi-erect but the warmth rising from the tea and the constriction, and what he described as a kind of suction, aroused him in a second and he was agonizingly trapped in the flask’s narrow neck. His peril was doubled because his parents were upstairs, his sister playing just outside, and he was in the kitchen. Another boy in my class swore by oranges. Another inserted himself between the furry legs held tight of a younger brother’s teddy bear. One boy who played in the wood every night claimed to have fucked a hen but everyone knew he was a liar.

  My own invention was the cardboard core of a toilet roll liberally coated inside with Brylcreem. The only drawback was that the Brylcreem was cold and took some time to warm up. Ejaculations were so fearsome and overwhelming that I sometimes tottered about the bathroom close to fainting.

  These acts of ferocious self-abuse were of course attended by agonies of guilt. Every night I knelt by my bed, until I was cold and my knees hurt, asking Jesus’ forgiveness for my lies, impurity, smoking, foul language, and constant abuse of the Temple of the Holy Spirit. And every night after my prayers, warmed, reviewing the day, my mind would fill with the image of the hairy thatch of a lady ping-pong player and my hand would sidle down to grasp my heated member and guilt would temporarily be driven out in a fresh burst of sweaty friction.

  It was something of a problem to know what to do with what eventually must have amounted to pints of sperm. I tried handkerchiefs but what would happen if I forgot to remove it from under my pillow one morning and my mother discovered this yellow, rigid rag? And besides, it would have been difficult to explain the loss of a handkerchief every two or three days. Eventually I took to lifting the carpet round the edges and dribbling onto the felt underlay. My bedroom began to smell like the corridor of an extremely sleazy hotel. After some months the carpet and underlay were so tightly bonded that I began to worry about what possible explanation I could give when spring cleaning occurred.

  * * *

  Sexologists state that males reach a peak of sexual energy at about eighteen, while females reach a peak of sexual desire in their thirties. Inaccurate, as usual. Boys achieve a peak of sexual energy at about thirteen or fourteen and by eighteen are, comparatively, quiescent, if not in decline. A boy of thirteen lives possessed, and I use the word in its biblical sense. Such words as “desire” or “lust” are pallid counters for the raw actuality. Frenzy, or fever, with their medical connotations, are more appropriate.

  Everything in the physical world promoted excesses of deranged desire. Erections occurred without volition, induced by the vibrations of buses, store dummies being dressed in passing windows, the hair or an earring of the lady passenger in the seat in front. Washing hung out on a line sometimes proved unbearable. Even the texture of velvet, fresh-planed wood, or the curve of a highly glazed vase was enough to induce a voluptuous state necessitating a hasty trip to a locked bathroom.

  We fought our way onto double-decker buses in order to be behind some particularly attractive woman in the hope that she might go upstairs and we could hang back on the platform perhaps to glimpse an ascending stocking seam, a froth of lacy slip or petticoat. We believed that women who wore highly shined shoes mirrored onto that polished surface visions of what was above and stared intently in the always-disappointed hope.

  The words, “Thank you. Come again,” from shop assistants caused us to reel about the pavement in paroxysms of hysterical laughter.

  We stood as close as possible over seated women in the hope of being able to peer down blouses; when free of homework we haunted parks and wasteland at twilight in the hope of observing lovers engaged in sexual acts; in shops we asked to see items on high shelves; we peered at night through every lighted window. Housewives were stalked in the constricted aisles of G.R. Lumley and Son: Grocers, until the erection had to be concealed by stooping, as if in consideration over the Huntley and Palmers Assorted Creams, knowing that our naked lusts were marked on our brows for all to see. Being dragged through department stores by mothers where lingerie was flaunted and panties strewn about in casual heaps while pretending to ignore it all was anguish. Other boys’ sisters and mothers were assessed; even grandmothers were eyed.

  Ours was, of course, an all-male school. The girls’ grammar school was about a mile away. We were forbidden to speak to them. The sight of these maidens in their plum-pudding hats and blazers, serge skirts, ankle socks and brown Oxfords drove us to the mindless frenzy of piranhas scenting blood. Our weekly trip to the nearby municipal baths was hallowed by the knowledge that the day before those very girls had used the same cubicles, hung their clothing on the same hooks, immersed their bodies in the same water. We could have drunk it, chlorine and all, in homage and desire.

  The power of words need hardly be mentioned. The father of a boy who lived near me had a Navarre Society edition of the Decameron with sepia-tinted illustrations. Although I didn’t like the boy, I cultivated him so that I could gaze at these pictures of wenches, breasts boiling over their bodices, seated on the knees of jolly friars. We gazed together, transfixed with lust. The word itself, “bodice,” was only just bearable; such a word as “nipple” was beyond endurance; the black letters on the white page blurred into an aura, an aureole of shimmering desire so intense that further reading was impossible and we would stare into space bereft of our wits.

  Much of my early reading was merely the search for erotic incident. Two fragments lodge in my mind yet. One, “he toyed with her bubbies” was presumably from some eighteenth-century novel. The other, “she made him free of her narrow loins,” was the first of many intense pleasures given me by Evelyn Waugh.

  Nightly, I crouched beneath the windowsill of my bedroom with my telescope trained on the bedroom window of a girl two houses away; once I saw her pick her nose.

  I longed for a sister so that I could commit incest.

  My masturbatory practices grew more fanciful and more desperate; I did it with a cylindrical pencil case filled with warm porridge and violated my younger brother’s kaleidoscope.

  On Sundays, I walked with my mother to church. In the winter, she wore fur gloves; in the summer, white gloves of some sort of netting stuff. I was embarrassed to be seen with her and these white gloves, worn even in extremes of heat
, served as a focus for all my hatred of her and our way of life. Those net gloves were everything from which I wanted to escape.

  On Sundays, she invariably smelled of lavender, a scent which even now makes me feel irritable, reminds me of piety and death.

  At the close of each service, Holy Communion was celebrated. Although I always attended the sacrament I have never, in fact, partaken of it. During this most solemn rite I prayed with desperation to be forgiven my manifold sins and wickednesses. I evoked Christ’s Passion, He who had died for me, but the harder I prayed the more my mind crowded with narrow loins, nipples, thighs, and buttocks. And although I was slowly coming to an active rejection of Christianity, I felt nervous about receiving the sacrament because, being in a state of sin, something bad might happen, and there was no point in going around asking for trouble. I had read in some anti-Semitic work of a woman in the Middle Ages who had contracted with some wicked Jews to steal a wafer by retaining it in her mouth until after mass and then handed it over to them; the Lord, however, caused the Host to turn to flesh and grow immediately to the roof of her mouth in a vast lump. My theory was that if you hadn’t swallowed it you hadn’t really done it, so it was my practice to swallow the wine (that didn’t count; it was non-alcoholic grape juice) but push the cube of bread into my cheek and flatten it. This slimy mess I then coughed later into my handkerchief or spat out unnoticed.

  On the walk home, my mother, softened perhaps by Communion, would often take my unwilling hand with her netted glove and say,

  “You’re still my little boy, aren’t you?”

  * * *

  At the end of my first year in grammar school came my first Annual Report and the subsequent parent-teacher interview evening. My report was mediocre but my main fear was what might be said.

  It seems, looking back, that I lived in a world of constant guilt, anxiety, and self-loathing; they were my mother’s handmaidens. When I was a small boy, she had even managed to make me assume guilt for the sufferings of the Eighth Army. I had been playing with an outdoor tap in the garden, enjoying the splash and sparkle of it, and she’d grabbed me from behind, shaking me and shouting,