Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  That I am going to lag behind other boys in growing up I have known since I was twelve, when it begins to happen for others in my class but not for me. And it is when I’m still immured in my impregnable boyhood that I begin to watch.

  No matron ever charts the growth rate of her charges as sedulously as I do: half naked in PT, crucified twice weekly on the wall bars, I scrutinise the armpits of my classmates on the look-out for the first tell-tale graze of hair. I know the line of each neck, detecting the first bulge of an incipient Adam’s apple even before its owner, and noting glumly not only that Hollis has respectable armpits but that a thin column of hair is now beginning to climb towards his navel.

  Had Leeds Modern School been imbued with as much public school spirit as the headmaster fondly hoped, we would all have been herded into the showers after gym or games, thus rendering this furtive charting of my fellows’ incipient manhood redundant: one glance at their pelvic regions would have told all. Fortunately, though, whether we take a shower is optional; after gym there is never the time and since I generally sidestep games the problem does not arise. But with, as it were, nothing to show throughout most of my adolescence, I live in fear of having to take my clothes off, managing somehow to avoid it during the whole of my schooldays and, more surprisingly, the entire two years I spend in the army. Occasionally I read of women who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were able to serve as soldiers without their sex ever being discovered. It’s no surprise to me, who, through school, National Service and university, am never caught with my pants down.

  This elongated boyhood goes on, it seems to me, for years; furtive and ridden with guilt, a less carefree boy it would be hard to find. Not that I have much to be guilty about: it’s true I discover wanking at the age of thirteen but in all my time at school I never touch or am touched by a single one of my schoolfellows, though in a provincial grammar school this is not unusual. It’s also that, for all the prurient surveillance which I keep on my classmates, what action there is generally manages to escape my notice.

  The best-looking boy in 4 A is Ken Thomson, a greengrocer’s son from Kirkstall. He is a sleepy kind of boy who sits in the second row of the class by the window, his back to the wall, surveying the class with a forgiving smile. He is an athlete and a good swimmer, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist and a body so perfect that in gym or the baths I find it hard to look at him. He is my age but unlike me is long past puberty. His nickname is Tommo. I have no nickname as there has never been any need for one.

  Another boy in the class is Briggs, who is poor, quite shabby and not always very clean. With a cheeky face, wild hair and thin as a whippet, he, too, is good at games and nippy on the wing but with none of Tommo’s slow Roman grace.

  We are getting changed after swimming in the school baths. This is always hectic and hurried because Mr King, the PT master, invariably keeps us in the baths longer than he should and afterwards rampages up and down the aisles banging the doors of the cubicles and shouting at us to get a move on as the bell has long since gone. I am changing in a cubicle opposite Thomson, who is sharing with Briggs, and fearful of the displeasure of Mr King, who doesn’t like me as I can only just swim and can’t dive at all, I have dutifully hurried up, and so I’m almost dressed when I look over to the opposite cubicle where I can see that neither Thomson nor Briggs has even got his shirt on.

  ‘Are you not ready yet?’ I say, smugly. ‘I’m dressed.’ The two boys, who seem to be busy with something below the level of the cubicle door, look up slightly startled but also with a smile of both pity and contempt, and I can still feel the contempt fifty years later. They obviously know something I don’t. At which point Mr King starts driving the class out, ready or not, and Thomson and Briggs hurry into their clothes and join the line-up outside, shirts hanging out and still half-dressed, and so get bollocked by Mr King, but only half-heartedly as they’re both good swimmers.

  It’s only when we get back to the classroom that I realise that what they were looking at below the level of the door was each other, and what they were doing was tossing off, something which I’ve only just discovered how to do, and feel far from easy about, and needless to say mention to no one.

  Why I remember so vividly an incident that I don’t altogether understand at the time, I’m not sure. True, it makes me feel ‘out of it’, but plenty of things do that … chiefest, of course, that I am still a boy when most of the class are virtually men. But what puzzles me and makes a lasting impression is the disparity between the boys, one flawlessly handsome, the other nice enough but skinny and a bit of a runt. Sex, it seemed, didn’t require equality between the participants or even parity of charm, just as in this case a cheerful and seemingly guiltless collaboration in its mischief.

  This wasn’t a lesson I was ever going to take to heart, or at any rate not until it was almost too late. Looking at old photographs of my school class then, I see that we all look untroubled and even happy, but I am filled with pity for myself, and at how little I know and how long it is going to take me to learn it. Thomson and Briggs know it already, and one component of that unforgotten look they give me across the wet corridor is that they share a secret I have not yet discovered, namely that there is no shame in this mischief, only pleasure, and that not to know this, as I plainly do not, is to be a fool.

  There are plenty of boys in the class … Gedge, Stones, Maine … who, seeing it happening, would either have shouted encouragement or nipped across to have a look, even take part. But I am not that kind of boy. Or I am, but I can’t let on. I think of their wet hair, the chlorine on the cold flesh, one body skinny and hard, the other smooth and classically proportioned. Both now in their seventies and this episode, so vivid for me still, by them buried or forgotten.

  Two years after this incident nothing much has happened. I am still a boy, my anatomical clock seemingly stopped. Were it not for the prospect of National Service I might be easier in my mind about being so slow to grow, but my looming nightmare is that I shall still be in my unfledged state when, aged eighteen, I go for my army medical, so my last years at school turn into a race between puberty and the call-up. I know of no way of hastening the process, but I try. Somewhere I have read that it is the thyroid gland that controls growth and that one of its constituents is iodine. So I disinter our ancient bottle of iodine from the back of the bathroom cupboard; it is brown and ridged (and therefore poison) but I put it to my nose and deeply inhale, and even venture to lick the fatal cork.

  That I do not achieve maturity until I am well past sixteen, though it blights my boyhood, I now regard as a blessing, this protracted pregnancy of puberty constituting an education more enduring and exclusive than any I receive courtesy of Leeds Modern School. It is an education in contraries: whereas in class and in anything to do with books I am always one of the leaders, in matters of the body I am among the last, the lessons in this parallel instruction written on the flesh. Or not written, that is the trouble. It is in those years from thirteen to seventeen that the conviction takes hold that, full membership having been denied me so long, I will never thereafter be a proper member of the human race, and will always to some extent be set apart. I am such a late starter it seems to me there is hardly any point in joining, still less catching up.

  Thus it is that, though not ungregarious by nature, I have never since been a joiner, have avoided clubs and societies, and particularly those where women are not included; the absence of women, it seems to me, always bringing out the worst in men. Unfortunately until well into my twenties I regard sex as a club too, and one to which I have no hope of belonging. This begins at school, where sex seems an extension of organised games: the boys who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. So being excused games was also being excused life. There is always talk, of course, but skinny, fearful and prudish, I take no part in these discussions, partly because I haven’t yet acquired the proper equipment, but also because I am ‘religious’ and ‘not that kind of boy�
�, and so am thought to disapprove. I think I disapprove, too, though I am careful to overhear what is being said, while not always appreciating what my classmates get up to. Innocent yet prurient, I am an unattractive youth.

  In the plays that I have written characters often recur who are, in some respect or other, maimed: a boy with a club foot; a girl who, as they used to say, is not all there; a young man with mysterious eczema, and another who inflicts on himself a tattoo. They are individuals who are in various ways stigmatised. Having suffered nothing that could properly be regarded as a stigma (though the need to write sometimes seems so), that such characters so often smuggle themselves into my writing I put down to this period in my boyhood when I felt marked out. Marked out, because still unmarked.

  I am conscious that to someone genuinely stigmatised – disfigured or crippled, say – such fictionalisations will seem both fanciful and exploitative, projected as they are from the experience of a boyhood protracted, which though it did not seem so when I was going through it was actually both brief and not uncommon. Still, a writer has to use whatever is to hand in the way of experience; he or she is in the business of making mountains out of molehills. I am not sure if the metaphor should come from vaccination or homeopathy, but it takes only a pinch of an experience to inform the imagination and body forth the whole.

  So I have never regretted that time or the wretchedness that came from being a late developer. While looking in the mirror is not in itself an inducement to reflection, what we find there can be the beginning of wisdom. A boy sees acne, a girl small breasts, and another breasts that are too large; a small dick may look like an affliction but an over-large one may be an embarrassment too. We are self-stigmatised, our supposed shortcomings just one of the several educations of the heart.

  As with many long-awaited occurrences, when puberty actually does arrive I hardly notice. I am seventeen, having a reluctant holiday with my mother, reluctant because I feel this is my father’s job, not mine, but as usual he is unable to get away from the shop and I am her only available companion. And companion is exactly what I feel like; one of those downtrodden spinsterly attendants one saw then, but less often now, trailing after their employers at Harrogate or the seaside, buffers against loneliness. Actually almost anyone would be better company than me, who’s sullen, moody and embarrassed at being too old to be on holiday with his mother. Which I am, though I don’t look it.

  It’s Whitsuntide and we are staying in a suburban boarding house in Whitby. In the days after I’d found out about wanking I used to rush home from school at dinner time, get one in before the meal and then another before I went back to school. Those hectic, rapturous and guilt-laden times are long since gone, and my religious fervour has in any case put a brake on the self-abuse, sex and devotion thought to be more incompatible in 1951 than they are today. My body still seems to be on hold. There has been no progress on the pubic hair front that I can see, and on the watched-pot principle I’ve stopped checking.

  It’s early afternoon and my mother is waiting downstairs to go out so it’s a far from ideal moment, but with nothing better to do and less out of desire than curiosity to see if anything’s happened I lie on the bed in the boarding house back bedroom and pull myself off.

  It’s hardly the unstoppable gusher I might have hoped for but this time at least there is something. I’m going to be all right.

  I don’t know it at the time but there is an appropriateness in my first coming in the setting of a boarding-house bedroom; it had been in a boarding house that I was conceived sometime over the August Bank Holiday of 1933 at Morecambe or Filey. Not Whitby, though; that would be too neat.

  But as the newly arrived young man descends the staircase before spending the afternoon on the sands with his mother, to whom I remember I was particularly foul that day, I feel for him only pity.

  ‘If only I’d known.’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘Oh, just known.’

  Having made manhood as it seems to me just in time, when in August 1952 I go off to the York and Lancaster Regimental Depot at Pontefract Barracks to begin my National Service I am still far from adult. A puny boy, I have turned into a lanky young man, looking, in my khaki and beret, not unlike those underfed youths in outsize Wehrmacht uniforms, paraded before the Movietone cameras early in 1945 to demonstrate how far Nazi fortunes had sunk that the Fatherland must needs be defended by such children. Now it is my turn.

  MRS HOPKINS: Anyroads, you seem to know a lot about them.

  HOPKINS: Who, lesbians? Yes, well, I come across them in literature.

  MRS HOPKINS: I hope it is in literature and not in Huddersfield.

  Course it’s all right if you’re educated. That makes it all carte-

  blanche. Well, I was the one that wanted you educated. You want to

  remember that when you’re running your mother down.

  HOPKINS: I don’t.

  MRS HOPKINS: And you’re not, are you?

  HOPKINS: What?

  MRS HOPKINS: That?

  HOPKINS: A lesbian?

  MRS HOPKINS: No, the other.

  HOPKINS: Mam, I’m nothing, Mam.

  (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf)

  It is some time in 1950, while passing the First Church of Christian Science at the top of Headingley Lane, that I come to the conclusion that, all things considered, I am homosexual. The church has since moved to more modest premises and the imposing Portland stone temple that was witness to this boyish assessment is now an adjunct of Leeds Girls’ High School. It would have been evening and the chances are I was out for a walk. ‘Going out for a walk, are you, love? Don’t go anywhere lonely.’ Mam is making a lampshade and Dad is playing along to the wireless on his violin. Television has not long been started; I have never even seen it and we still cling to the wireless, hoping it won’t catch on.

  Evenings are generally like this. I go out for a walk and visit the library on North Lane. Mam and Dad go to bed about nine, and when I come back I take them a cup of tea. My lonely patrols take me all over the still gaslit streets of Headingley, Woodhouse and Meanwood, the world to me at fifteen suddenly a place of inexpressible wonder. I marvel at the wind streaming through the beech trees on the edge of Beckett Park, the colours of the rain-washed flags, and the lights of Leeds laid out below Woodhouse Ridge. That is the way I will have gone on this particular evening. Down Wood Lane and along the path up to the Ridge, then cutting through one of the ginnels into North Hill Road or Cumberland Road, lined with the great mansions of nineteenth-century wool merchants, now hostels for the university or flats for lecturers. This brings me back into Headingley Lane, as off it run the Richmonds, and somewhere in Richmond Avenue is the reason I’ve taken to roaming these suburban streets on summer evenings: a boy, a couple of forms below me at school, with whom I am hopelessly infatuated, and to whom at this time I have scarcely spoken, and seldom do much, and he certainly never knows the part he plays in my life.

  ‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight, /To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light.’ We had done Wordsworth for School Certificate, and at fifteen this seems to me not so much poetry as a statement of fact. Patrolling the streets on these ‘rain-ceased evenings’ it is just what I feel, though the cause of the world’s transformation is plainer to me than it was to Wordsworth. It is love, as I have no hesitation in dubbing this feeling that sends me walking the streets; not to meet the loved one particularly, which I never actually do, still less anybody else (which I didn’t know you did). It is just to look wide-eyed at the world.

  Still, if love can transfigure Leeds, it isn’t, it seems to me, just an adolescent phase. No. There is no doubt about it, and I cross the road to the white Portland stone temple, I am homosexual.

  Enlisting in the ranks of deviancy, though, has nothing to do with sex. How can it, since I’ve never had any sex? It is as if someone who has never been to a football match now decides which team
he will support. With me it is all looking, not doing, though the looking, I know, is always at my own sex. It is a fate, too, a destiny, and one, it seems to me, that rules out any possibility of happiness, which I think of not as a mood that comes and goes, but as a goal, a place one arrives at … or in my case, not.

  The problem, it seems to me then, is less an emotional than a mathematical one. If, as the papers sometimes say (and they say very little at this time), one in ten men are homosexual; this means that the odds against one meeting, falling for Mr Right, are ten times greater than if it’s Miss Right one is looking for. And the chances of Mr Right falling for me in return make the odds against it astronomical. I see it all in terms of love and romantic passion, the thought of sex with the loved one scarcely figuring – and the thought of sex with anyone but the loved one not figuring at all. Had it done so, I might have come to my senses – and that phrase exactly describes it – much sooner. Where sex is concerned, what I find hard to believe is that two people, boy and girl, or boy and boy (girl and girl never occurs to me), can ever be of one mind. That one might desire the other, that I understand since it’s my permanent state of mind, from fifteen onwards. But that that feeling might be returned, let alone acted upon, is beyond my comprehension. The same sex, the other sex … whatever alterations are made to the parts, the equation seems to me impossible. How can the desire of one person intersect with the desire of another? And produce the line, however long, they will never intersect; human beings are parallels, never meeting, distinct, separate, each one moated and fortified, on and on to infinity. It’s this sense of impossibility that gives me, as knowing and lascivious as any other boy of that age, a seeming innocence. Because I do not believe sex can happen, I seldom notice when it does, and some of this incredulity has stayed with me all my life.

  Fervently Christian though I am, it never occurs to me to think that my feelings are wrong, still less perverse, even though I am not at this time the least bit open-minded but illiberal and censorious rather. But how can a state of mind or heart that so transforms the world and vivifies it and makes each day count, painful though it is while filling me with melancholy and longing, how can this be other than good? And though there is no one in whom I can easily confide, I know instinctively that these unrequited affections, a succession of which will see me through my teens and, on and off, twenty years or so after, are the only education worth having. It isn’t an education which I would have elected to undergo, but nor do I wish it away, then or now.