The afternoon we met up, everyone was chatting, although as usual I was the quiet one of the group. Before then I had never seen the Monty Python film Life of Brian, but one of Tom’s friends put on the video and I found it utterly hilarious. Perhaps fuelled by the ‘puff’ we were all smoking I was in pain from laughing so much and I was getting on really well with Tom’s friend, which didn’t go down too well with him. The next time I saw him he left me in no doubt that, although he was again with a group of friends, I was the one in whom he was interested. I’m sure we must have had our first kiss that night, although I can remember very little about the evening because the guys took us to a pub and got me completely and utterly drunk. They were buying me gin and I just couldn’t handle spirits like that. It was mortifying to go home with Tom and to have his mother find me pissed out of my mind. There was no way I could go home in that state and so she let me stay the night. It was my first night in my new boyfriend’s house but any idea of naughty games was out of the question. I actually spent the entire night throwing up in their toilet and being looked after by his mother. By morning I just wanted to die.
It’s an ill wind, however, that blows nobody good and there was to be a happy outcome from my out-of-character night of drunken behaviour. Tom’s mum had telephoned my grandmother to explain that I wasn’t really well enough to go home and that she was happy for me to stay in their spare bedroom. The next morning she drove me home and met my nan who was impressed by the fact she had a car and was totally reassured that I had been safe for the night. They swapped telephone numbers and Tom’s mum said I would always be welcome to stay over at their house in the future. I was deeply ashamed and embarrassed by what had happened but it did mean that forever after that I could tell my grandparents I was staying at Tom’s house and they believed me every time.
So Tom became my first love and we started exclusively dating each other. He went to the local all boys’ school and I was at the girls’ equivalent, so we took to travelling home on the bus together several nights a week and then mostly just hanging out in his room. I fancied him from the start and we started having sex almost immediately. The first time with him was in his own bed at his house while his mum was out at work. His grandmother lived with the family and she was in the house at the time but, luckily for us, was a bit deaf. For the first time I really enjoyed the sex and it became important and fun for me. From then onwards there was no holding us back.
I would see Tom several times a week and at weekends, sometimes staying the night and sometimes not. I had no worries about getting pregnant because I had been prescribed the pill a year earlier, not as a contraceptive, but as a treatment for my acne. It was a really effective acne cure and I ended up being prescribed three-monthly contraceptive injections for the same reason. They stopped my periods completely as well as removing the fear of an unwanted baby. With that freedom, a boy I really fancied and a bed where we could have plenty of privacy, I became something of a sex maniac. I could hardly keep my hands off of Tom’s body and I was usually the instigator when we were going to have sex; my sex drive seemed to be extremely high because I liked him so much. As far as I can remember I did have orgasms through masturbation before I met Tom, but certainly not with any other men. Now I found I could come if I rode on top of him, although no other position worked in the same way for me. As a result I was always trying to arouse him so that I could, literally, jump on top of him in bed. It was a long time later that I realised that he was not the best-endowed man on the block, but in my relative innocence size truly didn’t matter to me at that age. He was large enough to make me happy.
Even though I was the one doing the jumping, Tom enjoyed the sex just as much as I did. He was younger than me and I was also his first regular girlfriend. He always claimed that he wasn’t a virgin when he met me but I think he was lying; I certainly told a few white lies of my own, assuring him that I had only ever had sex with one man before. I thought the truth of several different partners, including the two men who shared my virginity between them, might be too much for him to take. Given the regularity of our sex it’s not surprising that we started to explore our own desires more and more and I was soon leading Tom into sexual areas that had always interested me.
Me being the one on top was our regular sexual position and it seemed only natural to pin his arms back against the bed as I rode him. It excited me enormously and he certainly didn’t object. Then, because I was always the one taking the lead, I tied his hands to the bedhead. Since we both had started out wearing our school uniforms before various items were discarded as superfluous to requirements, it seemed only natural to use both our school ties as my very first pieces of bondage equipment. In time I got hold of some rope and I did try tying him up properly to the bed; looking back now I can see what a terrible bondage job I did, but we both enjoyed it at the time. I think that Tom was a little like a rabbit caught in the headlights: fascinated by what was rushing towards him and unable to move away. From there we graduated onto other domination experiments, always with me in charge of proceedings. One evening I brought some ice into the bedroom, blindfolded him and started rubbing it over his sensitive parts. He was going crazy underneath me, half enjoying the experience and half hating it. I just thought it was so interesting that he could still feel horny and excited despite the discomfort I was causing. It was perhaps the first time that I realised that I hugely enjoyed having power over another helpless human being. It’s a power I’ve enjoyed ever since; a power to be used responsibly and, at times, tempered by kindness but it is a highly addictive feeling I love to this day. I suspected even then that I was a step ahead of my peers in my sexual activities but never felt guilty about it. They probably weren’t tying their boyfriends to the bed but to me it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
As time went by, Tom and I grew bolder in arranging for me to stay the night in his bed. As far as my grandparents were concerned, Tom’s mum was happy for me to stay over at her house in the spare room; as far as Tom’s mother was concerned I was leaving most evenings to go home. The truth was that we were busily deceiving both of them. At the end of the evening I would say goodbye to Tom’s family and he would then offer to walk me to the nearby bus stop. We knew that while we were out the whole family would go off to bed, making it easy for him to sneak me back into the house and upstairs to his bedroom. They were having work done to the house and so for a long while there was scaffolding around the building. That made it even easier for me to shimmy up the scaffold poles after I had supposedly left to go home and climb back in through the bedroom window. In the morning, I would simply leave by the same route whilst everyone was getting up and then a few minutes later turn up at the door to ‘visit’ Tom again. ‘Morning, sleep well? Good to see you.’
In the end of course, I got caught out. I was so tired one morning that I let Tom go off to school on his own whilst I stayed put in his bed. I thought I had locked the door but his mother caught me out. It didn’t go down too well to find me asleep in her son’s bed, but the relationship had lasted for so long by then that she hardly made any fuss. The love affair with Tom had led to a temporary truce in my fights with my grandparents. But 18 months down the line, as with many first loves, cracks were starting to appear in our relationship. The end was nigh and the end of one relationship was to rekindle all of the problems in the relationship with my own family.
The real war of independence was about to break out at home, and it was not going to end well.
CHAPTER 12
GOING OFF THE RAILS
I knew Tom was lying when he told me he’d had a quiet weekend at home. I’d already heard that he and his mates had been to a local club and, in a way which was starting to typify our friendship, he hadn’t wanted to take me along. He always said that having me with him on a night out meant that he couldn’t ‘relax’ in the same way as if he was on his own. As far as I knew, Tom was not being unfaithful to me but a clear pattern was emerging. It seemed
that I was good enough for him to use for sex during the week but at the weekends he wanted to go clubbing with his mates – a routine that usually involved varying degrees of drug-taking. I felt hurt and rejected. As I rather crudely put it to one of my friends: ‘I’m alright for fucking but not to be seen on his arm.’ We were going out together less and less and, although our sex life remained strong, we were obviously nearing the end. Having caught him out in one blatant lie I was happy to go along with a girlfriend when she suggested our own Saturday night out at my old haunt of the Hammersmith Palais. Earlier in my teens I had been ‘Miss Goody Two-shoes’ when it came to men and late-night clubs. This time I was in the mood to be naughty.
The guy who chatted to me in the club that night was tall, dark-haired, handsome and well-dressed. As I later learned, he had a ‘thing’ for designer label clothes, although, then and now, that is the last thing in the world likely to impress me. Having little money myself for most of my childhood, I couldn’t understand the appeal of wasting £50 and upwards on a T-shirt. He was about my own age, a little older than my neglectful boyfriend, and things soon got a little out of hand as we danced. After a few more drinks I ended up doing something I’d never done before or since: I had drunken sex with him in a toilet cubicle. It was not the most memorable sex of my life and all I can really remember is people laughing, whooping and hollering encouragement outside the door. It made quite a commotion until suddenly the bouncers cottoned on that something untoward was underway and duly kicked us out of the club. It was not quite a one-night stand; I did see him a few more times but the affair came to a crashing halt one evening when, out of the blue, he decided to bite my bum in bed. It was not a gentle love-bite; this was a full-blown bite on my arse-cheeks that had me yelling in pain. It was the end of a not-so-beautiful friendship.
In the meantime, Tom and I had endured a painful true-confessions evening when he admitted various lies to me and I came clean about my nightclub fling. I hadn’t intended to hurt him so much but I am both a terrible liar and terrible at keeping secrets from anyone. It was a little selfish, I know, but if I have a guilty conscience then I always have to ease it by telling the truth. I felt so hard done by because of the way he had refused to take me out but I felt bad because he just looked destroyed from the moment the words left my mouth. Understandably, he said he couldn’t be with me anymore and although we tried to struggle on together for a while, it was clearly the end of our relationship. I was sorry to lose him but such childhood romances do have their natural time span and this one’s time had come.
There was a bittersweet postscript to my long friendship with Tom. Despite our later problems he had been my first love and the first man to awaken my sexual desires. He had helped shape the fetish and domination interests which have lasted throughout my life. I’d had boyfriends after him, but nobody special and then, more than three years later, I heard he had asked a friend how I was. I couldn’t resist giving him a call. The result was a second, six-week-long, fling of ‘sex-with-your-ex’ which was exciting and fun. With new experiences under my belt I also realised that he was not the best-endowed man in the world and that his cock, which once had been the centre of my world, was distinctly smaller than others I had known. Of course, being the kind lady that I am, I kept that opinion very much to myself and, to be fair to him, the size of his penis didn’t stop me wanting to jump all over him again. We had a lot of conversation to catch up on and I felt our renewed friendship was worthwhile and strong. It was not, however to last.
Our second-time around relationship came to an unhappy halt on a Valentine’s Day when Tom turned up at my door armed with the requisite chocolates and flowers. As the evening wore on a minor disagreement suddenly turned into a serious row and he announced that he no longer wanted to see me. The shock and my anger made me lose my normal ladylike demeanour: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘You’ve brought me Valentine flowers, manufactured a row from a tiny problem and then you tell me you don’t want to be with me any longer. What the fuck is this about?’
A sudden explanation entered my mind: ‘Is this just getting back at me for what fucking happened three years ago? Did I really hurt you that much? Is that what this is?’ Despite Tom’s persistent denials, I still found it hard to believe that a man could arrive at my door with chocolates and flowers and split up with me immediately afterwards because of the smallest of disagreements. It felt messed-up and wrong and the rejection upset me deeply. We never spoke again.
My first break-up with Tom was to have ramifications far beyond the temporary heartbreak and loss of my first serious boyfriend. For a couple of years my relationship with my grandparents had been easier because of my friendship with a boy they had liked, a boy from what they believed to have been a respectable family. My grandmother in particular had stopped worrying about me being out late or not letting her know where I had been because she assumed that I was in the ‘in locus parentis’ care of Tom’s mother. The irony is that while she believed my moral welfare was being safeguarded by Tom’s mum, I was spending entire nights introducing her son to my very own brand of kinky and dominant sex.
Once Tom was off the scene, however, family relationships spiralled rapidly downhill. Life at home with my grandparents turned into a nightmare for all of us. Many years later, some years before they died, I apologised to them with all my heart for the heartache I had caused them as a teenager. I had never stopped loving them and had always understood that they loved me deeply. They in turn apologised for the sometimes clumsy way they had tried to raise a rebellious granddaughter, both of us recognising that none of us had been trying to hurt the other; it was just a situation tailor-made for confrontation. I like to think that by then we had both come to terms with what had happened in my teenage years. I loved them then and still to this day miss them with all of my heart.
The truth is that I never set out to be naughty but, in my search for teenage independence, I hit the brick wall of a serious generation gap. My grandparents’ expectations of what I should and should not be doing were wildly outdated when compared to those of my peers. Speaking now to my birth-mother, long after the deaths both of my grandparents, she admits how poorly equipped they were to handle the situation. I was nothing like an angel, but many of our rows at the time sprang from their complete lack of understanding that teenagers are hard-wired to push against the barriers as they grow older.
My granddad tried to stay out of most of our confrontations but my grandmother and I had a lot of screaming rows, like mega-screaming rows, pretty much always over me not being home. I used to go to school in the week, but then at the weekend I would go out clubbing. And I was working, I had a job in a chemists and I would go out on a Saturday night and then come home on the Sunday. If I said to my grandmother, ‘Oh, I am going to be out till late tonight,’ she would have one stock reaction: ‘Where are you going to be, who are you seeing, where is the phone number? I need to ring them.’
‘No, no, no you are not embarrassing me like that… and ringing everybody all the time, Sorry. And no, I’m not telling you where I’ll be because I’m not having you turn up there.’
By this time I’d passed my sixteenth birthday but was still being told that I had to obey a 7pm curfew each night. I was a stubborn young woman and the more they tried to be strict, the more they tried to interfere in my life, the more stubborn I became. One constant bone of contention was the privacy I could expect in the house. My grandmother would tell me she did not want me ‘out walking the streets’, but then would deny my privacy at home. It was impossible to have a private phone call without them overhearing or asking who I was speaking to and if I brought somebody home, she would constantly walk into my room.
‘You are so over the top,’ I would say. ‘Every five minutes I get, do you want a cup of tea? Do you want this or do you want that? If I want a cup of tea I’ll come down and get one, or ask you. You’re using just use any excuse possible to get into my room and invade my pri
vacy. I’m here, sitting in the house, you know where I am, and you’re still on my case.’
Quite often when we had screaming rows they would end with my stomping out of the house and slamming the door, or I would just stay upstairs and stick my music up full blast, just to piss them off. I know it was bad behaviour but it was born from frustration, total frustration. A lot of the time I wasn’t even doing anything particularly naughty. Sometimes it would be nothing other than hanging around in the local park with friends but I would still get the third-degree when I got home. I no longer had a boyfriend and although I was seeing guys occasionally, I was always immensely careful not to get pregnant. There were odd occasions, few and far between, when like all teenagers, I would get horribly drunk with friends, but because I had very little money, drinking and drugs didn’t figure much in my life. Yet nothing I could say would persuade my grandmother to cut me any slack.
There were times when my birth-mother would try to act as a peacemaker and tell me to behave. I’m sure that my grandmother would plead for her help because after some particularly horrendous argument, Ellen would come on the phone to talk to me. She would frequently lay a guilt trip on me in an effort to change my attitude: ‘Your grandparents aren’t going to be here forever; you have to try and get along with them. They are doing the best they can, you know, they are a different generation, you have to understand that one day they will be gone and you will feel bad for not getting on with them.’ It was all very well her coming the heavy parent over the phone; it might have had more effect had she been there in person.
Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 8