1894
On my first morning Taylor explained that to begin with I’d just practise with him or the other boys every morning, then rest for an hour or so to get my strength back, and then spend the night entertaining the gentlemen who visited. He said they always did it that way when a new boy arrived. I didn’t much like the idea of having to suck him again, nor did I imagine there to be much more to it than what I already knew, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Taylor has all sorts of implements and lotions for giving and receiving pleasure, and over the next few weeks he taught me how to use them all with absolute expertise. He made good whores of us, Taylor did. He calls it studying, what we did in the mornings. Well, I say mornings – we were never up much before midday, truth be told.
I never knew there was so much to learn about the art of love. Taylor taught me every trick of the trade in the weeks after I arrived. He has a series of brass cocks of bigger and bigger sizes. We started on the smallest and worked our way up to the largest, which he has nicknamed Moby-Dick. It’s the size of a blacksmith’s forearm, but it didn’t take long before I was able to wriggle my way onto its oiled girth without so much as wincing. As for taking it in the mouth, though, I never got beyond the ten inches of solid brass he called Priapus. Taylor brags about one boy he tutored who managed to swallow Moby-Dick all the way to the base, though none of us believes him. Taylor dabs his eye as he tells us the story, swearing it’s no word of a lie.
‘And then the ungrateful little cunt ran off with a priest!’
You could say he takes his work too seriously. ‘Knowing how to suck cock properly, may I remind you,’ he always says, ‘is a very useful skill to have. It’s gotten me out of many a fuckin’ scrape, that’s for sure.’
Taylor hasn’t just taught me the pleasurable but the practical too, like how to milk a man’s cock to see if he’s got the glim before you let it anywhere near you, though that’s hardly failsafe. When Ackerboy came down with it recently Taylor made him drink some rank-smelling concoction made out of gin and chicory and God alone knows what else three times a day for five days on the trot, and demoted him to strictly non-sexual duties for the duration. Taylor told us that some people claimed fucking a virgin would cure you, though he’s never seen proof of it and besides, as he said, slurping on his gin, ‘Where the fuck would you find a virgin in this city?’ He showed me how to wash out my arse with a funnel and a bucket of water so I’m clean and shitless and ready to be fucked. He says he wants us to provide something the gents can get nowhere else.
‘You’re the élite, you are,’ he tells us every evening before we start work. ‘You are the crown jewels of Christendom. Those syphilitic she-skirts down the Dilly don’t know a dog’s arse about giving pleasure, not like you boys. Never forget, my dears, that you are angels dressed as handsome devils. Now bugger off and earn your keep!’
And I found that it wasn’t so bad. Despite the stench of them they aren’t bad men, on the whole. Just hardened and nervous and often very grateful for the little pleasure we give them.
I spent yesterday morning with a young French aristocrat who visits us every time he’s in London. He only ever wants to sit and masturbate while watching two rats tear each other to pieces in front of him. He sends a telegram in advance so we can catch the rats, though there’s never any shortage of them in this city. And we have to keep them separate and starving until his arrival so that they are hungry enough to tear each other’s throats out when thrown together. This Frog gets so excited he squeals like a pig as he comes. And it goes everywhere.
Then, in the afternoon, I met a regular swell on a certain platform at St Pancras station and together we boarded a train. It’s the same every time. We have to have a carriage all to ourselves and I am not to speak at all during the journey. All he wants me to do is to sit opposite him and at a certain point in the journey I have to lean across and draw a line on his cheek with the piece of blue chalk he handed to me before we boarded the train. At this point he ejaculates with a slight gasp and twitch, and then we continue in silence until the next stop. I get out and leave him in the carriage and hop on the next train back to London.
When I got back I hardly had time to rest before another regular turned up. This gent likes to take me out to Epping Forest by horse-drawn carriage and once we’ve found a secluded patch I strip down to my birthday suit and just run around as he watches me. After he has spent I get dressed and we climb back into the carriage and return to the city. One of my most regular visitors – a peer of the realm, no less – arrives every night at the stroke of seven without fail, barring Christmas Day. All he wants me to do is to stand naked before him with my backside a foot away from his face. It was a bit strange at first but I’m used to it now.
‘I want to breathe you,’ he whispers, frigging away. ‘How I love the smell of you.’ He never lays a finger on me. He simply kneels there making little sniffing sounds, followed by tiny gasps, as if he can only breathe this way, gasping those words over and over. ‘I love the smell of you. I love the smell of you.’ I let slip a fart once by mistake (I couldn’t help it) and I thought he would be cross. But instead he came straight away, most violently across the backs of my legs, making more noise than ever. So that became a regular occurrence, the farting. I was learning.
I made the mistake recently of saying that he could touch me if it pleased him to and he was most offended. He said, ‘Good lord, no. I am far too ugly ever to touch such a thing of beauty.’ He said that he would be certain to adulterate my beauty immediately should his hand touch my flesh and that he was worried lest even his breath got too close to the perfection of me and threatened to sully it.
I’ve been here eighteen months now and, believe me, I reckon I’ve just about seen it all.
The other boys who live here are all a year or two older than me and all beautiful and corrupt as pirates. There’s Charlie Carter, alias Lottie. He hails from the East End, like myself, Stepney or somewhere like that, though I think from his voice that he’s had some schooling. He’s blond and pink, a rosy glow to his white, white skin that gets pinker with shame – though he never truly shows any, if I’m honest with you. His hair is white as an angel’s, his body hairless as marble; and the end of his cock is as red as his nipples.
And there’s Sidney Acker, alias Ackerboy, a South London lad with raven-black hair and eyes like jet, the left one a touch lazy, giving him the most charming squint. He has the biggest and most impressive yard out of all of us all. I took a shine to him straight away, bewitched by his sleepy black eyes and their impossibly long lashes. He’s known as Ackerboy on account of him being the most popular with the swells and making Taylor the most ackers.
Then there’s Walter Flowers, alias Princess Pea, who is from up north, Manchester way, and who always makes us laugh with the way he talks and the phrases he has. It’s like another language at times, blunt and crude and fuckin’ funny. I never knew him to take anything seriously, always laughing and cracking jokes and making us roar.
Finally, there’s John Maynard, alias Johnnycakes, a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Yank, with a face like the sun and a voice like buttered sunbeams. He tells us such stories of New York that I have a dream to visit the place some day.
Taylor himself likes the men well enough and will trawl Hyde Park at nightfall in search of cock. He’s spent many a night in the cells in Marble Arch after being caught in the bushes sucking some guardsman. He is partial to a bit of uniform, the guards especially. He claims to have spent his youth in the Royal Fusiliers, but it’s hard to believe, him being so womanly. He also claims his father was a rich cocoa manufacturer who died when he was twelve and left him a fortune that he frittered away. He spends hours hanging round Albert Gate, or will tramp across town to a particular barracks, his favourite being South Kensington. He’ll travel miles, for sure, and will on occasion drag them back – all the Queen’s men. And then he gets them to thrash nine bells out of him. His particular taste is for pain, which
is foreign to me, although I can do it for a price.
I never go in for that malarkey unless I have to, preferring a quick frig or maybe a suck, but most of the gents do insist on putting it in me, either their fingers or their tongues or their pricks. And we get all sorts of pricks in here, bankers, peers, lords, members of parliament, members of the National Liberal Club. They all of them pay us frequent visits. Royalty, once or twice, even. We’re popular, we are and no mistake. It’s the life of Riley compared to what I was used to. I consider myself truly lucky – one of the blessed, as Taylor himself promised.
And Taylor makes a small fortune out of us here. We work long hours, though truth be told it never really feels like work. It’s just like one long party. The sex is mostly boring after doing it for this long, but I fuckin’ love the rides in Hyde Park, high tea at the Ritz, champagne at the Café Royal. I take my ma the flowers that gents offer me, and the little trinkets and gifts, and she loves them. Once a week I go back home to hand over my wages. I’m able to give her much more now, lying about more and more promotion at the Post Office. She’s so proud of me I haven’t the heart to tell her the truth. What good would it do, anyhow? Things at home are still the same. Pa’s drinking more than ever. It breaks my heart to leave. Making my way back to Taylor’s always feels like travelling into another country.
Taylor was in a right flap when I got back from visiting Ma this afternoon, telling me to make sure I looked my best, saying that we were going somewhere special to meet someone special. ‘Make yourself pretty,’ he said. ‘Mr Wilde likes nice, clean boys.’ I had no idea who he was going on about, but I must’ve done something right ’cos since I came downstairs after a scrub and decked out in my best suit, hair brushed and parted, he hasn’t stopped beaming and pinching my cheeks, his pupils the size of guineas. ‘Beautiful’, he keeps saying as we climb into the cab, me and him and Charlie, ‘bloomin’ beautiful! Mr Wilde’s gonna fuckin’ love you!’
I’ve never seen him so excited.
1954
I am a man of few friends. Until recently I worked as a commercial artist for a moderately successful advertising company. I left six months ago, to become an artist. Or at least, to find out if I am one, if I can become one, if I have anything to say. I remember sitting in my father’s library as a small boy and poring over volumes of Hellenic statuary. Their eroticism was potent to me. I had seen men naked at swim, and relished the furtive sight, but the poetry of the marble was electric. I first masturbated over a photograph of a sculpture of Hercules and Antaeus. Looking at art has always, for me, been a source of profound pleasure. Now, of course, you can buy these wonderful Physique magazines full of delightful photographs of young men, but I still prefer the paintings and sketches that first awakened lust within me.
One day, when I was about five, I took a sheet of paper and a pencil and I tried copying a sketch by Leonardo. I produced an appalling scribble, of course. But I started again, and over time, over many weeks, something emerged. I did it till I could copy images without looking at the original, by simply concentrating on a point of light that seemed to shine like a star on the tip of the pencil, a spark created by its contact with the paper. I began to spend all my free time sketching, or looking at art books from the library – and, when I was old enough, visiting galleries and museums. It felt like living in another world, looking at art, and it still does, sometimes, though I have stopped going quite so often, as I travel to the West End far less frequently now that I don’t work there.
But the life that art creates is not the same as the life that creates art. As I continued to draw more and more, I began to see the world around me in a completely different way. Home for the summer holidays, I would go for a walk in the streets where we lived and see billowing sheets of bright light hanging out like God’s laundry from the sky. There would be colours that danced in the treetops like angels on fire. Above my head, a cupola of birds flocked across my field of vision like a veil, and was gone. Rainbows snaked their way out of houses and chased each other down the road like otters playing in the shallows of a sunlit stream.
I am still not sure if such a confession makes me an artist or a madman, or whether this question itself might indeed be the answer I seek. How can you ask other people if they see the world the way you do? For how can you risk their saying no? We all accept without question – on faith – that the way we see the world is the way it is, the way other people see it, a truth or a fact that need not be corroborated. As Pascal said of religious faith, ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’
My parents died in quick succession last year. My mother was one of those women who should never really have had a family but, given the limited social horizons for single women at the time, undoubtedly felt it her duty to marry and breed. I didn’t perceive bitterness so much, because she did, after all, achieve a great deal with her public life, but I experienced her distance and exhaustion a great deal of the time. She was, for the first part of her career, a Justice of the Peace, later to become Mayoress of the Borough of Camden. We lived on Camden Road, in the house in which I was born and raised. She did, to her credit, refuse to hand me over to a nanny, and insisted on balancing her busy public life with her duties as a mother – when I was home from boarding school, that is. Many a time I would see her clambering out of the Rolls-Royce that had driven her to and from some council meeting, laden down with shopping she had stopped off to buy, having made the chauffeur wait outside the local grocer’s. It never occurred to her that the neighbours might view this as an act of ostentation, as showing off. It only struck me when I was much older and I overheard some gossip in the very shop at which she would stop in her ‘fancy mayoress’s car’. She was completely indifferent to the trappings of social status, a true socialist at heart. On her return from a dinner party at Buckingham Palace her only comment was, ‘The food does come up cold on those gold plates.’ She was, by any standards, a remarkable woman, and it is one of my deepest regrets that I never really knew her. She came from a family of staunch republicans. I remember one Christmas party when Uncle Bruno spat into the fire while declaiming against the King. Since he had just taken a swig of the whisky he’d been supping for hours, the flames flared up in a sudden heated rush, lifting the row of Christmas cards that hung on a string above, like laundry in a swift breeze. My mother had an unshakeable and stoic work ethic, and, while she accepted my artistic bent, she nevertheless insisted it be channelled into a professional capacity. Not for her son the bohemian life of the artist: I would have a trade and graft for a living.
Father is more difficult to conjure. Like a phantom, he defies contour, wavering between being and becoming. A man in outline only. He was a placid, almost invisible man, who went along with his life without complaint. Mother and he spent little time together. He was a tailor by trade, running the family business as his father had before him, and his grandfather before that. He did very well although he wasn’t quite Savile Row. As a child I was always immaculately dressed in suits that he, or more likely one of his underlings, had made. He was a man devoid of energy, a man from whom all enthusiasm or sign of life had been removed, drained gradually, over years, in slow and steady drips. Nothing seemed to cheer him, nothing ever amused him. I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. He would sit and read the newspaper for hours on end, tutting to himself intermittently like a clock slowly ticking. If he had dreams or interests, I’ve no idea what they were. He had no hobbies that I was aware of, unless you can call criticising everyone and everything you come across a hobby. I suppose it passed the time for him.
I can recall only two occasions when the topic of our conversation was at all intimate, though I use the term with vast reservations, as you shall see. The first time was the occasion on which he imparted to me the facts of life. I was ten or eleven, and it must have been one of the school holidays, during which I would return home to that silent and cheerless place in which my parents lived. On this particular occasion,
Father was watching out of the drawing room window, which gave out onto our modest lawn. I was sitting reading, or most probably drawing. He called me over, by name, and I ran to his side, pleased to be receiving his attention. It was rare indeed for him to acknowledge my presence at all. He pointed out of the window and I followed the direction of his finger. On the lawn outside were two of our dogs copulating, though at the time I hardly knew what they were doing and the scene merely struck me as humorous and shameful. I was immediately disturbed, wanting desperately to laugh, though sensing I shouldn’t. ‘If you do that to a woman, you’ll get her pregnant and have to marry her. You would do well to remember that,’ he said, in a tone that conveyed unequivocally that that was to be his one comment on the subject and the lesson was over. I returned to my chair, not knowing whether I wanted to laugh or to cry. I knew already that I had no desire whatsoever to ‘do that to a woman’, though I had already begun to fantasise about what it must be like to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.
The second occasion was nearly twenty years later, when I was approaching my thirtieth birthday. I was still living at home and had never once courted a woman. One morning over breakfast, from behind his newspaper, Father said, ‘Colin, your mother and I think it’s time you were married.’
I dutifully found a woman quiet and compliant enough to be my bride. Joan was one of the secretaries at the commercial agency where I then worked, and we’d been friends, sort of, for two years before I asked her to marry me. We had been to the cinema together, sometimes as much as once a week, and often discussed novels over lunch, exchanging books we’d particularly enjoyed. She was a handsome woman, with large, soft brown eyes and a generous smile, and she smiled often. (She said, ‘It costs nothing to smile.’) Not overly talkative, but intelligent and well read, with an irreverent sense of humour I admired. I didn’t know if she had ever considered what we were doing to be some kind of courtship, but I knew that I never had. Until my father suggested I marry, I had regarded it as no more than a simple friendship: we never approached discussing our private lives. But I realised I had never known her to go out with any other man during that period.
London Triptych Page 5