Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

Hilda apart (and by now she was well on her way to plumpness and her new school manners), sex in those days had little to do with love or affection; curiosity was the basis of it.

Roaming through the fields with a couple of my pals one day, and stopping for a pee, I saw that one of them had the other kind of prick, with skin. When we were alone I asked him to let me have a look at it.

He brought it out willingly. It seemed a very strange object, somewhat long and pale, with the skin coming right over the red knob and ending pink and pursed almost like the bud of a small flower. He let me finger it. When I rubbed it a bit for him, nothing happened. I believe I asked him if it would open and he said no.

That time of life is a curious mixture of knowingness and complete ignorance. In the summer term I played in the school cricket team, and gained a reputation as a fast bowler. We were all sitting behind the pavilion, smoking – sharing two fags between the group of us – when one of the bigger boys, Peter Adamson, a good bat, told us that he knew where babies came from. The Adamsons’ maid had told him. He said that they came from ladies’ cracks and that, before they came out, pricks had to be stuck up the crack.

The notion struck us as both repulsive and unlikely. Peter insisted that the maid had shown him how it was done, demonstrating with a finger up her own crack.

Infuriated by his persistence in such a lie – such a disturbing lie! – we seized him and beat him on the behind with his own bat!

Peter’s preposterous tale lingered in my mind. So did my interest in uncircumcised penises. When a big plump boy called William offered to show me his, I was eager. William, by his own account, ‘flapped himself’, as he called it, every night. His penis felt pulpy and peculiar, and was covered by a very thick skin, which I touched. It became erect in my grasp and he let me draw the skin back, to reveal his glistening knob brightly coloured. I wanked him for some while until he shuddered and groaned and gasped and cried ‘Faster!’ to me.

That was exciting. Although I did not greatly like William, his home was fairly near ours, and so we returned from school in the same direction. Just out of our way stood an old semi-derelict farm which the farmer had half-converted into a filling station. One of those gaunt old petrol pumps of the thirties stood there, and old broken cars, and a shiny metal sign advertising ‘Pratt’s High Test’ – a brand of petrol. William got me into the back of these premises through a hole in the hedge, and we there investigated each other.

I did not much like his holding my penis. But I had the notion, before his grew too large, of inserting my knob under his foreskin. In this unusual position we proceeded to wank ourselves off. It excited me as much as it did William. Eventually he broke loose, rubbing himself briskly and crying ‘Here it comes!’ I was mystified, and not unmoved, by my first glimpse of anyone undergoing orgasm.

No sense existed then of urgency, or of the need to follow up one thing with another, such as one feels as an adult. The phenomena of life were isolated. There were so many phenomena; it had to be left to chance to see which connected to which.

For all that, my interest in sex was growing. I confided in neither Nelson nor Ann about my activities with William, perhaps because they disturbed me too much. It was the contortions he went into, as well as the mystery of that extra piece of skin. He rubbed me also, on two occasions – enjoyable for me, but he was annoyed that ‘nothing happened’ to me, and after the second occasion I would not let him do it again, though I continued to manipulate his foreskin whenever the idea entered our heads. Each time he went shuddering off into climaxes I could not understand.

If this sounds inconclusive it was inconclusive in a deeper sense. I knew from my limited experience that sex was pleasurable; I could not know that it was more pleasurable than I had experienced. Of orgasms, I comprehended nothing. William’s pleasurable writhings had no meaning; perhaps I regarded them as a kind of affectation on his part, a facet of his rather unpleasing character.

This record is predominantly sexual in its emphasis. In my life, and more especially in my childhood, it was not so. This truth, while it affects every page, cannot be repeated on every page.

Ann’s interest in sexual organs was as great as mine. She had not abandoned her plan for introducing her nasty school friend to our sessions.

Rosemary’s nastiness lay mainly in the eye of the beholder. She wore plaits with ribbons in and was somewhat pallid, but that was the extent of what Nelson and I had against her. At this period I was still undergoing my ‘girls are soppy’ phase. (Ann, as a sister, did not come within the girl category.)

Because her hold over me was firmer than her hold over Nelson, Ann managed to get me alone with her and Rosemary in her bedroom.

‘Show Rosemary your cock,’ she said. There was a lack of finesse in those days!

I brought it out, cradling it protectively in my open palm while the girls inspected it. Rosemary was an only child; she had probably never seen anything like it before. Although I was happy to assist in her education, it was irritating to submit to investigation. The two girls had been colouring some pictures. With a crayon, Rosemary prodded my prick, trying to make it turn over.

‘I’ll show you how to work it. Watch me make it grow big!’ Ann said. Kneeling down by me, she cradled and stroked my prick as if it were one of her guinea pigs. She whispered to it encouragingly, tickling and rubbing it underneath, enticing it, while Rosemary awaited the miracle. Under her stony stare, the pet would not come to life, and I slid it back into my trousers.

Only a few days after, Rosemary was playing in the house when I came home. I ran up to my bedroom to dodge her. She followed me in and said, ‘Can I get it out?’

‘Get what out?’

‘You know – your thing. Your little plonk. Please!’

‘You don’t like it,’ I said, sulkily.

‘I do like it. Really!’

‘I suppose you can, then.’ I wasn’t keen for her to do so, but it seemed uncivil to refuse. The parents had been careful to instil rules of hospitality in us.

I stood there while she clumsily unbuttoned my flies, looking down at her head and her plaits. She had a neat white parting, unexpectedly pleasing. Amateurishly, she felt in my trousers, fumbled gently to grope her way into my pants. Sensing her approach, my prick flipped up to attention.

She drew it forth. ‘It’s awfully big today!’

Admiringly, she traced round the rim of the glans penis with a finger.

‘You can rub it if you like,’ I said loftily. I showed her how to do it. She started, but Ann called her, and she ran away.

When she had gone I remembered how her parting had looked, and wished I had asked her to show me her crack. It never occurred to me to ask her another time.

Life went on. Nelson was now working hard for exams. He wore spectacles and was more remote from us. For all that, our wanking sessions were still held intermittently, more secretively; Nelson began to prefer Ann not to attend. He said it was ‘bad for her’.

He crept into my bedroom one morning and said, ‘Horace, boy, I can come!’ Opening his pyjamas, he showed me his penis, hanging large and limp; he had just masturbated. Above the root of it, downy hair was growing: not much of it, but decidedly hair! I had heard that what we then called spunk came out of the ends of full-grown penises.

‘Show me!’ I said. He began rubbing his organ, pressing it back and forth with his fingers until it struggled into an erect position. Then I took over from him, kneeling up on the bed to get at it properly.