Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Our high jinks in the dorm were getting rather rowdy. Miss Willis’s voice called up from the bottom of the stair-well to ask what on earth was going on. Roger froze in the middle of a thrust, just when my pioneering arm was investigating the uncharted territory between Julian’s soft legs, and called out that everything was fine. ‘It’s just boyish high spirits, Miss Willis,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing I can’t control.’

Then he said, more quietly, ‘Settle down, everyone — play-time over,’ but he was merciful enough to leave me snuggling against Julian.

‘Come on,’ said Julian. ‘You spend so much of your time mothering us and feeding us, I think it’s about time I gave you a cuddle. Come here, my sweet baby, come to Mummy! Let Mummy make a fuss!’ He took me in his arms and kissed me, and moved me about quite a lot with those strong arms, making sure not to rest any weight against me.

Soon we heard Biggie and Gillie setting off up the stairs to tuck us in and turn the lights out. The boys who had strayed in from elsewhere scattered to their proper dorms. Roger scampered over to pick me up and carry me back to my bed. There was a flurry of sheet-straightening and tucking in of blankets.

There was no adventure story after lights-out that night. It would have been an anti-climax. I stayed awake for a long time, with my brain fully engaged in the sifting of new information. I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought I had managed to locate Julian’s penis, in the last half-second before Miss Willis called out and Roger Stott froze. If I had, then my ideas about the world would have to be revised one more time. The dwindling-bud theory of sexual development would have to be abandoned. It wouldn’t wash.

While I waited for sleep I imagined that there would be many more exploring times to come. My expedition into the interior of the manly groin was only just under way. I understood, though, that conditions would never again be so favourable to the project. Just that one time, everyone had lent a hand with my homework. With a lot of help, I now had my mental Julian flicker book bound and safely shelved.

I know there’s a theory that experience works by contrast — without the lows you wouldn’t enjoy the highs. By that logic Judy Brisby was necessary for me fully to appreciate that night in the Blue Dorm with Roger and Julian, with a whole innocently whooping crowd helping me to stuff my face with forbidden fruit. I disagree. Riding the rollercoaster of Julian’s body was a peak independent of any trough. It was mystically separate, and strangely, for that reason, it didn’t blot out my awareness of Judy Brisby, her cruelty lurking in the institution like dry rot that undermines everything, a fruiting body hidden in the walls.

Bloody Assizes

It would have been some sort of fitting end to that evening if Raeburn had burst in and walloped us all. In fact it was a few nights later that the wrath of the Board of Education was visited on the Blue Dorm. I suppose we had been making a ruckus, and we’d ignored Miss Willis when she shouted up the stairs, ‘Quiet in the Blue Dorm!’ We would simmer down for about a minute and then start up again. We forced her to take more drastic action. ‘Now you’ll be sorry!’ she shouted up the stairs again, ‘I’m going to report you!’ We knew what this meant. There might be two co-principals but only one used physical means of discipline. She was threatening to summon Old Rabies and unleash the B of E.

Miss Willis didn’t really approve of physical punishment, and usually she was just bluffing, but this time she made good on her threats. The next thing we heard was the same voice shouting, ‘Now Mr

Raeburn is coming to give you little rowdies “What for”!!’ Raeburn came lurching into the dorm and got to work walloping bottoms. He turned the lights on and told us all to roll over onto our tummies. Then he went round giving a single tremendous thwack at each bedside.

I did as I was told. I could turn onto my left side but not the right, because of the way my right elbow stuck forward. Using my head to give a little more momentum I could end up on my tummy, more or less. It wasn’t comfortable, and I had a bit of panic in case I suffocated against the pillow, not being able to raise my neck fully clear of it. Still, I did it. I presented myself for punishment, wondering if I’d be able to stand up to it, or if this would be the death-blow that even Judy Brisby hadn’t dared to deliver.

Then Old Rabies was by my bed. I felt his warm hand against my buttocks through the material of my pyjamas. ‘Is that your bottom?’ he asked, without anger, almost tenderly. Under the circumstances it was a strange question. Did he have doubts about it being a bottom, or doubts about the bottom being mine?

‘Yes,’ I answered, my mouth completely dry. Thwack! went the Board of Education. The noise was terrific, and the pain was non-existent. He had given the bed a mighty blow with the B of E. Then he said sternly, ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ and moved on to the next bed and the next rowdy bottom to be given ‘What for’.

I lay there wishing I had known ahead of time that he wasn’t going to hit me. Then I could have paid proper attention to the feel of his hand against my bottom, something that I’d fantasised about for so long. As it was, I rushed through the sublime moment anticipating a dreadful one. That’s always the way with sensation. It claims to be so absolute, but everything depends on the context.

Even now I’m not sure if he hit the other boys. Perhaps none of us got a whack and no one wanted to own up, but I’m inclined to think that the Board of Education claimed some victims. There was a certain amount of blinking back tears after he had left, and also a certain amount of hatred, which is the immediate as well as the lasting product of physical punishment. So perhaps I was the only one to get a placebo beating, just as I imagine I was the only one to get a loving pat on the bottom, like a little caress from the hanging judge, right in the middle of the Bloody Assizes.

Adult essence

By this time my mind was no longer entirely a child’s, and my body was making the same pilgrimage towards maturity. My orgasms weren’t as dry as they had once been. They had begun to produce a few pearls. The adult essence didn’t make its appearance suddenly, from one day to the next, and dribbles could be dissipated. Creamier compounds could be rubbed over the hands until they disappeared. Although there were obsessive hawks in the school, none was so vigilant or well-trained as to spot minor signs like the dandruff snowflakes fluttering from a boy’s hands …

A lot of the time the fibres of my pyjama trousers simply absorbed the distillate, which turned them crisp and made the matrons frown. It’s true I collected Redoxon Effervescent 1000 mg tubes from my blood brother Trevor Burbage, Trevor the unsinkable, the human suitcase with the riding hat. Purely in the interest of science I would sometimes shut myself away with a Redoxon tube, so as to decant the seminal treasure, what little there was of it. I’d stopper it up and keep it in my pocket to see what happened to it over time. The results were not pleasing.

So there was sexual practice, in the form of these solitary adventures, and there was sexual theory, in the form of the nightly play, now inconceivably orgiastic. Apart from that single night in the Blue Dorm there was no convergence between the two.

In any given week so many cowboys and foreign visitors had played with my bosoms and emptied their testicle consommé into my ravenous vagina, that I was a little bored with it all. We had worked our way through every possible heterosexual permutation. What changed the proceedings was a troubling new presence in the audience.