Fit Intimations of sex.

This is the the third of four short stories, which should be read in the following order:-

Willy Wagstaff’s Double Whammy

An Unlikely Friendship

First Intimations of Sex

Stranger than Fiction

It was my first term at Ulverton, a public school for boys located in Northumberland, in a village of the same name, right on the Scottish border. My best friend, The Honourable Augustus Trent-Norton, or just plain Gus Trent as he was known to his schoolmates, was, like me a new boy. The two of us had been flung together in adversity as it were, when our house-captain, a quintessential, nasty piece of goods called Jamie Mackenzie, a really miserable, cane-wielding, sadistic Scott, had shredded our respective bare arses in quick succession. There was nothing exceptional about being caned on the bare, as that was the only way it was the so-called rod of justice was ever applied at Ulverton. But Gus had the misfortune to be the house-captain’s fag and as such was treated by him as a sort of whipping boy: Gus supplied a captive arse on which the house-captain could exercise his undoubted fondness for the cane whenever he wanted – which he did with frequently with considerable vigour!

It was on that occasion, when our house-captain had made me watch him shredding Gus’s arse that he and I had really got to know one another. The house-captain had caught me running in the corridor – a definite no-no at Ulverton. I was waiting my turn to be thrashed for that cardinal misdeed, whilst Jamie was applying his final artistic embellishments to Gus’s arse, for some trumped up inadequacy in his duties as fag. Well to be clear, it was actually in the lavatory, where we both had gone in an attempt to ease the post-flagellation pain raging through our respective posteriors that our friendship was born.

On the face of it, Gus and I were an unlikely pair, as our backgrounds were so totally different. He was the younger son of a peer of the realm – something I had learned only later – whilst I was the only son of a working-class owner of an ironmonger’s shop in Manchester. I had been plucked out of my working-class background by my mother, Mavis Wagstaff, a social climber if there ever was one, who, after my father had had a big win on the football pools, had decided that her only son should, henceforth, have a private education. And so at the age of eight I had been pulled out of the state school system, where, had I been asked, I would have happily remained with my friends. But I had no choice and was sent as a day-boy (my mother’s first mistake) to a local prep school and thence, aged thirteen, as a boarder to Ulverton, a public school for boys,

But fact is often stranger than fiction and in spite of our very different backgrounds, Gus and I somehow clicked and became best pals; at least, during our early years at Ulverton together that is exactly what we were: just best pals. But as the hormones started coursing through our systems, we, as adolescent boys, suddenly became aware of sex and in our final two years at the school, we had become much more to each other than just best pals.I think I can safely say, that at the tender age of only eighteen Gus and I were more or less an item. We were already copulating with each other like rabbits. You know how it is; once you have experienced the joys of an orgasm, you can never have too much of it. If the Headmaster had known of our liaison, both Gus and I would have been out on our ears. But we were discrete and never got caught in flagrante.So we both completed our time at Ulverton and left, aged nineteen, superficially squeaky clean, to the world at large. If only they had known!

Things were not made any the easier for us, as, although Gus and I were new boys together and members of the same house, Ogden’s, we shared neither the same dorm nor, indeed the same class. At Ulverton, each year’s new intake of boys was split between two first-form classes, of which fate had decreed that Gus be in the one and I in the other. But the bond , which developed between us as we sat together in the lavatory that day, each of us trying, with cold water – in vain, I might add – to ease the excruciating pain in our respective arses, was so strong and immediate that we became an inseparable pair thereafter for our entire time at the school. Outside of lessons and sleeping, we spent most of our time together. It was as if from day one we were joined at the hip. Over the years, indeed right through to the end of our final term at Ulverton together, having been regularly caught at some nefarious activity, we were often thrashed together by any one of a number of sadistic, cane-wielding zealots, including both prefects and our housemaster; and, one one awful occasion, by the Headmaster himself. I lost count of the number of times our housemaster said to us as he readied his cane to enervate our respective backsides of any feeling other then intense pain: “Not you two again; when will you ever learn?”

But during that first year of our friendship, Gus was still our hated house-captain’s fag. So, in addition to getting his arse striped along with mine for any of the illicit scrapes in which we jointly found ourselves, poor Gus had still to contend, on a one-to-one basis with his cane-happy fag-master, our reveredhouse-captain, that sadistic Scottish sod, Jamie Mackenzie. Many were the times when, in the privacy of the lavatories, I found myself comforting my best friend and attempting to ease the pain raging in his arse by the application of a little Aloe Vera cream. The only positive thing one could say about Jamie Mackenzie, was that he was a real crack with the cane. He was one of the hardest caners at Ulverton during my first year at the school; and if not absolutely the hardest caner, he was certainly the most prolific. During that first year, Poor Gus was beaten by Jamie, probably once a week, for some piffling failing in his fagging duties.

Only on one other occasion during that first year, did our house-captain once again roast my arse when he caught me not wearing a tie during the day. So it was with a joint sigh of relief, especially from Gus, whose arse, during that first year, had been embellished God knows how many times by Jamie’s cane, when the school year ended and he left Ulverton for pastures new at university. Of course, the post of house-captain is like night following day; as one incumbent leaves, so he is replaced the following year by another. But I can say that in my years at Ulverton, although we never had a house captain who did not exercise his authority to the full, we were never again lumbered with one as sadistic as Jamie Mackenzie. I did, years later, ask myself how Jamie had fared at university, as beating boys’ naked arses had become part and parcel of his life; it was almost as if he was addicted to the use of the cane as one becomes addicted to a drug. I did wonder if he would have withdrawal symptoms once he no longer had a subservient supply of naked arses on which he could vent his spleen and exercise what was obviously his lust for inflicting pain on others.

On my arrival at Ulverton I had felt like a square peg in a round hole. Even though I had been through the wringer of a prep school education since the age of eight, as a day-boy I had never really fitted in there among the boys from better-off families who talked posh. So when I left my prep school to go to Ulverton as a boarder, I was still speaking with a broad, working-class, Mancunian accent. Add that to the fact that prior arrival at Ulverton, I had never lived in close proximity to or slept in a communal dormitory with other boys, none of whom had any hesitation walking about naked in front of their dorm mates. I was so shy at first that I was even embarrassed to have to strip naked and take showers with them. So it is not surprising, feeling utterly gauche as I did that I made a bad start on my studies that first month and was taken to task for it, first by a beating from the Headmaster himself; then, to my horror, an hour or so later, again by my housemaster.

I have never understood to this day, what drew Gus and me together.

But something did; but I have ever since been, in a strange way, grateful to Jamie Mackenzie, an otherwise totally hate-worthy, sadistic character, for having caught me running in the corridor which, by chance, led directly to my meeting Gus. I would gladly have taken any number of sore arses to maintain my friendship with Gus. As I spent more time with Gus, who was from the top drawer in English society, combined with the upper-class ethos which generally reigned at Ulverton, my Mancunian accent gradually began automatically to fade and I felt much less a sore thumb and more at home among my peers at the school.

Just as Gus had told me he wanted to be an ordinary guy called Gus Trent, without all the rigmarole of the Honourable Augustus etc. clap-trap, and allowed his noble antecedent trappings, if not to whither, then to move backstage, so I saw that, influenced by the environment in which in now lived my daily life, that my own working class mentality was automatically fading away and was being replaced by the manners, accents, habits and, most importantly, the mind-set, of the group of boys with whom I now lived. Whilst the boys at Ulverton did not overtly look down on the working-class, there was a clear divide between Ulverton boys and the hoi-polloi, as the lower classes were referred to in school-speak, And gradually, I found I was becoming one of them; I was being automatically brain washed by my environment and was slowly turning into someone whom my parents would eventually not recognise.

And so to come back to what I mentioned above, which I saw as my mother’s first mistake, I should have been sent immediately as a boarder and not as a day-boy to prep school. In coming home each evening as I had done, I was gaining nothing from the environment in which my peer group at prep school lived, an important step in preparing them for the rigours of their future lives as boarders at a public school. So in my start at Ulverton, I was doomed, from day one, to be that proverbial square peg in a round hole. It was to be my job, if I wanted to survive the experience, to knock the corners off that peg and make myself fit into my new environment.

The second mistake my mother made with her best intentions for my future, was that in deciding on a form of education for me, totally foreign to our status in society, she had, quite unwittingly, started a process of alienation between me and my family. At Ulverton I was becoming accustomed to and accepted as the norm, a totally different style of life to the working-class life which I had formerly lived. I could see that by the time I left Ulverton, I would have little in common with my parents. Our views on the world and of life in general, would be totally different. It is not that I would love my parents any less or they me. But gradually we would both be going our own very different ways in life, with little anymore than blood in common between us.

I date the start of my drift away from my working-class roots to the end of my first year at Ulverton. The Christmas and Easter vacations, I had, of course, spent with my parents in Manchester. But already, what few friends I had had in our street, looked askance at me, as I was longer, in their eyes, one of them. Not that I had ever truly been part of the community of local kids, as I had always been seen as an animal apart, due to the fact that I, alone in our street, went to a private school and was already considered to be posh – not that I actually was. So already, after only one year at Ulverton, I felt isolated and bored with life in what was my own home. I guess that I already knew, aged fourteen, as I then was, that I would never again live permanently in my parents’ house.

My saviour was, of course, Gus. He in his own way felt just as isolated as me. His elder brother, Titus, heir apparent to the barony of Trent-Norton, was ten years older than Gus and worked in some government department in Whitehall. So as brothers, they had little in common. In fact, as I was later to learn, they did not even like each other, for one very good reason. During the the frequent absences of their father’s, Titus had taken it upon himself to act in loco parentistowards his younger brother, whose faults he had regularly corrected with the cane. Whether this had been by agreement with their father or not, Gus often found himself with a very sore arse delivered by his brother. So Gus, having been brought up in that grand tradition of upper-class families in which the cane was used as often at home as at school, was no newcomer to the thrashings he and I were to take together over our years at Ulverton.

Gus’s father, Lord Trent, spent most of his time in London and was rarely at the family home, Trent-Norton Hall, located near to a village of the same name in Somerset. As Gus’s mother had died a few years previously, when he returned home for the long summer vacation, he was even more isolated from boys of his own age than I myself was. And that is how, that first summer, at his invitation, I spent the major part of the long vacation, with him at his ancestral home in Somerset.

I had begun my first long vac, as it was called, by going home to my parents’ house. But a week later, I received a letter from Gus, inviting me to come to Somerset and spend the rest of the summer with him at at Trent-Norton Hall. I did not tell my parents that my best friend, Gus Trent, was a scion of the English nobility. And so, after some argument with my mother, I was provided with some pocket money and a third class ticket to Bath Spa railway station, where I was met by a welcoming Gus in his father’s chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce. If I tell you that Trent Norton was about twenty miles from Bath and was not served by any form of public transport, you will see how isolated we were and why Gus, rattling around by himself in his ancestral home felt lonely.

But the fact that neither Gus’s father, the Noble Lord Trent, nor his brother, the Honourable Titus Trent-Norton, the heir apparent to the title, were in residence, seemed to have no incidence on the functioning of the house, which was staffed by a full complement of servants, whose sole purpose seemed to be to look after the needs of Gus and me. This was my first experience of how the other half lived. No, let me correct that statement; what I should have said was how that infinitesimally small percentage of the population, who were very, very rich lived. Even aged fourteen, I could see that the Trent-Nortons were stinkingrich. I could see why Gus felt lonely when he was at home, surrounded as he was by servants with no family around, other than an occasional weekend appearance by his father.

I have to admit that the first time I met Lord Trent, I was very nervous, but his presence in our – Gus and my – lives was brief. After being introduced to him by Gus, on which occasion Lord Trent uttered a few traditional pleasantries, I never saw him again.

That first visit to Trent-Norton Hall was the first of what was to become a permanent feature of my long vacations from Ulverton. Gus and I shared a bedroom in what was a huge mansion and I experienced for the first time how it was to live isolated from the reality of normal every-day life in the depths of the Somerset countryside with a bevy of dutiful servants to tend to our every need.

The summer of my first stay at Trent-Norton was hot and dry – yes it does occasionally happen in England – and Gus and I had a wonderful time together, enjoying the freedom which came with the total absence of the restraining hands of any kill-joy adults. Well not quite without a restraint; Gus and I both suffered at the hands of Titus, his elder brother, who made, what was for Gus and me, an unwelcome appearance over a long week-end, with a group of friends from London – including, of course, some members of the opposite sex. Aged fourteen as we then were, Gus and I were not yet into girls, as it is now casually put. In fact as our friendship matured and we moved into adolescence, Gus and I never did get interested in members of the opposite sex as we both turned out to be what were then commonly referred to as queers or perverts; the more attractive and less aggressive word, gay, now virtually exclusively used to describe homosexual men, had not yet been appropriated by society at large to describe what Gus and I were.

By the time we were both sixteen and becoming sexually mature, we suddenly realised what had for the past year been staring both of us in the face; we both had eyes only for other members of our own sex. Gus and I were unspoken and, as yet non-practising homosexuals. I am not sure that that either of us were even aware of the word homosexual; and as mentioned above, the modern adoption of the word gay to describe what Gus and I, in fact, were, was still not on the horizon. The slow realisation that we were not of the same sexual orientation as most of our classmates, was a revelation which was, in the next few years, to change our relationship for ever.

But that first summer together at Trent Norton Hall, Gus and I were not only not into girls, but we were not really aware of the role that sex played in the world or of what it would ultimately play in our two lives. We were exactly as we appeared on the surface: a pair of naïve sexually-unaware, fourteen year-old schoolboys who enjoyed each other’s company. To say that the unannounced arrival of Titus and his friends was a fly in the ointment would be an exaggeration, but the presence of a group of bright young people from London, whom we did not know and with whom we had nothing at all in common other than the fact that one of them was Gus’s brother, did somewhat cramp our style. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Gus and I fell afoul of Titus, who accused us of insulting – I know not how – two of his lady friends and he was obviously out for our blood in retribution. Gus had already related to me, how in their father’s absence, Titus had, in the past, taken it upon himself to act in loco parentis and had, on several occasions, taken a cane to his younger brother’s bare arse.

And that is exactly what he did to to the pair of us. We argued our innocence, but to no avail. Titus, accompanied by two of his male guests, gave us each twelve cuts across our bare bums with a really nasty rattan cane. No stranger at all to having my backside striped by a variety of cane-happy masters and prefects at Ulverton, I saw – or as I should more accurately say, I felt – that Titus was highly experienced in the art of flagellation. What set off as a six cut beating for Gus and me, quickly turned into a fully fledged arse roasting occasion for both of us. Urged on by his two friends, both of whom were almost salivating with with Schadenfreude as they watch us both me having our arses shredded by Titus, we each finished up with no less than twelve, well defined parallel stripes, neatly placed across our buttocks.

As I was later to learn from Gus, his brother had been head-boy at his own public school somewhere in the south and had been universally hated because of his excessive use of the cane; and after one encounter with him, I could see why. After that very painful beating from Titus, I never ever saw him again. But he was, nevertheless, to influence my life profoundly many years later in a very unexpected way. Gus and I had been sharing a room, but that night, for the first time, we comforted each other in our painful misery, by sleeping together in one bed. There was nothing at all sexual in our actions, but looking back, I guess that that was the innocent starting point for our future sexual intimacy.

THE END.