Stranger than Fiction

This is the fourth 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 

Fact is often stranger than fiction and amazingly, in spite of our very different positions in the class structure which was, and still is, an open sore which bedevils society in the UK, the Honourable Augustus Trent-Norton, younger son of an hereditary lord and I, William Wagstaff, the son of a Manchester ironmonger, had somehow clicked at school and become best pals. We had been thrown together at Ulverton, a boys’ public school on the Scottish Border. And for the first few years after our meeting under what had been rather painful circumstances for us both, that is exactly what were: just best school 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. The carnal lust of homosexuality was busily making itself manifest in both of our souls and its increasingly strident demands had to be satisfied. I doubt that either of us was aware that we were homosexual by nature, but one does not need to know the word to know what one wants.

You know how it is; once you have moved on from adolescent masturbation and experienced the much greater sensations of pleasure of an orgasm produced by anal sex, you can never have too much of it; and that is exactly the position in which we found ourselves. I am not sure that the concept of love entered into our relationship at first, but by the early age of only eighteen, Gus and I were already more or less an item. In the lower sixth form at Ulverton, we were already copulating with each other like rabbits and I guess that we both knew that there was more than just sex that held us together. If the Headmaster had known of our liaison, we would have been out on our ears; and sporting very sore arses to boot.  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 next phase of our education at Cambridge. If only they had known!

By the time we were fifteen, I suppose that it began to dawn on both us that we were becoming much more than just close friends.  Along with our other classmates we had both become interested in the sexual overtones of the adolescent male body, in the form of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. And as did most of our classmates, we went on from the spontaneous emissions and the pleasurable sensations which they generated and began masturbating; first secretly under the protective cover of our bed-sheets; but soon, as we all enjoyed wanking, as it was then called, and we realised that we were not alone in our self-abuse – the Headmaster’s term for what we did to ourselves – we indulged ourselves in little covert tossing-off – as it was known in the north – parties with several of our more adventuresome schoolmates, none of whom were put-off by the inevitable beatings, which were delivered by the Headmaster if they had the misfortune to be caught in flagrante.  Already in puberty, the driving power of sex was making itself manifest. It is quite amazing just how much boys back then taught themselves about the joys of sex without the formal type of sex education which is now common in most schools. But I can tell you that by the time we were sixteen, Gus and I had gone a long way to understanding where what we were then doing was eventually to lead us, even if we did not actually get there until a little later.

I can date more or less exactly the day on which Gus and I did It for the first time; It, of course being to have penetrative, anal sex with each other; or in the very direct and vulgar language of today, to fuck each other. That first time when Gus and I had sexual intercourse together, we were both sixteen, going on seventeen and as had become the norm, I was spending the major part of the long summer vac from Ulverton with Gus in his ancestral home, Trent-Norton Hall in Somerset. Before that fatidic long vac when our relationship changed radically, I think that we both knew, without actually putting it into words what we wanted. We were as besotted with each other as two adolescent boys could ever be and I guess we both knew that one day soon we would go all the way in our sexual activities.

However, until now, the fact that Gus and I, although members of the same house, Ogden’s, at Ulverton, had by chance, as new boys, been assigned to different dormitories and really had nowhere private to go to indulge our basic instincts, had effectively put a damper on our burgeoning sexual desires for greater intimacy. We were scared stiff of being caught at what we referred to as at it. It is hard to believe that we were then unaware of the panoply of vulgar expressions associated with sex, which are commonplace today, the lack of which left us verbally groping for words to express what we felt and what we would like to to do to each other..

And so, although I am sure that we both knew that we wanted the same thing, the thing being to fuck, we never got to the stage of actually doing it. Looking back on things, although even we both knew what we wanted, we never, somehow, seemed to have the courage to put our yearnings into appropriate words.  I see that I have referred above to anal sex activities as it, going all the way, doing it and at it, which expressions are not at all as mealy-mouthed as they seem, but merely illustrate the paucity of our then vocabulary referring to sexual matters. I am quite sure that until the age of fifteen or even sixteen, neither Gus nor I had ever heard either of the words to fuck or to copulate. But, whatever the act was called, we both knew instinctively in our heart of hearts that we wanted to do precisely that with each other.

Even the words, to fuck, and its polite equivalent, to copulate, were, as late as the 1950s, both regarded as taboo words and were never heard in the sort of polite society in which Gus and I lived. Fuck was then a word that, in spite of our closeness, neither Gus nor I ever uttered. The Oxford Dictionary defines to fuck, first apparently used in 1503, as to copulate.  It then goes on to say, that the word was seldom written but used verbally, as a profanity. Today the word has become so debased and so commonplace as to be completely and utterly meaningless; it really is no longer a profanity which has any significance at all. It is sprinkled, like an unwanted and unnecessary punctuation mark, in the daily speech of many people of all social classes. But back then, even though Gus and I wanted desperately to fuck each other, we did not have the vocabulary to express our desire to each other in such a succinct and unequivocally simple way.

But given the general taboo nature of everything concerning sex in general, I doubt that we would, ever have actually said to each other what we both knew we wanted; even had we had known the appropriate words,  we would have both found it just too embarrassing to speak our minds. Sex, even heterosexual sex, was cloaked in mystery. Suffice it to say that we all knew that Father Christmas was a myth and babies were neither delivered by a stork nor found under a gooseberry bush, but not much more. But we both knew instinctively what we wanted; and what we wanted to do was to fuck each other.

But coming back to that first time that Gus and I had sex together, it was the mandatory imperative of the sex drive, rather than words – or the lack of them, which finally led us to the act. That summer, I was picked up at Bath spa station, as usual, by his father’s chauffeur-driven Rolls to be driven to Trent-Norton. It was already seven in the evening when the train from Manchester pulled into the station. For the first time, I saw that Gus was in the front passenger seat alongside a new driver, a very attractive younger man, who was not the normal chauffeur who had picked me up in the past.  However on my arrival, Gus immediately got out and joined me in the rear. 

He gave me a huge, bear-hug of a greeting and said: “God, Willy, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again. I’ve been so lonely and bored down here on my own since the start of the long vac.  I could barely wait for you to get here.”

I could not help but notice that Gus was already totally sexually aroused by my arrival. His sizeable sexual endowment, with which I was very familiar, having seen him in the showers and, in private, worked it manually many times, was tenting the crotch of his trousers to what looked like the breaking point. He laughed as he saw me looking at him and said: “Sorry Willy, but I’ve missed you so much since term finished, that just seeing you again turned me on. But you’ll see, we’ll have great time together now that you are here.”

When we arrived at Trent-Norton House, another handsome young footman took my bags up to my room and Gus and I went straight into dinner. To my surprise, the butler served us a bottle of champagne. “It’s to celebrate your arrival,” said Gus, “And to get our time together for the rest of the long vac off to a flying start.” Gus had always claimed that he wanted to be ordinary like me. But even though, as the second son, of the sixth Lord Trent, a hereditary baron, he was not to inherit any of the considerable wealth by which we were surrounded that evening. But when he was at home, as he now was at Trent-Norton Hall, he was his aristocratic self. He was to the manner born and conducted himself, in the absence of both his father and his elder brother, Titus, the heir apparent to the Trent millions, as master of the place.

In view of the effusively affectionate manner with which Gus had greeted me at the station, it was no surprise to me when he suggested, shortly after dinner, that we go upstairs to our rooms. I guessed that he had things other than sleeping on his mind and I was to be proved right. On my past visits to Trent-Norton, we had slept together in a twin bedded room, but this time I discovered that my bags had been put by the footman in a room with a huge double bed, which had already been turned down invitingly for me. Gus left me at the door of this room and said, somewhat cryptically: “Sleep tight as you must be tired after such a long journey.”  I sensed that I was part of some grand plan being hatched Gus, as I could not believe that he intended to leave me alone to my own devices that night after the way we had been together at school during the past term at school.

And quite frankly, I did not want to be left alone to assuage my burning sexual needs by jerking myself off alone before I fell asleep. But I was totally amazed by what happened next that evening, as Gus had clearly planned to go the whole way with me. This was the occasion when caution would be thrown to the winds and we would finally do it; that act, which we both knew we desperately wanted  to perform with each other, but which we due to a lack of adequate vocabulary, and in spite of our closeness, we had never managed to put into intelligible words.

Left alone by Gus, as I had been, I unpacked my things, put them into empty wardrobe and drawers, undressed, put on my pyjamas, climbed into the bed and waited. A few minutes later, the communicating door to the next bedroom opened and Gus entered. The bedroom curtains had been drawn at the windows, but in the dim light I nevertheless discerned, with somewhat of a shock as it was so totally unexpected,  that Gus was stark naked; and not only stark naked, but obviously sexually turned on, as he was sporting  what was, at least to my eyes,  a very desirable, erect penis. In view of our past sexual fumblings at school, not to mention the communal showers we all took together, I was already familiar with Gus’s generous endowment. But somehow, this evening, in its aggressively rampant state, it appeared bigger than usual. It was self evident, at a glance, that Gus was intent on exercising his sex organ for its God-given-purpose.

Without saying a word, Gus walked across to the bed and slid himself under the alongside me and said: “Relax Willy; just let yourself relax. There is nothing, nothing at all to be afraid of. We are completely alone with each other and will not be disturbed.  So, just relax and allow yourself to do with me what we both know we want to do with each other. Tonight is the night when everything is possible and we   can finally realise our wildest unspoken dreams together. So just relax and enjoy the occasion.”

Gus then stretched himself out, his naked body alongside mine, put his arms round me and kissed me fully on the mouth for the first time ever. “God, Willy I don’t know what I would have done with myself if you had decided not to come here this summer. In case you have not got the message, let me spell it out for you. I am totally, head and heels, in love with you William Wagstaff.”

I was somewhat blown away by this unexpected declaration, but as our bodies we were more or less glued to each other, I allowed my hands to run down Gus’s deliciously naked back until they reached his buns, where I  began to fondle his lovely bubble butt.  Face to face and more or less at one with each other I could feel Gus’s erection thrusting against me.  And now, aroused by the developing situation my, own manhood too was preparing itself for the act which I knew I desperately wanted to perform with Gus, but which remained as ever, unspoken. The suddenly, my naked partner, drew himself away from me and, without saying a single word, pulled my pyjama jacket off my body over my head. The next thing I knew was that he was tugging at the legs of my pyjama trousers, which he easily succeeded in removing. By now, I was trembling with anticipation of what I imagined was about to happen; and, to be quite fair, it was what I also desperately wanted to happen. Gus and I had never been totally naked together before other than in the showers at school.  But now, things were totally different and it was evident that we were on the road to going all the way into what was for both of us the great unknown with each other.

Gus, as the prime mover in what was happening, clearly knew exactly what he intended to do. With the two of us now both completely naked and each sporting magnificently rampant penises, which by their dripping readiness for action, intimated, more eloquently than any words, what was now about to happen,  Gus now knelt beside me and started to kiss my torso. He began with my nipples, which by skilful use of his tongue – I wondered where he had learned the technique – he managed quickly to arouse in a way, which I had never before experienced. He then pressed his lips to my skin in a series of descending kisses which ended, to my great surprise and I have to say, also to my intense delight, when he took the tip of my by now dripping erection into his mouth. At school we had each, in communal wanking sessions, manually fondled each other’s genitals; but never, until now, had there been such an intimate act.  I can tell you that I was already in seventh heaven and from the moment on, I knew that I was going to allow Gus to do exactly as he wished with me. I was putty in his hands; my body was his to do with as he wished; I was his entirely.

All that had happened so far was without any word being spoken. But Gus now said: “Are you OK with what has happened so far, Willy, we can stop right now if you wish or we can go on. So which is to be, it’s up to you?”

I said nothing, which Gus clearly took as a yes. To my surprise, Gus appeared to be extremely well organised for what he had in mind. Again I wondered how he obviously knew so clearly what he intended to do, as he was conducting himself like a seasoned professional. Remember that we were both just rather naïve seventeen-year-old schoolboys, or so I had thought until now! When I say, seasoned professional, I am not really sure of what I meant at that moment. But it was quite clear that Gus knew exactly where he was going and the route to get there.

There is a rather cynical saying, which I learned years after the events of this evening, which I am now relating, which says: “If you know you are going to be raped, just sit back and enjoy it.”  Now the word, rape, was not then part of our vocabulary; but I knew that we were moving inexorably towards our first true sex act together, which, under the then circumstances, giving the willing complicity of the two protagonists, is just about as far from rape as any sex act could ever be. And so, as I prepared myself to have sex with Gus for the very first time, which was, at that precise moment the thing I desired most in the world, I did just that: I sat back, relaxed and enjoyed what was happening to me. In fact, to be quite honest, when push finally came to shove and I was faced with the fact that Gus was about to thrust his erection into my virgin arse, I did have a moment of anxiety; but more of that later.

Gus, like run-away horse, had now got the bit between his teeth and there was no stopping him. I guessed he was totally psyched up by the thought of what he was about to do to me and I, for my part was like a piece of soft Plasticine in his hands, completely subservient to his wishes and totally ready to  mould myself to his will. Was I nervous?  Well I suppose I was; what young man about to surrender his anal virginity to his partner for the first time would not be?  Gus had not actually said what he intended to do to me, but I guessed that he intended going the whole way and that I would shortly be granted my most urgent, unspoken wish and lose my anal virginity to his rampant penis. You know looking back, I am not even sure that we referred to our most precious male possession as our cocks in the vulgar way to which were soon to become accustomed.  I am almost sure that until that moment, if we had alluded to our penises at all we had called them a thing.

When I say that Gus was well-organised for the job he had in mind, I really was not joking and I wondered how he had learned about what he was now doing in a really professional way, as if it were part of his daily routine. But I allowed him to continue with his preparations without making any comment, somewhat mystified by his obvious savoir faire in preparing for an act which both of us desperately wanted to happen but with which neither of us was exactly familiar.  He had gone, quite purposively, into the bathroom and produced a large bath towel which he insisted I lie on. Then kneeling beside me he produced, as if from nowhere, a bottle of some kind of oil with which he liberally anointed the area around my anus. I stiffened slightly as he allowed his urgently massaging fingers to probe deep inside me to ensure that I was well lubricated internally as well as externally.

Then, satisfied that I was well prepared for what was to follow, he told to me to spread my legs and raise myself onto my knees, which I did without question.  I felt him kneel behind me between my legs and the next thing I knew was that the tip of his rock-hard erection was thrusting against my anus. I have to say that at that moment I panicked as I felt my anal muscles, of which, until that very moment I confess I had been totally unaware, resist what they clearly saw as an unwanted intruder.

Realising that I was resisting his efforts to enter me, Gus said: “Willy, just try to relax and let me enter you.  You will be OK. There is nothing at all to be afraid of and you know that you want my thing (there was that word again) inside you just as much as I myself want to enter you. Come on, Willy; you know it’s what we both want.  It’s what we have both, unspoken until now, been moving towards for quite a while; you know it and I know it. Well the moment has finally arrived; it’s going to happen right now; we are going to have proper sex with each other for the first time. So please just relax and let me shaft you; just try to relax and let me enter you and I will try my level best to make your very first time something you will remember for the rest of your life.”

I knew that what was about to happen to me was more or less inevitable; not that I wanted to avoid it anyway; indeed not, for it was what I had been dreaming about for weeks now. But that first step when I allowed Gus to penetrate me for the first time was like climbing a mountain. But I knew he was right. It was what we both wanted of each other.  So with Gus’s erection still firmly pressing on my anus, I finally managed to relax enough for him to slide his full length inside of me. As what I later learned were called my anal sphincter muscles, finally yielded to Gus’s insistent pressure, I felt his penis slide effortlessly past my anus until his pelvis bottomed against my arse.  I felt one sharp stab of pain as Gus’s penis brushed by what I later learned was my prostate gland, but apart from that I had no pain at all.  For a few moments after penetrating me, we were both completely silent as the impact of what we had just accomplished hit both of us. By allowing Gus to push himself inside of me, I had lost forever my anal virginity and we were having our first fuck. “But was it his first?” I asked myself, as he seemed to know so very exactly what he was doing.

After a longish pause in which I lay there with Gus inside me, he finally started to fuck my hole.  He first withdrew himself partly and then re-thrust his full length back inside me. Then he gradually built up that classic, reciprocating rhythm associated with any form of copulation, as he attempted to bring himself and me to orgasm. It was evident from the very start of this our first ever sexual communion, that after his confident bravura performance leading to his penetration of my anus, Gus became less sure of himself.  But I guess that once a man find himself copulating for the first time, mother nature comes to his rescue in what is the most fundamental act which a man ever commits and he does quite naturally what is expected of him, even if he fumbles a bit.

And that is exactly what happened to Gus and me that first time we attempted to copulate together. I suppose that by the time Gus actually penetrated me, we were both so sexually aroused that neither of us could control our climaxes. So, after a first few tentative copulative thrusts with his cock, more by good luck than by good design, we both climaxed more or less simultaneously.  Gus had just withdrawn himself more or less completely from me, when he erupted emitting an uncontrollable Niagara of sperm, which he vigorously jerked all over my arse and lower back. I myself climaxed a couple of seconds later and deposited my equally generous load all over the towel on which Gus had had the foresight to make me lie. And looking at the sticky mess we had jointly made, I saw the logic in his insistence on the towel. But, I have to say, that I did wonder, yet again, how he had come up with the idea.

We both lay there breathless for several minutes without speaking, wallowing in our own spunk. Finally Gus said with a laugh: “Well, as a first attempt I guess that was sort of OK.  But practice, my dear Willy, will make perfect. So what say you to our cleaning ourselves up and having another try? The night is still young and I can tell you that after that first attempt, I am still more than ever filled with lust for your body and still raring to go.”

In complete control as ever, Gus pulled me up from the bed and a few minutes later we were together under the running water of the large walk-in shower, ridding ourselves of all traces of the sticky joint emissions of our first attempt at anal sex. I was standing behind Gus, soaping up his back and my cock, which had never really become completely flaccid again after our attempt at copulation, suddenly hardened again due to the very sensual action of my soaping up Gus’s arse with my bare hands.  Looking down at what had, within a few seconds, again become my rock-hard erection, I suddenly realised that I, myself, desperately wanted to shaft Gus. So, as my cock was raring to go and slithery smooth with soap and as Gus’s delightfully attractive bubble butt was there for the taking, that is exactly what I did. It was a spur of the moment decision driven by sheer carnal lust. Without saying a word to Gus, I grabbed him by the hips with both my hands and then thrust my rock-hard man-meat straight between his two buttocks. 

I have to say that my first attempt at penetrative sex was very much a hit or miss affair, as I had could not see – in fact I had never seen – Gus’s anal entry-port as I thrust my cock between his buns. But as luck would have it, my cock-head found itself pressing against Gus’s anal sphincter muscle. As soon as Gus realised what I was attempting to do to him, his muscles automatically stiffened, resisting an intruder, just as my own had done a few minutes earlier.  So, I whispered into Gus’s ear: “Gus, just relax and let me shaft you, just as you penetrated me when we were in bed together.” I guess that both of us wanted so very desperately to have sex together and even though neither of us really knew what we were doing, his anal muscles suddenly relaxed and I slid the full length of my penis inside my partner.  It was, for me at least, a gloriously memorable moment. A few minutes earlier, I had lost my own anal virginity to Gus and now here he was being forced to surrender his own anal virginity to the ministrations of my penis. 

So, by this, our very first, penetrative sex acts, we had both suddenly totally lost the last vestiges of our respective virginities. Within the space of a few minutes, both Gus and I had conjugated the verb to copulate in both the active and passive voices. Precisely put, we had both actively fucked each other and had passively been fucked by the other. At that very moment, I remember thinking that, like Julius Caesar, we had now both crossed the Rubicon definitively and that there could be no going back.

But if our first sexual communion that evening, when Gus had fucked me, had turned into a somewhat fumbled affair leading to premature ejaculations on both our parts, I myself had learned a great deal about what should have happen once penetration had been achieved. I was determined to make my own first active act of anal intercourse a success. And so, after a few seconds pause with my cock deeply embedded in Gus’s rectum, I withdrew myself a few inches before giving him my full length for the second time. And then for the next few strokes, I systematically withdrew myself still further and increased the force of my return thrusts, each time always making sure that I bottomed my pelvis against his arse to ensure that he fully benefitted from the ever increasing length of my thrusts. It was in so doing, in my first act of copulation ever, that I experienced for the first time that exquisite feeling developing in my active member that I knew instinctively would ultimately lead to that state of nirvana called orgasm.

I had deliberately begun my first effort at fucking with considerable thought, but as I soon found out, my efforts rapidly propelled me towards full arousal where I became subordinate to the demands of my cock, which quickly took control of my brain and of the entire operation. And so as most men have found out, my own control of what I wanted to happen was quickly subsumed into the unspoken yet imperative demands of my penis, of which the only objective was to reach a climax and ejaculate its seed as soon and as vigorously as possible.  So my deliberately controlled strokes of the beginning of the act were quickly replaced by ever quicker, longer and more forceful reciprocations, until at the end my cock must have resembled the to-and-fro movements of the piston of a steam engine as it thrust itself in and out of my partner’s anus.  I say as it thrust itself in and out, which is, of course utter nonsense, as I was the one providing the energy for the entire operation and once striated I did not stint on the force. 

But there was nothing at all I could do to stop myself as I was completely in the thrall of the unspoken sexual imperatives dictated by my aroused penis. And so, like many young-men before, and I guess also, after me, I simply had no alternative but to follow that uncontrollable path, which my initial actions had aroused in me. I was aware that my efforts were becoming ever more frenzied and brutal until, at the end, sensing that I was about to climax and reach an ejaculative orgasm myself, I found myself automatically withdrawing my cock completely from Gus’s anus and waiting a second, before delivering what I can but describe as my coup de grace, that final thrust, which ended with Gus again taking my full length inside of him, with my penis ejaculating its semen deep inside his rectum.

At more or less the same time, Gus also reached that point of no return which precedes any orgasm and ejaculated a stream of his own thick semen in a series of spontaneous, uncontrollable, vigorous jerks, which projected his seed all over the shower cubicle where it was washed away by the water under which we had just achieved, on my initiative, what I guess by any standards had to be considered as a very successful first fuck for myself and a satisfactory climax for Gus.

I think that it was at that precise moment that I suddenly realised a fact which had escaped both of us in our first efforts at exercising our cocks on each other. Whilst the end result of sexual intercourse is more or less the same in terms of sperm production as what is achieved solo by jerking oneself off manually, the intensity of the orgasm, when finally reached, is incomparably better. It is easy to see, how once one has crossed the line and started sharing oneself with another man, either actively as the fucker, or passively as the fucked, one becomes totally besotted by, and beholden to, the pleasures of the act of copulation and can no longer live without it. In its own way, its grip is similar to that which a narcotic exercises on a drug addict.  But even more important, I had already learned from our first two efforts at sex, that it takes two to tango. And when one trips the light fantastic of anal sex with one’s partner, either as giver or receiver, it has always to be remembered by the fucker, as it is he who controls the entire action that the act is a partnership from which both partners have to emerge fully satisfied if their relationship is to endure. 

I think that in our two first efforts, both Gus and I, each in turn taking the active role, in our haste to satisfy the imperative demands of our respective penises, had overlooked the importance of the mutuality of what we were doing. Using another man’s anus to reach orgasm is a totally different proposition to jerking oneself off manually. The physical effort in using another man’s anus to achieve orgasm, simultaneously brings, or should bring, the passive partner himself to orgasm. I have a strong impression that this important fact is very often overlooked by the one who is actively fucking his partner, as all too often it is subsumed by the active partner into satisfying his own needs to reach orgasm as soon as possible.

I take no great pride in the fact that more by chance than any skill on my part, the outcome of my maiden efforts at fucking Gus, led to a truly satisfactory outcome for him as well as for me. Under the shower the evening, I had somehow managed, quite unwittingly, to bring Gus to his own climax, more or less simultaneously with my own. I wish I could have said that it was all part of my grand design in shafting him under the shower, but it was not. Like so many young men in my position, I was interested only in penetrating his anus as a means to satisfy the immediate and imperative carnal demands of my own penis. So as two beginners at gay anal sex, which was soon to become the glue which cemented together our relationship, I had by chance, quite accidentally, stumbled on the key aspect of the sex act, which I guess escapes many others and ultimately leads to grief.

Years later, with the universal availability of gay male pornography on the internet, my view was confirmed and reinforced by the endless staged, pornographic  scenes, where two or more young men, indulge in oral and anal sex, often in death-defying, gymnastically-imaginative, athletic positions. After the active partners to the act have climaxed, the others who have just had their anuses fucked with a ferociously vigorous intensity that beggars belief, are then left to create their own orgasm by jerking themselves off. There is no mutuality in the act at all. It is just that: an act.

That Gus had totally enjoyed the experience I had just given him under the shower was confirmed by the fulsome praise he heaped upon me, demanding to know where I had learned to fuck like that. I can tell you that I had a hard time convincing him that his was the first anus that I had ever in my life shafted and that, for better, as it had fortunately turned out, or worse, he had just participated in and enjoyed my maiden act of sex. We dried ourselves off and Gus was clearly anxious to get us both back into bed as he obviously wanted to have a return match with his own penis in charge of the proceedings. I did venture to ask him where he had learned about all the preparation which he had done with such professionalism as he prepare himself for what was to be our first ever fuck.  He then told me that it was the young footman, David by name, who had acted as chauffeur that day and who by all accounts was quite an active swinger, as Gus put it, who had briefed him on a few key aspects. Gus swore to me that the intercourse, as he somewhat pompously put it, with David had been purely verbal and that he had, like me, been a complete virgin in all physical aspects of sex until he had shafted me a little while earlier in the very bed in which we were now lying together naked, entwined in each other’s arms as true lovers

Not unexpectedly, Gus suddenly asked me if he could have another go at fucking me before we finally called it a day. As we lay there together, I tried to explain to him some of my thoughts on gay male sex. I told him that, being wise after the event, his first attempt at fucking me was pre-ordained to a semi-failure as we were both already so psyched up by what we were about to do, that we were on the verge of premature ejaculation before we even touched each other.

“After all Gus, it is not every day that two lads like us make their first their first attempt at copulation, so it is not at all surprising that everything did not quite go as planned. When I say as planned, I am not at all sure that either of us had had a plan, other than a mutual desire finally to fuck each other; I know I certainly didn’t. I think that both of us just simply had reached the stage in our relationship where where having sex with each other became the overriding motivation for our actions. We both just simply wanted to have sex without any true understanding of what we were doing. In a nut-shell, we were both motivated by the sheer, carnal lust surging through our bloodstreams. I don’t think that either of us had any idea of what it would feel like to fuck each other; finally to unite our bodies in the most intimate way possible, or of what would make it so totally different from jerking off together, which we had done dozens  of times at school. It was just the most imperative thing in the world which our inbuilt sex drives made the two of us do together. Our sex drives, nature’s most potent force which every man possesses, had reached such a pitch for the two of us that there was no way in which we could avoid our first coupling just a brief hour ago.”

“I think, Gus, that neither of us really knew what we were doing, what it would be like, or even what we each wanted from the act when we tried to fuck each other for the first time.  My motivation was that I wanted to have sex with you. In the event it was you who took the the initiative and decided that you would fuck me.  But our only motivation was to have sex with each other, without any any understanding of what this act would bring to either of us. The only thing positive thing one can one can say about our first attempt at sex together, is the we each lost one half of our complementary virginities in the act, the second half of which we surrendered to each other, or better put, I stole from you, under the shower just now. Let’s face facts; I did not really give you much say in what I was about to do to you, but you let me do it nonetheless.”

“But less psyched up under the shower just now, than we had been in bed a little while earlier, I was able to handle my cock in a much calmer, more rational manner. And as I was fucking you, although at one point I became so overwhelmed by the imperatives imposed on me by the sexual arousal I was experiencing that I could barely control my actions any longer, I saw that I had to go on until I finally climaxed inside you.  And it was just then, when you reached your own climax a few seconds after my own, that it suddenly hit me; anal sex between men has to be a mutual act, from which both server and served emerged fully satisfied. So Gus, in my view, what we need to strive for is that whoever is the active party in any act, must realise that the act in which he is engaged is a mutual one, and that his passive partner of the moment must also emerge sexually satisfied.”

Gus took in my observations and said: “OK Willy, as I see it, what we need to do is for whoever is doing the fucking to see that he holds himself back until his partner is on the verge of climax himself and then make one final thrust and bring both of them to simultaneous orgasm. That my friend might be easier said than done, but I can but try.  So, please now after all your profound philosophising, could we I now start on act 2 scene 1 of what is fast becoming our own private sex orgy. This is the scene where I fuck the living daylights out of you, for that Willy is exactly what I want to do.  And, by the way, David has suggested that whichever of us is being fucked and has his dick footloose and fancy free, so to speak, put this on to contain his emission when it comes.”

He then handed me a purple packet labelled Durex Transparent Latex, with which I was not at all familiar. Gus went on and explained:  “It’s what is politely called a condom, a rubber contraceptive sheath, which a man pulls over his erection before he has sex with a woman to catch his sperm and avoid an unwanted pregnancy. It’s also known more vulgarly as a Rubber Johnny in the north of England, where it litters the countryside as young, unmarried couples have nowhere else to go to have pre-marital sex with each other. The man usually the pulls the thing off his cock, full of his spunk, after he has finished the act and leaves it lying there.  In fact, you must have seen them lying around as they are as often as much a feature of the countryside near towns and villages as are are buttercups and daisies.  But you get the idea; by wearing a rubber on your cock whilst I fuck you, when you shoot your load, it is contained and does not create that sticky mess which we both made in the towel during our maiden attempt at sex.” 

“I could also use a rubber to catch my own spunk, but it is less important as if I perform correctly, which I have every intention of doing this time round,  I shall deposit my seed in your rectum where it will remain trapped thanks to your anal muscles until you next answer a call of nature.  So, Willy, be a good chap and roll this thing onto your cock, which is already as hard as a rock and let’s get started, as I desperately need to exercise my cock on your anus again; and I promise that I will take account of everything you have just said. I will try to bring you to your climax at the same time as I shoot my load, which I shall attempt to deliver with my cock buried deep inside you this time.”

His remarks had become very clinical sounding note, but I saw the sense of what David, our apparent ad-hoc Guru, the fount of all knowledge on matters sexual, had recommended. As Gus prepared me for his second onslaught by re-anointing my anus with oil, I did ask myself where David, who was still a very young man, had accumulated his knowledge of things sexual.  But my thoughts were thrown to the winds, as Gus, at that moment, shafted me for the second time that evening. And I have to say, that this time with me lying supine on my back and Gus kneeling there, holding my legs over his shoulders, in what I later learned the omniscient David had told him was known as the mission position, he did my hole proud. It was as if Gus’s penis and my anus had been predestined for each other in a perfect partnership.

This was a totally different Gus than the one who had fucked me just over an hour ago. In this position, with his hands firmly on my hips, with my legs held over his shoulders, he had perfect access to my anus. He was he was in complete control of his actions as he thrust himself deeply and powerfully inside me and then gradually built up  his strokes into a rhythmic, reciprocating, fucking motion.  As ever longer and more powerful strokes followed one after the other, with ever increasing speed, I felt myself being transported to heights of sexual feeling which I had never known existed until that moment.

But Gus did not quite achieve his objective, which had been to bring both of us simultaneously to orgasm. He suddenly said to me, having reached that stage which we all reach, where we are no longer in complete control of our actions: “Willy, I don’t think I can hold myself back any longer. I am sorry but I just have to allow myself to climax. I can’t stop it.”  And at that he thrust himself for one last time deep inside me me and shot his load, in what was, for him a long and intense orgasm during which he just kept on pumping his sperm into me.

I confess that I was disappointed – we were both disappointed – that we had not achieved the ultimate nirvana which we had both hoped for, But I felt we were on the right track, Both of us were now conscious of the fact that sexual intercourse between the two of us was a mutual affair and that both of us needed to emerge sexually satisfied from each encounter. But in his efforts, Gus had aroused feelings in me which I had never before in my life experienced. I knew that given a little patience we would reach that perfect harmony we both were seeking. Gus lay face down on me, and I could feel his tears of disappointment dropping from his eyes onto my cheeks.

I suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns and turn what Gus saw as his failure into a triumph.  I pushed him off me, rolled him over onto his back, pulled his legs over my shoulders and then, in exactly the same position as he had just fucked me, thrust my still hard, condom clad cock firmly into Gus’s anus. I then fucked him as vigorously as he had just done to me. I had already been on the verge of a climax myself when Gus had pulled the plug on his efforts and within a few long and vigorous strokes, which, by the way, was to become my signature style, I was able to bring myself to orgasm shoot my wad into the condom on my cock, buried deep inside my partner. To my utter surprise, after the huge orgasm Gus had just experienced and the massive emissions he had made, as I myself now exploded  inside of him, I saw the my efforts had somehow induced a second orgasm in my partner, as he was jerking more semen from his own cock.  So somehow, in a totally unexpected way, we had come to a truly satisfactory conclusion to what had been only our third effort at mutual sex. I felt fully satisfied with the results of our joint efforts.  To me, Gus and I had become true lovers. We again fell into each other’s arms and slept the sleep of innocents.

Looking back on that evening when Gus and I had sex together for the first time, which I suppose like the first time for most guys has remained for ever engraved on my memory, I suppose our experience was typical of what can happen to first timers.  We were both urged on by that imperative cannot-be-refused-must-be-obeyed-sex-drive which neither of us could ignore. So when we dipped our wicks for the first time into each other’s most private parts, we were purely motivated by our sexual psyche, which had inculcated into us the mutual desire to have intimate carnal contact with the other. How we knew that we were intended to indulge in anal copulation, not at all a natural act in the general manner of things, I do not know.  But spurred on by that unstoppable force called our sex, that is what we automatically did, without any understanding other than the physical act of penetration of what it meant to either us and of where, other than the simple act of copulation, it might lead us.

But one thing was quite clear to me after our initial fumblings leading to our premature ejaculations and my first attempt at fucking Gus, that to be a sustainable activity between Gus and me, each and every act had to give satisfaction to both of us; for me, the sex act had to be an act of love and not just a substitute for jerking oneself off, which was a great deal less strenuous and less messy than the actual physical act of copulation. And I think that I convinced Gus of this fact by my impromptu act in which I surprisingly brought both of us to that most desirable conclusion, the simultaneous orgasm.

So what happened next to our nascent intimacy? Well inspired by the maxim, practice makes perfect, by the end of the month of August, when we had to return North to Ulverton to begin our penultimate year in the lower sixth, we had both become so totally obsessed with the task of pleasing the other whenever we had sex together, that we were pretty well always on the same wavelength. So, the active partner of the moment always ensured that he brought his passive partner to that state of orgasmic nirvana, the achieving of which is the true prize behind the sex act, at the same time as he himself climaxed. And it was this understanding which turned our friendship into much more than regular teenage fuck.

Perhaps I should tell you that the relationship which had developed, quite naturally with no discussion at all between Gus and me, was one of two, totally equal partners. Unlike many homosexual relationships, where one partner plays the role of the male and the other becomes his surrogate female, Gus and I were totally different.  We both enjoyed actively fucking the other. But the secret of the success of our relationship, other than the fact that we were two young men, who independent of any sexual activity, were true friends and had been so for many years, was the fact that whoever was, at any moment, playing the active role in the sex act, always took care to take his passive partner with him all the way.  As practised and perfected by Gus and me, during that month of August at Trent-Norton, the sex act truly became worthy of the epithet: a toy which never fails to please.

Seventeen-year-old schoolboys we may have been, but  I think that I can truly say that by the time we returned to Ulverton in early September, Gus and I were already well on the way to becoming an what we today would call an item.  We were totally head-over-heels in love with each other and we were as inseparable as if we had been joined at the hip.  On our return to Ulverton as lower-sixth-formers, we each moved out of our hitherto, separate dormitories into our own study-bedrooms.  This sudden availability of privacy enabled us to indulge ourselves sexually in a way we had hitherto not been able to do previously. And so, for the next two years, our final years at Ulverton, Gus and I became ever closer, if that were at all possible. I do not know how we managed it, but there were never any rumours about the closeness of our relationship, probably because we were intimate only with each other and unlike several others of our schoolmates, who whether by inclination to play the available field or just because of frustration at the lack of female availability, were ever on the prowl looking for any attractive arse to shaft.

You will remember that these events were took place in the 1950s when homosexual acts, even between consenting males in private, were crimes in the eyes of the law and could lead to imprisonment of those involved. But so imperative is the sex drive in its demands that along with thousands of other young men like us, the law could not stop us from continuing our activity.  We became acutely aware, even as schoolboys, of the much publicised case of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Michael Pitt-Rivers  and Peter Wildeblood, where the three of them finished up in prison for their activities.

So in spite of the fact that we knew that what we were doing was illegal under the then benighted laws of the land, we continued. Thank God we were never caught in the act, unlike one of our classmates, who was caught in flagrante, sexually importuning a younger boy, by our odious the sports-master.  After a sound, retributional thrashing, involving both the birch and the cane, administered by the Headmaster, he was expelled from the school. Although previously, Gus and I had been thrashed together, times without number, by practically everyone who authorised to use the cane – the Headmaster, our housemaster, Mr. Rogers  and the prefects – in  our penultimate year we managed to escape without ever again having to offer our naked backsides to the bite of that dreaded length of rattan.

At Ulverton, an order to visit the Headmaster, Mr. Birch, was always unnervingly unsettling, as it usually presaged one of his legendary thrashings. And make no mistake, Birch by name and a true lover of the birch and cane by nature, when he thrashed arse, Mr Birch really knew how to lay it on. So, when Gus and I received, in the final week of the third term of our lower-sixth year, just such an invitation, which can, of course, never ever be refused, our blood immediately ran cold. I confess that I could already hear in my imagination the shrill screech of a senior rattan-cane as it coursed down through the air to deliver its excruciatingly painful message to my naked arse. But what would be would be and Gus and I had face the fact that we we had a command appearance in front of the headmaster.

At the appointed hour, we knocked on the door of the Headmaster’s study, inwardly trembling at what the immediate future might hold, but having spruced ourselves up to picture-book-perfection. We had made sure that our uniforms were immaculate, our trousers freshly pressed to a razor-sharp crease, our shirts clean, our ties properly tied and our shoes polished to a mirror-like shine.  With some trepidation we entered the holy sanctum of the Headmaster’s study, a place which held such painful memories for both of us, to find Mr. Birch seated behind his desk. My heart missed a beat as I observed several canes lying there on the desk in front of him, which seemed to confirm my worst fears and portend an uncomfortable outcome to our visit. My fears were immediately heightened as he said to us: “Well boys, as you are a few minutes early, I think we had better await the arrival of your house-master, Mr. Rogers, as he has a key part to play in the proceedings today.”

On hearing this, with the canes lying there in full view, my heart sank to the bottom of my boots, as I suddenly recalled that truly awful day in my first term at Ulverton, when I had been beaten by the Headmaster for my mediocre first month’s progress report. I had then limped back to Ogden House nursing my excruciatingly painful arse, only to be greeted on my arrival by my house-master, the very Mr. Rogers for whom we were now waiting, who had then seen fit to treat my already blistered arse to another six cuts on the bare with his cane to bring home to me the seriousness of my situation. Talk about a baptism of fire for a boy whose virgin arse had never before, in its thirteen years of life, made acquaintance with the cane, this double whammy had been for me a journey to hell and back.  And now, it looked as if both Gus and I might be candidates for a similar performance.

From the expression on Gus’s face, I saw that he too appeared to be as nervous as I myself was at that very moment. In the few moments before Mr. Rogers arrived, I wracked my brain to think of what we could have done, which would justify a command appearance of the two of us together before both the Headmaster and our house-master. In view of our covert, illicit, sexual liaison, about which, or so we both thought, not another soul knew, Gus and I had, in our penultimate year in the lower sixth form, led a life which was, overtly, as pure as that of  Caesar’s wife. If we had each been summoned independently to see the Headmaster, my fears would have been less acute. However, the fact that we were in front of the Lord High Executioner together could only mean one thing: the Headmaster and our house-master had somehow found out something negative which concerned both of us.  What could it be, other than that they had somehow found out about our longstanding, ongoing, sexual liaison?

With this potential seed of disaster now sown deeply in my mind, I began to shiver inwardly about what this could mean for Gus and me.  The visible presence of the canes surely meant that we both were destined to be given the thrashing of our lives, before that final coup de grace: expulsion! This could not be about to happen to us, could it, as it would ruin our future careers? To be thrown out of school at the beginning of our final year when we were destined to sit the public examinations, the success in which would be our passport to university, was just too awful to contemplate. Our future careers seemed already to be in tatters before they had even begun.

My thoughts of the dire consequences of the situation, in which I had convinced myself we now found ourselves, were interrupted by the arrival of our house-master, Mr. Rogers.  “Ah, Rogers,” said the Headmaster, in a genial tone of voice which sounded as if he was greeting a long lost friend, “I had not yet started to talk to our two young gentlemen from your House, about why they have been invited here together this evening. So now that you are here, perhaps we should put them out of the misery which is written all over their faces and reveal to them that visits to the Headmaster’s study are not always painfully unpleasant. I think these two young men will be very pleasantly surprised to hear what their future in the upper-sixth-form holds for them next year.”

I could not believe my ears when the Headmaster said that we would be in the upper-sixth next year. Evidently, in spite of my worst fears, we had not been summoned to have our have our arses shredded by the Headmaster and then to be thrown out of the school on our ears. Somehow I had allowed my imagination to run away with me and had got it all wrong.  But surely we had not been summoned just to be apprised of the fact that next year we would be in the upper-sixth? There had to be something else, something much more important, to be invited to a meeting with both the Headmaster and our house-master.

The Headmaster quickly explained: “Wagstaff and Trent-Norton, as a pair, you have been two of the most mischievous boys I think I have have ever encountered in my time as Headmaster of this school.  I can think of no two boys who have been thrashed for breaking school rules as many times as you two have; and not only by me personally, but also by Mr. Rogers, your housemaster, as well as by numerous head-boys and prefects over your years at the school.  At one stage, I think that your masters had despaired that either of you would ever settle down and work properly, as your sole objective seemed to be to get yourselves into some sort of trouble, with the usual painful consequences for you when you were caught and had to answer for your inacceptable conduct.  However, this last year, since you moved into the lower sixth, there has been a miraculous change in both your behaviour in general and your application to your school work in particular. For some unknown reason (if only he knew, I thought), you have both become model students, so much so, that to our utter astonishment, you are both in the top few of your class in all subjects you are at present studying. And moreover, looking at you personal files, I see the neither of you has been beaten this year, which, considering your past record, is a remarkable achievement for you both.”

By this time, I wondered where all this was leading. But when it finally came, I think that neither Gus nor I could believe our ears.  The Headmaster continued: “And so, Wagstaff and Trent-Norton, both Mr Rogers and I agree that you should be rewarded for this dramatic change in your habits and your future prospects of university careers which go with it. I am, therefore delighted (a condition one did not much associate with Mr Birch, as he always looked so sour when one saw him; as if he had lost a pound and found a penny) that in your coming year in the upper sixth, you will each be elevated to the rank of prefect.  So you will each be part of the elite group of eighteen sixth formers across all six houses, who will hold the prestigious rank of prefect and will have the responsibility for keeping order both throughout the school during the day and in your own house in the evenings.”

“I do not have to tell either of you of the means available to you as prefects, by which you are authorised to maintain order. The cane, with whose considerable powers of persuasion you are both intimately familiar, is an indispensible implement in the daily life of this school and, as you yourselves know only too well, is there to be used. As prefects you will be authorised to use it. You must use it wisely, but when needed, you must not hesitate to use it.  It is my view that a well-beaten bottom as a reward for ill-considered behaviour never hurt anyone, however often he is beaten. And I think that you two young gentlemen are shining examples of unruly boys who have, over the years reformed their behaviour due to the beneficial effects of a well applied cane. So gentlemen, in conclusion, it remains only for me to wish you well next year and to present each of you, as I do to all new prefects each year, your own personal set of two rattan canes, the sine qua non of your office.”

With that valedictory flourish to his rather long-winded speech, he leaned across his desk and presented each of us with two canes, one junior and one senior, all of which had been lying there in full view since our arrival and had give me the totally wrong idea of the reason for our convocation to his study that day.  Need I say that both Gus and I were walking on air as we left the Headmaster’s study? My God, we had gone in there with a horrible feeling of foreboding that we were on the verge of being cashiered and had, quite unexpectedly,   emerged ennobled. Miracles do, apparently, still happen.

Carrying the gift of the tools of our trade with which we had just been presented by the Headmaster, we walked back to Ogden’s, where Mr. Rogers, our house-master, ushered us into his study. It was the first of my numerous the visits to that room over my years at Ulverton when my arse was not in line for a beating.  But nothing had changed since my last visit. I looked at the pattern on the carpet, and recognised the worn spot where Mr. Rogers always placed the chair, over the back of which he made his victims present their naked arses to him for correction, the term he used to describe the savagely sadistic beatings he inevitably delivered. Times without number, Gus and I had stood before him in our pyjamas, having been summoned to see him from our separate dormitories just before lights-out, to allow him to exercise his largess with the cane on our naked arses. 

Occasionally I admit that both Gus and I deserved the beatings he handed down. But all too often, he had summoned the two of us together to answer for some footling little misdemeanour which certainly did not merit the savage way in which he inevitably shredded our arses cane. The procedure was always the same. We were both made to step out of our pyjama trousers and stand, arse-naked, with our hands on our heads and our noses pressed against the wall, whilst he selected a cane with with which to roast our buns. Then, whichever one of us he had decided to beat first was made to bend across the back of the chair and remain perfectly still whilst he beat the living daylights out of the pair of buns before him. Then, having been beaten his first victim, he was made to regain his position against the wall, hands again on his head and forbidden to touch his flaming arse whilst he waited whilst his partner in crime suffered the same fate.

Mr. Rogers never gave anyone less than six cuts but more frequently nine or ten. His favourite punishment – for minor offences – was what he called his gated ten, which consisted of eight, strictly parallel strokes completed by two crossed diagonals. One had to admit that he was a consummate artist with the cane and no boy ever left his study other than sporting an aesthetically perfectly beaten arse; a small, non-palliative consolation for the agony the bearer was still suffering at the obligatory post mortem viewing of his wounds by his dorm mates. Our revered house-master was generally reckoned as the most severe of any of the six house-masters at Ulverton. To my mind, although a young man himself, he was an example of the legendary, archetypal, sadistic schoolmaster of the school stories of the last century; a man, who truly enjoyed beating his pupils and used every excuse to wield his cane as often as possible.  Life at boys’ public schools is often described as brutal.  But there is brutality and brutality; and then there are those like Mr. Rogers, who go beyond brutality and are utter sadists. It is an unfortunate fact of life, that their victims never dream of complaining and so the tradition of excessive beatings continues.

But coming back to the present, in contrast to our visits to his study in the in the past, which always presaged a beating, on this occasion, for the first time, Mr Rogers was all sweet light with Gus and me when we arrived back at his study. He invited us to sit down in front of the fireplace – fire unlit as it was high summer – and offered each of us a glass of sherry.  He then began: “Well boys, I suppose that you were surprised to find that I had proposed you as prefects to the Headmaster. I think that the firm and frequent exposure to the rigours of the cane to which you have both been subjected in your journey through this school, has been in no small way responsible for your improved behaviour and the stunning results in your class work. You two are among the top handful of students in the sixth form with prospects of going on next year either Oxford or Cambridge when you finally leave Ulverton.”

“But, I have to admit that I had a further reason for recommending your elevation to the elite rank of prefect.  In view of your own intimate familiarity with the undoubted benefits of a well and frequently applied cane to a boy’s posterior, I decided that you would be the ideal pair to take in hand and correct what I have discerned to be a distinct lowering of standards of behaviour in Ogden House. I must partly blame myself as I have, for the past two years, recommended boys as prefects, whose performance in the role has been disappointing – very disappointing indeed.  For the past two years, discipline has been allowed to lapse and become lax in this House, which has resulted in a considerable loss in in prestige. The cane, I regret to say, was not used by the three prefects anything like often enough.”

“You are, I am sure, both familiar with the expression: Give them and inch and they’ll take a mile. Well, that I, regret to say, is what has been allowed to happened over the past two years in Ogden House. Two years’ intakes of new boys have been allowed to do more or less as they wanted and in the coming school year, as second and third formers, I see anarchy on the horizon.  And so, in appointing you two young men as prefects, who have yourselves been subject to the regular discipline of the cane and are a shining example of what its use has achieved, I thought the pair of you would be the ideal new-broom to sweep away the mess left by what I have come to think of as the ancien regime, for which I must also bear responsibility by my bad choice of prefects.  The Headmaster, in presenting each of you with two new canes, also encouraged you to use them; a sentiment which I can but echo loudly.”  

“The rot, in my view, begins with the new intake of boys. If they are allowed to get away with anything at all without appropriate retribution, then we are already on the road to disaster. And so, next year, I can but urge you to pay strict attention to the way our sixteen new boys, in the two first form dormitories behave, and take corrective action immediately. It is my own view that regular use of the cane in the dormitory just before light-out, is a highly effective way of making new boys understand that they must toe the line if they do not wish to go to bed with a sore bottom on a regular basis. Indeed, I would not consider it amiss, if the whole sixteen of our new intake were to become acquainted with the doubtful delights of a bare bottom beating by the end of the first term. That, I am sure you would agree, would give them food for thought, rather indigestible though it might be. Otherwise as you know only too well, prefects’ beatings in this House are usually performed in the house sixth form common room.”

“But, I am sure, given your own past experience in the matter, I can leave it in your capable hands to see that things run smoothly in the coming year. Just one small point; first year boys are punished only with the junior cane and you are limited by the school rules to awarding a maximum of six cuts on any one occasion. (Did one detect a tone of regret in his voice?) However, from the second form onwards you may give up to twelve cuts with the senior cane on any one occasion. (Yes, most definitely, there had been a tone of regret, as his voice was much brighter now.) And to finish, I must tell you that next year’s house-captain of Ogden House, who will be the senior of Ogden’s three prefects, will be your classmate Alistair Meakin.”

“However, you two prefects have carte blanche from me to execute a clean-up procedure of the first, second and third formers as you best see fit.  Of course if you feel you need to correct an older boy then you are free to do so. But on the whole, leave it to Meakin and me to deal with the boys from the fourth form and upwards on a regular basis. It goes without saying that my remarks are in reference to what I expect of you when you are maintaining order in Ogden House. During the day, as members of the court of prefects under the aegis of the head-boy of the School, whose name will be announced by the Headmaster at assembly tomorrow morning, you will exercise the authority which goes with your elevated status as and when you see fit.”

As you might well imagine, Gus and I left our house-master’s study walking on air. No one could have imagined the events of the past hour or so. Here were we, undoubtedly the two most systematic, regular and permanent breakers of what was possibly the most stringent rule of the school, appointed as prefects for our final year at Ulverton. And not only prefects with all the power over our schoolmates which goes with the position,  but with an express mission from our house-master to beat the living daylights out of  our housemates in the first three forms in an attempt to stop the downward slide in discipline which he perceived – rightly or wrongly – was happening in Ogden House.  This was a gift from the Gods, which neither of us could have ever conceived of receiving in a month of Sundays. We, probably the most beaten pair of students in the annals of Ulverton, had just been given what amounted to total, unfettered power over our junior schoolmates.

Neither Gus nor I were bloodthirsty, public-school aficionados of corporal punishment in the way that many prefects, and certainly our own housemaster, were. But we were also human beings in a school environment where the cane figured boldly in the daily life of all pupils, from new boys to upper-sixth-formers.  And as we ourselves had been subject to its painful bite on so many occasions, it is not surprising that we both, fancifully, regarded our elevation as a gift of recompense from God for what we had personally received in the past. So for Gus and me, our final year at Ulverton was to prove a pay-back time; a period when we could exercise our punitive power over our younger brethren, more or less without restraint.  Talking about this as we lay together in bed that same evening before indulging ourselves in what was to turn into a mini-orgy à deux of anal sex to celebrate our good fortune – God, that evening, we fucked each other with such vigour as if there were to be no tomorrow – we more or less formulated the ground rules for the way we would handle matters as – to coin a phrase – a fustigatory duopoly.

As we had become what we both now knew was an indissoluble item in our sex life, we decided that as prefects we would share and share alike all punishment activities, and so, as two prefects we would always act together. Boys slated for punishment would always be beaten by the two of us with each of us delivering half of the allocated strokes.  As Gus laughingly pointed out: “That way the lucky lads who benefit from our delicate attention to their arses with the cane, will be able to compare and contrast the beating styles of two different prefects, an advantage which has never before been offered in the past.” I admit I was not at all convinced that recipients of our efforts to set them back on the straight and narrow, would much care who thrashed them, as long as it was quickly over and done with, and not too hard.

But not too hard was concept to which neither Gus nor I subscribed.

We both felt that if a beating was justified, then it had to hurt; and hurt a lot on the principle: as we had been done unto so shall we do unto others.  So there would be no question of soft pedalling when Gus and I started to beat arse next term. We also agreed that we would, as far as possible, deal with the first formers in front of their peers in their respective dormitories to inculcate into them a sense of discipline and acceptable behaviour. By allowing the whole dormitory to witness one of their delinquent dorm mates being thrashed for his sins, seemed to us as an excellent deterrent to prurient onlookers, who were simultaneously terrified and fascinated by what they were witnessing. But then again, did we really want totally to deter boys from breaking the rules? A regular supply of arses to beat was a sine qua non of what we intended to make our mission in life during our final year at Ulverton. So we had to temper our desire to beat arse and killing the goose of disobedience which laid the golden eggs.

Otherwise, we agreed that punishments meted out in Ogden House itself would be on an ad hoc daily basis whenever necessary. A half hour before lights out, the day’s unlucky participants, in what was to become known by the boys as the nightly punishment parade, would be obliged to present themselves in the sixth-form house-common- room, dressed only in their pyjamas, with a view to facilitating naked access to that all important part of their nether anatomy where the cane would bite. Any punishments which Gus and I would jointly deliver during the school day to any schoolmates, who merited it, would be carried out immediately following prep in the School library.  I think that we felt quite pleased with ourselves that we had so quickly agreed the ground rules of our future punishment regime.

One final thing we agreed was that we would be very strict hard caners, but fair. We were both looking forward to exercising our unexpected power, as most prefects do. But we both felt that although we should aim for a legacy which celebrated us as two of the hardest caners in the history of the school, we would never beat anyone on spurious charges as we so often had been beaten ourselves. Both Gus and I, who had been beaten so many times in the past, with no lasting ill effects, shared the view that a public school boy’s buttocks were somehow ordained by God to mate with the cane quite frequently. After a thorough naked-buttock beating, however devastated a boy’s arse might look – and sometimes, believe me, they can look pretty bad – there was never any long-term damage and even the deepest and most livid of cuts, spotted with flecks of blood where the cane had broken the skin and which were excruciatingly painful to the receiver and absolutely horrific to the eye of the beholder, healed without leaving any trace in a few weeks. So, spurred on by the motto, pain is the name of the game, Gus and I both agreed that our jointly administered beatings should be made as memorable as possible. And when I say as memorable as possible, you should take that as a mealy-mouthed substitute for what we really meant, which was as painful as possible.

Term ended a few days later and Gus and I went off from Ulverton on the long summer break; he to his ancestral home in Somerset and I, for one brief week only, to my parents’ house in Manchester.  I see that I have written to my parents’ house, rather than to my home.  At this stage in my life, my alienation from all that my parents stood for was more or less complete and I no longer thought of my parents’ house as my home.  I knew by then, that I would never again live with them in Manchester and that my father’s unspoken but evident wish that I would take over the Wagstaff ironmongery business was not to be.  My mother, Mavis, in her well-meant eagerness to give me, her only son, a better start in life, thanks to the money from my father’s enormous football pools win, had turned me from a working class-boy into a young gentleman with the airs and graces of the upper-class among which I now lived at Ulverton.  My brainwashing was complete and there was now no going back.

My education at Ulverton had effectively all but extirpated my working-class manners and accent.  Thanks to my privileged education, I no longer had anything at all in common with my working-class roots. I state this as a fact of life and not as something to be praised or condemned.  But I was what I had become and that was a fact with which I now had to live. It was not that I loved my parents, Edgar and Mavis Wagstaff, any less than I had always done; but their lives and mine had totally diverged and we no longer had anything in common, other than the immutable fact that I was their son.

So, after my filial, obligatory week at my parents’ home, I took myself off as usual to Trent-Norton and my lover Gus, the Honourable Augustus Trent-Norton, for the rest of the summer. It was, as you may remember, the previous summer that Gus, spurred on by the verbal encouragement of a new young footman called David, had initiated the first true intimacy between us, which had led to our sexual blossoming as devoted lovers.  Until that first night when Gus had robbed me of my anal virginity, I doubt that we had both realised that fate had predestined us for each other and that a year later, whilst still at Ulverton School, we would have become an indissoluble item, indulging joyfully in the forbidden pleasure of anal sex on a regular basis. I ask myself at the time Gus first shafted me and translated what were our obvious sexual feelings for each other, to the stage of reality, if either of us had even realised that we were both homosexual.  We were just doing what seemed natural to both of us.  

But we had finally to accept the fact that we were homosexuals; and practising homosexuals at that: perverts or sodomites, criminals in the eyes of the law, who committed unspeakably unnatural and totally indecent acts with each other, which were never ever spoken about in the polite, hypocritical society in which we were then living. Swept under the carpet in what then passed for decency, in spite of the law against it, gay sex was alive and well then as it always has been in the past and as it always will be in the future.  It is just a pity that the UK government could not breakaway from old misconceptions and prejudices and accept the fact that homosexuality was as much a fact of life as was heterosexuality and that no amount of legislation  would ever stop it.

Anyway, enough of my philosophising on the mores of the time;

that final long summer vac during the month of August before we embarked on our final year at Ulverton was a dream time for Gus and me, who as two sexually active, eighteen-year-old young men were as totally in love with each other as any couple on earth, homo or hetero, could ever be. In the full knowledge that we were skating on the thinnest of very thin ice, we both revelled in the freedom of Trent-Norton Hall, which the absence of both Gus’s father and elder brother, other than for the odd weekend, gave us.  So not surprisingly we used that glorious month – that year the weather behaved itself and was absolutely perfect – to consolidate what was already an unbreakable, physical bond between us.  It goes without saying that as two, essentially gay, randy, young studs (which is what we then really were) at the beginning of their active sex life together, we did not hold back at all.

I had taken the early morning train from Manchester and arrived well before lunch at Bath Spa station where the footman, David, that fount of all sexual knowledge, on whose wisdom Gus had relied last year to take our unspoken lust for each other to the realms of concrete reality, was waiting for me in the Rolls. He put my luggage in the boot of the car and then stood there and opened the rear door for me to get into the back seat, on which I saw was a neatly wrapped packaged; a box or carton of some sort.  David saw me looking at the package and said: “Welcome back to Somerset, Mr. Wagstaff. Oh, that package on the back seat is a present to you from Mr. Trent-Norton, which he asked me to pick up in Bath.  I think that perhaps you should wait to open it until you get back to the Hall, sir, so that the two of you can enjoy the occasion together, sir.”

Looking at David, I was hit by what a good-looking, well-set-up young man he was.  I did wonder whether the relationship between David and Gus last year had gone further than the verbal instructions in the rudiments of anal sex as Gus claimed to be the case.  I was increasingly jealous that Gus’s liaison with David might have gone further than words and that David might have given some practical demonstration to Gus. In the intervening year at school since I had first met David, I had become increasingly aware of my attraction to other young men. David was only a couple of years – if that – older than Gus and me, and I have to admit, that wearing his livery as he was, he was sexually a very attractive proposition. Given his obvious knowledge of gay sex, which he had imparted to Gus, I could easily see how, in my absence, Gus could have succumbed to David’s undoubted sexual charm; very easily indeed, in fact, for standing there about to get into the car, I could feel myself hardening just at the sight of David holding open the door for me.

 “David,” I said, “If it is alright with you, I think I would rather enjoy – I  remember quite distinctly choosing the word, enjoy, rather than like – sitting up front with you in the  passenger seat.” Of course, being honest with myself, what I was about to enjoy was not so much being in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, an act, which, for the likes of me, was not to be sneezed at either, but the fact that I would be sitting in close quarters to the sexually attractive David.  I blushed internally to myself that I could have such thoughts about David, given that I was so deeply in love and sexually involved with Gus. But facts were facts and I could not deny that just looking at David was arousing me sexually. Given the sort of discussion, if discussion it had really been, between Gus and David, I divined that David was probably a man’s man like Gus and me. But I have to say it bothered me as to how Gus had ever got into such a discussion with David in the first place. How on earth did the son of Lord of the Manor even begin think about having a conversation about homosexual sex with his footman?

After all, one could hardly begin: “David, I have a very close school friend coming down here to spend the summer with me. We are very close at school, but so far we have stopped short of having proper sex together. However, I think that this summer might be the perfect occasion for us to start fucking each other, an act which, although still unspoken between us, I know we both desperately want to indulge in. So, I just wondered, David, old chap, as a man of the world and all that, which you clearly are,  if you had a few tips you could give to me as to how to to tackle this rather delicate, but burning,  problem.”

No, no, that was clearly not how it had happened. Gus had obviously been attracted by the overt sexuality, which David exuded in spades, in exactly the same way as I myself was now becoming aroused by just sitting next to him in the Rolls.  I hang my head metaphorically in shame to say that had David propositioned me, I would, there and then, have succumbed to his undoubted magnetism. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Gus and David had had sex together last summer, and that that was how Gus had obtained his firsthand knowledge. I was immediately angry at the thought that Gus could have betrayed me. But then, sitting next to David on our way to Trent-Norton, I realise that I was being hypocritical: I was myself the pot calling the kettle black. David was just so attractive that I could see how Gus could have momentarily fallen under his spell.  But this was all all just supposition. Would I ever know the truth? Did I even want to know the truth?  Perhaps it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie.

It was late morning when we finally arrived at Trent-Norton Hall. Gus was there to greet me with open arms. The other footman, Stuart, took my luggage together with the brown paper parcel up to my room – our room!  Gus and I followed him straight upstairs to the same double bedroom which we had used the previous year. And there was the same double bed in which I had surrendered my anal virginity to Gus. Never having been fucked by anyone, I was dead sure that Gus had robbed me of my own anal purity, but seeing that bed again brought all the same doubts rushing back into my head. I know that in the car, I had more or less decided that I did not even want to know.  But I knew that I was deluding myself. I knew that I would not rest easy until I knew, yes or no, whether Gus had had sex with David or not. And if it he had succumbed to David’s charm a year ago, had it already happened again this year?

“Oh, it’s just so good to see you again,” said Gus. “But I see that Stuart (the other footman) has remembered to bring the package up from the car. David got it for me in Bath as welcoming gift for you. But actually it’s something for both of us to share. So do open it up and see if you approve. And if you feel up to it (always a challenging phrase!) after your train ride, we can try starting to use it straight away.”

I tore off he brown paper to reveal a cardboard carton, which I opened to find, to my my utter astonishment,  a five dozen pack of Durex contraceptives and half a dozen tubes of a non oil based lubricant called Durol. As each individual, packet contained three rubbers, we had at our disposal no less than 180 individual rubber condoms. I laughed out loud when I saw what Gus had bought and I understood why he had said it was for both of us.  Last year David had given him a few condoms for whichever of us who was bottoming to wear. The aim was to keep the mess – and make no mistake, gay, anal intercourse, delightful though it is, can be a very messy, sticky business – down to a dull roar.

“We’ll never get through this lot this summer.” I said.

“We can but try,” he replied, “And what’s left over we can take back to Ulverton with us. But answer my question. Shall we right now, before lunch, begin to start to commence to tackle facing the utterly Herculean task which now faces us, which is to get through a 180 Durex condoms this summer?”

“To do that,” I said, “I reckon we would have to fuck each other several times daily for the whole of the month of August and that, my friend, is something that neither of us is up to. But Gus, to be serious for a moment, there is something which is eating me up inside and only you can calm it by being completely honest with me.  There is something I have to know about you and David and I need you to tell me the truth, as without it I think I cannot go on with you anymore. I need to know if you and David have ever had sex together. So please Gus, just tell me the truth. Have you two ever fucked each other?”

“The short answer, Willy, is no. David and I have never had any kind of sex together whatsoever. I can tell you that when you have not been around, I’ve really had to hold myself back as David is just so damned attractive sexually. It’s been hard, hard, hard at times to hold myself back, but no we’ve never had sex, although I confess I would still quite like to fuck him.  But Willy, I can go still further and promise you that I have never had sex with anyone other person than you. And I can think you can probably say the same vice-versa.”

I was mightily relieved to hear that Gus had not betrayed me with David, although I could well see how tempted he might have been – and still was!  David just oozed sexual attraction and was there like a ripe fruit for the picking. Just sitting next to him in the Rolls had so turned me on and I could well see that if he were around every day, his allure would be just too great to resist.  I think it was at that moment that I realised that both Gus and I were humans with all a human being’s frailties. Devoted to each other we might be, but that did not prevent our inbuilt homosexual instincts stopping either of us being attracted by someone else.  Just sitting next to David in the Rolls had already turned me on sexually, a state for which David bore no responsibility at all as he given me not the slightest indication that he might harbour any sexual designs on me.

I felt that owed Gus an explanation for my fears: “Gus, forgive me for doubting you, but it is just that you seemed so close to David that I feared the worst.”

I had wanted to go on and explain myself more fully, but Gus interrupted me: “Oh, Willy, I can see now why you thought David and I had a thing going for each other. You were worried about the business with the towel and the lubricating oil and the Durex last year and the surprise present of rubbers I had David to buy for me in Bath earlier today. Well let me explain. I have known David all my life.  He is a local lad from the village. He and I went to the Trent-Norton village school before I was sent off as a boarder to prep school at the age of nine.  David is two years older than me, but in spite of the fact that we were not in the same class at school, for some reason he became my guardian angel and protected me from bullying by the  other boys, who saw me as being posh and not one of them.  And so, in spite of our age difference, we became good friends, a friendship that has endured through the years. During the holidays when I was at Trent-Norton alone, David was, in fact, my only close friend. And so I was delighted to find that my father’s butler had set him on as junior footman. I always told you I wanted to be an ordinary bloke like you and not tied to all that honourable, claptrap stuff, which is why I call myself Gus Trent, as you well know. Well as life has turned out for me so far, you, my closest friend and lover and David, a life-long friend, are just ordinary blokes.”

I thought to myself as Gus told me all this, that he and my mother had diametrically oppose objectives in life.  He always maintained he wanted to climb down the social scale, an assertion which I seriously doubted, whilst my mother wanted to push me up it.

“So, as you might well imagine isolated as I am, rattling around in this huge, empty house, which my father insists on maintaining at enormous expense to himself, with David to hand, so to speak, in the past two years, our friendship has grown and we have become close confidants. David told me that he was gay and that he and Stuart, the other footman at Trent-Norton, whom you have also met, were an item. As far as I can tell, David and Stuart are as gay as coots and are themselves as solid an item together as are you and I. That is how, just before you arrived here last year, I came to tell David about you and me and our friendship which was moving towards sex. David then pointed me in the right direction and recommended me to take the bull by the horns, which is how we got started fucking each other last summer.”

“After a year at school where we have certainly gone hammer and tongs on the sexual front, I thought it would be fun to present you with all those rubbers as an indication of what I hoped we might do with our time this month.  I can tell you, I would personally never had the nerve to go into a chemist’s shop and buy even one packet of  Durex, let alone that jumbo pack. But David told me he would get them at a barber’s shop in Bath, which does a roaring trade in what he tells me are euphemistically called mens’ requisites. So David and Stuart know that you and I are very much an item as they themselves are and that we are fucking on a regular basis even though we are still at school.”

“And from what David has told me, they are very much like you and me, in that they are equal partners and both perform the roles of top and bottom as we do.   So now that all that is behind us, what do you say to having a quickie here and now before lunch? We don’t seem to have had sex together for ages and I am just dying for a fuck right now. As you are my guest and as far as I know the only warm body to hand at the moment, I thought it only right and proper to give you first chance of refusal before I am forced to jerk myself off in frustration.”

“Gus, correct me if I am wrong, but to the best of my recollection, I seem to remember that you reamed out my hole as if was going out of style on the very last night of term and unless I am very mistaken we spent the rest of that night in my bed and we did not exactly sleep much. Now that was not more than ten days ago.  I know that absence makes the heart grow fonder; but really you need to learn to control yourself better or you risk becoming a sex machine!”

“There are times Willy, when you can be an absolute prick and this, my friend, is one of them. So let me ask you again before I do something I would forever regret, like taking matters into my own hands and raping you, do you or do you not wish to have sexual congress with me before we go down to lunch?  Just give me a yes or no answer so that I know where I stand!”

By this time we were both beside ourselves with laughter. We both knew that neither of us could keep our hands of the other for very long and, in spite of our joking banter, we both knew full well that we were going to have sex there and then. I have to confess that I was as keen as Gus to get our holiday off with a bang. But there was something I had to clear up with him before we indulged ourselves in what I suppose, given the euphemism for sex Gus had just used, might best be described as pre-prandial congress.  I was feeling very guilty that I had ever doubted Gus’s faithfulness to me. But given David’s aura of sexual magnetism, which either involuntarily or by design he seemed permanently to radiate, I could well understand how Gus might have been tempted and taken a bite of what was a sort of forbidden sexual apple.  And given my own thoughts on David and the way I had, myself, become sexually aroused just by the simple act of sitting next to him in the Rolls as he drove me back to Trent-Norton, I felt doubly guilty as I knew that given half a chance I could easily fall under David’s spell.

And so I answered Gus’s direct question by saying: “Yes, but.”

“What do you mean by that?  Either we are going to have sex before lunch or we are not.  So, come on Willy; stop sitting on the fence and say yes or no. Don’t you realise that I am just dying to have sex with you?”

“Yes, you great ape, I do want us to have sex right now; I’m as keen as you are. But before we do, I have something I need to get off my chest; a sort of confession I want to make to you.  Gus, I’m really sorry that I ever doubted you and that I wrongly thought that you and David had been together. But I did not know of your longstanding friendship with him until just now and given your apparent knowledge about matters sexual last year, I could not then understand how you could have discussed such matters with David, who is, after all, an employee of your father. But now I do. Anyway, for what it’s worth, given David’s undoubted sexual magnetism, even if you had crossed the line with him, I would have forgiven you; it was just that not knowing was gnawing at my guts and I just had to know for certain.”

“But Gus, I have a confession to make.  I had never ever even looked at another man than you until today.  However, when David picked me up in Bath just now, I sat in the front of the Rolls with him and I have to tell you, that just sitting next to him turned me on sexually. I guessed he might be like us and I found him so sexually attractive that had he propositioned me, I would gladly have accepted. So being driven back here by David, I discovered a side of my character which I did not know existed until an hour ago. So you can see why if you had succumbed to David’s undoubted charm and had had sex with him, I could easily have forgiven you for I saw that there, but for the Grace of God, I myself might have gone.  Gus, I feel so very much better now that I have got all that lot off my chest. So, yes, let’s indulge ourselves and wallow for an hour in the rare delights of pre-prandial sexual intercourse.”

Gus locked the bedroom door and we stripped off. Gus was already raring to go as he slipped out of his clothes as his cock immediately sprang aggressively to attention, leaving no doubt as to what it wanted.  Gus had opened the carton of Durex and handed me one of those inimitable little purple packets bearing the innocuous legend Durex-Transparent Latex, totally belying the purpose of its contents.  I had already understood by Gus’s action that he intended to have the inaugural fuck of what was later to prove a more or less non-stop month of sex between us. I notice that he himself was also rolling a rubber onto his own cock. But as the urge to copulate was by no means one-sided as by now I was also totally ready for sex, so I rolled on the rubber. Quite frankly I did not mind at all that Gus, in handing me the rubber, had pre-empted any discussion of who would do what to whom first that day.  I felt at that moment that I owed it to Gus to let him do what he wanted with me, in retribution for the doubts I had been harbouring for over a year about his honesty over his relationship with David.

Gus lubricated his own Durex-clad cock with some of the Durol cream and approached me. He then pushed me flat on my back onto the bed, knelt between my legs, which he obliged me to spread and hoisted them over his shoulders, before shafting me with one, smooth, incredibly quick thrust.  I can only describe his actions that day as being like those of a dog that has smelled the scent of a bitch on heat and cannot control its natural instincts to mate with her. He went at my anus like man possessed and hammered me with extra long strokes of his rock-hard cock. I was obvious that Gus almost immediately lost control of what was doing as he egocentrically satisfied his own burning need to fuck me. 

As he banged away at me like a man possessed, gone was any concept of mutuality. I saw from his frenziedly phrenetic actions, that he had but one objective, which, come what may, was to bring himself to a climax as rapidly as possible. And then as he grunted and panted with each vigorous thrust of his cock as he attempted to satisfy himself, it suddenly hit me that he had been quite serious when he had said that he was just dying to fuck me.  I had taken that as an off-the-cuff remark at the time, as we had had sex at Ulverton only ten days ago. But now I saw – and felt – from is actions that he had he had really meant it.  Absence, as the saying has it, did seem to have made Gus’s heart grow fonder; and the single minded vigour with which he fucked me, made me be believe that he really had needed to have sex with me.

He climaxed relatively quickly whilst still deep inside me and shot his considerable load into the rubber he was wearing before falling on me putting us face to face, dripping with sweat at the effort he had just expended to satisfy what I perceived to be the imperative and mandatory command of his own sex drive. As we lay there allowing Gus to recover from what had been entirely his effort, I suddenly understood how men were driven to rape, by their unrelenting sex drive.  Gus had, for some reason fallen under the spell of that imperative command of the sex drive, which he, like a dog scenting a bitch in heat, could not ignore. I saw that he had had no option but to obey his basic primeval sex instincts.  If I had not acquiesced to his demands, I saw quite clearly that he would not have been able to control himself and would have taken me by force.

All this being said, and although what had just happened ran totally counter-current to the ethos of mutuality which existed between us and which we had both assiduously brought to a fine in our joint sex life the previous year at Ulverton, I found, in the post-copulative state in which I now found myself, pinned down by Gus who was still deep inside me, the whole episode had, in retrospect, been quite exhilarating.  Would I have chosen it, had it been offered? Most definitely not.  But now that it had happened, I had thoroughly enjoyed the sensation having my body used as a target for Gus’s battering ram.  It had been a completely new experience for me – and I suppose also for him – and although I had not climaxed myself, I felt absolutely great; somehow the lack of having reached orgasm, which was normally the holy grail of our congress, did not seem important in the present context. It had been a new sexual experience for me – and I suppose also for Gus – as we had both only ever had sex with each other and what Gus had just done was a departure from the norm.

But it did give me food for thought as I lay there under him unable to extricate myself. I admitted to myself that I had enjoyed enormously what Gus had just done to me. I had also discovered today a side of my sexual make-up I had not know existed, sitting next to the sexually inviting David in the Rolls. Just looking at David had completely turned me on, as my cock had told me in no uncertain manner. (What a sexual barometer a man’s penis truly is!) So I wondered if perhaps Gus and I should explore what had hitherto been unknown territory to us both; enlarge our field of experience, so to speak.

Gus now had evidently sufficiently recomposed himself after his sterling efforts and withdrew himself from me, rolled over and lay on his back at my side.  He was in what I can but describe as his mea culpa mode and was almost in tears as he started to apologise for what he had just done, which was unlike anything we had previously known together.

“Willy, I am so very, very sorry for what I just did to you. I simply could not control myself as I wanted you so much that things got completed out of control. Can you ever forgive me for treating you like that?”

Gus would have gone on had I not cut him short: “Gus, forget it. It was an aberration; but one which I totally enjoyed; it was something new for both of us and if it gave you the satisfaction it gave me, then let’s both look on it as a very enjoyable, if unusual, occurrence.” I looked over at Gus to see that his cock was still hard and that the condom he was wearing had really done its job and collected what had been, judging from the bulging rubber, a quite unusually large emission of his sperm. As my own cock was also still rock-hard and clad in its own, as yet totally empty rubber, it seemed a pity to let things rest at that. “Gus, why don’t you take that thing of your dick before it bursts with your overgenerous load of spunk, roll on a fresh one and then turn over onto your stomach and let me try to take you to heaven and back before we go down to lunch?”

As Gus removed the overfull condom from his penis, I marvelled that he knew what to do (David again, I suppose) as I watched him tie a neat knot in the bugling rubber to stop its contents leaking everywhere. Then he did as I had suggested and rolled on a fresh rubber (we had plenty, remember!) and prepared himself to be shafted by me in the doggy position. Having lubricated my rubber-clad, but as yet unused cock-in-waiting with a good dollop of Durol, I knelt behind him, pulled his legs into a kneeling position, spread them to gain access to his all important entry hole and without waiting, shafted him giving him my full length before pausing for moment.

I had already decided that what had just been sauce for the goose, would now also be sauce for the gander and that I would treat Gus’s anus to the sort of vigorous battering he had just give me; with one vital difference however. Although I too had been looking forward to fucking Gus – when did I ever not? – I was not in the psyched up state he had been when he unleashed his totally uncontrolled fury on me.  So I had already decided that I would batter Gus with my cock and let him experience what rough sex is like – very enjoyable, in fact – but with sufficient self-control over my actions that I would bring both of us to a simultaneous orgasm to give that all important mutual satisfaction, which I seriously considered as the cement vital to the longevity of any sexual relationship.

I started as I meant to go on and made my actions as brutal as I could from my very first thrust. As Gus had just done to me,  I battered his anus with my cock as hard as I could and was delighted that I was rewarded with exhortations from Gus of don’t stop – please don’t stop now – please go on – oh, that feels so good . He was clearly enjoying his first experience of a really rough fuck from me as much as I had mine from him. Still basically in control of myself, I managed to hold myself back until I saw that Gus was on the edge of climaxing, before withdrawing myself fully from his anus, I gave him that last powerful thrust of my cock, that final straw which broke the camel’s back, upon which we both climaxed explosively together, pumping out what seemed, at the time, like two endless streams of sperm.

Both orgasms when they came were very intense and Gus produced for the second time in half-an-hour a rubber-bursting quantity of his creamy cum.  I looked down and saw that my own condom was also filled to the bursting point with my emission. As we lay there together to catch our breath after what had been for both of us an unexpected, but totally exhilarating, experience, Gus simply said: “My God, Willy, that really was something else. How the fuck did you do it?” And that was the very first time which I heard the F-word, as it has come to be known, used by Gus, in what has today become a meaningless context.

After discarding the rubbers – I followed Gus’s lead and also tied a knot in mine to avoid subsequent sticky leaks – I saw that David had been right: anal sex between two males was an intrinsically messy business, but one which rapidly became totally addictive to both parties. So his suggestion that each party to any act wear a rubber on his cock was very sensible. Not that sense has much to do with sex, which is a law unto itself and often leads to unforeseen consequences.  But I think that David’s wisdom had already sunk in and henceforth whenever we had sex in bed, Gus and I were at one, in that we always each used a condom.  You will note that I did say whenever we had sex in bed, as we both somehow thought that bare-back sex, where flesh is in direct contact with flesh, was somehow preferable  and in al fresco sex, to which we were to come, mess did not seem to matter.

Anyway, to progress the story, after a shower to wash away the sweat of our morning’s travails, we eventually arrived in the dining room at around one, where lunch was served to us. When I say served, I really do mean served, for everything at Trent-Norton, in spite of the absence of both the Noble Lord himself and Titus, Gus’s brother and heir apparent to the title, was de rigueur. I had been exposed to the opulent excesses of Trent-Norton during the past several summers, but aged eighteen as I now was, I suddenly saw life at Trent-Norton in a totally different light.  It suddenly hit me that Gus and I were living in a time-warp, as if we were in the year 1900 and not in the mid-1950s, two world-wars later. As far as I could see, nothing had changed since the turn of the century. If you can believe it, the butler was on hand to supervise the two young footmen who actually served the food.

Can you imagine the cost? Three men to serve lunch to two young men not yet nineteen years old and who were still at school. Add on to that the cook, whoever she was, hidden away somewhere in the nether regions of Trent-Norton Hall, very probably assisted by some skivvy,  working away cooking the lunch for two schoolboys which it was now taking three men to serve to us.  It seemed to me the ludicrous height of extravagant excess, no matter how rich you were. But it was obvious that Gus’s father, Lord Trent was either stinking rich or an utter fool or possibly both, to spend his money with such gay abandon. And at the end of the day, what did we actually have served to us?  Shepherd’s pie followed by rice pudding!  It was more or less the level of the food we were served daily at Ulverton School and no better. I assumed the cook at Trent-Norton was what was known as a good plain cook, which accolade, judging by her today’s efforts, she merited totally. Of course, the food itself was beautifully served on fine china and we used solid silver cutler engraved with the Trent-Norton crest. But I ask you; all that for shepherd’s pie and rice pudding!

However, his verbis dictis, which, for my Latin disadvantaged readers, translates as: these words having been said, the presence of both footmen, David and Stuart, who, according to Gus were both a queer as coots and were, moreover an item, gave me the opportunity to look at both of them more closely, with an eye that was sexually more acute and refined than it been when I had arrived at Bath station just a few hours ago. I had sat next to Dave in the front of the Rolls as he drove me from bath to Trent-Norton and as you already know had been sexually aroused just by sitting next to him. Couple the realisation that I was attracted, for the first time, towards a man other than Gus with the startling fact that I had enjoyed – as also had Gus – the two bouts of hard sex in which we had just indulged, you can easily appreciate the way I evaluated the two young footmen who were waiting on us. Both David and Stuart were well-set up young studs about twenty years old and both were sinfully handsome. But I found my eye automatically focussing on the crotches of their well-cut livery-trousers, which either by accident or design allowed any acute observer (me) to discern that both young men were well equipped the man-meat department.

I can tell you that I was astonished that within a few short hours I had suddenly become aware of a side of myself that had not hitherto known existed.  The simple fact of the matter was that I was attracted toward other men and it had become a matter of burning importance to know what they packed in their trousers.  And so as I ate the shepherd’s pie and rice pudding, my eyes kept flicking from David to Stuart as I wondered what they would each look like stripped for action. Would their cocks measure up to the hidden promise of the bulge in their trousers? Did I imagine it or did David flash me a knowing smile when he saw my eyes focused on his crotch? Had I been as evident as that? David, of course was aware that Gus and I were sexually involved; but was Stuart?  I assumed that he was, as according to Gus, he and David were an item and probably had no secrets from each other.

Other than by Gus, I was not sexually turned on at all when I saw, as I did on a daily basis, my classmates naked in the showers. But I knew at that if I were ever to see either David or Stuart naked it would be totally different.  I knew that just the sight of either of them naked would have the same effect on me as does the scent of a bitch in heat on a dog; I would want to have sex with them. I say sex, as love and affection were not involved.  It was pure, carnal lust which could be satisfied by a bout of rough anal sex in which the active partner thought only of his own satisfaction. Of course, as I had learned from my brief experience of rough sex with Gus, even for the passive partner, taking an anal beating from another man’s cock could be an invigorating experience not to be sneezed at. Yes, man-to-man sex was certainly a much wider field than I had ever realised; but would I ever experience it?

The weather in August that year was glorious; the sun shone every day and there was not a drop of rain during the entire month. The grounds of Trent-Norton Hall were, to say the least, extensive. There was no modern swimming pool as such, but the property did possess a lake, hidden from the house by a small wood. And there one of Gus’s forbearers had built a small bathing hut and had had a jetty built projecting out into the lake, enabling swimmers to plunge directly into  deep water and avoid walking rather painfully across what was a  pebbly, gently sloping shore. Between the bathing hut and the shore was a small, secluded area with short grass on which bathers could relax and sunbathe. We had used the lake for bathing in previous years only occasionally, but this year, with the glorious weather we were there almost every day.  We had found a number of inflatable mattresses in the hut and a foot-pump and so we were able to make ourselves very comfortable. Of course it goes without saying that remote and invisible from the house as we were, and with no other family members around to disturb us, Gus and I did a lot more than swim and sunbathe that summer.  This was our first ever opportunity to wallow al fresco in the joys of total nudity and enjoy the freedom that a complete lack of clothing brings with it.

The day after my arrival, we had brought, a supply of our mens’ requisites  with us to the hut. So, footloose and fancy free as we were, we indulged ourselves to the limit. As I had said to Gus when we first to opened that monster pack of Durex condoms:  “We’ll never get through this lot this summer.” to which he had replied: “We can but try.” Well let me just tell you that try our best we did. I find it hard to imagine that two young men, totally in love, equally besotted the one with the other as we were, could have copulated with more often than we did. From that very first day at the lake, we behaved as I imagined a married couple did on their honeymoon; we took every opportunity we could to fuck each other. We had gone down to the lake immediately after lunch and stayed there for some four hours  until about six, sunbathing, swimming and, of course fucking each other sybaritically totally nude in the open air.  Looking back, I think I can safely say that our joint sexual appetites were totally insatiable that summer. Try as we might to satisfy our carnal cravings, we both always wanted more. Our inbuilt sex drive had us as completely in its thrall, exactly as if we had been taking an addictive drug from whose powers we could not escape.

In a quieter moment, lying there side-by-side, we discussed the two occasions on the day I had arrived at Trent-Norton, when what should have been our love-making had turned into rough sex. It had been a surprise turn of events for both of us, but in retrospect we both agreed that it had made a refreshingly exhilarating change to our normal routine. Slowly as we discussed our feelings, we both came to the conclusion that there were two quite different aspects to sex between two men, but also probably to sex between a man and a woman for that matter. There was the sex of true love-making, in which Gus and I regularly indulged and which was the rock underpinning our relationship and which rendered us inseparable. But then there was the rough sex which simply satisfied a man’s carnal lust and which had nothing at all to do with the affection of one man for another.  

I told Gus again of the strong sexual attraction I had felt for David in the Rolls the day of my arrival and how it had been reinforced when I was able to observe him and Stuart his footman colleague and sex partner more closely as they had served lunch that very first day. “Gus, I have to confess to you that all throughout lunch, my eyes jumped from staring admiringly alternatively at the crotch of each of them and wondering whether I would ever experience the objects of pleasure hidden there. I think that my motivation was just sheer lust. I did not see either of them as a substitute for what you and I have. It’s just that I wanted – no let me correct that and say I still very much want – to have rough sex with either David or Stuart – or both of them. Gus, can I ask as you how you feel about David, who is a friend of longer standing to you to you than I am and who has been your guru, your mentor, your guide, in matters sexual, but remains a man with whom you have never had sex.  How would you feel, if the opportunity arose, to have rough sex with David, at which I am sure he is very good, or for that matter with Stuart, whom you know less well?”

Gus thought for a moment before replying: “Well I can tell you that what I, in my insatiable desire to fuck you as soon as you arrived, I inadvertently initiated something which has changed our perspective on sex as we have hitherto known it. My clumsiness in my desire to satisfy to possess you, developed into a type of sex in which we had never before indulged – indeed which we had probably not known existed – until we experienced it quite by accident. But now that the genie is out of the bottle, I see no way of ever putting it back. And quite frankly, having enjoyed the experience so much, as far as I am concerned I don’t ever want to put it back. You see, Willy, like you I enjoyed our little – let us call it aberration – enormously.  It is, as you say, a quite different aspect of male-male sex, but it does have the potential to broaden our sexual horizon and give both of us great pleasure. And let’s face it, Willy, men fuck each other for the pleasure it gives them; or more pertinently, you and I fuck each other because of the pleasure it gives us. So if we can have a new string to our bow, then let’s bring it on! To answer your question about having sex with David and Stuart, my answer is a resounding yes. But that may be easier said than done.”

Anyway our discussion had cleared the air for a potential, new approach to sex in parallel to what had become our normal routine; rough sex, in which it was the active partner who attempted to satisfy his own lust without any regard as to his partner’s feelings, but which, as we had both seen, could be equally exhilarating for the passive partner. Well, it had been that way the two times we had experienced it and I guess that we were basing our theory in extenso on just those two practical cases. And then we had both admitted that we were attracted to David and Stuart, although I don’t think that either of us was very clear about the type of relationship – if any at all – we could ever have with either of them. One thing was certain; Gus’s eagerness to have sex with me before lunch immediately on my arrival at Trent-Norton and his subsequent inability to control himself had really thrown the cat among the pigeons and upset our hitherto  complacently harmonious sex lives, which would never be quite the same again.

It was on the Wednesday in my first week at Trent-Norton, after lunch, Gus and I had gone down at the lake and, having discarded our clothes, were again indulging in our favourite pastime. In fact, on this occasion, I had just mounted Gus who had graciously offered me the first fuck of the day, and had presented me with the delightful prospect of fucking his arse al fresco in the doggy position. Then, just as I had entered Gus, totally unexpectedly from behind me, a man’s voice said: “I do hope that I am not intruding.”  It seemed to me a totally stupid remark to have been made by a third party, who had just come across a pair of naked young men, one of whom was engaged in fucking the other.  Had it been me, I would have withdrawn without saying a word, utterly embarrassed by what I had seen.  But the first thought which flashed through my mind, given the criminal nature of our sexual activities, was that we had been seen committing an act of sodomy and might be in deep trouble with the law.

But the intruder, whoever he was, had not gone away as he said: “I am so sorry to have disturbed you, so perhaps I should go away and let you get on with what you are doing.” Now, to say the very least, it is not every day that one is caught red-handed outdoors, totally naked, indulging in an act of illegal, homosexual, anal copulation. So, on the principle: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, the very last thing either of us wanted was for our unknown intruder to vanish without a trace and leave us wondering who had caught us at it. It was disturbing that we had been caught copulating naked al fresco. But we had to face the facts, that what had happened could not be wished away and we had somehow to try to mitigate the potential consequences of what was, to say the least, the very awkward and compromising situation in which we now found ourselves.

I withdrew myself from Gus’s anus, stood up and turned around, my condom-clad rock-hard cock pointing in a vaguely aggressive way at our intruder. To my great surprise and relief, and I have also to say, delight, our unknown intruder was none other than David, who stood there smiling at us, a towel around his neck, wearing nothing but a pair of tight shorts. By the time I had turned around, Gus had also pulled himself to his feet. Astonished, but with relief obvious in his voice, it was Gus who spoke first. “David, what the hell are you doing here; are you not supposed to be on duty at the house?”

If David was surprised to see the two of us standing there, stark naked, with now two condom-clad cocks still totally erect and pointing directly at him in an accusatory manner, he certainly did not show it. He began: “Well sir.” only to be cut of sharply by Gus who told him that as he was apparently not at present on duty nor wearing his footman’s livery, to cut what he referred to as the bended knee deferential attitude as they were old friends and call him Gus as he always had done on the past. He he also told David that my name was Willy and not to address me as sir under the present, unusual circumstances. Gus then said: “So come on David, let’s be hearing it. How come you are here in the afternoon when you are supposed to be on duty at the house?”

“Well Gus, Mr Hodge, the butler, decided this morning that as there were no guests at the house other than you and your friend, Willy, and as the weather was so exceptionally good, he would allow Stuart and me to take alternate afternoons off for the whole of the month unless some unexpected guests of your father or brother arrived. Stuart and I tossed to see who should have first afternoon off, which is today, and I won. As I have often come down here to the lake, which is normally deserted, on my one weekly afternoon off-duty and as I like swimming, I decided to come down here today and so here I am. So, Gus, where do we go from here? If you wish, I can disappear and leave you to your labours – I almost said to your labour of love, which has a totally different meaning to the sort of labour you two were just engaged in – or do you have a better idea?”

Listening to all this, the last thing I think either of us wanted was for David to go off. I seemed to me that we had been handed a golden opportunity go further than the verbal advice on matters sexual, which David had hitherto imparted to Gus  and move on to more practical instruction in matters sexual.  Quite frankly looking at David’s beautifully muscular and well-ripped body, standing there wearing only a pair of shorts, I could feel myself moving towards orgasm just at the sight of this superbly sexy-looking young man. The least we could do before he left us would be to get his shorts off as I desperately wanted to see his cock. And once we had got him naked, as we ourselves were who knows what might happen? I sensed, quite correctly that Gus too did not want to let David leave before at least having tried to engage him in some serious action.  However, you have to remember that what was now being said, was with Gus and me standing there naked, our cocks erect, clad in Durex condoms, facing a sexually very desirable, half naked David; not at all a normal situation to have a three-way conversation, even among friends.

So Gus then said: “David, to say that you did not know we were down here, you did not seem very surprised to see us.  And the fact that you also caught us in the act and found it necessary to make your presence known to us rather than going quietly away and leaving us undisturbed to finish our business, leads me to wonder if you had an ulterior motive in staying here.”

“Gus, quite frankly I was surprised to find the two of you here, as I had no idea where you had gone after lunch. But as you had told me a great deal of intimate detail of your relationship with Willy, I was not at all surprised to come on the pair of you in the act of fucking each other. Quite frankly, if I had found you not been having sex in a secluded place like this on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, I would have thought that there was something radically wrong with the pair of you. I know that both Stuart and I would love to be able to do al fresco exactly what you two were doing just now; but that is is an opportunity, which rarely, if ever, comes the way of most people. Look here Gus; cards on the table; we four, that is to say, you and Willy, and Stuart and I, are both couples, items as we are usually called, who each already know quite a lot about the others. Now we each have our own sex lives, but the way, you Willy, had your eyes glued on my crotch in the Rolls when I picked you up in Bath and again in the dining room when you focussed your eyes alternatively on my crotch and then Stuart’s, makes me wonder if the two of you have something in mind over and above the verbal advice I have given you.”

I took over from that point: “David, you are quite right I have had my eyes on your crotch, which proved quite a cockteaser for me from the moment I stepped into the Rolls the other day. And why? Because I am absolutely dying to see what I am sure is your formidable equipment, which has been hidden, first by the trousers of your livery and now by the shorts you are wearing. So as we are laying our cards on the table, let’s cut to a level playing field. Gus and I are both starkers and as you can see are still ready for sex. So why don’t you conform to the dress code of the moment and step out of your shorts and let us see what you are hiding?”

David laughed as he dropped his shorts and revealed his all; and how formidably attractive his hitherto hidden endowment – his all – proved to be. As a public schoolboy, I was no stranger to seeing young men, my schoolmates, naked in the showers on a daily basis.  So I was familiar with the different physiognomies which a man’s most precious possession could take. But nothing I had ever seen compared with the breathtaking beauty – and I choose that word carefully – of the penis and balls which I now had before eyes.  In words of today, I was just blown away by what I saw. I had suspected from the promising bulge I had observed in David’s livery trousers that he was a well-endowed. But nothing had prepared me for the size and visual attractiveness of what David had just revealed to us.  

First of all, David as I have already observed, was a muscular and well-ripped stud with not an ounce of superfluous fat on his superbly sexy body. But what he packed between his legs was truly remarkable: a sex-kit to kill for! Over a pair of well-proportioned, tightly held balls, his rubbery, well-balance cock descended in a six-inch-long curve, whose graceful line was worthy of a mathematical equation. And as if that itself were not attraction enough it terminated in a totally exposed cock-head – the glans penis in medical speak – devoid of any veiling of foreskin to mask its perfect form. I had never before seen a man whose penis had been circumcised, a very rare occurrence in England, but I was totally entranced by the attractiveness of what the total removal of the foreskin had revealed.  Devoid of foreskin as it was, David’s cock displayed in all its glory the most well-defined head imaginable, set off from the shaft by a clear step in its lower rim or corona. I had never seen a cock quite like it and I had seen a lot of cocks at school in Ulverton.  The fact that it had that wonderful rubber quality to it, gave it an aggressively attractive appearance even when flaccid as it now was. It appeared to be saying: “Look how handsome I am at rest and try to imagine what I look like when I am fully erect and primed ready for action.”

But this was not all, for I saw that David had no pubic hair, which he had obviously shaved off. And the fact that his genitalia were no longer poking through the usual thicket of unattractive hairy-undergrowth, added considerably to his sexual allure.  In a word, David had a God-given set of sex-tools and I only wished that mine were as good. Both Gus and I were well endowed, but neither of us had that visual allure, that come-hither-look, which David had just revealed to us.  And I can safely speak for Gus here when I say that we were both metaphorically salivating at the prospect of experiencing David in action.

Having got over the surprise of what we had just seen, I attempted to answer David’s question about what we might have in mind.  So I told David about our philosophy of mutuality when it came to sex and how we had, just the other day, discovered quite by accident, that there was more to anal sex than we had hitherto realised: “David, Gus and I have been faithful to each other as true lovers and we only ever have had sex with each other. That is precisely what we were doing when you found us having sex today; we were making love; quite specifically I was making love to Gus.  But you seen we both found that we had enjoyed the experience of rough sex which we had inflicted on each other quite by accident. So, we wondered if we could widen our horizons and start to indulge in what I suppose we might call recreational rough sex; sex where mutual love does not come into it at all; sex on an ad hoc basis with a third party, possibly with someone unknown and possibly as a one-night-stand; sex which does not morally count as cheating on one’s regular partner, and even when indulged in by only one of the two partners, does not risk jeopardising the relationship as it is a purely physical thing: an outlet for carnal lust and nothing else.”

“David, both of us find you and your partner, Stuart, sexually very attractive and now that you are here, under what are really very extraordinary circumstances, we sort of wondered how you might feel about having a little recreational pas de trois, to borrow an expression from the ballet. In other words would you like to join Gus and me and show us two beginners what rough sex is all about? Of course, if you feel that our suggestion might compromise the relationship you have with Stuart, then you should decline our invitation. You can, of course, decline anyway and tell Gus and me to go to hell.”

“Well you two young studs have really thought it all out, haven’t you?  You know, Stuart and I have a relationship very similar to yours.  We were initially drawn together when we were both eighteen, by that strange mutual attraction called love. And like yours, our relationship is based on the love we have for each other. However, like you, we also discovered that there was more to sex than making love to one’s partner. Variety is the spice of life as the saying goes; so from time-to-time we do indulge in what you call rough sex, both with each other, but also with a couple of other guys in the village. And I will admit that we do occasionally frequent clubs of ill repute as they are known, in both Bath and Bristol, where we pick up a guy who wants a no-questions-asked, anonymous, one-night-stand.”

“It makes us realise afterwards how lucky we are to have each other and the solid relationship which binds us together.  If either of us goes solo with another guy for any reason, then we have golden rule that we tell the other about it. Stuart and I keep no secrets from each other and we are as near as being one flesh, as the church quaintly defines it, as any two males can ever be. You two guys, who are still at school, are lucky to have found each other so early in life, for many men of our sexual persuasion wander through life and never find a true partner, which is sad. But what is even sadder is the way the law of the land treats us as criminals and it not averse to putting us in prison if we are caught doing what you two were doing just now.  Hopefully people will one day see the light and realise that we are not a menace to society and stop calling us perverts.”

“But to come back to the point after my monologue, I shall be delighted to accept your invitation to turn what has hitherto been verbal advice to Gus into a more practical vein and give the two of you an introduction to what rough sex is really like.  I take it looking at the two of you and your attire that you have brought with you a supply of the men’s requisites I bought for you in Bath.”

Gus waved toward the hut, into which David then went, to emerge a few minutes later sporting the biggest erection either of us had ever seen in our lives. If David’s cock had been impressive when soft, as it now was, fully erect, rock-hard, dead straight, condom-clad and lubricated for action, it was mind-bendingly spectacular. It must have measured between eight and nine inches in length, with a circumference commensurate to its length, giving it an overall, frighteningly magisterial appearance.  It was carried at an acute angle to David’s stomach and if ever a penis was worthy of the epithet, fuck-stick, this had to be it.  This was David at his most potently sexy, ready, to share his incredible man-meat with Gus and me.  I have to admit that I did feel a vague shiver of fear running down my spine just looking at the formidable tool which was to be used to fuck us, But now was no the moment to be squeamish. We had asked David to serve us and that is is exactly what he was doing.

“Well boys as I stopped Willy in process of servicing Gus, perhaps we should begin this afternoons coaching activities by my taking over from where Willy left off, when my remarks led to a case of  coitus interruptus, for which I will now do my very best to make amends.”

David did not wait for an answer, as he took Gus by his shoulders, swung him around and made him kneel down, legs well apart in the doggy position. He then pulled Gus up by the hips so that his arse formed the apex of an acute-angled triangle with Gus supporting himself on his knees and his forearms on the air bed.  And then with Gus in that position, David grabbed his hips in both hands and thrust the entire length of his erection into Gus’s anus. There was no hesitation at all as David’s nine-inch, rock-hard fuck-stick, which is the best description word for what his penis had now become, overcame the resistance of Gus’s anal sphincter and slid effortlessly inside him. I winced voluntarily on behalf of my partner at David’s apparent brutality. If this was a foretaste of what was now to come, Gus was in for a lesson in really rough sex. Gus however accepted this initial attack without a murmur.  He was of course no stranger to anal intercourse; but never had he previously been forced to take such a huge penis into himself, so abruptly and with no warning.

David started fucking Gus almost immediately. He practically withdrew his huge member from Gus’s anus at each stroke and then thrust his full length violently back. I had never before observed anyone being fucked, but as I watched David exercise himself on Gus’s anus, I saw that this was indeed a totally different approach to anal sex to that which Gus and I normally practised on each other.  But that was what we had wanted: rough sex; and that was what Gus was getting. David was certainly rough as he pounded Gus’s arse with every increasing fury.  Then there was a slight pause as he withdrew himself completely and remained for a few moments with his man-meat in the air.  Morbidly fascinated as I had been by this exercise in sexual brutality and standing there with my own cock still hard as a rock and well lubricated from my aborted attempt at fucking Gus when David had appeared on the scene, in spite of a vague feeling of revulsion at what I was witnessing, I knew that I wanted to participate in what was happening before my eyes. As David’s anus was momentarily in a position which was just asking to be shafted, I found that I could not decline what was a wordless invitation and succumbed to my base instincts, thrusting my own cock, with one vigorous movement, deep into David.

I had no idea what David’s reaction to my unexpected and unplanned intervention would be. But as I bottomed my pelvis against David’s arse, he suddenly said: “That’s the idea; the more the merrier; that’s what rough sex is all about; every man for himself and to hell with the others.  Now we are really having a pas de trois, as I think you called it. We may not be as graceful ballet dancers, but we can have a great time bang-fucking each other.”

And that is exactly what David and I, as the two active protagonists in this little orgiastic scene did. I followed his lead and fucked his arse just as hard as he did to Gus’s.  I have no idea when David or I reached orgasm together or if Gus ever reached that state of nirvana. But frankly, who cared? It had been every man for himself without any consideration for the others. But that is what rough sex is all about. We had each used the others as a means of satisfying our own needs. And even in my case if I harboured a lingering doubt and felt slightly guilty about what I had just done, at the end of the day I had to admit that I had enjoyed it enormously. Even Gus, who had been the passive partner in all this, admitted that he had enjoyed having his arse hammered to death by David’s monstrous man-meat.

But David was not yet finished with what had become his master-class in the art of rough sex. After a short respite, in which we all attempted to catch breath, he suddenly, rolled me over, pinned me down, hoisted my legs over his shoulders  and proceeded to fuck my arse to pulp in the mission position.  If this was what rough sex was really like, then I have to admit that I absolutely adored everything he did to me.

That afternoon by the lake had broken down the slight reserve which had still existed between Gus (the master) and David, (the servant) in spite of their long standing friendship. It led many more encounters by the lake that hot month of August and to our physical introduction to Stuart, who suddenly appeared one afternoon, as had David. He proved to be at least as well endowed physically as David and just as efficient in the use of his enviable equipment. In fact, throughout that long, hot month of August, Gus and I benefitted from the sexual expertise of two well-equipped young studs, who, together, taught us more or less everything there was to know about recreational sex. I think that the coming together of Gus and me with David and Stuart was a success for both sides as we all knew that neither of our two relationships was threatened by the other. Gus and I were anxious to learn everything which David and Stuart could teach us; and formidable teachers they showed themselves to be.

The climax of our sexual liaison had to be the night before Gus and I were to leave the next day to return for the start of our final year at Ulverton. We had just gone to bed, naked as had become the norm, and were about to indulge in what had become our nightly homage to the insatiable call of anal sex, when the bedroom door opened quietly and totally uninvited, David and Stuart entered. Without saying a word they quickly stripped off their clothes and pulled Gus and me out of bed, naked as we were, flung us onto our backs side-by-side on the bed and proceeded to fuck each of us twice. David first had sex with me, whilst Stuart tended to Gus’s needs. After they had shot their loads, they then change places and repeated the operation. It was a sort of farewell fling for all of us after what had been a summer devoted to learning the finer points the rougher side of the art of anal of copulation. It was an evening I would never forget in my entire life. I think I can speak for Gus too, when I say that we would both be forever grateful to David and Stuart, who had shown us that there was sex outside the exclusive intimacy in which two guys function as an item and that recreational sex with third parties did not necessary menace a solid relationship.  It was as pair of much wiser and sexually much more experienced young men, with much broader sexual horizons, that we returned to Ulverton for our final year. 

And what a final year it promised to be with the surprise announcement at the end of last term that both Gus and I were to be elevated to the august level of prefect, a distinction which not in month of Sundays either of us would have dreamed possible. But the fact was that here we were in our final year, prefects, with all the power that goes with the rank over our all our schoolmates from first to upper sixth formers. If you think about the disciplinary system which reigns in most public schools, you will realise that it is anything but democratic and totally unfair. The prefects are nominated by the Headmaster in consultation with the house-masters, but once chosen, they have power, which they never hesitate to exercise, comparable to that of an absolute monarch over their schoolmates.  

At Ulverton, an archetypical, traditional public school, the prefects were given free rein to exercise their unbridled power on their brethren, playing the roles of police, judge and jury, and executioner in matters of daily discipline.  Whilst there was a great deal of pleasure in catching someone red-handed breaking one of the myriad of rules, which governed a boy’s behaviour, and the subsequent verbal chastisement visited on him before pronouncing the inevitable sentence, it was in the execution of the sentence with its overtones of the sexual eroticism which are often associated with a caning a bare arse, that the greatest of pleasure lay for most prefects. Spurred on by what might best be called the pay-back period to compensate themselves for the physical pain of the cane inflicted on them by the prefects as they progressed through the school, it is not at all surprising that most young-men, when appointed prefect, quickly developed a taste for wielding the cane on their schoolmates  backsides. Most prefects exercised extreme vigilance to see that even the most minute of faults was detected, nominally in the name of maintaining law and order in the ranks, but more realistically to ensure a regular flow of arses to beat. The moment of greatest pleasure for most prefects, who were no longer boys themselves, but young-men with the sexual stirrings which goes with that age, was when their latest victim was bent arse-naked across the chair, waiting for his arse to be shredded with the cane.

Speaking for Gus and myself, three words sum up our activities in our final year at Ulverton: application, flagellation and copulation. By application I mean the extreme diligence which we both gave to our school work. As Gus and I were more or less, by now, joined at the hip, as if we had become, in biblical terms, one flesh, the thought of our ever separating was excluded from our joint agenda. We both therefore worked very hard at our studies during that final year at Ulverton, to make sure that we passed the public examinations and, more importantly, succeeded in our attempt to secure places at Cambridge.

In the upper-sixth arts stream as we were, we had both decided that a career in the legal professions would suit us and we both took the Cambridge entrance exams with a view to reading law. Our hard work was rewarded, as subject to satisfactory exam results, we both were accepted by Greatorix College, Cambridge. I personally felt that this was the crowning achievement of my career at Ulverton, where at the end of my first month at the school, both the Headmaster and my house-master had seen fit to beat me within an hour of each other, as a painful reward for my lack of application to my studies. That very first encounter of my bare arse with the cane, my double whammy as I thought of it, will remain for every etched on my memory, much as it was painfully etched into my naked buttocks that day.

But to come to flagellation, which often preceded some of our most erotic and satisfactory sexual couplings, Gus and I quickly became the most feared of the prefects that year – the gruesome-twosome as we were nicknamed – for the way in which we operated as a team and the severity of the beatings we gave. Never before had two prefects acted together in all their disciplinary actions. To be confronted by Gus and me, both wielding our canes and to know that whatever punishment had been decreed would be administered by both of us, had no equivalent in the annals of the school  and struck fear into the hearts of those about to benefit from our bounty,  which I can assure you was never less than generous. Gus and I, like our co-prefects, were very conscious of our position of authority and of our obligation to keep order and enforce the school rules, which we did to the letter. In the forty-two weeks of the full calendar year, which made up the three school terms, Gus and I achieved a beating average of just over two boys per week, which grossed up for the entire school year, implied that we had together beaten between eighty and ninety of our brethren always in the name of justice.

To give you a flavour of our reign as prefects, here are accounts of three of our more notable achievements. Mr Rogers, our house-master had asked us to concentrate our in-house disciplinary actions on straightening out what he saw as sloppiness in the first three forms. So we had decided that we would make a nightly inspection of all six dormitories of first, second and third year boys at lights-out, beginning with a visit to the first of the two first-year dormitories, fifteen minutes before lights-out, which was at eight-thirty, by which this time all boys were required to be in their pyjamas and ready to get into bed.  Our entry into the dormitory, each of us with a cane in his hand to signal to the new boys that obedience to the rules began on their very first day, had an immediate chilling effect on the boys, who, suddenly fell silent. A quick glance around the room showed that one boy was missing.

“Stand by your beds boys,” said Gus. “Now one of you is missing at the moment; you are supposed to be eight in this dorm and you are only seven at the moment. So who is absent and where is he?”

Now this was the boys’ first night together and although some of them knew each other from their prep-school days, the dorm had not had time to gel into the tribe of eight loyalists as it soon would, who would remain together throughout their time at Ulverton. A timorous voice informed us that the missing lad was Sedgwick, but where he was, no one knew.  The mystery was resolved when five minutes later the missing, pyjama-clad Sedgwick appeared. As soon as he saw that two prefects were in the dorm, his face took on that guilty, frightened look of a boy who knows he has done something wrong and is now wondering what will happen to him.

Gus immediately took the boy to task in a harangue which reduced him practically to tears and his attendant dorm mates to abject silence well before the cane conveyed its painful message to his soon-to-be-naked arse: “Ah, Sedgwick, I believe it is; the wanderer returns; how nice of you to join us.  Now perhaps, Sedgwick, you would care to enlighten us where your illicit (Gus emphasised the word, making the already nervous Sedgwick even more so) peregrinations in this hostile, unknown land have led you  and what prompted you to leave the safe haven of your dormitory, from which you had chosen to stray on your very first day with us. Are you not aware, Sedgwick, that the school rules strictly (emphasis yet again) forbid boys from leaving their dormitories other than for the purpose of relieving themselves during the last half hour before lights-out? Explain yourself, boy; where were you?”

By now poor Sedgwick was in a blind panic. Here he was, a new boy on his first day at the school, being harangued by a prefect he did not even know. He got no further in his answer than saying: “Please sir”… before Gus authoritatively broke him off and said: “Sedgwick, in this school, you do not use the word, sir, to address anyone other than a master. You address prefects by their name. As we have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced to each other, allow me to inform you that my name is Trent-Norton and this is my co-prefect, Wagstaff, and, in case you are unaware of our role in your lives, we are your two house-prefects in charge of maintaining order in Ogden House and making sure that all boys, and that includes you, Sedgewick, obey the rules. So, now that you understand that, Sedgwick, you may begin again with your explanation for your absence from the dormitory.”

I noticed that Gus, in spite of his avowed wish to be what he called ordinary, had used his full family name, Trent-Norton, presumably to impress the boys with the importance of the correct form of address.

Sedgwick, by now terrified, as were his dorm mates, if the looks on their faces was any guide, began again:  “Please Trent-Norton, I had only just gone to say hello to my brother, just along the corridor. He’s in the third form, sir – I mean Trent-Norton. That’s all I was doing, Trent-Norton.”

“So, Sedgwick Minor as we shall have to call you, as you have an elder brother, who by your arrival becomes Sedgwick Major, what actually transpired at your fraternal meeting?”

“Well, Trent-Norton, my brother, Nicholas – I’m Christopher, by the way – told me that I was a fool to have left my dormitory as it was strictly forbidden and that I had better get back here straight away, because if I was caught wandering around in the corridors in my pyjamas, I risked having my bum swished. So, Trent-Norton, I came straight back here as you can see, as I did not want to get a swishing.”

“And do you think that your brother gave you good advice, that by doing what you did you risked, as you put it: having your bum swished?”

“I don’t know, Trent-Norton. I only know that I came straight back here and that I now only hope I am not going to be swished. I had my bum swished quite a lot at my prep school and didn’t really like it.”

“Oh no, rest assured, Sedgwick, you are not about to be swished for your sins. What we do here at Ulverton to boys like you, Sedgwick, who break the rules will, prove a refreshing change from a prep-school, bum swishing. I this school, we give an offending boy’s arse – that’s the term we, the pupils, use for bum here at Ulverton, while the masters refer to it more politely,  as your bottom – a very sound beating on the bare with a rattan cane. So you, Sedgwick, will have the honour to be first boy of your dorm to have his arse beaten; and on the first day of term too; a singular achievement, wouldn’t you say? Sedgwick, kindly take the pillow from the head of your bed and place it over the rail at the foot of your bed. Then take off you pyjama trousers, bend over the pillow putting your hands face down on the bed and stick your bare arse as high as you can in the air, when Wagstaff and I will have the pleasure of introducing it to the joys of the cane.”

Poor Sedgwick looked dumfounded at what he had just heard. Frankly, given the minor offence he had just committed and the fact that it was his first day at Ulverton, he hardly deserved a beating at all. But I saw that Gus was intent on carrying out our house-master’s instructions to the letter. Mr. Rogers had said that he wanted us to teach the younger boys that they had to adhere to the rules and that he was not averse to seeing the whole of the sixteen new-boys in Ogden House, thrashed by the end of the first term. So, there was no going back on what Gus had just said.  Poor Sedgwick meanwhile, petrified with fear, had not moved since Gus had pronounced something, which to the trembling lad, sounded like a death sentence.

“Sedgwick, I see that you have not moved since I gave you your instructions just now. Is there something in what I said that you did not understand or are you, perchance, hard of hearing? I thought I was very clear; you are going to receive six cuts on your bare arse in retribution for leaving the dorm in your pyjamas. We cannot stand here all night waiting for you to do as you have been told. So, unless you wish to receive extra cuts, get your pyjama trousers off, boy, move your pillow to the end of the bed, bend over it and let’s be seeing your arse in the air; and when you get it there, keep it quite still until I tell you otherwise.”

As a token of his determination Gus, swished his cane menacingly through the air a few times, making the entire dorm wince at the damage it was about to wreak on Sedgwick’s bare arse. Sedgwick finally moved to do as he had been told and dropped his pyjama trousers to reveal that he was still wearing his underpants. Now one of the school’s strictest rules was that all boys slept only in their pyjamas, which, in spite of dire punishment for any infractors, was, nevertheless, often broken.  Any boy caught in bed, wearing his underpants under his pyjamas, which was considered by the school to be grossly unhygienic, was given a mandatory punishment of six with the cane on the bare. 

Gus looked unbelievingly at Sedgwick:  “Sedgwick, I can see already

from you behaviour even on this your very first day at this school, that you boy, are going to have a hard time coming to terms with the rules of this school, which, if you continue breaking them at your present rate, will lead you to life with a permanently sore arse.  Take off you underpants at once and thank your lucky star that you cannot be given more than six cuts of the cane at any one time;  both your offences today each carry mandatory six cut beatings, so you are getting-off lightly.”

As Sedgwick now resigned himself to the worst, I looked at the other seven members of the dorm, all of whom were standing there transfixed by that extraordinary combination of fear tempered with pleasure at the prospect of seeing one of their dorm-mates beaten. So far it was Gus who had spoken and harangued Sedgwick but it suddenly occurred to me that if Sedgwick had been unwise enough not to take off his underpants, might other not be doing the same? And so, speaking for the first time, I said: “The rest to you, whilst you are watching Sedgewick prepare himself to suffer retribution for his sins, kindly show us that you are not also sinners.” A look of horror appeared on several faces which told me I was right in my suspicions, as I said: “Come on boys, all of you now drop your pyjama trousers and let’s see if you are all as pure as driven snow.”

Well the result was that three other boys, who also had been wearing their underpants, were immediately invited to adopt the same the same position as Sedgwick over the ends of their respective beds. I have to say that it was with a sense of some considerable satisfaction that I looked upon four plump little pairs of buttocks, which Gus and I were now to have the pleasure of initiating into the harsh realities of life at Ulverton in a baptism of fire. In the next few minutes the cane cracked down no less than twenty-four times on the naked arses of the four culprits, six cuts for each.  It was a salutary first experience for those four boys, unfortunate enough to have incurred a beating on their very first day at the school.  But that was the reality of life at Ulverton, which, even by the public school standards of the day, was brutal. But it was also a first for Gus and me, as it was our maiden appearance together of what might be described as the fustigatory duo, which was to be our flagellation signature throughout our final year at Ulverton.

On this occasion, Gus began by giving three strokes to two of the boys whilst I did the same to the other two. We then switched over and gave each of the boys, whose arses we had not yet addressed, a further three strokes each, So each lad had the very doubtful pleasure of having felt the cane laid on by each of us.  All four of them went to bed with six, well-defined stripes on their backsides and lay face down on their beds sobbing quietly, displaying their wounds to all and sundry.

It is a fact that corporal punishment usually has a sexually arousing effect on the administrant, on the recipient and even on the witnesses to such acts, which manifests itself in the form of a totally involuntary and incontrollable penile erection of all three parties to such dramas.  Gus and I were not immune from this phenomenon and that night, in Gus’s bed, as we indulged ourselves, as ever, in our insatiable desire to copulate with each other, the fact that we had come from administering four bare-arse beatings intensified the pleasure we took in fucking each other. However, as we lay there, side by side, supine in our post-coital bliss, I voiced my own misgivings to Gus about what we had just done to the new boys.  I had an attack of severe self-doubt, as I reluctantly admitted to myself that I had taken great pleasure in wielding the cane for the first time and giving each of the boys a painful, striped backside, which would be extremely sore for several days. I knew exactly how the boys felt as I had experienced the same thing myself countless times during my years at Ulverton. All right, Gus and I were prefects whose job it was to keep order among the boys; but somehow, I felt guilty about enjoying what I was doing.

Gus listened to my guilt-based outpourings, before saying: “Look, Willy, just get real; we have been appointed prefects and our job is to maintain order and to see that our schoolmates stick to the rules, pettifogging thought they at times might seem. And the only sanction we have when boys break the rules is the cane. Now no one knows better than you and I that the cane hurts like bloody-hell, but that is what it is meant to do; to coin a phrase, pain is the name of the game! Now we agreed that we would never beat a boy on spurious grounds, as was done to you and me on many occasions in the past by bloodthirsty prefects.  So provided we stick to correcting true misdeeds, however small, our consciences are clear; and that is what we are meant to do as prefects; it’s the most important part of our remit. Note that I said, however small, as Mr Rogers, stressed that given inch boys will always take a mile. And so we do not give even a fraction of an inch and punish the slightest infraction to avoid runaway disobedience. That is exactly what we did to the four lads this evening.  Although it was their first day at Ulverton, to have allowed them to get away with what they had done, would have been a mistake. It would have been to give that first inch which leads to the mile. We were quite right, and not only right, but also justified, in shredding the little blighters’ arses as we did and sending them to bed with something painful to lull them to sleep.”

“So, if in exercising our duty, we happen to enjoy certain aspects of what we do, where’s the harm? It’s one of the perquisites of the job. After all, lots of people enjoy the job they perform in life; so why not we? Now I agree with you, the beating of a boy’s naked arse is a sexually arousing experience for all concerned: for us, the beaters; for the boy, the beaten and also for any prurient observer who happens to be present.  It’s a fact of life over which none of us has the slightest control; it is an unavoidable corollary, seemingly indelibly attached to the act of flagellation.  And it is not only the likes of us in late adolescence, in the sexual throes of becoming young-men, who experience it as it does not seem to diminish with age. You have seen yourself, whenever we have been beaten by the Headmaster or Mr. Rogers, both of them quickly develop hard-on boners, which tents their pants, embarrassingly for them. And I’ll bet you a pound to a penny that when they have finished dishing out their justice, they rush to the bathroom and relieve the sexual tension they have built up by jerking themselves off.”

“So, Willy, just stop wallowing in your self-doubt about what we did this evening and accept that wielding the cane and its side effects are part and parcel of a prefects responsibilities.  Just let’s face it and be honest with ourselves, as we both know that we shall enjoy exercising our authority over our schoolmates. Come on, Willy, get real; this is a totally unexpected chance of a pay-back period for all we have suffered together over the years in this place; this is manna from heaven for us. Just look at the increased pleasure we have both just experienced from having sex with each other right now. Look upon what we did to the four lads as sexual foreplay to what we are doing right now; which leads me to tell you to roll over so that I can give your delectable arse the benefit of another dose of my cock. Come on, Willy, forget you soul-searching doubts and enjoy being fucked again before we separate for the night. My God, Willy, do you realise just how lucky we are to have been made prefects? Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth and enjoy the power which goes with our new position.”

Gus had truly embraced all that being a prefect required of him and finally his enthusiasm for what we were doing infected me and I too was forced to admit to myself that in spite of my misgivings, whacking a boy’s naked was an erotic pleasure for me too. 

A few days after our maiden event on the four boys in one of the two first form dormitories, we decided to make an unannounced inspection around nine in the evening when all the boys should have been asleep. Seeing a light from under the door of the second of the two first form dormitories, we made a dramatic entry to find all eight occupants were sitting on the floor playing a game of Monopoly.  We proceeded to send all eight lads sobbing to bed, each with six, painful stripes across their backsides. As Gus remarked later, we had now, in the first week of the school year, almost fulfilled the wish of our house-master, Mr. Rogers, by seeing that that twelve of the sixteen first-formers of Ogden House had already received a taste of the cane before the end of term. “Twelve down, four to go!” said Gus.

But to move on to the second of the fustigatory highlights of our final year at Ulverton, we caught six second-formers entering the school grounds from an unauthorised expedition into the village. And to make matters worse for them, the cherry on the cake for Gus and me, was that not one of them was wearing his school cap either. So that evening, straight after supper, the six delinquents were made to present themselves at the school library for punishment, wearing only their gym shorts and vests. There, we had arranged six chairs in a line down the middle of the room, over the backs of which which the trembling boys were made to bend to present their naked arses to the caress of the cane.  This in itself was a sight to behold; six pairs of naked undefiled buttocks just waiting to be beaten. Then, in what I can but describe as tour-de-force of flagellation, comprising a total of sixty swingeing strokes of the cane, ten, for each boy, I followed Gus five times down the line as we each administered a stroke to the arse presented before us. News of this mass beating flashed around the school more or less before we had completed it. It established our reputation throughout the school as the two prefects not to cross if you cared at all for the wellbeing of your arse.

But the nec plus ultra, the pinnacle of our flagellation efforts, was when we thrashed two of our upper-sixth contemporaries. Sixth-formers at Ulverton were rarely ever caned and upper sixth-formers practically never. So for a member of the upper-sixth to be forced to submit his naked arse to the rigours of the cane was an event of some consequence. On the odd occasion when it did happen, it was the event of the year, which resonated around the entire school as an example that no one, not even the boys of the upper-sixth were above the law. I think that we should consider the three episodes already described above as the gradus ad parnassum, the intermediate steps taken by us and me on our way to the ultimate summit of fustigation, when a prefect skins the arse of one of his contemporary classmates.

It is not easy for the Headmaster, himself, to beat a boy even from the lower-sixth, let alone a member of the upper-sixth, who is a young man in all but name. So you can imagine how difficult it is for a prefect to exercise his undoubted authority over one of his direct contemporaries; believe me, it requires nerves of steel and a firm resolve on the part of the prefect concerned. But it is in that fatidic moment, when the offender has to bow to the authority of a boy of his own age, with whom he sits in class, that a prefect realises that he does in fact have power over all his schoolmates, whatever their age.  When push comes to shove and needs must, the offending young-man from upper-sixth finds himself reduced to the same level as any first former and obliged to submit his naked arse to the rigours of the cane. And as practised at Ulverton, I am not exaggerating when I say, rigours of the cane, for on the rare occasions when a sixth former was thrashed, it was seen as a monitory example of the equality of treatment to the whole school and the lad’s backside received a true roasting with the cane. 

Late one Saturday afternoon during the first month of the new term, Gus and I, together as usual, (but when were we ever not?) just happened to be passing the senior showers after an inter-house rugby match, when we heard loud voices and shrieks of laughter emanating from within the room, which at that hour should have long been empty. Two occupants were having what was evidently a towel-flicking session, a practice strictly forbidden in the school rules as it was quite rightly considered dangerous on the wet tiles of the floor. If caught in the act, the perpetrators were automatically given a six stroke mandatory beating decreed by the Headmaster as two years previously, such tom-foolery had led to a boy falling and breaking his arm. But it was not so much the laughter of the two enactors of this little drama which struck us, as the foul language which they were bandying about between them.  Bad language of any kind was strictly proscribed at Ulverton and if heard by either a master or a prefect always had mandatory, painful consequences for the offender. 

Today, the language being used was particularly foul as the two lads involved gave voice to what, by any standards, was a series of hyper-vulgar, joking comments to each other.  In quick succession, the words fuck and bugger and expressions like fucking hell and fuck-off you fucking bastard, followed each other in an uninterrupted stream of foul-mouthed invective, interpellated only by shrieks of laughter. It was almost as if the two lads involved were having a competition to see which of them could outdo the other by shouting the most obscenities in the shortest time. Although there were no other witnesses to this little drama, as prefects charged with maintaining the school rules, we could, not in all conscience, turn a blind on such flagrant disrespect of two of the schools most strictly enforced rules. But also, to be quite frank, here was a rare, not-to-be-missed opportunity for us to exercise our authority on two offenders who were our exact contemporaries. It was not every day that a prefect had the chance to shred the arse of one of his class-mates and Gus and I had no intention of letting the two sixth-formers, whoever they were, escape the painful consequences of their actions.

Nevertheless, it was with a certain feeling of apprehension that we opened the door of the shower room and entered, to find two upper-sixth-formers, Clarke and Whitaker engaged in a towel flicking match and attempting to outdo each other in the grossness of their language.  I felt a great sense of relief when I saw that the two offenders were both from the science stream and as such were not direct classmates of ours, as we were in the arts stream.  Moreover, they were not members of Ogden House, which made matters a little easier. But taking two contemporaries of one’s own age to task was a totally different matter to that of dealing with younger boys.  However, Clarke and Whitaker had to be dealt with, and dealt with quite severely if we were to maintain our authority as prefects. There was no going-back now that we had entered the showers, as from the moment we entered the rooms and caught Clarke and Whitaker in flagrante, argue later as they might, the inexorable process to a bare arse beating had been started.

As soon as they saw that they had been caught at it, by two prefects, they knew that their fate was sealed. The two of them stopped their play as we entered the shower room. Naked, in all their late, adolescent, athletic glory, Clarke and Whitaker, as key members of their house rugger team, were a truly handsome pair of studs, who to Gus and me, with our sexual orientation were physically very, very attractive. But this was neither the time nor the place to consider any sexual hanky-panky. Startled as they clearly were by our impromptu and obviously undesirable intervention, Clarke was the first to speak and in so doing made the classic mistake of digging himself deeper into the hole in which he found himself.

Evidently on the motto that the best form of defence is attack, Clarke’s first words were: “Oh it’s only you two, Trent and Wagstaff; what the fuck do you two want? Why don’t you just fuck off?”

Gus as ever took charge of the situation and in his aristocratic way, read the riot act to the two of them.  He pointed out that they had been caught in the act of breaking two of the School’s most sacred – where he got the word sacred from, who knows – both of which carried rather painful, mandatory penalties. He went on to say, that matters had been made worse by the aggressive way in which Clarke had greeted us and that no boy  of the school was allowed to swear at anyone, least of all at a prefect. Gus then concluded in a way which I can but describe as magisterial, as he passed sentence on the two offenders, both of whom listened in utter silence, accompanied by growing looks of disbelief on their faces as he outlined what the immediate future had in store for them. It was clear that the two of them could not believe that two prefects, their exact contemporaries at the School, intended to beat the two of them for their actions. Gus’s performance was worthy of a High Court Judge passing sentence of death on a pair of convicted murderer.

“So, gentlemen, as you have broken two of the School’s most important rules, my co-prefect Wagstaff and I have no option but to punish you for your misdeeds in the traditional Ulverton manner, with which you are doubtless familiar. You will oblige us by reporting to the school library for punishment at eight o’clock this evening.  It goes without saying and I am sure that I do not need to remind you that as you are to be beaten for your misdeeds, you will of course, as tradition demands at Ulverton, present yourselves for punishment wearing just your gym shorts and vests.  The mandatory punishment, laid down by the Headmaster for each of the two offences you have just committed, is six cuts with the senior cane on the bare; so you will each receive a twelve stroke beating this evening, administered jointly by Wagstaff and me.”

I added under my breath rather blasphemously to myself as Gus ended his speech: “And may the Lord have mercy on your arses.” I have to say that just looking at the two of them standing there naked in front of us, I felt myself getting hard in my pants at the thought of what of what Gus and I would give ourselves the pleasure of doing to them later. The prospect of a twelve stroke beating on on the bare is enough to make the blood of even the most hardened of offenders run cold. But I was counting my chickens before they were hatched, as the ultimate fate of Clarke and Whitaker was still not settled.

Gus had berated the two offenders without any interruption or objection from them and as far as he was concerned the matter was settled; there was nothing more to discuss and the affair would be closed that evening when Clarke and Whitaker had received their thrashings.  But as far as the two offenders were concerned, the matter was far from settled. The look of disbelief on both their faces as Gus had taken them task for their actions had now turned into boiling anger.  Neither had said a word whilst Gus had been speaking, but now they made their views clear with volcanic rage.

“You two fuckers had better get real,” said Whitaker speaking for the first time. “You come in here pulling rank on us. Jesus Christ man, we are all in the sixth-form together and you cannot expect to treat us as you do the first formers.  You had netter think again as there is no way that we are going to let you two roast our arses in the library this evening. You are both out of your bloody minds.”

Clarke then added his fillings: “Whitaker is right; you are both out of your tiny fucking minds if you think that you can treat us the way you do the younger boys. So just forget it. You are not going to beat us in the library this evening as we are simply not going to turn up. So you can give yourselves a cheap thrill by sticking both your canes up your fucking arses.”

Gus metaphorically drew himself up to his full stature and did not allow himself to be intimidated in the slightest by the foul mouthed invective from the pair of them:  “You two – I  was going to say, gentlemen, but having listened to the foul-mouthed language you have just used when addressing us, I have my doubts that you justify that civility – have just been caught red-handed breaking two of the strictest rules of this school, for which you deserve to be punished and for which, one way or another, you will be punished. There are no extenuating circumstances, which would mitigate the punishment you will receive, which is a mandatory six cuts of the senior cane for each offence. However, in the light of the foul language you have just used to address us, I have decided that you will each receive a further three strokes of the cane on the bare, when we meet again this evening, which takes your punishment to a total of fifteen cuts each. Now if you choose not to turn up and accept your punishment as young gentlemen should, then you will be referred to the Headmaster, who, in the light of the gravity your offences and your recalcitrance, will certainly birch you. That is all I have to say right now. Wagstaff and I will leave you come mentally to terms with the painful consequences of your offences. We shall await your presence in the library this evening, when with great regret, we will use our best endeavours to lay this regrettable incident painfully to rest.”

After we had left the two of them to stew in their own juice, I asked Gus if he thought that they would show up that evening. He replied: “I am sure that they will, as they will not want to be referred to the Headmaster as they know he will shred their arses with his birch. But either way, the two of them are in for a very painful interlude.  But a pound to a penny, in spite of their bluster, they will both show up and you and I will have our pound of flesh. And to boot, beating of two upper-sixth-formers, will establish our reputation as a force to be reckoned with for the rest of the year.”

That evening at supper, if looks could have killed, Gus and I would have been stone dead.  After supper we went to the library each carrying our senior cane. By convention, on seeing that a prefects’ beating was in the offing, any readers in the library left immediately.

Gus and I placed two chairs in the centre of the room, over which Clarke and Whitaker would shortly be invited to offer their naked arses as a sacrifice to the cane. We discussed exactly how we would proceed with the administration of fifteen strokes of a senior cane, a very severe, but well merited punishment indeed, which would leave the two of them in agony for several hours and unable to sit down comfortably for several days. In view of the extremely rude way they had addressed us, we both agreed that this would be the full Monty: a hiding with no holding back: a beating, which Clarke and Whitaker would remember for the rest of their lives.

To heighten the drama of the occasion, we placed the two chairs back to seat, so that whoever found himself occupying the rear chair would have a fine view of his partner-in-crime’s naked arse and would be able to follow as the individual cuts built up to create the final harmonious picture of a well-beaten arse; an arse created by extreme pain which the bearer could be proud to have endured and which would be admired in awe by all who saw it later, as many surely would.  Gus would begin by applying his first stroke across the arse of the occupant of the rear chair. Then, after a pause of some ten seconds to allow the unfortunate recipient fully to appreciate the pain of a well seasoned and well-apple rattan-cane – I would deliver my first stroke to the same pair of buttocks. There would then be another pause before Gus placed his first stroke on the second naked offering, to be followed by yet another pause before I delivered my first stroke.  And so we would proceed six times, passing from one to the other at a majestically slow pace, thereby by allowing the two offenders fully to appreciate the individual pain of each of his twelve cuts. We had agreed that we would deliver, as far as possible, the first twelve cuts in a strictly parallel manner, from the bottom of the back to the crease where the buttocks meet the legs, the so-called sit-spot, always considered the most sensitive part of a boy’s arse and worth special attention from the cane.

After the first twelve strokes we decided that we would take a five minute break from our labours and allow the two offenders to suffer in agony whilst they waited what would seem like an eternity for the final three cuts which would end their penance. Gus and I had agreed that as the additional three cuts were in punishment for the obscene language which the two of them had spoken to us, we would each give one of them our three strokes.  A toss of the coin landed me with Clarke and Gus with Whitaker, for what was to be our coup de grace.  I knew myself that intended to make my final three cuts diagonally and as painful as possible by way of retribution for the language the two of them had used to Gus and me. Gus agreed with me that these last three strokes were personal and were our only means of venting our own disapproval of their bad language and for what it was worth, indulging our own, lamentable, worst instincts to get even with the pair of them.  So there it was; our plan of action was drawn. All we now needed were the two main actors to this drama.

“Don’t worry, Willy. They’ll be here; mark my words.”  And at that moment, Clarke and Whitaker, looking very disgruntled, entered the library.

Defiant as ever, Clarke began: “You two jerks are not intending to go through with this are you?  Come on, it’s unheard of for a prefect to beat a sixth former. So why don’t we pretend the whole thing never happened; treat it as a bad dream and just drop it?”

Clarke would have gone on, had Gus not cut him short: “Clarke, you have evident learned nothing from our first encounter. First of all we we are not jerks, which expression has, for the record, earned you another three extra strokes, which my co-prefect, Wagstaff, will be delighted to give you in addition to the three extra strokes you have already accumulated by your prior use of bad language. So if you have nothing more to say, might I suggest that we get to the matter in hand we get to the matter in hand.  The two of you, take of your shorts and bend across the back of either of the two chairs. Stick your naked arses well into the air so that the dog can see the rabbit. I would hate you to think that you had been cheated out of what is your just due.”

Whitaker now voice his objection: “Fucking hell, Trent, you are not going to insist on beating us on the bare are you? Cannot we at least keep our shorts on and preserve what is left of our dignity. May I remind you that we are sixth formers and you cannot expect to treat us in the same way as you do the younger boys?”

“I see, Whitaker that like your partner in crime you have not learned to moderate your language when you address a prefect.  You too have just earned yourself an extra three cuts of the cane, which means you are tying with Clarke, as you will each now be the worthy recipient of eighteen cuts of the senior cane on the bare. So unless you wish to continue this dialogue and accumulate even more cuts, I suggest you take of your shorts and present your arse for punishment by bending over the back of one of the chairs. And before we begin, allow me to assure both you two gentlemen that we shall do our utmost to see that you leave us with the traditional well beaten arses that are the hallmark of justice in this school.  Yes, I am sure that with an eighteen cut beating, we can guarantee you of a pair of magnificently striped arses to take a way with you, the likes of which have never been seen before, and which you can show with pride to your school- mates later this evening.”

I had listened to Gus’s oration in his somewhat pompous and overbearing style and I wondered if we would have further trouble from them.  But no, both of them, all colour now drained from their faces, finally shed their shorts and bent over a chair, Clarke at the rear and Whitaker at the front, presenting Gus and me with two of the most magnificent pair of muscular, rugby-player of buttocks to shred. This moved our game into a totally different league, for here we were about to beat two young men, both of whom were no longer boys by any stretch of the imagination. And as young men, they also inevitably showed us, their male endowments, both of which were generous to say the least. They seemed totally unembarrassed by the fact that they were both totally aroused as their large cocks and pendulous balls, having nowhere else to go, dangled freely in the air between their legs  as the bent over the backs of the chairs  I suspect that I felt more embarrassed for them, than they felt for themselves.

As ever, whenever I was about to a beat any boy, I was already fully aroused by the verbal foreplay well before I placed my first cut; a glance at Gus showed me that he also was in the throes of the same erotic tension whose power no man can gainsay. So I suppose that the situation was, in fact, normal, in that both the flagellators (we) and those-soon-to-be flagellated (they) were already sexually fully aroused before the first stroke of the cane fell. What made the present situation different was the fact that we were about to beat two of our exact contemporaries, whose arses were just so attractive that under other circumstance both Gus and I might have been tempted to treat them to a dose of another, less-violent rod. But duty called and sexually aroused even as all four of us were, sex was totally out of the question.

Gus positioned himself alongside Clarke, who, as he was over the rear chair, was to have the doubtful privilege of receiving the first stroke of what was to be a marathon of a beating session. I watched with bated breath as Gus raised his cane well above his head and then with no prior warning brought it smashing down to land on Clarke’s naked flesh with what seemed to me to be the loudest crack I had ever heard – and as a recipient, I had heard plenty in my time at Ulverton. In the ten seconds pause before I delivered my first contribution to Clarke’s agony, I saw the results of that first cut – and cut was really the appropriate word. Gus’s maiden stroke had ploughed a deep furrow into Clarke’s arse which had taken on that crimson colour, which is always the initial sign of a successfully applied cane, before the edges of the stripe darken and develop that deep bluish tinge, the first intimation of the painful road to what is usually referred to as a well-beaten arse. I have to admit that although Clarke, and for that matter, the waiting Whitaker too, deserved all that was coming to them, I found myself sympathising with him as I knew from my own bitter experiences, the excruciating pain he was already experiencing.

I now raised my cane above my shoulder and, with extreme accuracy and with the same vigour,  placed my first cut a quarter of an inch below, but exactly parallel to that first stripe,.  And in the ten second pause before Gus moved on to send Whitaker’s arse on the same long and painful journey, I was gratified to see my own effort was indistinguishable from his.  And so, by the time we had finished delivering the quota twelve strokes to each of them, at the leisurely pace of one every ten seconds or so, the two of them had been bent across the chairs for about four to four-and-a-half-minutes, which must have seemed like a lifetime to the unfortunate recipients of our efforts.

Looking at our handiwork, I have to say that we could be proud of what we had created, as both arses had twelve parallel stripes from the bottom of the back to the top of the legs; and as a testimony to our joint expertise, not one stripe had overlapped another.  Both arses already qualified for the epithet, well beaten, and had already taken on the colours of a post-impressionist painting. My earlier self-doubts vanished, as I viewed what I considered two artistic masterpieces of the art of flagellation, for which I myself was half responsible and for which I felt justifiably proud.

But Clarke and Whitaker’s penance was not yet over, as Gus and I still had six more strokes each with which further to embellish our unfinished masterpieces of flagellation. But as we had mutually agreed, we now allowed the two offenders to stew in their own juice for a full five minutes and suffer the pain which we had so far inflicted on them, in the full, agonising knowledge that there was more of the same still to come. During the pause, my eyes remained glued on the two arses we had just roasted and my mind went back to the time when, at the end of my first month at Ulverton, aged only thirteen at the time, I had taken twelve strokes on the bare, albeit delivered in two sets of six, first by the Headmaster and then by my house-master. In all the many times I had been beaten at Ulverton that was the only occasion in which I had ever taken twelve cuts of the cane. So, I knew exactly how Clarke and Whitaker must have been feeling at that moment. But for them it was even worse, as not only had their punishment been dragged out, but they were now faced with a further six cuts each across their already excruciatingly painful arses.

The brief respite of the pause was over and Gus positioned himself to the left of Clarke and I to Whitaker’s left. We had agreed that Gus would lead and I would synchronise my own strokes with his. And so the first of our six gating strokes descended together and landed on the two target arses within split seconds of each other with that inimitable, resounding crack – pleasing for the administrant but horrific for the receiver – which which a rattan cane makes as it mates with firm, muscular flesh. Neither Gus nor I held back at all on this final leg of our performance and it was gratifying as both Clarke and Whitaker showed their appreciation of our efforts by emitting loud howls of pain.  Both offenders were reduced to tears by the first cut of this final volley of six, which is not at all surprising in view of the parlous state to which both their arses had been reduced by the first twelve cuts. We each went on to deliver two more swingeingly-effective, gating cuts from the left before moving over to the right-hand side of the two offenders to apply our final three cuts backhand.  With generous appreciation pauses between each cut, it was about a minute and half before the additional six cuts had been delivered, by which time both Clarke and Whitaker had been reduced completely to tears and were obviously in unbelievable agony.

As we stood back and admired our handiwork, I saw we had both broken the skin and raised spots of blood by our gating strokes wherever they had crossed, the twelve original cuts.  We had obviously delivered the two of them the severest beating of their lives, which would, hopefully, teach them an unforgettable lesson.  In any case it left them with arses which would retain the pain for many days to come and make life very uncomfortable for them.  Talk about retribution for their sins, this was retribution writ large. When we told them that it was over and they could each get up from over the back of their chair and leave, neither of them moved for almost minute. And then they each gingerly managed to stand upright and by massaging their buttocks made an attempt to calm the agonising pain which they were both suffering. I noticed  that our ministrations with the cane, had not only  shredded their arses, but had calmed the erotic arousal of their cocks, which were now hanging there dejectedly like limp rags between their legs; all traces of braggadocio had clearly been beaten out of them.  

As they each attempted very gingerly to stand upright, it was obvious that they were both in great pain and their first few steps were agonisingly difficult, almost as if they were handicapped. They both winced as they attempted to pull back on their shorts over their red-hot arses. In the time honoured manner of Ulverton, Gus and I shook both their hands before they left, accompanied by the traditional platitudinous assurance that there was nothing personal in what had just happened and that we had just been carrying out our duty as prefects. But from the look on their faces as they left, I got the strong impression that they were not convinced. And being completely honest and somewhat ashamed of myself, I knew that as far as I was concerned they were right; I had laid on my six gating strokes with as great a force as I could muster as pay-back for their remarks to us. But I had to admit that it had given me a great deal of satisfaction.

We may have beaten any erotic feelings inevitably aroused by such occasions out of the two offenders, but both Gus and I remained fully sexually aroused by what we had just done. Indeed in my case I could feel drops of pre-cum oozing out of my cock and wetting my underpants, which by the time we had finished were really quite damp.  It goes without saying, that we concluded what had been our pièce de résistance of flagellation with two hours of the most exhilarating of rough sex we had ever had together. I felt that had there been a degree or diploma offered for our efforts that day, we would both have graduated summum con laude – which I suppose translates as with starred firsts. However, what was sure was that our efforts that evening established our joint reputation as the hardest and most relentless caners among that year’s prefects and gained us the respect of the entire school.

Although we continued to beat arse on a regular basis throughout the three terms of our final year at Ulverton, nothing compared even vaguely with this dramatic occasion, which occurred early in the first term of the school-year.  We were assiduous in rooting out all misdeeds and as I remarked earlier, us and I achieved a beating average of just over two boys per week, which grossed up for the entire school year, implied that we had together beaten between eighty and ninety of our schoolmates.

We both passed the Cambridge entrance exams and spent the next three years reading law at Greatorix College. Our joint sex life became ever more exciting as at Cambridge we found a wide number of attractive young guys of the same sexual persuasion as ourselves with whom we jointly enlarged the scope of our sexual repertoire. For the first year, we both lived in college, but we found the conditions there too restrictive for young men like Gus and me, who had vigorous sex lives already. So for our second two years we moved out into a flat which we rented, a practice forbidden to undergraduates, who were at that time obliged to live either in College or in approved lodgings where the landlord or landlady was on the premises. In the quaint words of the Greatorix College regulations: Undergraduates shall live either in college or in approved lodgings to protect them from the temptations leading to gross moral turpitude. Well I suppose that Gus and I, sinners that we were in the eyes of the law and the church, together and sharing a bed every night, were the living proof of the wisdom of the college in its restrictions. We were certainly not only committing regularly an act which would qualify as gross moral turpitude and lead to our immediate rustication (being kicked out) from Greatorix, but one, which if detected by the police could lead to our prosecution and potential imprisonment under the benighted, sexual offences act, which forbad what it referred to as buggery and sodomy – anal sexual intercourse between men, which had become  the life blood of our relationship without which we could not have lived. 

But what the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve. So, just as we had kept our sexual relationship secret at Ulverton for two years, so we managed to keep our forbidden relationship secret at Cambridge.  The three long vac summer holidays and the shorter Easter breaks we spent together at Trent-Norton, where we renewed our liaison with the two footmen, David and Stuart, who revealed themselves ever more more inventive  in their gymnastic approaches to sexual intercourse.  Each Christmas I went back to my parents’ house in Manchester to spend the holiday season with them. Frankly, I would have preferred to have spent the time with Gus, but my conscience pricked me too much to allow me to forget my filial duty to my parents.

We both graduated with honours in law at the end our third year; Gus with a first and I with an upper second degree.  We now moved on to the third stage of our life together. We had both decided that we wanted to become barristers: lawyers qualified to plead in court.  In addition to studying and passing the bar exams, we both had to undergo what is known as a year’s pupilage in the chambers of a group of barristers who practised together. The English legal system is idiosyncratic and barristers in London have their chambers (their offices, in everyday language), which are located in one of the four so-called Inns of Court, to one of which all barristers must belong. Gus decided that he wanted to practise criminal law and found himself a pupilage in a set of chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. I opted to practise civil law, and eventually was accepted by a set of chambers in Gray’s Inn. Eventually we were both called to the bar by our respective Inns of Court and became barristers who could appear in court plead cases before before a judge.  Our careers in the legal professions were thus finally launched, mine as Mr. William Wagstaff and Gus’s as Augustus Trent-Norton.  I chivvied him about his use of his full family-name, which conveyed anything but the sense of ordinariness to which he professed wishing to aspire.

Since our university days, Gus and I had always lived together and committed the illegal sexual act with each other then defined by the law as buggery, an ugly sounding word if ever there was one. And now, here we were, two barristers practising the law in front of the very courts in which we could be tried as criminals for acts which we indulged in on a more or less daily basis and if found guilty, sentenced to prison. I can tell you that we not alone in the legal profession to be breaking the very laws which we were supposed to be upholding. Gus, as a criminal lawyer, decided never to accept a brief involving homosexuality, either for the prosecution or the defence, leaving such cases to his colleagues, some of whom held diametrically opposed view to him about the injustice of the then laws governing homosexual behaviour.

Why did Gus not take on homosexual cases as defence lawyers, I hear someone ask.  For the good and simple reason that charity begins at home and Gus had no intention of risking being prosecuted for a relationship of longstanding with me, equivalent in both our eyes to the marital tie enjoyed by heterosexual couples. It is hard anyone reading this today, to realise under what threat men of our persuasion then lived. There were always enough mean-mouthed people around, to whom the concept of live-and-let-live was alien, and who in the name of a God whose existence was to say the very least unproven, would denounce you to the authorities.

And so, Gus and I kept a low profile. Gus rented an anonymous house in Hampstead in his name only, in which we lived happily for many years undisturbed. We occasionally still went down to Trent-Norton which was as delightful and as ruinously expensive for Gus’s father as as it had always been. Then, the disaster struck. Gus’s father, aged but sixty and in hearty, good health, died sitting at his desk in his London office from a totally unpredictable heart attack. But the bitter pill was when Titus, Gus’s elder brother, who on his father’s death became the Sixth Lord Trent of Trent-Norton in the County of Somerset, to give him his full title, discovered that his father had made no provision for passing on the estate to him as his heir, using the then five-year-exemption rule. In fact, in spite of his business acumen, Gus’s father, the Noble Lord Trent, died at his desk intestate, studying the very  will, which he had not yet signed, which had been drawn up for him by his solicitor precisely to deal with  passing on his wealth tax-free to his heir, Titus. So it transpired that the physical estate of Trent-Norton, which was entirely owned by Gus’s father and his entire other business wealth, were hit with death duties and taxed at a swingeing 80%!

Titus, now Lord Trent, somehow managed to survive this financial catastrophe, but life at Trent-Norton Hall, as I had know it in earlier years, disappeared completely. The house itself was more or less mothballed and left in the care of one man and his wife as housekeepers. The grounds were left untended and allowed to grow wild and in time go on to develop a certain romantic aura. But as Gus said to me, the disappearance of all that wealth in the form of taxes to the state did not really affect him as he was anyway excluded from inheriting anything. So the misery was all for Titus alone to support. Or was it? for fate has a strange way of taking things in hand and in a way which was as brutal as it was unexpected.

Titus was a lover of fast cars which he drove with gay abandon. And only two years after his father’s untimely death, he was killed, aged by thirty, along with his fiancée in a head on collision with a huge, articulated lorry, which jack-knifed on the impact and then somehow managed to fall on Titus’s car, crushing it and the two occupants to death. And so it was that the Honourable Augustus Trent-Norton, a man had who professed he wished to be ordinary like me, became the totally unexpected seventh Lord Trent of Trent-Norton. The estate was again hit by the same swingeing level of confiscatory death duties. Neither Gus nor I had any concept of financial matters at all, and the question of death duties was put in the hands of a firm of taxation specialists, who managed to save for Gus the sum of about £2 million and Trent-Norton Lodge, a house on the estate, in which, in his grandfather’s day, the estate manager and his family had lived. Trent-Norton Hall itself and the surrounding land had to be sold off to pay the inheritance taxes. So, the I want to be ordinary like you, Gus had finally inherited not only the ancestral title of Baron Trent of Trent-Norton, but some £2 million and a substantial house, Trent-Norton Lodge, which together, although but a tiny fraction of his father’s former wealth, still made Gus a very rich man.

My story could well end at this point. But there is still more to tell. The fact that Gus was now a peer of the realm and could, if he wished, sit in the House of Lords, a privilege he never exercised, changed nothing in our daily life. We both continued working as barristers, each of us earning a good living, which left us wanting for nothing, until that day when Gus pulled a very surprising rabbit out of the hat.

“Willy, I want to speak to you about something very serious.  So please listen very carefully and do not interrupt me until, I have finished what I wish to say. Willy, as you know I never ever anticipated or dreamed of becoming the seventh Lord Trent, which came my way due to two tragic deaths, both of which were totally unexpected. However that is what I now am: the seventh Lord Trent of Trent-Norton, the estate of which is now just a faded memory. But what you may not have realised is that I might well be the seventh and the last Lord Trent as I have no heirs nor given my sexual preferences, am I ever likely to have. Titus, my brother never married and has no heirs and my father was an only child. So as far as I am aware, I have no even distant heirs in this country. In fact I am sure of this as I have recently had a company which specialises in genealogy examine my family tree and they have confirmed that on my death, the title of Baron Trent of Trent-Norton will lapse. Now although I told you when we first met as new boys at Ulverton  that I wanted to be someone ordinary like you, I wanted that for myself and not for the family. And so now that I, by happenstance, hold the title, I do not want to see it disappear as if the Trent-Norton Barony had never existed when I die.”

“Willy, almost since the day we first met all those years ago at Ulverton, you have been the love of my life.  So my dearest Willy, do not think me mad when I say that I wish to adopt you legally as my son. We cannot legally be joined as an item under the present laws of the land, but if I adopt you we can be legally joined as father and son  Now what this means is that if I die before you, you will automatically become the ninth Baron Trent.  But if you die before me, then on my subsequent death the title will pass to your male heir. Now you have a sister, who has a son. So, sooner or later he will become either the ninth or the tenth Baron Trent, depending on which of us dies first. If you pop off before me, he will succeed me as the ninth Baron; but if if I kick the bucket before you, it is you who will be the ninth Baron and he will be the tenth Baron on your death. So there it is Willy; what do you think?”

“Gus, I am deeply touched that you see me as the heir to your title, but I barely know my sister’s boy; in fact, I barely know my own sister anymore.  She married a man, now my brother-in-law, by the name Horace Horridge and as I had no interest in joining my father in the shop, my father made him a partner in the business; so our old ironmongery business is now called Wagstaff and Horridge. I believe that my nephew, Horace’s son, Albert Horridge is now also working with his father and grandfather. So one day, after we are both pushing up the daisies, it will be Albert Horridge, who will succeed as ninth or tenth Baron Trent of Trent-Norton. It doesn’t sound very good does it?”

“Good, bad or indifferent, it matter not one wit. What I want is you, my dearest friend and life’s partner, without whom I could no longer live, to succeed me to the title.  And if you agree to become my son, then via your sister’s boy, the succession will be ensured and the title will endure.”

There was no stopping Gus in his quest to adopt me; and so I finally agreed to his extraordinary request and the adoption was made legal.  So at the ripe old age of only thirty, I changed my family name legally to Trent-Norton Wagstaff and by thus doing, became the eldest son of a baron, albeit a son of the same age as his adoptive father. As such I had the courtesy title of The Honourable William Edward Trent-Norton Wagstaff.  Needless to say I continued my bar practice as William Wagstaff and Gus his as Augustus Trent-Norton.  But for Gus, the most important thing was that was that the title of Trent-Norton was preserved for the foreseeable future. However, on my becoming his son, Gus made me a present of just over a million pounds which made me too a millionaire in my own right.

The Trent-Norton Title was preserved for posterity – did anybody other than Gus care, I wondered? – but the Trent-Norton estate was gone forever. However Gus decided that he did not want to sever himself completely from his ancestral roots and set about renovating the house, Trent-Norton Lodge, which he had inherited from his brother. And over the years, this house became our bolt hole and finally our permanent home, when, aged sixty-five, we both retired from the bar.  And there we lived, father and son legally, but as a pair of gay old gentlemen who had been together for over sixty years, until Gus’s death aged eighty after a short illness. Although we lived to see both the repeal of the misguided laws criminalising homosexuals such as us, and the legalising of same-sex marriage, Gus and I as father and son were unable to unite in marriage for obvious reasons, However we each wore a ring on the third finger of our left-hands to acknowledge the bond between us which had endured for over sixty years.

And here concludes this story in which fact did prove stranger than fiction.

THE END