The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

He shafted and came fast!

He shafted and came fu-u-uck-ing fast!’

It chanced that to me fell the opportunity to become a second Dancer.

The short and sergeant-majorly old school sister retired. In her place came a woman of a very different kind, Sister Virginia Traven. ‘When she arrived, they called her Virgin for short but not for long,’ ran the immediate school joke, for, in that castle of acute female-shortage, it was recognised that she was not exactly incredibly old or incredibly ugly.

Sister Traven was slightly built. She had indeterminate-coloured eyes, which did not always manage to look at you. Her hair was short and tawny, she carried her head rather attractively on one side, as if half in sly jest about life. The old sister had never been in jest about anything.

A mystery surrounded Sister Traven, how the headmaster passed her as safe for a boys’ school being the first one. Not that she was less than thirty-five years old, which is a staid old age to schoolboys. She spoke in a rather sibilant and allusive way. And she never came out on to the rugger pitch to cheer the first fifteen; the old sister had never missed a game.

The sister arrived at school at the beginning of what proved to be my last year at Branwells, just when I had secured the position of hooker in the first fifteen. She attracted me from the start, perhaps because it so happened that she was returning to school from a shopping expedition by the same train on which I was reluctantly arriving, and she invited me to ride the two miles from the station to school with her in the school car (I had carried her bag to the car). If I was struck dumb on that ride, it was chiefly because she was registering on me.

I wanted to register on her. Playing in the first fifteen was the ideal way to do it – until I found that she never bothered to watch the game. This made her very unpopular with most of the school. We had a vote on it in the sixth, to which I had now ascended, and it was carried by a narrow margin that, since her gesture was more insulting to the headmaster than to the boys, she was okay. Nobody was rat enough to suggest that she might not be interested in rugger.

During a vote taken only a week later it was decided that she was already being screwed by the music master. Nobody was rat enough to suggest that she might not be interested in sex. (‘But dear old Chopin is as queer as a coot, darling – I’d have thought you boys were sharp enough to see that!’ – thus Virginia, when I put it to her a few months later.)

Slowly we pieced together a bit of news here and a rumour there. Sister was arty. Sister had actually been seen sketching, all wrapped up and sketching bloody fucking Six Sisters. Six Sisters was a hated local landmark, six – actually five by that time – miserable stunted trees to which we had to run once a fortnight, exposed to all the inhospitable gales of Derbyshire. And Sister wanted to paint them! Her stock fell even lower in the junior school. I joined the art club.

I was one of the school slobs, rough but not aggressive (despite occasional bouts of old enemy temper), plodding rather than clever, jocose rather than witty. My friends and I formed the sporty and philistine side of the sixth, still reading Frank Richards’ stories about Greyfriars and St. Jims – because, we said defensively, we were amused that the smoking and drinking (and, by inference, the pulling off, for who could imagine Tom Merry with a hard-on?) which went on at those colleges was always done by slackers, whereas at Branwells most of the venery was committed by the stars of the first fifteen. We were on good terms with the arty half of the form, even though they read Conrad and that ass R. L. Stevenson. But it was felt by everyone, including myself, that I was an incongruous figure in the art club.

Despite the incongruity, I did rather well. I discovered I could paint. During my second term in the art club I was out painting the Six Sisters myself, when not playing rugger. By then I was big enough to belt anyone who laughed.

In other ways my horizons were widening. I became interested in socialism, and that in a curious way.

Most of my sexual liaisons were with fellows of about my own age. But a much younger boy called Brown had caught my attention. Brown was in my dormitory, and had distinguished himself by being the youngest boy ever to make a pilgrimage round the beds – generally, the younger members were more sinned against than sinning. Brown, however, was keen. Keen on everything and sex most of all. He had bright ideas, with a natural flair for the erotic; after I had spent a couple of hours in bed with him I felt was destined to go far – and downwards all the way.

He confessed to me that he was in love with another boy in the sixth. Torturing him by threatening to leave him on the brink of orgasm, I got from him that this boy was Webster. I burst out laughing, because Webster was someone whom none of us took seriously. He spoke with an affected ‘upper-class’ drawl – I believe it was affected, although he never entirely dropped it; he could increase it in class, in order to infuriate masters. His parents were known to be well heeled – his father was someone high up in Imperial Tobacco. But Webster was a socialist, or a communist, for neither he nor we were too sure of the difference; he had a catch-phrase, and used to preach to us that things would be different after ‘the absolutely bloody revolution’. It was hard to visualize him as Brown’s ‘lover’ (a word, incidentally, that transgressed the Branwells code).

Through our mutual interest in Brown we got together for an ‘insurance’, the three of us. This was behind an outbuilding at Rowe’s Farm, a couple of miles from school. With rubber bands, we coupled our pricks together, Webster’s and my turgid black things on the outside, Brown’s elegant pink-and-white weapon in the middle, like a grotesque sandwich of cod’s roe between two salamis. Webster’s tool had been badly scarred by the rite of circumcision, and we were all scared temporarily by the rubber bands before we were finished. On the way back to school, Webster chatted about all the injustices in England, how wrong it was to have servants, and so on.

‘One glorious day, laddies, the down-trodden workers of Britain will arise and free themselves, and the skivvies of England will dashed well knife their masters in their beds.’

‘Will the skivvies jump into the beds of the young masters?’ Brown asked.

‘Yes, and cut off their little rigid plonks!’

What fascinated me even more than that particular vision was the fact that Webster actually knew working men, and showed no particular antipathy for them, although, with his accent, he would surely have been one of the first to go under when they rose on the day of absolutely bloody revolution. His outlook was novel in my experience. I knew only the distaste and fear with which my mother and father and their friends regarded the workers. Even Liberals were bad enough, but the workers … Father hated to see them drawing the dole, believing that the principle of giving money away was wrong. He had been heard to call the destitute of the town, ironically, ‘Our non-banking friends’.

‘Non-washing, you mean,’ Mother said. It was not their financial so much as their hygienic habits she loathed.

Now here was Webster saying that these blighters might get the upper hand some time. My parents would be the first to go.

I thought over what Webster said for a long while before asking him, some days after the rubber-band experiment, ‘Supposing the workers do revolt, surely the upper classes won’t let them kill off all the middle class?’

He chuckled, richly and patronizingly. ‘Stubbs, old man, the upper classes and the aristocracy absolutely hate the bloody guts of the middle classes!’

Art. Sex. Socialism. And the greatest of these was sex. But even sex was changing now. England had recently enjoyed (or suffered) the spectacle of their king relinquishing the throne to marry the woman he loved. For many, the issues arising from this crisis in the monarchy were complex; at Branwells it signified only one thing: that the adult world outside our stony walls was as mad about sex as we were, whatever it hypocritically pretended. And our discussions centred round whether or not Mrs. Simpson was attractive.

The abdication also focused the attention of the older boys more sharply on women. Whatever we did with other boys, faute de mieux, it was women we thought about, women we talked about, given a few exceptional boys. Women, we could see, were what we needed, as surely as we lacked them.

Although my father remained aloof from me, never interesting himself in what I did or said, I had by now seen enough penises – ‘a clutch of penises’ was the agreed collective noun – to persuade me that my circumcision, however barbaric, had not been directed at me. It was something bank managers had done to their sons at birth, a sort of caste mark; while the postman’s son, a Branwells day-boy, was allowed to keep a foreskin like the end of a fire-hose.

With the allaying of this anxiety, and such minor and common anxieties as to whether my organ functioned as well as, or was as large as, other people’s, I began to lose interest in pricks, although not in masturbating; that remained a never-ending pleasure. But the fantasies connected with masturbating became increasingly preoccupied less with Beatrice and more with Sister Traven, as gradually I managed to win what seemed like her friendship.

In my fantasies Sister sometimes changed shape and became Esmeralda. I had written to Esmeralda and she wrote back, somewhat to my surprise. Her letters were never very long, but they gave me a delight out of all proportion to their length or content. I was none too sure that I did not love Esmeralda.

Did I also love Sister Traven? It must have been some such kind of madness that made me hope to make love to her; or perhaps that is an egocentric view, because many boys at Branwells also dreamed of her in their hard little beds. Not only was she fairly attractive; she was safely inaccessible; and, supposing she were attained, then she was safely old enough to play her role in a motherly way.

She definitely took notice of me individually, I told myself. It needs terrific effort to make yourself individual to an outsider when you are just one of a herd of boys. Overcoming my shyness, or, rather, battling with it all the way, I trotted some of my water-colour sketches along to show her. She actually recognised where one or two of them were supposed to be.

‘Do you paint in the holidays?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes, pretty often.’ I had never touched a paintbrush since I was about six.

She asked me where I lived. I told her. She was pleased. Pleasure always caused her to raise her eyebrows slightly, as if her pleasure somewhat amazed her.

‘I don’t live too far from you. Have you heard of Traven House? Perhaps you’d like to come sketching with me some time? I could get the chauffeur to come and pick you up in the car. We have some lovely views in our grounds.’

Confusedly, I said it would be lovely. She asked me what my father did. I said he was a bank manager, adding defensively, ‘And he belongs to the Rotary Club.’

She told me her father was a rear-admiral. But he had been retired from the Navy at an early age because of some disgrace in the China seas. Now he was a press magnate. Not that I knew what that was.

Learning to distinguish between facts and fantasies is one of the most vital arts that separates childhood from adulthood. Some people – politicians, actors, the mentally sick – never acquire the art.

Crisis-time for breaking from the childhood world where fact and fantasy intermingle comes in adolescence. In the next school holiday I was tortured by this crisis.

Sister had promised she would come and take me out to sketch with her. But was she just playing a game? Something in her demeanour, that half-jesting expression of hers, suggested that she was.

On the other hand, I had a strong faith in the unlikely. The stately home, the chauffeur, and no doubt the Rolls-Royce, were much more probable and acceptable to me than the whole formidably unlikely organization of Branwells, which, possibly because I had been sent there at a relatively late age, I could never take for granted.

The one bit of unlikeliness with which I could not come to terms was that this sophisticated woman could love me, or be at all interested in me.

That proved to be fact and not fantasy. She did duly arrive to take me out, although the episode developed in a way I had not expected. My parents did not refuse to let me go out with Sister at the last moment, as I had dreaded they would. Ever since Nelson said jokingly, ‘So you’ve started chasing older women, eh?’, I feared my father would read my amorous intentions in my expression and stop everything.

He did not. Nor did Beatrice get Sister on one side and tell her ‘what he is really like’. Nor, for that matter, did Sister turn up in a Rolls-Royce. Nor did the Rear-Admiral accompany her!

My relations with Mother were still painful. Although she had by now abandoned the device of threatening to leave us if we were bad, she had developed another tiresome device. If we did anything that pained her, she would cover her eyes and pretend to cry, often actually did cry, and shriek that she was the most miserable of women.

We saw through this at once. Her little darling Ann saw through it first – it was, after all, something of a feminine ploy. Without being taken in, we would nevertheless go boredly to comfort her, since that was the easiest way to silence her and have the embarrassing behaviour out of the way. I believe we held precisely this condescending attitude to her ever since Ann was seven. As this meant that we dropped whatever we were doing that offended her, she thus got her way, and so the situation was self-perpetuating.

That was only a minor tyranny. On the subject of girls, Mother was more difficult. I used to look hungrily at them in the street, the half-challenging, half-inviting stare of the shy man. If they returned the stare, Mother would say, ‘Huh, she must be a cheap little bit, giving anyone the glad-eye on the street like that! You want to look out for that kind, my boy – they’ll only get you into a lot of trouble!’

When the enemy threatened to materialize into the shape of Sister, she was nonplussed. For this wasn’t an ordinary girl friend. This was a member of the staff of Horatio’s school, a school official. It was unthinkable that she could – or that he could – well, it was unthinkable. But she had considerable qualms about the outing, and the more I artlessly stressed the painting line, the more Mother seemed to worry. Father was just sarcastic.

‘She’s a bit old for you to be going out with, isn’t she?’

So she bloody well was. But it just happened that she happened to show a bit of personal interest.

Sister changed the arrangement once or twice, each time to my alarm. But the date held up, though I imagined her saying to the old Admiral over a cocktail, ‘It’s an absolute bore, Daddy, but I must take the spotty little blighter out, since I promised to do so in a weak moment. Noblesse oblige and all that!’

She dropped me a note to say when she would be round to the house to pick me up. Panic! I was the first to panic! Supposing that my mother guessed how much I fancied Sister when she saw us together! Or – supposing Mother and her affectations put Sister off! Supposing the house put her off! Supposing the smell of beer in the living-room put her off!

In my anxiety and general uncertainty I failed to let Mother know when Sister was calling for me until a couple of hours before she arrived – and then Mother was thrown into panic.

‘I’ll have to change my frock! We’d better have lunch early. Ann and Rosemary will have to play in the back garden. You might have warned me, darling! And you say she’s one of the Travens of Traven House? What posh circles you move in, Horatio! I’ve passed Traven House going north – you can just see it between the trees. She’s going to take you there?’

‘Yes, so she said.’

‘Lovely! You’d better wear your best suit. I wish you’d had your hair cut! You will speak up if the Admiral talks to you, won’t you? I’ll give you ten bob, darling, just in case you need it. We’ll have to have her in here – I hope she doesn’t get the whiff of beer or she’ll think your mother’s a secret drinker!’

We were still running in circles, and Ann had no shoes on, when Sister arrived; she was her usual quiet self, with that gentle smile which invited you to be friendly – a ‘distinguished’ smile, Ann called it, for even she was impressed.

‘But she was so nice!’ Mother said several times afterwards, astonished that it should be so. ‘Do you think she’d like to come to tea one day?’

It was cheering to know that Mother and Ann admired her (though what would they say if they guessed how I felt?). And it was cheering that Sister appeared not to notice the aroma of beer as she stood for a moment, small and individual, in our drawing-room before we left.

The car proved to be, not a Rolls-Royce, not even a flashy little two-seater, but a battered old Ford. Sister said something about the other cars not being available. And we weren’t going back to Traven House. She felt like a drive to Grantham instead.

None of that worried me in the slightest; I hardly heard what she said. The great triumph was to be with her, and in the holidays at that! I sat beside her blushing scarlet from head to navel; for I saw that she had not bothered to bring along any paints at all. On the back seat of the car were not sketching pads but cushions. Clear evidence she was going to drive me somewhere and seduce me!

There I sat, feverishly clutching my own sketching block and paints, and now and again feeling the one French letter in my pocket – the remaining one of the two left over from the Esmeralda affair; I had used the other for tossing off into, and lent it out at school for the same purpose. Now the unused one was to be put to a real test, and I was scared at the prospect.

To my relief and disappointment, Sister intended no seduction. We ate lunch together and strolled round gazing at the shops. We passed an Army Recruiting Centre; she put her arm through mine and asked, ‘Which service will you join if there’s a war against Germany?’

We went to the cinema. I held her hand and nestled against her. And she responded! That night, safely home again, I bagged an old exercise book from Nelson and started what I boldly headed ‘A Virginia Journal’. It is before me now, my first essay in love, and two pages of immature handwriting are devoted just to the period in the pictures, when I had the joy of holding her hand.

After the cinema we went for tea to a little teahouse that I uneasily felt did not befit an admiral’s daughter. There was nothing flashy about it at all. But she was entirely at ease, so sweet, so smiling, so easy to talk to. She poured my tea for me. I passed the cakes to her. Our table was in one corner, and there were three steps up from the rest of the café to the small room in which we sat.

She told me tantalizingly little about herself; and it was a condition of my life that I could not ask, for fear of seeming rude (had I not always been told ‘It’s rude to ask questions’?).

She had a big sister whom she adored. I forget her name now, but I know she could ride like the wind.

What’s more, she – and Sister – rode in Africa. They had a great gaunt black Zulu as servant for the two sisters. His tongue had been cut out in childhood, and he always carried a spear, but the girls adored him. Their father loved Africa best of all the continents.

She said why didn’t I call her Virginia in the holidays? She hoped we could meet again. I grasped the opportunity and asked her if we could meet again the next week. Well, she was going to have to go to London for a few days, but she’d drop me a note.

I thought it was the brush-off. She clutched my hand under the table, drew it on to her knee, smiled lovingly at me, said that she really would write. ‘Don’t you believe I will?’

‘I do believe you will.’

‘Honestly I will, love. But I have to go up to London to appear in court – one of my best friends is involved in a divorce case, and I am a star witness.’

‘You lead such an exciting life, Virginia!’

‘Divorce is not exciting – it’s just cruel. What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done, Horatio?’

I told her about the time Nelson and I had been chased by hornets at Hunstanton, and how we had jumped into the sea with all our clothes on to escape from them. Virginia and I both laughed greatly. She was wonderful company.

When she drove me back to our front door, again the agony of crisis. I stared at her. She kissed me fleetingly, just brushing her lips against mine. ‘See you soon!’

They asked to look at my sketches as I hurried up to my bedroom.

‘I left ’em at Traven Castle,’ I said.

My last term at Branwells, although I did not know it then: Summer term, 1939. I thought I had another year to go and Higher School Cert before me. It was the only term I went back eagerly. I knew I was going to see Virginia.

Our second meeting had miraculously come off. She had been as good as her darling word. We had done much as the first time, and had even managed a brief sort of half-cuddle and a long kiss before parting. Virginia had kissed me! Virginia Traven had kissed me!

At Branwells she seemed only a little more distant, but I realized that if we were going to be lovers, then both sides must exercise caution.

I was made prefect at the beginning of term. This gave me extra freedom. It meant that one could walk about the school on one’s own without being questioned, an unheard-of luxury. It also meant that one had a study of one’s own in what was called Prosser’s Row – a privilege that gave one many sexual advantages, although it is fair to say that few of the prefects took advantage of this, or not very often. We agreed that we were much more civilized than the louts who had been prefects when we arrived as new boys, so long, long before.

Frank Richards was now put behind me. Greyfriars had palled at last. I had talked with Nelson and a friend of ours at home about socialism – somewhat to my surprise, they both declared themselves to be socialists – and Nelson was going out with a girl who called herself socialist (his engagement to Catharine had been broken off or, more accurately, had faded into thin air). I read all about socialism and the less boring bits of politics in the school library. I also happened on Keats and other poets – splendid fellows, I now discovered, who threw a few sidelights on what was happening between Virginia and me. In short, I was becoming civilized.

I was also working hard for School Cert. All that nightmare, the outward climax of one’s school career, is so dead now that I have no intention of reviving it here. I passed it creditably, and that was the end of it. It was a bore at the time; it bores me now. Whereas Virginia still interests me.

It should not be imagined that the favourite school interest was dead to me. The cess-pit was still on the boil, as one might say. I now had the pleasure of finding that Brown slept only a few beds away from me in the dorm – to Webster’s comic jealousy: ‘I’ll see they get you, old man, on that glorious day when the bloody revolution dawns!’

Brown had his adventure to relate. He claimed that in the holidays the gardener caught him trying to toss the family chow off in the asparagus patch, and had taken him into the potting shed, there inducing him to try the same tactics on what Brown described as a very large Hampden indeed.

Such tales, some true, some partially true, some wishful thinking, some downright lies, went the rounds at the start of every term; the lies sank and were forgotten, the truths survived and were welcome. Drury described how he had screwed his sister. We knew Drury screwed his sister; we had heard it from him before; he always came up with a wealth of detail, and there was not a boy did not envy him. Harper Junior claimed that his mother had got drunk and had sucked him off. We ignored Harper Junior.