The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

She had made me grow up, made me see that there were other things than immediate satisfactions – I would not have dared ask her to toss me off, as I might have done with another girl; for Virginia was teaching me immense ideas about sexual organs – ideas that I learned only reluctantly, ideas that went against all my early training: showing me that love had to be there somewhere, and that against the recurrent isolation of life the hastily snatched orgasm was not the only antidote.

Firmly, she held my hands.

‘There’s a war … People get separated. I learnt that in the last war, when I was younger than you.’

‘I can’t bear to be separated from you, Virginia, darling! We’ve only just got to know each other.’

She looked very searchingly at me, then said, so quietly that I could hardly hear, ‘You can always write to me at my Nottingham address. I shan’t be off to London yet … And, Horatio – I must tell you … You really don’t know me at all.’

I rested my head on her shoulder.

‘Oh, Virginia, I want to, I want to know you better. You’re so wonderful for me, and I love you so much.’

She never said she loved me. But she stroked my cheeks and looked at me in what for her was a wild sort of way.

‘Virginia, I want to know you …’ The eternal cry of lovers. It was eventually by getting to know her that I lost her.

‘Sweetheart, you are a child!’

‘You never said that to me before. Why say it now? I know you don’t mean it as an affront – as Mother does when she calls me a child. But I’m sick of childhood. I’m finished with it, I hate it! It’s so sordid – you’ve showed me – Christ, you’re the one who has brought me out of it!’

I choked on the words. We just sat there in the uncomfortable car, touching and looking at each other. She never even said that she needed me, but I had always been secure in that. I knew she needed me; it was one of the things I understood about her without the necessity for words.

We parted there by the bloody old cemetery, in which my grandfather had been only recently buried. I walked back, hands in pockets, saying to myself over and over, ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck it all, fuck the whole shitting issue!’

And as I went along, I resolved that my childhood could be closed, after all, if I really wished for it. Did I really wish for it? What would being an adult entail? That was unknown. What had being a child entailed?

All very mysterious. It had not meant a lack of sex. I was introduced to the delights of masturbation early, and had never looked back since then. You might say I was a hand-reared boy. Perhaps I should have been ashamed of all that; I was not. People pretend to be so enlightened about sex these days; they talk happily about copulation and such subjects, about adultery and homosexuality and lesbianism and abortions. Never about masturbation, though. And yet masturbation is the commonest form of sex, and tossing off the cheapest and most harmless pleasure.

Of course, as I grew older I graduated to more fashionable delights.

Shortly before I was born, my father was promoted manager of a branch of Barclays Bank Ltd. in the East Midlands. It was a small dull town then, in the early twenties, and is a large dull town now. For a reason I forget, we did not go to live in the accommodation the bank offered, but instead took over a large house on the edge of the town which had been an inn in the prosperous days, a century earlier, when the stage-coaches flourished.

One of my first memories is of the smell of beer which the floor of our living-room released whenever the sun shone on it or the room was warm – ancient beer, which had soaked into the wood for decades, and could never be eradicated, however my mother set her series of maids to polishing. Could I somehow have become intoxicated by those benevolent fumes as I sprawled on the floor? Did they have some loosening effect on my infantile moral sense? Sophisticated fellows might answer yes. But I believe the maids themselves were more to blame for my failings!

Of those maids, and in particular of Beatrice, we will speak later. First I must describe the family.

My father was a small and aloof man. He could be cold and sarcastic, to his wife as well as his children. He feared his father, my grandfather, until the day the old man died, and I believe this relationship did much to blight his pleasure in life. When my grandfather and grandmother came to stay with us, as they did all too often, my parents suffered a good deal.

My mother, on the other hand, was thin and clinging. Although far from passionate, she demanded love from her family and returned it by spasms. Terribly moody herself, the highest praise she reserved for other people was to say, ‘So-and-so is always the same!’ She cosseted me often, devoting much attention to me where my father devoted almost none. Yet I never doubted that he loved me deeply, just as, from a remarkably early age I doubted whether she loved me at all.

My elder brother, Nelson, was born in 1920. He grew tall and thin and dark where I was chubby and fair. I always admired him and he tolerated me with what I regarded as marvellous good nature. He hit me a good deal, as I suppose bigger brothers do. He loved animals and once tried to stuff a dead cat with wood shavings – his only venture into taxidermy. Nelson was a fairly clever boy, clever enough to be always slightly rebellious; he was secretly planning to become an architect, and drawing fantastic buildings, at an age when I was tamely following Father’s suggestion that I should go into banking and ‘work your way up’.

I was born three years after my brother, with my fists – so claimed the midwife – clenched in my eyes. 1923 was not a good year to be born. There were dock strikes in England and coal strikes in America. The French were occupying the Ruhr, Hitler was tunnelling away in Munich, like a mole under Germany’s troubles. A mighty scene was already being set for my late and trivial adolescence. On the day I arrived in the world there was a severe earthquake in Japan.

My mother was always secretly frightened of men. I say ‘secretly’, but a mother has fewer secrets than she imagines from the young innocent tagging boredly and apparently unobservantly at her skirts. The way in which she was all friendly condescension to the tradesmen, the way she skirted the dole queues which afflicted the Midlands – and perhaps much more subtly the way all her appeals and coquetry towards Father were framed – spoke of her terror of the male. Although both her parents were dead long before I arrived howling on the scene, they had been a formidable couple by all accounts; her father; whose old farm we sometimes drove past in our tiny black car, had been a tyrant of the Victorian school. No doubt he, and the stern nonsenses with which he could fill a small girl’s head, were sufficient to give her a scare for life.

Marriages (I was told as a kid) are made in heaven. In fact, they seem to be made in a tiny, dim, shuttered, undiscovered room in the brain, where some fiendishly clever little hunchback of a genius sees to it that we get the marriage partner we really want, whatever we think we want, and however we rail against his choice later.

I believe that, much though my mother suffered from my father’s coldness and his sarcastic tongue, she chose him because he was aloof and did not ‘trouble her too much’.

Since I do not go far with the psycho-analysis, I’d better drop that line of reasoning. It makes sense to try to make sense of our parents; it is part of the process of understanding ourselves. As far as Freud helps common sense, he is welcome. I suppose he might have agreed that, for whatsoever reason, my mother was happier in the company of her own sex.

For that reason she badly wanted a little girl. If Nelson was a disappointment, Horatio was a greater. Not being a maths wizard, she must have felt that the chances of the second baby being a girl were twice as great as the first time. My father, who, as a banker, could no doubt have enlightened her on that simple excursion into the realm of probability theory, characteristically did not. Mother went into what was euphemistically termed ‘a nervous breakdown’ and took several months to recover. Perhaps it was in some sort of revenge for that that they called me by the unfortunate Christian name I bear; or perhaps, had I been a girl, they had been intending to christen me Emma; when my father read a book it was about British heroes – preferably Nelson.

Anyhow, the mother would not look at the new baby, or was advised by the family medico not to look at the new baby. A wet nurse was found for the new baby, and he went to stay in her house for the first two months of his existence.

Was it that early exile that tipped the sexual scales? I ask myself … but no longer very fervently!

Legend has it that my father came every evening after the bank closed to inspect his second son and to see that the wet nurse was looking after him. The action sounds hardly characteristic of Father, although the story sounds characteristic of Mother’s tales.

What she suffered then goes unrecorded – like most suffering. She could never afterwards entirely decide on her behaviour towards me. Should she blame me because she ‘nearly died’ on my arrival? Or should she make it up to me because I had been sent away at once? She never solved the problem.

A partial solution arrived four years after I was born. In the summer months of 1927 she achieved her long-awaited daughter. Caroline Adelaide Ann Stubbs opened her eyes upon the world, and found it good. She also found it good that a devoted mother awaited her every behest.

The birth of Ann, as the baby was called in the family, brought a measure of happiness to us. We were glad that Mother was glad. Nor was this particularly unselfish; it gave Father more peace, and it gave Nelson and me the chance to play with less supervision. I believe we really loved Ann, almost as much as Mother demanded we should. True, my brother did drop her once while carrying her round the garden, but I recall the sincerity of his penitence after, which had nothing to do with Mother’s tears or Father’s chastisement!

Mother’s success with Ann went to her head – or womb, rather. Two years later she bore another little girl, but this baby was still-born.

I recall poignantly the news of its arrival. One of the maids was keeping Nelson and me amused; she kept running out of the room and coming back, telling us, ‘You’ll hear it cry presently! It’s coming now!’ I remember leaving our toys and going to kneel on the wooden window seat; I stared through the panels of yellow semi-frosted glass that flanked our windows and wondered what it felt like to be a child that as yet was nowhere – listening eagerly for its cry and hearing instead a cuckoo, asking myself if there was a connection between mysterious bird and mysterious baby. Then Father came and told us – he took our hands – that the baby was dead and Mummy was very sad.

‘It would have been a little sister for you,’ he said. ‘But God took her away again at the last moment.’

After that we were more devoted than ever to Ann. Neither Nelson nor I would have put it past God to take her too.

Our little town boasted one superior kindergarten, run by a Miss Matilda Unwin, and to this I was sent at the age of five. Nelson was almost ready to leave and go on to grammer school.

Kindergarten was satisfactory enough. We bullied and were bullied, but nothing very terrible. I was immediately attracted to several of the girls and, although most of this attraction was entirely undeclared, it was generally reciprocated in some degree, which contributed considerably to the pleasures of school, since seats were scarce in the youngest form and we had to sit two at a desk. So I was able to cuddle against Sheila, in her lovely golden-brown cord dress, which reminded me of wallflowers. It had a white lace collar, and white socks went with it. Her legs were pretty, but I believe I loved her only on the days when she wore that fetching little dress.

I was continuously fond of Sonia, who had attractively short-cropped fair hair. She was a tough and adventurous little girl and we used to play together out of school. At one time we planned to marry, but then she was sick in class, right – splash! – into her desk, and I turned my affections elsewhere.

Even in those days, just like adults, we thought of little but sex, although it took diffuse and childish forms. We invented a lovely game to play in the playground: Farmers and Cows, it was called.

With our heel, we scarped outlines for sheds in the playground gravel. And with sure instinct the boys were the cows and the girls were farmers or dairymaids, coming to milk the cows. This meant they had to give a really good squeeze and feel of our tiny genitals. It was the best game we ever invented!

Innocent fool that I was, I ran home and told my mother about it. She flew into a terrible fright, trotting round the room and seizing up Ann before her to cuddle – whether to protect the child or herself, I don’t know. I was forbidden to play Farmers and Cows again.

But the old serpent of sexuality was rampant on the playground now. The girls naturally wished to know more about the strange udders of their cows. Behind Miss Unwin’s house, beside the water-butt, by the tatty privet hedge, I unbuttoned my fly-buttons and showed my rosy little wee-wee to Sheila and Hilda.

They were interested but sceptical. Hilda, darling girl, reached out and touched it and said it was nice. Sheila was more cautious. Already our grown-up selves were foreshadowed there.

The next picture I have is of a slight advance. The water-butt again, scene of happiness and depravity. Sheila and Hilda there again, and a smaller girl, name forgotten. Again I open my trousers and exhibit. Again they stare, with none of the maidenly modesty that will afflict them in a very few years.

Hilda and the little girl look very closely, getting in each other’s way. Sheila stands back, half-leaning against the wall.

‘It’s nice,’ says the small girl. She makes no attempt to touch. ‘You can come and play in my garden after school, if you like.’

She lifts up her dress and takes her knickers down; Hilda follows suit. Both show me what they have, and the little girl giggles a lot and flaps her skirt up and down. I concentrate on Hilda’s thing. It looks pretty and chubby. Her stomach and thighs are pleasant to me.

I say to Sheila, ‘Let me see yours too.’

‘Some other time,’ she says, lolling from side to side, smiling into the distance, confident possibly that I would enjoy what she kept concealed. As far as I recall, she never did show me.

After school Hilda and I decided that we would go into the little girl’s garden and play, the assumption being that we could then have a better look at each other. But the little girl was met at the school gates by a nanny and led away firmly by the hand, while we were shoved away.

Time went by, the endless congealed time of children and lunatics. Basically, cricket and Red Indians interested me more than female wee-wees. They seemed to possess more potential in those days.

The slump was on. Father went about with a long face, predicting that the bank would have to close. ‘Money has dried up,’ he said. Money has dried up – a marvellous phrase! I pictured it golden, damp, congealed, like beaches as the tide leaves them.

We were seeing something of beaches at this time. Taking advantage of a customer’s bankruptcy, my father bought from him a small bungalow on the North Norfolk coast. We used to drive there for summer weekends – a long boring drive that grew interesting only when we got through Spalding and King’s Lynn and could smell the sea. The bungalow was on the dunes just outside Hunstanton. The tide went out for miles, leaving all that congealed money, and I never got over the wonder of it.

The sea air was supposed to ‘do me good’. I suffered much from bilious attacks at the time, greatly to the bafflement of our family doctor and my parents. Nelson called me a dirty beast, but I was always scrupulous about never being sick anywhere but in the right place.

It is clear enough to me now what ailed me. I was emotionally upset by my mother.

She was no disciplinarian. Father would take a stick to Nelson and me when we were naughty; it was a painful punishment that left no after-effects – only Father’s habit of insisting I shook hands with him directly afterwards, as if to absolve himself from guilt, faintly annoyed me. But Mother’s way of inducing goodness into us was altogether more deadly. She threatened that she would not love us any more, and that she would run away from home, taking Ann with her.

Perhaps such threats would mean nothing to an insensitive child, if there is such a thing. To me, who had experienced separation from my mother at birth, they loomed enormous. I was frequently sick because that would keep Mother at home; she pampered me marvellously when I was ill in bed. (At the time, of course, I had no inkling of my own thought processes.)

My mother was capable of actually carrying out her threats. On one occasion, when Nelson and I had done something of which she did not approve, she put Ann into her coat, hat, and leggings, stuffed her in the push-chair, and was off. We had the terrible mortification of seeing her from our bedroom windows, heading for the market place, Ann howling with apprehension as she went. If my memory serves, this was the last occasion on which I saw Nelson cry. We cuddled together against the bed and wept, ‘She’ll never come back! We must try to be better boys!’

No doubt Mother’s treatment of us had much to do with her mysterious nerves, which the seaside was expected to alleviate. Sometimes, Grandfather and Grandmother came down with us for the day, to look after the children while Mother went for one of her walks along the beach. In covert misery I used to watch her tall figure dwindle in the perspectives of the shore, wondering whether she meant to return, or whether something mysterious and terrible would happen to her as soon as she was out of my sight.

Sometimes she would take one of these seashore walks with ‘Uncle’ Jim. Uncle Jim Anderson was a smiling man with cold red hands who made rare and ambiguous intrusions into our family life. He and Father were always very hearty with each other. When Uncle Jim appeared at our bungalow he would bring amazing things to eat at picnics – game pies and pineapples, I remember – and was welcome on that account. But he would also accompany Mother on her long walks; then Nelson and I became strangely uneasy and refused to swim, even when Grandfather shouted at us.

‘Do you think he and Mum are up to something?’ Nelson asked. We suspected they were, although we had not the vaguest idea what people did when they were up to something.

When Nelson was going to grammar school he became more remote from me. In my own little animal world I formed a tentative pact with Ann. Although Mother mothered her vigorously, Ann was by no means her slave, as I felt I would have been had I received such smothering kindness. Ann reserved her independence. This meant that she was not entirely a reliable ally; anything I did which she disliked was reported at once, and loudly, to Mother. Yet she plotted against Mother in her own right and, of us three children, she was the most subversive. She was a clever and inventive child, and together we used to stray far from home over the common. Once we saw an old tramp take his trousers down and shit under a gorse bush, which embarrassed us both greatly.

We invented a fascinating and perilous game in the back garden. It began, I believe, after Mother took us all to the circus in Nottingham and we had seen some acrobats, performing.

Ann and I were tightrope-walkers. The clothes-line lay on the lawn, and we walked along it, pretending to sway perilously and occasionally fall off. Later we acquired a length of thick rope. With Nelson’s aid, this was stretched tightly between two apple trees, a foot or so above the ground. Ann and I soon learnt to walk along this with our shoes off, so that we were able to raise the height of the rope.

At its most developed, this game became quite professional.

The rope was stretched from the corner of the garden shed to our biggest apple tree, perhaps a yard above the ground. Sometimes we were in the jungle, escaping from wild animals, but more often we were kings, tightrope-walking above England; we could have as much of it as we could walk over without falling off. This must have presaged a later and more megalomanic game to be mentioned in due course.

Despite the gloomy predictions of our parents, I cannot recall that Ann and I ever hurt ourselves at this game, except on the final occasion we played it. We had tied one end of the rope to a vertical drainpipe running down the side of the shed; the drainpipe came away from the brickwork when I was on the rope. Falling, I did no more than graze a knee.

The craze was over, just another of the crazes of childhood, like marbles or hoops. I cannot recall ever trying to tightrope-walk again. Other attractions claimed me; among them was Hilda.

In my last year at the kindergarten I was in love with Hilda. She was my age, pretty and slender, with curly brown hair. Her father was a hairdresser; he also ran the local amateur dramatics group with his wife. The theatrical streak lay in Hilda also. She would tease me, but captivatingly, and dance for me. Her mother was always buying her pretty dresses, of which I thoroughly approved.

Hilda and I spent a lot of time together. She cured me of my final Red Indian craze. We used to go and play with a pallid boy-cousin of hers, Ronnie, because Ronnie lived in a huge house with lots of agreeably derelict outbuildings. We could always scare Ronnie by pretending we had seen a ghost in the stables. On the other hand, Ronnie could scare us by saying he saw ghosts in the house. I’ve often wondered about this interchangeability of roles, which occurs in adult life too, for our characters are by no means as fixed as we like to think. In this particular case there was an immediate explanation: Hilda and I knew the stables were not haunted, but we suspected the house was, and were easily alarmed by anything that tended to confirm that suspicion. Ronnie, knowing the house to be haunted, would naturally expect ghosts in the outbuildings.

But I have seen boys at school, miserably bullied one term, turn into tough little bullies the next; and the sloppiest soldiers, given a stripe, are transformed into bullshitting corporals. Cowards turn into heroes, heroes into cowards, according to circumstance rather than nature.

Hilda and I turned into lovers. We used to kiss each other a lot, though I never kissed her as much as I wished. Kissing her was absolute delight; I never wished for anything better. When we had scared Ronnie we would walk in the dead passages or climb into the old lofts, playing our tiny games. Once, I was taken to see her perform on the stage. She sang two songs: ‘An Apple for the Teacher’ and ‘Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day’ (only she sang, ‘Little Girl, You’ve Had a Busy Day’), and I clapped furiously.

We inspected each other’s bodies and rather politely kissed each other’s behinds. The look of her body was a delight to me. But we did not know what to do except look. I stood against her, touching her, but I believe that was only once or twice. We used to watch each other pee.

It was Margaret Randall, however, who gave me my first erection.

Miss Unwin divided her flock into Little ’Uns and Big ’Uns, or Little Unwins and Big Unwins, as we said. The Big ’Uns went into an upstairs classroom. Margaret Randall was one of the biggest of the Big ’Uns, due to leave at the end of term; I myself had only a couple of terms to go. On this momentous occasion, when Miss Unwin was momentarily out of the room, Margaret locked the door of the classroom, jumped on to the table, called to us all to gather round, and began stripping off her clothes.

Children take things for granted. We enjoyed the show without being surprised. Margaret had an attractive face, with big blue eyes and long eyelashes. A nice girl, good with the Little ’Uns. As she pulled her knickers off, we saw with delight – surprised perhaps at the inevitability of it! – the crisp black hair that seemed to curl from between her legs.