Lips To Cheeks

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONE

A strange confession, with which to begin a candid account of s****l experiences! Don't misunderstand me.

I was born with the usual five senses, all of them clean and keen, and some horse-sense to go with them; more than my share of curiosity, which a lifetime won't slake; the usual apparatus, in working order; but no sense of bodily shame. Not a shred, not a fig-leaf.

Now, this is a terrible deficiency! A moment's thought makes it obvious that all our society would fall to pieces if it was without shame. The clothing industry and the pin-up industry would be the first to fold. But the churches would soon have to follow. Lawyers an judges would be queuing in their thousands at the labor exchanges, and newspapers would reduce to half their size. One can't even be a savage without this heaven sent faculty, which I have been unaccountably denied

It was obvious to me as soon as I could think, or sooner, that society and I could never get along together in these circumstances. A hermitage in the desert seemed indicated. But we .know from the Decameron and the mediaeval painters what sort of worries the hermits have. So we had to do a deal, society and I. For my part, I mustn't make my weakness too obvious to others, particularly people who might be trying to teach me, rear me or employ me; and society would turn a Nelson eye as long as I kept my conduct comparatively private. This was English society, of course; and that's the English code.

Negotiating this curious treaty was not easy, as it had to begin so early in life: at the n****e, really. But I well remember the day we concluded our terms, society and I.

I was a youngish man at the time. I had recently given up wearing a napkin and had been promoted to brown velveteen knickers, as I was supposed to be "dry." I could walk and talk a bit; but paradise was already lost, my mother had produced a third son, I was no longer the baby, the apple of her eye. A little vomiting moist object of which I, if you please, was supposed to be proud and fond, got all the attention.

But in this little vignette of memory out of the darkness of the past I sense gaiety. I see a warm livingroom, full of fun and chatter. Even though my parents were fully occupied with my little brother, I was laughing.

I was getting some attention from another quarter, which soothed my vanity. My father's oldest friend, the Major, a military man with bristling moustache, was playfully bouncing me on his knee, making the insane gurgling noises that adults instinctively make to small children, and fondling my rosy thighs.

You would look far to find a more stalwart pillar of society than the Major. He had family pride (i.e. snobbery), military ideals (i.e. disguised timidity), conserva tive outlook (fear of ideas and of change), chivalry (dread of women), and a professed dislike of sentimentality (distrust of his own kind heart). All this I knew long before I could talk, from the set of his eyebrows and the dangle of his gold watch-chain when he bent over my cradle.

Bouncing on his knee I was riding the high horse of state, imbibing the sound ideals of this most respected upholder of the proprieties. It was a fine wordless lesson he was giving me.

But what, then, in the name of virtue, was his righ hand doing?

Gently but unmistakably it had crept inside my knicker-leg. His fingers had reached an adjunct which my parents had never mentioned, and for which I hac' therefore invented a name of my own. I said it nov* to the Major: "Owgypowgy!"

He smiled and said only "Goo-goo-goo!" He w, pretending that what he was up to was only the same i tickling my ribs or the palms of my hands. But somt how it was not the same. His index-finger was running lightly, persistently, round the tiny worm. I laughed more: he meant it as a joke, I saw that now. A nev kind of joke. What a funny feeling! Did I want t> make water on him to cap the joke? No, it wasn that. It was something else.

My little prick stiffened up. An exquisite pleasure coursed through my body.

Eros and Aphrodite had entered my life, through the tip of the Major's finger. I hope I have never since failed to accord those great gods the adoration which is their due. I owe them and their agents the deepest gratitude.

They have seen to it that I had a nice variety of experience, rewarding me in proportion as I brought no prejudice to mar or debar it. These anti-social deities were apparently pleased that I thought pleasure a good thing: they gave me pleasure with my elders and my juniors, with both sexes and the in-betweens, with love and without. I found it better with love, but good without; nearly always good, whatever the cost in the end.

But while I digress my Dutch uncle is advancing a little further, putting his finger into the crack between the cheeks of my bottom. I don't suppose it was very dry or clean. Probably he had something to smell, afterwards, for a souvenir; let's not begrudge him thatat least he wasn't fastidious, and to be fastidious in matters of love is a grave fault.

Now he drew back a little. He was playing with the small throbbing p***s. He bent his head and kissed me on the mouth; I felt the prickle of his bristles and smelt his breath, laden with tobacco and wine.

My parents had turned, were coming towards us. The Major very dexterously took his hand out. He looked at me quizzically.

My immediate impulse was to cry "Look, Mamma!" and show her the big thing I had got. Let the world admire it, and emulate me, and share my pleasure!

But I did nothing so disastrous. A warning voice made itself heard. The look in the Major's eye, perhaps; still more, the way he extricated his hand from the dangerzone, let me know how society feels about these things. I knew all at once that we were fellow-conspirators. I continued to ride a very c**k horse on his knee, and gave him, I am sure, a knowing smile. He kissed me again, very thankfully, before he left. He knew his hand could return with confidence to the same attractive spot in the future. It did, at intervals, till I was eighteen. I'm very glad I never betrayed him.

Of course it is possible he thought I would accept this first overture with perfect innocence; he could not know that I would be making my social contract that day. There is such a thing as childish innocence, in a certain sense of the term. I know a charming woman who has had a long and vastly complicated s****l career. I asked her, in an intimate moment, and to intensify my pleasure, about her first memory of the joys. She told me it was when as a child of four she was taken to the Zoo. A kindly attendant lifted her up to look at the animals, and wriggled his fingers inside her hole while doing so. Her mother and sister were close by, so his audacity was considerable. She remembered distinctly how hotly she enjoyed the sensation; how she sat tight, and made him carry her from cage to cage, the whole length of the cat house and back. He paddled his fingers in her baby cunt all the time. What a kind man, she thought! Only years afterwards did it occur to her that he might have done it for his own pleasure, rather than hers.

But she never told anybody. Why not? She did not know why not. Nor do I. Unless she, too, made a social contract of concealment and self-protection that day. Or possibly it did not even occur to her that there was anything worth mentioning. After all, it was a truly inward pleasure! She closed her baby lips over the warm memory. I imagine it revived in her unconscious mind, if not consciously, when the organs of a hundred males entered her, in after years, and enriched the experience with its wetness and heat.

The Major, I need hardly say, was a concealed homosexual; I always took it for granted that my innocent parents had no idea of the fact. They were such a pair of puritans, you wondered how they ever got as far as a f**k. But you never know your parents. Years later, a very sophisticated old man hinted to me that long ago there had been a secret love between my father and the Major. That was simply beyond my imagination, and probably untrue. I think the Major was incapable of loving in his own age-group.

He was very good for my ego, as I was the middle child. He was the first person to make me feel an object of excitement and desire.

The Major showed no interest in my brothers. I was "his boy," and he gave me presents, especially books, and taught me to paint in watercolours.

He learned to time his visits, for talks on current political affairs, with my father, to coincide with my bath-night. My mother remarked on how domestic he was, and what a shame he was not a husband and father-while his hand, under "the suds, was feeling between my legs, touching the little crinkled ball-bag, hardening the prick, pulling the foreskin back, and once putting the soapy tip of his finger right inside my bowel, till I wanted to s**t right there in the bath. His broad back was between me and my hovering mother, and I abetted my seducer by holding the loofah and flannel across my middle to screen his hand from the view, if anyone had chanced to look.

There was a happy time when I did not need bathing, only supervising, and the Major was allowed to do that service, and to dry me, all by himself. He had a trick which he much enjoyed, of so manipulating the rough towel as to give me an erection without his having touched it at all. Then looking at me with mock reproach, he would exclaim softly, "Why, what's this?" and seize it, while I wriggled and laughed.

This, alas, gave way to a time when supervision was out of the question, I was expected to bathe alone, and I used to listen mournfully to the Major's voice, talking to my father downstairs, wishing (as I expect he was wishing, too) that he could find an excuse to come to the bathroom; but he did not dare. It did seem for a time as if all that was over.

There are many interesting things about him that I shall never know: mysteries he has taken to the grave. Had he acquired a taste for small boys in India or Africa, as so many English soldiers do? Was I the sole object of his attentions, or did he have a private life that I knew nothing about? (He surely must have had!)

As for the opposite s*x, at the time of my first little adventures with the Major, I did not know there was an opposite s*x. I had no sister, and my mother was a sexless goddess of maternity, like a Victorian statue. I must have been six or seven years old when a boy at school, exhibiting his own organ to me with understandable pride, told me the astonishing news that girls had holes instead of pricks: "Didn't you know that}" he said (he himself had just found out).

I was at once devoured by curiosity to see one: a desire by no means easy to satisfy. Judy was the obvious person to approach. I was sentimentally in love with Judy, who was my own age. She was very nice, and gave me sweets, and I had kissed her at Christmas. But I was too scared of the consequences to ask her pointblank to take her pants down and let me see what she kept inside them.

But my curiosity burned, distracting my thoughts from lessons. It became necessary to think of a stratagem: my first.

One day Judy raised her hand in class: "Please may I leave the room?" And she hurried out with great urgency, clutching herself between the legs because her need was great.

I put up my hand and asked if I might get a drink of water. "Very well. Be quick."

Quick? I had never shinned up those stairs at such speed.

The dame school was a converted private house. The upstairs W.C. was for girls, the one-downstairs for boys; so I was silent as well as swift. Judy had not troubled to latch the door. I pushed it and it swung wide, and there I stood and grinned, appealing and appeasingly.