name seriously; she was rather grand, in her way. They had a big ramshackle house, and Esmeralda and her mum both played the piano and sang – rather well, I thought. They performed all the jolly and rather bawdy music-hall songs, like ‘Then her Mama Went Out, De-Da-De-Da-De-Da-De-Dee’ and ‘Who Were You With Last Night?’ and ‘Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend?’
I was pleased with all that sort of liberal-minded stuff. But on this particular night there wasn’t going to be any singing, or anything but screwing, because Esmeralda’s mum and dad were going to be in Nottingham and Esmeralda had given me the green light.
She was a cuddly, happy-go-lucky little thing, Esmeralda. I envied her her temperament. She enjoyed a bit of kissing on the sofa, liked it when I tickled her feet and felt and admired her legs.
I slid my hand up farther and whispered, ‘Let me have a look up there, love!’
‘You can have a look. That won’t hurt either of us. But I may as well tell you now, love, that you aren’t going to get anything more than a look.’
‘The sight of it may drive me mad!’
‘That’s up to you, not me!’
I patted my pocket. ‘You don’t have to be frightened. I’ve brought some things.’
The announcement did frighten her. She saw I meant business. The trouble was, I was also frightened, and didn’t know whether or not I meant business. I had never worn a French letter.
So I dropped that line of approach and got her friendly again. Bless her, she did let me have a look, a good look, and I dipped my fingers in it and rubbed her, although I had no idea about whether I was tickling the right thing. She didn’t even ask for the light off, for which I was grateful. It was marvellously liberating to be able to see.
But I could feel my hard-on going soft. I extracted it from my flies and started fumbling with the French-letter packet. I got one out, pushing the other two back into my pocket. I balanced it on my glans penis and began awkwardly to try to roll it down. Esmeralda had been lying back in a languorous posture. She sat up and watched with interest.
I got the damned thing on, wrinkled and repulsive. My hard deflated further. I began rubbing it to keep its spirits up, furious and yet also half-amused at the sight.
She laughed rather contemptuously, and put her hand on it. I let her take over, gaining courage, thinking she was more experienced than I had expected. In a moment I was ready to slide it in. Esmeralda leant back, and was all honey, and her plump thighs wonderfully moist. We were both nervous. It would not go in.
I did not actually know where to put my penis in that chubby pink pocket. I didn’t know enough about female anatomy. I had never explored my sister. I pushed and sweated, and the damned French letter meant I could not feel her pleasant parts.
‘You’re hurting me, love. I’m a virgin – I think you’d better give over!’
Did she invoke that middle-class spectre of virginity to save my face? I don’t know. But I was glad enough to desist, and pulled the French letter off in exasperation.
My prick hung limp and ludicrous. Something seemed to expand within me until I believed I was about to choke, remembering that I was soon due to go back to bloody Branwells. With a tremendous effort, blushing red, I managed to say, ‘Toss me off, Esmeralda, please!’
Whether or not she had heard the words before, she understood what I meant.
‘Come and snuggle by me,’ she said. She put my hand on her fanny and grasped my weapon, which immediately showed fight. I kissed her both passionately and lovingly. She was a fine girl. I would have died had I had to return to school without shedding my load in her darling presence, however it was done.
Into the brickwork at the back of the squash courts at Branwells was carved a legend. The lettering read merely ‘A. K. DANCER’, and underneath the letters was a boldly stylized outline of prick and balls. Behind that rather flashy and mysterious name, Dancer, lay a story known to every one of the three hundred boys at Branwells, its repetition guaranteed by the unknown memorialist.
Dancer had been expelled about ten years before – some years before even the oldest boy had arrived snivelling for his first term. But the name and memory and the legend of Dancer stayed green. For Dancer was the boy who had been caught fucking the matron. He was beaten and expelled. The matron had left too. Dancer had married her, and they lived happily ever after, with several kids.
Has any public school ever had a better or more telling myth?
If Dancer had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. He represented the secret hopes of all of us that we would somehow escape the awfulness of school to a natural life. Not unscathed, of course (that was the symbolism of the beating), for every public-school boy very soon becomes a realist. And the expulsion was also a meaningful ingredient. Dancer was sacked; he could never revisit Branwells. We knew that those old boys who came back after they had left school, to lecture and boast of worldly success, were really bores and flops, and probably crypto-homosexuals too, sniffing again the scents of old prowess. We knew that school was a prison. Only suckers returned.
We had one of those plodding school songs, built about the school motto, ‘Study and Stand Fast’. A wit had written in an extra verse dedicated to Dancer’s exploit:
‘In Derbyshire’s dull dorms,
On beds and desks and forms,
When lesser souls abused themselves, outclassed,
Our Dancer, saint and patron,
He upped and tupped the matron—
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!’