The Good Boy (15 page)

So that is when I became a great sinner, enjoying the pleasures of masturbation almost every day, often several times a day, and then heading off to Confession every Saturday so that I would be able to go to Mass and Communion with a clean slate and pure soul on Sunday morning. Each week I would make a great effort not to start again but rarely held my resolve beyond Monday night. It now seems surprising to me that my parents never said anything about sex education to me, and I can only suppose that they had ‘passed the buck' to the school or else that they regarded puberty as a natural phenomenon that I should be left to discover for myself. Given my father's reasonably firm religious convictions, I suspect that the former was his view and that he endorsed the school's advice that masturbation was a sin … though perhaps, given his medical training, not a very serious one and more of a bad habit (like biting one's finger nails)! My mother, on the other hand, may well have taken the latter view and I greatly doubt that she saw masturbation as sinful or as a serious problem. One day she surprised me in the very act, down in the privacy of the woodshed, and she retreated with an ‘Oh, you're in here!' faster than I could stuff my cock and clothes back into my trousers. Whether she told my father about the incident I don't know … it was never mentioned by anyone, and after the initial shock of being discovered, I continued with my pleasureseeking, though probably a little more carefully and discreetly.

The strange thing is that by the end of secondary school, all I knew about sex was that masturbation was of course free and was fun but was, alas, the sin of self-abuse. I never wondered whether girls also could masturbate, had no idea as to how the female genitalia differed from that of males, had never been told about procreation and the ‘birds and the bees' and, having grown up in the city away from the enlightening behaviour of farm animals, I knew nothing about intercourse between male and female. I had never wondered why my parents slept in the same bed and had never wondered or asked where we children had come from. In my all-boys secondary school, none of my schoolmates ever discussed sex in my hearing, and never told jokes about sex. While I kissed both of my parents goodnight every evening and my female relatives on meeting them, these were chaste little kisses on the cheek or forehead, and I knew nothing about the thrills of kissing on the mouth … playing around with girls was never discussed in my gang of school friends. I can remember being rather bored at the cinema when romantic interludes appeared in films, and when Cary Grant worked his way up to kissing his leading lady on the lips, I used to wish they'd hurry up and get back to the main story of the film. At that time, Hollywood adhered to a fairly strict code of censorship as far as sex was concerned and there was never anything to indicate that passionate kissing was a prelude to even more pleasurable activity. It was, I think, referred to as the ‘one foot on the floor policy': petting and pashing were permitted between the stars of the film (heterosexual stars, of course:
pace
Cary Grant and Rock Hudson et al.) provided they remained clad and, if reclining on couch or bed, kept one foot on the floor. Thus far and no further! And yet I sensed that there was some sort of sexual activity engaged in by men and perhaps by women (but not by my own parents, of course!) and that selfabuse was a sin and a bad habit because it in some way frustrated proper sexual function. But I had no idea of what ‘proper sexual function' actually was. It now seems extraordinary to me that it was possible in an Australian city in the 1950s for a boy to reach his teens without any knowledge of sex and to then be taught just one thing about it … that it was pleasurable but sinful.

The year after my father died, when I turned seventeen and my brother thirteen, I asked one of the senior teachers whom I most respected to explain the ‘facts of life' to my younger brother. ‘Killer', Br Kilmartin, was I think a bit surprised and so I explained that as our father had died just before Peter presumably reached puberty, I thought someone should step in and explain things … and that I felt unable to. Killer rather reluctantly, I think, agreed to my request, although I never knew whether he actually did speak to Peter, and I never asked Peter or discussed sex with him. (I do feel, however, that Peter grew up with a much more sensible approach to sex than I. My initial reaction to later hearing that he, his wife and their young children swam naked together in their swimming pool was one of surprise and disapproval, while I now see such a relaxed attitude in the home to the human body as a very sensible way of gradually introducing children to the facts of life.) What was my motivation in asking Killer to explain things to my brother? I now think that I had two intentions: one was to try to spare him the guilt and confusion that I was experiencing; and the other was, I think, the faint hope that I might through some side effect learn the facts of life myself!

The facts of life were not, however, explained to me until I was part way through my second year at university, and then it was done by a friend only a year or so older. At last I learned that the man pushed his erect penis into the woman's vagina (I suspect I nodded knowingly, although I was not at all sure what a vagina was or just why a man would want to do this), shooting his ejaculate up the passageway towards her womb, where it could fertilise the woman's eggs and make a baby. It all sounded more like hard work than fun. So
that
was proper sexual function!

‘How does the baby get out of the womb after the nine months of growth?' I remember asking … and there my informant was able only to speculate that ‘it was probably the same way as it got in'. This conversation took place before the days of television and the enlightenment generally available nowadays through that medium, and perhaps explains how I could grow to adulthood without ever really knowing the details of the processes of conception and birth.

Thirty or more years later I was talking with my Aunt Nell, then approaching 90, about her days as an art student in Melbourne. When she had first come to the city from her home in the country, at the tender age of twenty, she had stayed with a great-uncle and his wife, then living in an outer suburb. But after a few months of travelling by bus and train into and out from the city every day, she got her parents' approval to find ‘digs' closer to the city centre and the National Gallery School of Art in the CBD. She somehow or other was put in touch with a family living in a very posh part of South Yarra on the edge of Toorak, a family where the husband's business interests had declined so far as to convince his wife that to save the day she should take in one or two very respectable ‘paying guests'. The family home was large and comfortable, Nell said, close to the Botanical Gardens and to the stop of the tram running directly to the Gallery School at the top of Swanston Street. The arrangement seemed to suit everybody and so Nell moved in. Nell added that in her second term at the Art School she had become quite keen on a young chap in her class and apparently got to the stage of talking about him with her landlady, who tended to ‘mother' her. She then amazed me by saying that it was the landlady who had at that stage explained to her the facts of life, ‘how babies are made', as Nell put it. ‘Wouldn't you think that Mum would have explained all that to me before letting me come to live alone in the city?' she added. I could only agree, not having realised until then that my grandmother might have had some shortcomings in her role as a mother and some serious inhibitions as regards sex. And what about grandma's own mother, my valiant Great-Grandmother Fanny? Had she explained the facts of life to her daughters?

She had had eleven children, and my grandmother seven. What was it about British and Australian society that so inhibited parents in their dealings with their own children? Are those inhibitions now a thing of the past? Has the recent influx of migrants from the even more inhibited and socially quite feudal Middle Eastern Muslim world worsened the problem in this area of social behaviour? I found Nell's little story quite sad; she had apparently fallen in love with her classmate and, thanks to the timely advice from her landlady, she had not let the relationship go too far too fast for, by the end of the third term, the classmate had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, from which he died within a few months. Nell contracted the disease from him (she smilingly explained that they used to suck on the same pencils and paintbrush handles in art classes). Her coughing and pallor were immediately noticed by my mother when Nell visited her at St Vincent's Hospital and Nell was straightaway shipped back home to the country. Her parents were told that the only chance of recovery would be for Nell to keep to her bed for six months, the bed to be put out on the verandah in the fresh air, a special diet to be closely followed and a program of breathing and chest exercises to be strictly followed. To everyone's amazement Nell did exactly as the doctors ordered (proof, according to my mother, of her incredible willpower), made a full recovery, outlived all her siblings and died, ever celibate, on her 92nd birthday.

In the middle of my final year at school I had been asked to partner a lovely girl called Helen, the daughter of family friends, who was to attend the Loreto Ball and there to ‘make her debut'. Helen was beautiful and intelligent, with bright brown eyes and a dazzling smile, and I of course agreed. In this way I became caught up in a rather strange society ritual which was to play a significant part in my social and sexual education. The Ball was a quite grand affair, scheduled to be held in the St Kilda Town Hall, where guests could waltz and whirl around the dance floor to the strains of a large band installed on stage in the midst of a floral display, and where a splendid supper would be served when the dancers' energies flagged. In addition to the 20 or 30 debutantes and their partners who would be presented to the Lord Mayor or Archbishop or some other dignitary, there would be up to a thousand paying guests drawn from the best Catholic social circles of Melbourne, the proceeds of the night going to support a childcare centre in a disadvantaged part of the city. To play my part in this glittering occasion, I had first of all to buy a dinner suit, black bow tie and pair of white gloves and, most importantly, to learn to dance. I was therefore enrolled in and attended for six or eight weeks the dancing classes given by a certain Miss Lascelles of Toorak. Miss Lascelles, a tall, slim, trim and somewhat grim lady of reportedly very genteel English origins, had trained generations of the offspring of upper middle-class Melbourne, often in preparation for formal balls of the type I was to attend, and I was quickly and skilfully introduced to the waltz, the rhumba, the fox trot, the quickstep, the samba, the tango, the Charmaine, the Pride of Erin, the Valetta and even the slightly less decorous progressive barn dance. Once these basics had been mastered, I was able to join the special class arranged to train that year's debutante set which would be required to perform a show waltz as part of the presentation ceremony at the Loreto Ball.

These dancing classes were a bit of a challenge for me as I had not been in a co-ed situation since completing Grade Two at the convent school as an eight-year-old. At sixteen I needed lessons in social interaction as well as in dancing, but they were not included in the course. The hardest part of the classes for me was therefore not the dance instruction but having to mix with girls and trying to appear as if I were happy and relaxed and having fun like everybody else. Most if not all of the other teenagers in Miss Lascelles' classes would have been from the feepaying, private, single-sex colleges in the Toorak/Malvern/Kew/ Hawthorn area, but none seemed as socially inept as me. I was pleased to be learning how to dance but was really not interested in dancing partners. I preferred the company of Beau Geste, King Arthur, Francis of Assisi and the myriad of other fictional and historical characters familiar to me from my reading. Looking back now, I see that I was not physically attracted to the girls as the other boys seemed to have been and I found it virtually impossible to socialise with the rather single-minded boys either. As a result, the actual dancing instruction appealed to me, but the socialising before and after, and in the interludes between instruction sessions, bored, pained and terrified me.

As part of the preparations for the night of the Ball, several of the debutantes' families organised parties for the debutante set. Fortunately Helen, my partner, lived in the country, some 50 kilometres out of the city, and it was not practicable for her (and therefore for me) to attend every party so I was spared much enforced socialising. We did, however, attend one party, held in one of the mansion homes in Kew, and this was my first experience of an evening party for sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys and girls. I must have been a terrible embarrassment and disappointment to my poor partner, as I was probably the only male there not interested in the flirting and covert sexual games the others all seemed to enjoy. I did not feel the slightest desire to cuddle, grope or kiss any of the girls and was irritated by the way the other boys persistently sought to do so. There was certainly no alcohol but there was music and dancing, all seemingly designed to encourage smooching, and I was bored, bored, bored.

I was more interested in the beautiful house and furnishings, and in the elaborate supper … and, alas, I had exactly the same reaction on the night of the Ball itself. The setting in the Town Hall, the flowers, the women's dresses, the orchestra, the supper, were all wonderful; the dancing was both a challenge and fun; and the enforced socialising was torture. I was probably the only partner who did not try to steal a kiss (or more), and I can still recall the sense of mild expectation, disappointment and even understanding on Helen's part that I felt as I finally said goodnight to her.

I suspect that she had begun to understand me before I had myself. What might have seemed to other observers to be mere shyness and inexperience on my part was, I now think, simply the normal reaction of a homosexual male to a heterosexual situation … lack of interest. But I was far from realising that and, indeed, at that stage had no familiarity with the terms or their connotations.