The Good Boy (17 page)

Although we agreed to meet again, and soon, we never did. I was wracked with guilt and think that he was too. I didn't go back to the dressing sheds for weeks, and when I did, briefly, to look for him, he wasn't there. I did raise the subject with one of the Jesuits at Newman, telling him that I seemed to be homosexual rather than heterosexual and asking for his advice as to what I should do. He seemed not at all concerned or surprised by my revelation and question, and quietly said that many young fellows went through similar experiences. He said that for most young chaps the sex drive was quite strong and the way in which they responded to it depended largely on the circumstances in which they found themselves. If sex with a female, i.e. sexual intercourse, was available, most fellows opted for that but if sex was only, or seemed only, available with other males, usually in the form of mutual masturbation, many fellows did use that outlet as an alternative to masturbation alone. He advised me not to regard either experience as a serious sin and indeed seemed uncomfortable at my association of the two words ‘sex' and ‘sin'. This very sensible and timely advice, that sex should not be readily associated with sin, helped me to keep things in perspective both then and later in life. The wise priest who gave the advice never made it to the upper echelons of the church and I often wonder whether he was too much of a realist, too honest a counsellor, to be a successful company man.

A few months later, randy and reckless again, I answered a classified ad in the newspaper seeking a male model, suspecting from the wording that more than photography was envisaged. A meeting was arranged in a hotel suite in St Kilda and I duly presented myself. The advertisers turned out to be a middle-aged couple, Viennese I would say from their accents. She wore a fur coat and her fair hair was done rather attractively in a French roll; he had grey hair, glasses and a dark suit. They wanted photos of the woman having sex with a young man. I tried to hide my puzzlement and, keen for the experience and for the money offered, asked no questions and agreed. Before adjourning to the bedroom to get ready, the woman somewhat ostentatiously took a pill, ‘The pill, just in case,' she said and then disappeared into the next room to undress. I was invited to undress too, down to my jocks, the photographer checking that I was ‘in working order'. To my surprise, given my nervousness about what I was letting myself in for, and to his satisfaction, I was, and so we both went through to the bedroom. By no means sure what to do, I acted the shy innocent and the woman, who was not unattractive as she lay on the bed in the pose of Manet's ‘Olympe', seemed happy enough to guide me home. They didn't want preliminaries and a pretence of love, just straightforward fucking, so that is what I gave them … ‘doing what comes naturally' as one of the songs in
Annie Get Your Gun
, then playing at Her Majesty's Theatre, said. The old chap clicked away with his camera for fifteen minutes or so, and then I was finished, paid, and quite politely shown the door. So that was what sex was about! At last I knew the details, had compared the naked male and female bodies, and had been able to do what was expected of me. But was I normal?

I really had enjoyed the sex with Chris (which had gone no further than ‘69ing') much more than the ‘all-the-way sex' with the woman in St Kilda. Sex had been designed by God for the procreation of children, or so the church taught, and as that could only happen when the sex was between male and female then sex between two males must have been unnatural … pleasurable but wrong. Waves of guilt washed over me again, but the urge to enjoy sex with somebody, anybody, was strong and masturbation seemed increasingly pointless.

During the university vacation I found work as a labourer on a dairy farm 60 kilometres east of Melbourne and there, thanks to the herd of 50 or so Guernseys and the two bulls, I learned some more sexual basics. One morning I rather diffidently reported to the farmer that while waiting in the milking shed yard for her turn to be milked one of the cows had been attempting to mount another. ‘Oh, okay then,' he replied. ‘Which one was doing the bulling?' and when I pointed out the culprit he just said that when the milking was finished we would take the cow along to the bull yard, as her behaviour indicated that she was ‘in season' (whatever that meant). So we walked the cow up the lane towards the bull yard, where the occupant apparently smelled the approaching good times and started bellowing and snorting. ‘We'll leave them to it,' said the boss to my disappointment, adding what I came to realise was a favourite dairying joke: ‘There's only one good job on a dairy farm, and the bull has it.' Precisely what that job was and how the bull actually did it was not revealed until a few days later when I was entrusted with the task of walking another cow up to the bull yard and managed to linger long enough to watch the proceedings. There was a separate, smaller yard for the other bull, a ‘teenager' bought a few months earlier as a pedigree Guernsey calf and being groomed for great things in his adult life. He must have had an inkling of what lay before him and opted for a bit of practice because one day I saw him standing over a moss-covered tree-stump about three feet high – just the right height for him to rub his cock and balls gently across its silky surface – he was masturbating! And the thought did occur to me: here was an animal masturbating for pleasure, doing what comes naturally, without any instructions from outside, and without any appearance of guilt. If masturbating could be a natural action on the dairy farm, how could it be a sin in the city?

I was beginning to feel that sex should be social, a way of linking to others, so I continued looking out for new opportunities. Why on earth did I not, as most boys presumably did, look for a steady girlfriend and the prospect of marriage and the unlimited sex it would bring? I have long mulled over these questions and now realise that the answer is that I was following my basic instincts … and my basic instincts did
not
draw me to the opposite sex nor to seeking guidance as to why I was not so attracted. I was simply not part of the heterosexual majority whose basic instincts drew them towards coupling with the opposite sex by whatever means the social customs of the country and day prescribed: marriage through the mediation of parents or matchmakers in some countries, or by means of flirting, courting and wooing in others, such as Australia.

I seemed, to the casual observer if not to those close enough to me to know better, to be a well balanced young chap, well behaved, well spoken, on the way to acquiring a good education, of a somewhat serious disposition, quite uninterested in sport or in chasing girls to flirt with, inclined to be religious, and undecided as to what profession to take up. But that was not really the truth. I was as ‘mixed up' as many other young people, but usually managed to mask my inner turmoil. I suppose now that the asthma attacks I continued to experience were often triggered by inner tension. I vividly remember two of my sister's medical student friends, rather brilliant and eccentric twin boys who, at the age of twenty, both wore gold-rimmed spectacles (which I associated with grandparents, retirement and old age) visiting our house one day when I was wheezing badly. They came into my room in friendly fashion and one of them sat on the edge of the bed and advised me to stop worrying about my mother and her financial problems. How they knew that I constantly worried about my mother and all the work she did I do not know. I was surprised by the advice and was shocked and even angered by the followup comment from the other brother that ‘parents have done their life's work when their children reach adulthood and it does not make sense to question, or not to accept, their continuous, selfless giving.' The twins, who really knew me only slightly, had identified one of the big problems I was grappling with: was I, with my father's death, ‘the man of the house' and the person who should be supporting the family in his place? How could I earn the money needed to do that? How could I selfishly enjoy the life of the university student while my mother was toiling away in that office, lugging bags of shopping home on the bus and tram and keeping ‘open house' for her children and their ever-hungry friends? What should I do with my life? A second big problem was the issue of sex. How could I get enough sex while still acting responsibly towards my family? Was religion the answer? Perhaps a more devout life would stifle the sex urge and enable me to join a religious order and cease being a burden on my family.

With my personal life in a mess, I stumbled along academically, doing well in the subjects which I enjoyed and failing the two I did not. I had been encouraged when at the end of the first year the Philosophy Department asked me if I would be interested in doing an Honours course with them. I should have agreed as, to my surprise, I was finding Philosophy to be the most interesting subject in my course. However, doubting that in Australia one could make much of a living as a philosopher, I did not accept the offer. On the other hand, I loathed the two Law subjects I took in the second year, and had been shocked to find that the Law seemed to be more about preserving the status quo in society, about protecting the ‘haves' from the ‘have-nots', than about the pursuit of Justice as proposed by Plato and the philosophers. So at the end of the second year I gave up the Law side to concentrate on the Arts degree, with a major interest in French, which I was finding very enjoyable: I began to feel that life as a French teacher might turn out to be a good solution to my problems.

The Arts degree eventually completed, I still did not know what to do. My aunt the nun sent me a suggestion in the form of a beautifully printed copy of Francis Thompson's poem ‘The Hound of Heaven'. I resisted that temptation, seductive as it was. Teacher training would not bring in any income until at least another year of study had been completed and as I felt I just had to start bringing in some sort of income, I opted to start work as a temporary untrained teacher in the State High School system, then desperately short of staff. After two terms, however, I obtained, with the help of the French Department at the university, a position as
assistant d'anglais
³⁸
for a year at the Lycée Michel Montaigne in Bordeaux, and then at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris for the following year. Convinced that a period spent living in France was necessary for me to become sufficiently proficient in the language to teach it well, I accepted the posting and sailed for Europe at the end of the term.

Until the introduction of jet aircraft, which traverse in one hour the distance that the average liner does in a day, only the very wealthy could afford to travel by air between Australia and Europe; and as the much cheaper trip by sea took the best part of a month in each direction, it was not really possible for ordinary people to go to Europe for their two or three weeks of annual holidays. Even teachers and academics with their long summer holidays could not make the return trip by sea without taking additional leave. Going to Europe by sea was, in other words, a major undertaking and as it involved so much travelling time, few people could envisage making the trip more than once in a working life. Fares were expensive (my cheapest possible berth cost me ten weeks' wages) and because living expenses in Europe were higher than in Australia, many young Australians looked for paid employment while abroad to eke out their savings.

There were many shipping companies offering sailings via Suez and a few operating via Panama or around the Cape of Good Hope. As a teenager with a box camera, I had hung around the docks in Melbourne almost every weekend inspecting and photographing the many passenger liners calling in, so my decision to travel on the Lloyd Triestino liner
Australia
was based on fairly thorough research. Though not as big or as fast as the P&O or Orient Line ships, the Italian vessel was more modern, offered real cuisine as opposed to the ‘pub grub' in tourist class on British ships and, with its much more cosmopolitan passenger list, seemed (and proved indeed) to offer an easy escape route from the monolingual confines of the Anglo-Saxon world. I was of course thrilled at the prospect of the long sea voyage with calls in Fremantle, Djakarta, Colombo, Aden, Suez and Port Said before arriving in Naples. Pretty seasick and homesick for the first few days, I recovered after our first port of call and enjoyed the rest of the trip. In the dining room I had been placed at a large English-speaking table (most tables were Italian-speaking, with a few where Dutch or German predominated); others at the table were Lorna and Wendy, two girls of my age from New Zealand, both librarians setting off on a working holiday in the UK; Jeff, a young chap from the back blocks of NSW doing the same; Aldona, a vivacious 30-something Lithuanian mother and her seven-year-old daughter, Vida, travelling to the USA via Europe to join her husband (he was a doctor, but his Lithuanian degree had not been recognised when he had arrived in Australia so he had moved to Chicago, where it was); Hakim, a cheerful Lebanese chap fluent in French and English as well as in Arabic who was going home to Beirut on holiday and I think to find a bride; and Madame Zanetti, an elderly French-speaking Swiss lady returning home to Switzerland after visiting her married daughter who was then living with her husband and children in New Caledonia. A nearby table was made up of a similar mix of mostly young, English-speaking passengers and we tended to make a loose and relaxed group of friends around the pool, on the deck, in the lounge bar after dinner and at the dances, races, cinema shows and other entertainments on board. The ship did only seventeen knots and the voyage took nearly a month, so there was plenty of time to get to know one another.

This was a new and very strange social experience for me, as I had attended all-boys secondary schools and an all-male university college, and had lived a very close family life where conforming to my parents' presumed expectations of my behaviour had always been the only thing to do. On the
Australia
there were few constraints – I sensed that it was an opportunity for me to act as an independent, mature adult … but what do such people do? Leaning on the ship's rail in the moonlight, watching the flying fish leaping through the ship's bow-wave, dancing under the stars to the strains of the ship's orchestra (often playing Neapolitan love songs) was certainly wonderful, but did it make me feel ‘romantic'? What does a ‘shipboard romance' mean? I really was not at all sure, my head being full of ideas absorbed from the innumerable romantic, adventure and escapist novels I had read, ideas which, while exciting, may well have been unrealistic. I may have been book-wise, but certainly was not streetwise. Being by nature cautious rather than impulsive, I probably erred on the side of shyness. I was very attracted to one of the New Zealand girls whose repartee I greatly enjoyed and who had a dazzling smile, big lustrous brown eyes, a generous figure and, with a dash of Maori blood, wonderful honey-coloured skin. But my mixture of social timidity, ignorance and caution meant that I did not plunge into any sort of shipboard romance. I had never kissed a girl, and was not going to start out in the middle of the ocean where I might not be able to control subsequent events.