Chapter 2
The Early Teens
Both the boys went to the local Grammar school. Colin suffered a little in the shadow of his brother’s preceding reputation but soon made his own. He was top of the class every autumn term, middle in the spring term and nearly bottom in the summer term. The pattern hardly varied throughout the five years at school. He was quite gifted but could not see much point to much of the crap they had to learn at school. He did get excellent “0” level results in mathematics, physics and English but was extremely relieved when time came to leave school. He left school for the last time at 1.00 pm and was at work by half past two. There was a life to get on with.
During his last year at school his brother had left home to join the Navy and this had shaken Colin. He teamed up with a gang of lads, one of whom was a very intelligent, very plausible and very bad case.
They ran together for around eighteen months and created minor havoc in the area as well as emptying every shop in the city centre of anything that was movable. They had many scrapes but were far too intelligent to do anything unless success was virtually guaranteed. When he was nearly sixteen Colin and the bad influence went on holiday to the Isle of Man. Within three days they had to stop shoplifting for their suitcases were already full.
It was then that by pure chance Colin heard a news broadcast that a fifteen year old boy was to receive five lashes for some minor offence. This brought home to him just how serious society regarded what he had been doing for the last eighteen months. When they returned home Colin broke all contact with his bad influence and has never spoken to him since. Nor has he ever stolen anything again, not even by finding.
Although the catalyst had been fear he realized that a life of crime would require a total negation of his evaluation of his own worth. His self-esteem could be nothing but zero. This was the first glimmering of the moral values which would play a much more important part in later life.
He once had a girlfriend who persevered with an insurance claim for a lost ring even though she found in again. He finished with her. He once walked out of a supermarket with a checked out load but had genuinely forgotten some items on the bottom rack of the trolley. He went back and paid for them. His esteem and reputation were a million times more important than ten pounds worth of stolen goods. When his garden shed was stripped of all its electrical tools the thieves left the lawnmower that was on its last legs. It would have been easy to take the mower to the skip and claim a new one on the insurance. He did not. The damage to his esteem would simply not be a price worth paying for a new mower.
Colin and his old friend Paul took up cycling in a serious manner. They would cycle every weekend and several evenings in summer. Round trips of fifty miles were mere trifles. One year they cycled to North Yorkshire and spent three weeks punting on the river and courting half of the nubile teenagers in the county. They made the 140 miles return journey in one day. They still consider this one of the finest achievements of their youth.
Colin was never easy with girls. In a foursome there was no problem, but alone he was shy, tongue tied, and extremely embarrassed and clumsy. His problems in this respect started quite early. He had learned to masturbate very young and fantasised about girls long before he knew what he was fantasising about. When he was thirteen his brother and his friends were sixteen or seventeen and used to bring their girlfriends home to parties quite often. Colin was too young to be included in the amorous frolics that took place and grew quite frustrated, especially when, on some occasions it was obvious that things had gone far beyond petting. These things often took place in the shared bedroom from which he would be excluded. Afterwards the bed would smell of woman. But Colin was excluded.
By the time he was old enough to start courting in his own right he was unsure of himself and frightened by the force of his own passion. He had plenty of friends both male and female but could never form a close relationship with a girl. He was just too embarrassed by his longing and the stirrings within himself. He had plenty of opportunities but managed to mess all of them up.
His psyche had not been helped by bad parenting and a combination of unfortunate events. Any one by itself might have been harmless. Together they formed a lethal combination in his mind. He was just thirteen when he went to bed with a very bad cold on Boxing Day. His mother had arranged to go to the West Riding after Christmas. Peter was by this time independent but Colin had to go along. He felt awful but was wrapped up and dosed with tinctures and dragged through the north midlands on a coach.
The sisters in the West Riding had an endless supply of examples of other peoples’ children who had passed exams or gone to college or done some other thing which proved how much better they were than Colin. He had learned to let the bullshit pass over his head. But this time the devil conspired. The particular example this time had been passed to mother by letter so that the pump would be well primed. There was a dual edged knife in this message. Not only had the thirteen-yea-old daughter done something close to an act of God, but her father had made himself a fortune manufacturing domestic appliances. Mother was insanely jealous.
Mother had married father mainly because she thought she had caught a milch cow. When he turned out to be little more that an independent artisan she felt cheated and aggrieved. She and the sisters often criticised. The latest example managed with little more than one sentence to attack both Colin’s self esteem and his esteem for his father. Normally he would probably have coped with this unfair attack. But now he was very ill and weakened by his cold. He was miserable and in need of some loving care and attention. Instead he had to sit through an eight-hour cold and boring journey listening to his life being demolished by a carping old biddy who used to be a loving mother. Mother was returning to the source of her own misery.
When they reached their destination the attacks continued with feigned goodwill and incisive comments. Colin was very happy to be sent off to bed with a hot water bottle. He had never met, and would never meet, the paragon of virtue with whom he had been unfavourably compared and whose father had managed to destroy his father without ever meeting him. Colin was angry and ill, isolated from his family and totally confused.
This unfortunate process was continued by another badly timed event. When he was five years old, just at the end of the war, Colin had gone to his father’s factory one day. He found his father unloading a furnace. The white heat seared out at him across the workshop. It must have been a bad day for father. This was the time when Germany was being overrun and the Holocaust was being revealed. Father told Colin that the Germans had put children inside furnaces like that. He was terrified. He could not imagine how anyone could possibly do such a thing to another thing, let alone a human being. At that moment something died in the child.
He knew little of the holocaust. After the war there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence in Britain to not admit the evidence. Much was suppressed. When Colin was about 13 there was a much publicised court case to try to suppress a book that was to be published on the Holocaust. The agencies of suppression lost, and the book was published. Colin and his friends nicked one of the promotional copies and read it from cover to cover. The government’s attempts to suppress it had distorted their imaginations to think this was something naughty. They were sickened by what they read but also excited by the pictures of women being paraded naked before a group of leering soldiers.
What they learned was kept secret from fear and shame, lack of understanding, repression and the fact they had stolen the book. They had no chance to understand their complex emotions. The combination of lust and pleasure, pain and sex was simply not in the agenda of anybody they had ever met. They had no way of reconciling the horror with the excitement. The trauma that Colin experienced lasted many years.
One night, four boys and four girls had a party the main attraction of which was an extended session of Postman’s Knock. Colin had a good snog with the best looking girl in the neighbourhood and asked her why she was cold towards him. She replied that she never knew how to take him. One moment he would smile at her and the next would scowl. This was a revelation and a bit of a mystery to Colin. He was already beginning to lose touch with his emotions. He could not deal with the fear, confusion and embarrassment.
He had several dates but with little success. He could never make conversation. In a group he could manage fine. One on one and his whole person closed down. Total embarrassment. In retrospect it is probably that he was no worse than most young teenage boys but Colin was very sensitive and a harsh master of himself.
One night after a party in a friend’s house he and another girl were left to lock up the house. She was a year older than he and much more experienced. He had always been a little wary of her. They talked and kissed and cuddled and then lay on the settee. Eventually he ran his hand up her leg and met no resistance. Encouraged he continued and pushed his finger under the hem of her knickers and found for the first time in his life how a woman was shaped. The experiences were all new and a little bewildering. The slippiness, the warmth, the smell of woman. She gave a little gasp as his finger found her. She sighed very quietly in his ear and her embrace increased in intensity. He tried to slip her knickers down her legs but they would not move.
She had on a pantie girdle. He asked her how he could get it off and she said he would have to remove her skirt first. They were both strangers in this house and had no way of knowing whether their privacy would be respected. Indeed, most previous experience had shown it was unlikely to be. He had no intention of being caught with this girl stripped naked. He was not ready for the responsibilities that his ambient morality might then have thrust upon him. He didn’t particularly like the girl anyway.
He lay with her kissing and cuddling and considering what to do. He had been given his first nodder that day by his brother who had come home on leave for Christmas. It would be a shame not to use it. The girl was passive but quite willing. Eventually discretion, awkwardness, and fear got the better part of his sexual urge and he kissed her goodbye and left. She was not pleased. Many years later he met her again and was rather thankful he had made the choice he had. But at the time he thought he was the only guy on earth who couldn’t get his end away. That nodder never did get used.
Some of the others thought he had plonked her. He neither supported the claim nor denied it. He learned to avoid the issue.