‘And all for £1.25 from the market,’ he said. He was playing along wonderfully well.
‘For you, the dream. For little children, the nightmare — the pricked fingers, the education forfeited, the eyesight that fails …’
As I fiddled and talked, sexual excitement became as real as cloth and as elusive as tiny buttons. There is no task to which my fingers are less suited than the undoing of tiny buttons. Since I was sitting in Geoff’s lap, he had the position of control, and my explorings were only under licence. I couldn’t have undertaken this rare dalliance against his wishes.
I wonder where I learned all that about buttons. I can’t have been making it all up, can I?
He had started rocking me on his hips — it’s an action deeply engraved in the nature of hips, and not hugely compromising. Being rocked might make me into a baby, I suppose. He might not even have been aware of the movement he was making.
Mole stable
The ridiculous glory of the scene was summed up by one silly fact, that the buttons were essentially ornamental. They didn’t go all the way down but ended in a placket. So however many buttons I undid, this shirt would never lie open before me. I could hope to unveil him as far as the breastbone, but actually taking the shirt off would involve lifting it over his head, something that was far beyond my powers. For all my studious fiddling, this manly boy or boyish man would have to undress himself without my help, or stay inside his clothes.
The vocabulary of sexual attraction is on the narrow side, and was even narrower then. At CHAPs meetings no one admitted to anything as flighty as ‘fancying’ anyone else. Everything seemed fraught and problematic, the acts, the feelings and the words. Sex seemed to be some sort of duty, either sacred or grim. George and I had evolved a code word for those we found attractive: mole stable. Not much of a code word, I grant you, since it was really only the word ‘molestable’, rather arch in itself, split into two parts and jocularly pronounced, in the same silly spirit that makes people say picture skew for picturesque. Geoff in the cheesecloth shirt was definitely mole stable.
His sexual availability was more or less a fiction, thanks to the limited coöperation offered by his cheesecloth shirt. But it wasn’t a fixed quantity. We had arrived at a finely balanced moment in psychological terms, and a balance can always be upset. His shirt was now sufficiently open for one nipple to be on show. It was less than a foot away from me.
Gently I blew onto it from my little distance. I sent out a column of air to do my caressing for me. The air was warmed from being taken inside me, though it must have felt cool on Geoff’s chest. The centre of his nipple raised itself above the surface. It puckered into life under the influence of exhaled desire.
Geoff’s eyebrows went sharply up, and then slowly settled back down. The pucker in his nipple, too, slowly subsided. He had kept his balance, and it was time to raise the stakes.
I launched myself forward, in what was the equivalent in my range of motion of a trapeze artist swinging into the void, and made a grab for his glasses. For an instant Geoff could do either of two things, either defend his glasses and risk me falling, or reach to hold me safe. He had to choose, and he chose to hold me.
His legs were suddenly rigid with tension, now that I had made a decisive move. His eyes, naked without glasses, registered the depths of his dismay, the wavering of male privilege. He was no longer in charge of what was happening.
But was I? I was holding his glasses, that was all. He had only to take them back. But the balance had tipped just the same, and he badly needed to take back the initiative with a new action of his own. And so he did the only thing he could, by lifting me up and carrying me to the bed, as if that was what he had been planning all along. He lost face if he let me seduce him, but there was no embarrassment about being the seducer. And how could I resist him? He was lovely.
But was he free at the moment he made his choice? Here was dual determination all over again, but with a slight difference. I was determined enough for both of us.
It would have been nice to talk such things over with my peers at a CHAPs meeting, but it was never on the cards. Sex with straight men was an issue with more than its fair share of disquiet attached. On the one hand we maintained that there was no such thing as a straight man, and it was part of the revolutionary agenda to overthrow the ramparts of the patriarchy with cannonades of pleasure. On the other hand, anyone with an actual preference for heterosexual partners had internalised a lot of self-hatred and was thoroughly suspect. In any case nobody ever asked me at meetings if I had ever had anything in the way of a sex life, and it was simpler not to speak up. In fact, the single institution which has come closest to making me shut up was Cambridge’s independent forum where issues of sexual and political liberation could be freely discussed and worked through.
Cheshire Far from Home
In the Easter vacation of 1973, with very mixed feelings, I went to the Cheshire Home in Gerrards Cross for a respite visit. The name was mildly appealing, since ‘Cheshire’ had been one of the candidates for my middle name, because of exactly the Leonard Cheshire, veteran of the Battle of Britain, who had founded the Homes. The first Cheshire Home was actually Leonard Cheshire’s home — he lived there. He wasn’t disabled himself but was concerned for friends who were, and wanted them to have all possible control over their lives. I had a little fantasy about becoming something of a pet in the Home he had set up.
Gerrards Cross was only a few miles from Bourne End. It was strange to drive so nearly home, and then to stay away. My only previous experience of respite had been the gloriously ramshackle all-male nursing home (‘næ wummen’) in Bognor, where I had gone after my knee operation. Clearly that establishment was an oddity, and more likely to be closed down double-quick than taken as a model anywhere else.
Leonard Cheshire had been a Group-Captain. He would expect a certain amount of order and decorum. He wouldn’t want half-empty cups of tea or coffee left uncollected, let alone half-full pee-bottles. I couldn’t hope for ribald raillery. But a breeze seemed to be blowing through so many stuffy institutions, even Cambridge University, and I didn’t anticipate the Cheshire Homes would have double-glazed every window against every faintest zephyr of permissiveness.
When I arrived, there was a sort of interview. It wasn’t called that, it was called an Informal Welcome, but I decided it was really an interview, and a proper interview at that. The ‘inter’ part of the word meaning mutuality. Back and forth. Exchange of views. I would expect to ask questions as well as to answer them.
Mr Giles the Director told me what a privilege it was to be responsible for my well-being, which is just the sort of thing that puts my back up. I don’t believe it, and don’t see how they could expect me to. I don’t regard it as a privilege to look after me, so why should he?