Ordinary lovely boys
Woodlarks camp was only about half an hour’s drive away. In a funny way I was nostalgic for the old Bedford van. Not that the school’s Leyland bus was new. It must have been built in the 1940s. But I had come to prefer travelling separately from my wheelchair. There was always the possibility of sitting on someone’s lap. In the wheelchair I felt my erection was terribly noticeable, unless I adopted the hand position which had got me into trouble in the past.
Luke, of course, since he had been there before, knew the ropes at the camp. I was beginning to realise that he was the sort of person who was born knowing the ropes. The camp was run by ordinary lovely boys in their late teens, wearing jeans and the chunky suède lace-ups called desert boots. I suppose one or two of them may have been in their early twenties. It was all I could do to take my eyes off their ordinary jeans.
Luke and I were the oldest disabled boys in the party, allowed to stay up after the tinies had been stowed away in their tents. Luke and I had a tent to ourselves, which was an immensely exciting prospect.
Luke called our helpers ‘lads’, and talked to them relentlessly about girls. Almost his first remark was, ‘Who have you got lined up for us tonight, then? I like blondes, but my friend John here prefers brunettes.’ He got them talking about their girl-friends and occasional conquests, doing a very smooth job I must say. Buttering them up a treat. I tried to join in, even though all this girl talk was getting me down. I was baffled that Luke showed so much enthusiasm. Fucking fucking fucking. Every sentence seemed to need at least one fucking.
There was a proper camp fire. We had baked beans washed down with mugs of tea. We had marshmallows, impaled on twigs and toasted by the fire. They were almost too hot to eat, fiery puddles of sugar that would fall off the twig if you weren’t careful. We learned to blow on them to cool them down — even when they were already in our mouths. We would pull our lips back and try to balance them on the tips of our teeth. Somehow the taste buds seemed to send their most intense messages of sweetness when they were fighting for their own survival.
The lads had brought a radio with them, and I remember the ordinary god-like boy who undressed me for the night singing along with the Ivy League. The words should have been ‘I can’t sleep at night, tossing and turning’,’ but he changed the last phrase into ‘too much wanking’ instead, and gave me a wink.
The helpers were planning a sneaky pub visit and said Luke was welcome to join them if he liked. They thought he looked old enough not to be challenged (which I didn’t). It was an agonising moment. If he’d said yes it would have entirely scuppered my evening and possibly my whole life, but at the last moment he said, ‘You know what, lads? I’ll stay with John. You go on ahead. Save a girl for me!’
Before they left they put us to bed while the fire died down. Our sleeping bags were laid out side by side, with a ground-sheet underneath. I liked the lads, but I didn’t enjoy being helped into bed by them, though at least my pyjamas didn’t let me down. Mum’s needlework skills meant they were tailored to fit, not clumsily altered. The lads eased us down onto the ground and into our sleeping bags. I said I was still a bit hot from the fire, so I didn’t need to be zipped in just yet. I thought this was a brilliant piece of strategy. I wanted the shreds of my virginity to fall away quite silently, without effort. The wheelchairs certainly cluttered up the tent, and it was a relief when the helpers took them away.
That ecstatic clench
Luke said, ‘I thought those lads would never go,’ but I didn’t dare to put into words what I felt or what I wanted. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted to interlock legs. The convention of the evening seemed to be that we talked about girls, though, and I stuck with it doggedly. I was wittering on about a girl I knew in Bourne End when Luke cut in with, ‘Why are you talking about this Trish girl?’ He was already sliding smoothly towards me.
‘Well … she lives in Bourne End and she seems to like me. I was thinking I should start seeing her.’
‘Good idea. Now I’m going to suck your cock.’ All I could say was, ‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ It was no part of my sexual imaginings. He lifted the undefended flap of my sleeping bag away from my body.
‘You’ll like it. In fact you’ll love it. Everyone likes the way I do it.’
Everyone? Who was everyone? ‘Who, for instance?’
If Julian was right and everything connected with Vulcan was picked up by hidden microphones, then on the tape this would have sounded like spirited resistance, but in fact Luke had already taken my cock out of my pyjamas and was holding it by the base, giving it little shakes. Checking it for the wobble of half-heartedness, I expect, and finding none.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised. Chris Hudson, for one. He can’t get enough.’
How would I ever be able to face Chris Hudson? Not that I knew him at all well. He was a nice boy from Birmingham whose parents ran a shop. He stole, or rather things tended to disappear while he was around. I always kept an eye on the Ben Nevin box when Chris was in the vicinity.
It’s hard for someone in my position to defend himself from pilfering, whether it’s a Chinese box from Hong Kong that’s likely to go missing, or his own genitals, being swallowed by someone he’s been chasing for months.
Luke started doing what he wanted, which he was so confident would bring me pleasure, but I could hardly assimilate the sensations. I was so used to pressing myself against the sheet. All that slipperiness, that feeling of a membrane, was very alien. His lips closed round my penis in a hermetic seal. Air was as likely to get into that ecstatic clench as it was to penetrate the rubber gasket of Mum’s pressure cooker. I couldn’t understand how he was able to breathe, and I was worried that my excitement might explode in his mouth, and choke him or poison him.
Then Luke had the brain-wave of using his hand to help things along. I muttered, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as I came, thinking I was spoiling everything, but he amazed me by swallowing greedily. He lay there licking his lips, and even humming a tune. It was ‘Tossing and turning’ again.
‘I’ll be back for more of that, John,’ he said. ‘You kept me waiting long enough.’ Whatever Luke lacked, it wasn’t confidence.
Before long, the helpers came back from their pub expedition, if they’d really gone. Perhaps they were being tactful to leave us alone together. I’d opened Pandora’s Box at the ripe old age of fifteen, and I still hadn’t seen any penis but my own. It was stiff again and poking out of my pyjamas, and I thought it was a monster, an in-between creature like a basilisk, something unholy and unnatural. It wanted more. But I still wanted a cuddle, and didn’t understand how it was safe to do what we had done, but not safe to hold me as I wanted to be held.
For years after that night the smell of marshmallows toasting would give me an erection. Caramelisation of any description was likely to set me off. I had to steel myself against arousal when pudding time came round at the Compleat Angler. I’m not sure I’m safe even now.
It didn’t take me long, that night, to make sense of the novel idea and experience of being fellated. I decided that for a number of reasons it was a good thing. No evidence was left behind, so no one would know what had gone on. If the practice caught on at school, we could keep the staff in ignorance indefinitely of what went on in the sucking academy when they weren’t around. There was also a more mystical aspect. Part of me was now in Luke. Everywhere he went he would take a little bit of John with him. I had no illusions that his interest in me was deep or exclusive, but that too was a good thing. Every time he enjoyed himself so expertly with another male, we would both be bonded to another being down the chain …