Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

a boy came to him and said he was wanted. He was taken down to the basement where the boiler was, and there he found a group of the older boys.

      ‘They grabbed me, spread me on the table, and each of them raped me. If I struggled they hit me. They were big boys, fully developed, big enough for it [anal rape] to be very painful.’

      A day or so later he was taken again, this time by just two boys. ‘It wasn’t as bad as the first time. I got used to it.’ With most of the masters ‘it was just down with the trousers and, bang, in. All you got out of it was a sore bottom.’

      He told me how one master would beat boys on the bottom with a cane until their flesh was red and sore. Then he would smooth cream over the boy’s buttocks very gently. Then, ‘bang, in. It was pain, pleasure, pain. Funny thing, I really like smoothing cream on. I like smoothing cream over Joy’s back.’ He added, ‘I was a skinny little kid, and I always was the passive partner, but after, when I got older, I did it to the younger kids. I wonder now what happened to them.’

      Jack spoke fondly of the Major. He said, ‘The Major had a great influence on me. With him, well, sometimes we just sat in front of the fire and made toast - you know, bread on toasting forks - and listened to music. Other times, well, he wasn’t in a hurry. There’d be mutual masturbation, and after, well. I know I was the passive partner, but I’d got something out of it.’ He described how the Major would dress up in a woman’s suspender belt and stockings and would dress Jack as a schoolgirl. He said, ‘I got something out of it being loved and wanted, if only for one thing.’

      Jack spoke of ‘men’s sex and women’s sex’. Men’s sex, as he wanted it, was chiefly arousal and excitement, not orgasm. ‘I don’t put much importance on that,’ he said. If, when they were making love, Joy had an orgasm first, Jack would lose interest immediately. Making love to Joy was very important to him, but so was masturbation. He also valued his collection of pornography. Reading pornography was, he said, very stimulating. He found it immensely pleasurable to spend an afternoon in his bedroom, where he would dress up, as the Major had done, in suspender belt and stockings and read what he called ‘my books’, his collection of pornography.

      Joy accepted these activities, although she refused to watch his blue films and hated to look at his pornography. This was part of his life which was separate from her, and, as she explained to me later, when she first discovered what Jack did she did not know any other men and supposed that all men were like that. She now knew that they were not. Mark’s abhorrence of Jack’s collection of books made that quite clear, but she thought that she should accept this quirk of Jack’s character because she loved him. ‘I’m very good at loving,’ she said.

      Jack defended his activities to me. ‘Why should I stop doing it? I’m not hurting anyone.’

      When, as children, we suffer some severe trauma and discover that the world is not at all as we believed it to be, we struggle to master our experience - that is, to create a meaning for it which can fit without much difficulty into our meaning structure. However, our experience of life is so limited that we do not have many alternative meanings from which to choose our interpretation. We experiment with elements of the traumatic experience itself, perhaps believing that there is some hidden meaning which we can discover if we keep repeating in some form the experience itself. Jack was a child and therefore could respond only with the eroticism of a child. As the psychoanalyst Ferenczi said, ‘The erotic life of the child remains at the level of foreplay, or knows satisfaction only in the sense of “satiety” but not the feeling of annihilation that accompanies orgasm.’⁴⁵ Jack’s experience of the erotic remained that of a child. Moreover, as a child he had dealt with his fear of the Major by identifying with him. Anna Freud called this process ‘identification with aggressor’, but the old saying ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ would do just as well.

      Joy spent a week helping Alice when one of her children was ill. It had been a painful, difficult time for both women. They knew that they should talk, but neither wanted to distress the other. Risking Alice’s pain and anger, Joy told her about the discussions she and Jack had had with me and how she now understood him much better. She said to me, ‘Isn’t it strange, you can live with a man for thirty-five years and not know him.’

      Joy talked to Alice about Alice’s childhood when, as the eldest, Alice had to endure the birth of five siblings. One of these babies had lived only four days, and Jack had ordered Joy, ‘You’re not to cry.’ Forbidden to talk about her grief, for talking brought on tears, Joy withdrew into a depression. She struggled on with performing her duties as wife and mother but, as she told me, ‘I can’t remember Alice then. She was the schoolgirl in the family. It’s no wonder she was argumentative and demanding.’

      Alice, as she told her mother later, did not want her to talk about those times. ‘I thought you were going to criticize me and tell me what a great trouble I was to you.’ Joy was not placing the blame on Alice. She was reviewing what she herself had done and was feeling the pain that loving parents feel when they realize that what they have done to their children, often with the best of intentions, has hurt and harmed them.

      Alice told Joy of her encounters with Jack when she was just blossoming into womanhood. ‘He said that he wanted to undress me. This made me feel that I was supposed to respond, like the ball was in my court. I had to put up a barrier, but at the same time I felt that because I had refused him he rejected me. I still feel he’s rejecting me.’ Joy hastened to reassure her that Jack had not rejected her and that he loved her very much. Alice said, ‘I wish he’d write and tell me that.’

      Jack felt very discomfited at the prospect of writing another letter, but his face lit up with happiness as he told me how, when he had phoned Joy recently, Alice had answered the phone, and instead of immediately calling Joy had asked him how he was. He was delighted too that, as Jenny was leaving after Christmas, she had invited them to visit her.

      His face was again alight with pleasure as Joy told me about her visit to Mark and his family, and about Mark’s little daughter. Jack longed to see his granddaughter, but, as he told me with great sadness, ‘Mark won’t talk to me.’ A few weeks later Jack told me that he had written a second letter, this time to Alice. Mark, too, had phoned and taken the time to talk to him.

      Jack’s story shows how the sexual abuse of children can be handed down from generation to generation, like the family jewels. It seems likely, from Jack’s memory of the trip to the woods and the ice cream, and the fact that he retrieved this memory and wondered about its significance, that he had had some sexual encounter when he was small. However, the events of his early life (he said he remembered almost nothing of his first eight years) and many of the events of his childhood he hid in the deepest recesses of his memory. When he said that he did not expect his children to remember what he had done to them, he was speaking truthfully, for he did not remember what had been done to him.

      This forgetting was not just because he was the kind of person for whom repression is the most favoured form of defence. In those situations where he had been the victim of sexual and physical abuse he was completely helpless. There was no one to whom he could turn for help, and he was a small child in a world of powerful and dangerous adults. He did not want to remember what had been done to him, because with those memories would come that feeling of terrible helplessness and abandonment.

      Jack’s story shows, too, how a child, needing a personal relationship in the way he needs food, will, in the way that a starving man will eat anything, accept affection in whatever form it is offered. Children should never be put in a position where they have to accept love at any price but, alas, many of them are.

Denying Who You Are

      The price that Jack had to pay did not seem to him at the time too high. He was in the business of surviving, so learning to laugh at cruelty instead of being shocked by it did not seem significant; nor did learning to ignore his grief at the loss of the tenderness and love which should have been his by rights. He did