The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian Aldiss

idiot saw me with Margaret and reported it to my mother. She was very sweet and gentle with me, while making it clear to me that in ‘our position’ I must not be seen out with a girl who worked in Woolworth’s. She did not really like my going into Woolworth’s at all. It was a cheap place. And besides – well, I was a bit young for girl friends, wasn’t I? Why didn’t I try and be better company for Ann?

      Okay, if she wanted it that way. I let my sister toss me off again, although by now I felt this was slightly childish. One morning I made her do it three times straight off, which greatly impressed her. With Nelson I was more contained. He was very withdrawn now, studying for an endless succession of exams that lay between him and his chance of being an architect. He was courting a very dull girl called Caroline Cathcart, whom I thought as stupid as her name. Happily, she did not last too long. Nelson and I entered into no confidences about her sexual proclivities. Naively, I wondered if Nelson had forgotten about sex; something in the forbidding aspect of Caroline Cathcart encouraged this illusion.

      ‘Are you still bashing your bishop?’ I asked him once, but he told me not to be cheeky. As for the maids, Beatrice was engaged to be married, and Brenda had left. According to Ann’s report, Brenda left without any rows or dramatic disclosures, so we never knew whether Father had been lucky there.

      Dramatic disclosures were something of which we stood in great need. All unknown to us, our thirsty souls needed art and revelation. In this respect, public-school life, with its constant minor crises, was to be preferred to the dull security of home.

      ‘Your father’s trying to listen to the documentary,’ Mother would say reprovingly in the evening, as Ann and I grew noisy over a game of cards. All Father’s art and revelation came through the B.B.C. He did like a good documentary. While he was being educated we were being repressed – by his pained looks and Mother’s indignant ‘Ssssh’s!’. We hated documentaries, and the News, and the Fat Stock Prices – to which Father, when at home, would listen absorbedly.

      Ann’s hate and mine were uninhibited. Nelson, as elder son, veered between taking our side and taking Father’s. He could occasionally be tempted on to our side, and we would all three burst into helpless giggles. Sometimes he would stalk out in pretended anger, and sneak round to the pub for a half-pint of bitter.

      Apart from the B.B.C., there was nothing. Nothing except the cinema. We visited it whenever we could, under Nelson’s charge. There was our art and our revelation; it never entered our heads that it might be bad art and false revelation. Everything that those giant slow-moving grey figures of myth did was amazing. Under their spell we learnt how the big world turned, how the wicked never prospered, and how women had to have flowers and moonlight before they would let you get near them. But from them too we first learnt to listen to the marvellous unafraid noise of jazz and relish the extraordinary faces and sounds of black musicians. We never had enough of the cinema, because we were never allowed too much of it.

      At that period, and for long after, I was desperately grateful to Hollywood for opening up life and art to me. Now I’m less sure. They got the perspectives all wrong. The world depended on them, and they flogged it a lot of sentimental middle-class humbug!

      The one bit of broadcasting we all enjoyed as a family was ‘Music Hall’, which came on every Saturday night. Mother used to bake a big coconut cake, which we settled down to guzzle as the band struck up ‘Back to Those Happy Days’. The comics were my favourites, particularly the filthy ones like Max Miller, though it was agony to sit there bursting with laughter while outwardly looking stupid, as if you didn’t see the jokes. If it became too bad you could always pretend you had choked on a crumb of cake.

      As I grew up, the girl problem grew, if anything, more acute. The pride and delight we experienced at school when we first managed to generate semen proved something of an illusion in the big world. If there was one thing girls dreaded it was semen. Semen was the devil. By natural association of ideas, this dread seemed to spread to pricks. What a girl can innocently enjoy at ten, she stands in horror of at fifteen. Or such was my experience in our snobbery-bound little bourgeois circles in the thirties. The Pill has changed matters nowadays.

      All the girls I was officially permitted to mix with had been scared by nonsense tales. They and the boys were fobbed off with bunkum about not touching anyone you weren’t engaged to. The language of warning was vague, and perhaps the more powerful for that. Also, with the pernicious influence of the cinema, everything was supposed to be done ‘romantically’, which meant talking and courting and taking ages over it and hanging about for full moons and so on.

      Later in my teens I suffered depths of social and moral agony trying to fuck girls. They wanted it, they knew I wanted it, but everything was against us. For a start, they had been taught to say ‘Oh, please don’t do that!’ and ‘Oh, no, Horry, you mustn’t!’ and so on – phrases which brought some fellows on well, but only damped my enthusiasm.

      Then there was trouble about where you went to do it. Boys and girls alike, we had no money in those days, only a feeble bit of pocket-money carefully designed to keep you a kid as long as possible. You couldn’t buy a hotel room or anything – and probably would not have dared to if you had had the money, because the hotel owners would instinctively have been against you, against life, against fun, against pricks, against cunts. England was a filthy little hole to grow up in in the thirties – bitterly impoverished for the poor, bitterly repressive for the middle classes.

      Repression: it is part of civilization, very necessary in society, particularly middle-class society which, my scanty historical knowledge instructs me, only levered its way up into money and respectibility by postponing for the first years of its maturity such pleasures as sex. This is one of the attractions of war – the repressions can be shed.

      Those horrid middle-class repressions operated strongly in the Stubbs family. The younger Stubbs boy felt them badly in his teens, the time when sexuality is highest. At Branwells there were many boys, like me, who masturbated two or three times every day and gave themselves a treat on Sunday. Digby claimed to do himself every Saturday night until his semen dried up – six or seven wanks one after the other.

      And many of the boys were worried to distraction about what they were doing to themselves. They had got the word, often from their fathers, that masturbation would ruin their physiques or send them mad. The warning did not stop them. It often made them do it more, since the subject was more on their minds. Sometimes it forced them into peculiar habits. Beasley wanked himself almost to the point of climax every day and then stopped; only on Saturday night did he allow himself proper satisfaction. Spaldine, who tried to run away from Branwells his first term there, used to press a finger against the base of his penis so as to have orgasm without wasting semen.

      In that respect I was lucky; nobody ever represented the pastime to me as anything but enjoyable. I lay back and enjoyed it. But ever since the happy day when Beatrice caught me naked before the mirror I knew there were better things.

      The better things, as I say, were hard to come by from girls of my own age and class. They had had a dose of middle-class morality even more severe than the boys.

      There was, over everything else, the problem of babies. If, by some miracle of perseverance and guile, you managed to dip your wick, the girl would be screaming all the while that she might have a baby. Working-class girls were much better in that respect. Their drawback was that they always seemed to have in the background big tough boy friends who would jump out with big tough buddies and attempt to bash you.

      The baby problem could be overcome, at least in theory, by using French letters. But French letters had to be bought. It was not just the cash. It was stepping into the little barber’s at the end of Chapel Road and actually asking for a packet for a friend. The only time I dared to go in was one day when I thought I was on a sure thing for the evening, a rather plump girl called, so help her, Esmeralda, who belonged to the tennis club I did. I spent about an hour of indecision, riding past the barber’s shop and round the corner on my bike, at various speeds. Finally I did go in and buy a packet of three Frenchies.

      Esmeralda’s parents were common but rich. Nobody had a good word to say for them behind their backs; everyone toadied to them to their