Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ they needed it.’ ‘I’d stop him,’ said Joy. ‘I can’t bear violence. It’s so ugly.’ ‘Alice was the main one,’ said Jack. ‘She used to wind me up. I wouldn’t belt her just slap her around the face.’

      Several times in this conversation Jack remarked with some awe how he was remembering things he had never thought of before, ‘not just general things, but specific things. I can remember just what happened and what I felt.’ He went on, ‘You know, when I remember being with someone then, I remember it as being pleasant. It was warm. You were accepted, even though it was only for a night. The masters, well, they lived two lives. If one of them said to you “Come to my room at seven o’clock tonight” you knew what it was for. You weren’t going to get belted. They were really nice to you then. They gave you sweets and cakes, things you hardly ever got. Then next morning if you stepped out of line they’d belt you. If a master chose you, well, it was like being taken out of the pond. We were just like fish in a pond. If one master chose you, then the other masters didn’t. They each had their own group of boys. Your master might keep you for a long time, or he might get sick of you and then you’d get thrown back in the pond.’

      Jack stressed that the good part was that ‘you were always paired off with someone. There wasn’t much group sex. Sometimes the boys in the dormitory would have, for want of a better word, a wanking party to see who could come first, and there was one master, a slimy creep, who used to get several boys in his room and make them do it while he watched, but most times, even with the boys in the dorm, even if it was only once, it was just the two of you. It made you feel special.’

      Jack was very special for over a year. One master, known as the Major, singled him out. In his room Jack learned more than sex. The Major played records and introduced Jack to classical music. Music became Jack’s great love. The Major would also take Jack on excursions out of the school. ‘He would take me to Salvation Army meetings. Sometimes they would have concerts, really good music. And they always made a big fuss of me. They’d stuff me full of cakes and buns and give me a big bag of food to take back for my friends. I was really happy there. It was great, getting out and meeting people.’

      Then, suddenly, the Major left. ‘The staff were moved around the different homes a lot,’ he said, ‘but we usually had a few weeks’ warning. With the Major, he just left in twenty-four hours. I was thrown back in the pond and I was just another boy there for, well, over a year.’

      I asked Jack whether the other boys were envious when one boy was singled out by a master. ‘No, they just took it for granted. Everyone did it. If you woke in the morning and saw a boy’s bed empty you knew he was with so-and-so. And the boys who went with masters, they brought back sweets and things, for the other boys. If they didn’t hand them out they had them taken off them.’ Jack had felt envious of anyone who had something that he did not have.

      Despite their continual financial difficulties, Jack and Joy had always found the money to give their children the things they needed to pursue their interests. If one was interested in music, then musical instruments were bought. If another was interested in tennis, then tennis rackets and tennis lessons were bought. Jack was proud of his children’s achievements and of his hard-won ability to give them what they needed, but underneath that there must have lurked a small boy’s envy of the other kids’ possessions.

      The conversation turned to television, and Joy remarked that Jack could not stand any programme that revealed emotions. When I enquired, ‘What emotions?’ it became clear that Jack could not tolerate watching the expression of realistically tender feelings. He enjoyed the violence of westerns and war films (‘Well, it’s only on the screen, isn’t it?’) but the expression of real, tender, personal feelings, with all the concomitant yearning and pain, was something he could not bear to witness.

      Joy had suggested that Jack might like to come to see me on his own, and I was surprised when he agreed to do this. He spoke again of his sexual experiences at the orphanage. He described how he had been there only a few hours when 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 СКАЧАТЬ