LITMIR.BIZ

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not to be there. I turned invisible. I beat it. Without showing I was beating it. Oh, there are Poth’s parents – father from Swanage, mother pining for Braintree in far-distant Essex which I had never seen but knew to be all golden wheat and white clapboard mills. But Poth wasn’t with them. And they too were determined not to catch my eye. I turned again as though I had forgotten something I had to do and went on pretending till I felt all eyes – what eyes? – were off me.

      I was skulking alongside, almost inside, a yew bush. I took comfort from yews, from their gloom, their peeling red bark, their alluringly treacherous berries, their dust, and from their shed needles’ incapacity to absorb water so that drops rested like mercury on their surface beside twisted trunks and writhing roots.

      Michael Lea whose middle name was Simcott – the son of the vicar of Miserden in the Cotswolds, a scrumcap-wearer, a future Rugbeian and orchestral player, a chorister due to sing treble that night – sidled up to me, smugly excited, his breath, as ever, scented with Meloids. His catchphrase was ‘mitts off’. I suspected that he would claim ownership of the yew as he did of stray pens, rubber bands, Wrigley pellets.

      But: ‘D’you know what? D’you know what! Mr Blythe has been sacked. He kissed Venus One. Sacked!’

      At Salisbury Cathedral School the convention of major, minor, minimus did not apply.

      Jonathan Venus was Venus One, his younger brother David was Venus Two. Terry Lovell remained Lovell Two although his brother had left. The accretion of unrelated Youngs was such that there existed a small ginger creature called Young Five.

      Mr Blythe had kissed Venus One? I was mystified. For many reasons. The long e and terminal sibilant meant that Jonathan Venus and Jonathan Meades were near homophones to the latter, whose hearing had been permanently damaged at the age of five. Thus when the name of either Venus brother was called I would sometimes respond. On the occasions – very rare – that convention was suppressed and our shared Christian name was used I would always respond. I confused myself with Jonathan Venus. Had Mr Blythe suffered a similar confusion? Was I not the boy he wanted to kiss?

      Kissing was of course sissy.

      In the Cathedral School’s swimming pool changing hut, a riot of asbestos, degraded concrete and REEMA panels, just-prepubescent boys boxed with their penises in a spirit of friendly companionability and competitive violence: he who drew blood won. They aptly dignify this as cockfighting, insouciantly associating covert pugilism with the hedgerow gamblers’ sport conducted between roofless brick cowsheds where flames from pyres of palettes relieve the ruined farmyard’s midden chill and lend ceremony to the bucolic rite.

      On Harnham Hill where the chalky paths down the steep slope were diagonal and polished there were hidden places among the blackthorns and barrows which became familiar in late childhood summers. Exploratory sex – I never actually articulated that word to myself – with two girls, my mother’s former pupils, was no more or less than a form of play, innocent and delighted discovery and, not that we considered it, an ancient rite in an ancient Jutish place. Deep beneath the grass which we recreated ourselves on were buried the skeletons and flint tools of our distant forebears who had been at it too, in their time. That’s why we were here. We nuzzled, we felt each other’s genitals, we laughed and giggled and never kissed – that was for adolescence and going out with and love, which was also sissy. The hillside was littered with knotted frenchies, rubber-wrapped seed. They were as common as crisp packets. We knew what they were for. They used to tease me: ‘About time you was able to fill one of them up.’

      Prepubescent sex with both boys and girls provoked no guilt though we knew that it should. It was ‘mucky behaviour’. It was wicked. But it didn’t involve anyone who wasn’t our age. What occurs between coevals is not necessarily willing – but with us it was, it was all enthusiastically consensual, we taught each other as children always have. It was fun, it was living well at a tender age. It was illicit, another intimation that pleasure derived from pain – smoking hurt and was dizzying, stolen sweet liqueurs burnt my mouth. It would obviously have been different had an adult been involved, even if that adult had not been coercive. That adult might have been enjoined by us or, yet better, persuaded by me alone. If only …

      Maybe, after all, I just wasn’t pretty enough. How I longed to be loved by a handsome master with the looks of a fighter ace.

      When boys lie sated they do not consider kissing each other. Like the Spanish girls (or town prozzies) with nits in their mile-high beehives they never kiss. When Dave told me he had felt his one-year-old sister’s nappy’d vagina whilst she was in the pram at the plum orchard end of the garden I was less shocked than I would have been had he told me that he kissed her. (What actually interested me was Dave’s mother’s negligence in parking her in a place that teemed with wasps gorging on fallen fruit. In my moral hierarchy exposing a baby to the possibility of a wasp sting was a graver offence than casual fraternal violation.)

      What was Mr Blythe thinking of? Kissing!

      It evidently didn’t occur to me that Michael Lea had merely repeated the euphemism used by whoever had told him the reason for the sacking. It didn’t occur to me that the informant might have been an adult to whom cockfighting was but an ancient memory or even a matter of ignorance and that bugger was a word never to be spoken save as an oath and, even then, not in front of the renchild.

      That night they sung without Mr Blythe. The programme was, evidently, amended. I didn’t notice. I didn’t know or care how Mr Blythe’s special bits of lieder were taken care of. I was bereft and puzzled. Why had I not been favoured with his attentions? He liked me. Douglas Blythe was young and charming. His smile was shy and inviting, too inviting maybe. He smelled of lavender cologne. His hair was rakishly long for the era, if rather crinkly; it was stepped and staggered. He wore a British Warm, canary-yellow pullovers and tan suede shoes: someone said ‘he smooths around at suede miles per hour’. He had some pet guinea pigs in the garden of his digs in Salisbury Cathedral Close. His handwriting, which I sought to emulate, was exquisite, derived from italic, as crisply orthogonal as the terraces of his hair.

      His expulsion was swift. He vanished, he was not spoken of. What had become of him and his guinea pigs? Any question about his fate was met with a frosty churchy silence that warned not to ask again. I feared for him. My father had spoken in a regretful, uncharacteristically couched way of a Chafyn Grove schoolmaster named Mills who had been a squash partner of his when I was a baby. Mills had committed suicide. He was queer. Very good sort, had a really killing drop shot, just on the cusp of the tin, but queer. And queers committed suicide. Out of shame, guilt, dishonour, self-disgust. That was the received wisdom of the era. Not that it was much discussed. Cruel criminalisation and persecution were unconsidered, never spoken of. For a few days I longed to be assured that Douglas Blythe had not followed the same route as Mills and as Nancy’s bachelor brother Jack Misselbrook who worked at the Admiralty in Bath and slit his wrist. Was Dr Burt-White queer?

      Then of course, I forgot Douglas Blythe.

      Six months after his banishment from Salisbury I was honoured to be deputed to sort the school’s morning post in a mediaeval vestibule coarsely partitioned with painted plywood. I repaid the faith shown in me, arranging the letters with taxonomical diligence in trays according to boarding pupils’ houses, masters’ common room, bursar’s office, domestic staff etc. Among them were several to the headmaster E. Laurence Griffiths. One caused me to gasp: a small, square, cream envelope addressed to him in what was, unmistakably, Mr Blythe’s writing. It was postmarked Wolverhampton. The junior detective within me, a Blytonian nosy parker, scrutinised the envelope. When I was sure no one was approaching from either the direction of the changing rooms or that of the undercroft I held it to the window. But the paper was frustratingly thick and disagreeably rough: handmade paper was hopelessly old hat. What did the letter say? I toyed with stealing it, pretended to toy with stealing it, knew I was deluding myself. Unlike Stammler, a persistent and boastful shoplifter, I didn’t have the nerve. Its very existence bemused me. It suggested a lack of finality in the affairs of the world: a sacking was not, evidently, a complete rupture. Why was Mr Blythe in Wolverhampton of all places? He spoke with an amused drawl (which I coveted and failed to imitate). What connection could he

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