After a couple of months being molested every weekend I reacted by becoming a bed wetter. I had absolutely no history of night time accidents since potty training days and I was devastated.

The first time it happened Mum took the approach that it was just an accident but when it happened the following night and the night after that it was obvious that we had a problem.

Mum was hoping for a medical cause, so an appointment was made at the surgery in Petworth and I was given a day off school. I wasn’t at all happy about that, I loved school (my primary school that is) and hated being away for any reason.

It was an early appointment so Mum came with me on the school coach and we got off at Lane End to wait for the Southdown bus to Petworth. After what felt like hours in the surgery waiting room, probably about 30 minutes, we got called in to the doctor.

By the age of 10, having a pretty poor health record, I’d got used to certain things happening whenever I went to the doctor or he came to see me at home.

The first thing was that I always ended up with no clothes on, not too big a deal at 10 and certainly no worse than having a female teacher supervise us in the changing room after our weekly swimming lesson.

The second thing was that regardless of what part of me was misbehaving I always seemed to end up with the doctor’s finger up my bottom. This had been happening for as long as I could remember and I had a dark suspicion that it would happen even if I complained of a headache.

Apparently satisfied that there was nothing wrong there, nobody bothered to explain why this might reveal something, the doctor got me on my back and started looking at the area that I would have thought the obvious culprit.

After poking around for a while he tried to pull my foreskin back and it refused to go. He looked up at Mum, frowned and said

“Hmm, that’s not right”

Then without another word he just yanked the damned thing all the way back and told me to be quiet when I screamed at the top of my voice.

After finishing his examination he talked to Mum, referring to me in the third person as if I wasn’t even in the room. He told her that there was a strong possibility that I’d need a circumcision.

OK enough! Nobody used words like that around me without some sort of explanation, I demanded to know what this “circumcision” was. Holding the offending bit the doctor explained that they’d put me to sleep and snip the problem off.

I went berserk.

Indignant defiance isn’t easy when you’re 10 and naked but I managed it pretty well. Putting me to sleep and taking away my tonsils and adenoids had been one thing but putting me to sleep and cutting bits off my willie was not happening.

I jumped off the couch and stood there quivering with rage while both adults tried to explain that lots of boys had this done, in some countries all of them had it done when they were babies.

No sale! Taking a deep breath I put every little bit of my voice into one of the most dangerous word I knew where Mum was concerned.

“NO!”

That got me a quick, hard slap on the bottom but made no difference to my determination. We were getting perilously close to a full scale tantrum, something I could still quite easily do at 10.

Amazingly the doctor retreated, my first ever victory over authority, and suggested there might be another way. What he’d just done to me I’d have to do to myself, rather more carefully and gently, every night when I had my bath to stretch my foreskin.

While sceptical, I preferred this idea to butchery and agreed to try it. He did warn me that it wasn’t a guaranteed solution and that I’d probably still need something done when I started growing up, but for me that was ages away and of no consequence.

After that I was allowed to dress and the doctor said that he’d found no physical cause for the bed wetting, it was probably just a phase that I’d grow out of.

He did recommend that I have nothing to drink after 6pm so no more bedtime drinks for me.

At no point did anybody suggest that there might be an emotional cause behind the unprecedented problem.

The first few times I did the stretching thing Mum supervised and I’m not sure which of us was more uncomfortable, the first couple of times hurt like hell and I did a lot of crying. Eventually she was satisfied that I was doing it properly and stopped coming in to the bathroom to watch.

The drinks ban didn’t solve the problem, it just reduced the volume so an intervention system was devised that meant me being woken just before Mum went to bed and being supervised until I’d had a pee. It was a desperate measure for a desperate situation but at least the immediate difficulty was taken care of, I was waking in a dry bed.

I did grow out of the problem but I was almost 12 by that time and had never been able to stay over at schoolmates homes which almost certainly affected my social development.

Eventually I had a circumcision, by my choice and as an adult.

Love