I was tempted to pass over number 9 in my list and go straight to number 10 but then I remembered why I started this blog.

The purpose of writing about my childhood and teenage years is to face the unpleasant things that happened and not to avoid them. Glossing over this grim episode in my life would be dishonest.

This story is not entertaining, at least I hope it’s not, and it deals with some fairly serious issues. I’ll refer to the teenager who molested and then proceeded to abuse me as K.

This story probably isn’t told very well but that’s mostly because it’s one of the most painful of all my many unpleasant memories from those days.

It’s important to understand a little bit about the 10 year old boy that I was. Apart from the companionship of my best friend I was quite a lonely child and didn’t relate well to my peer group.

Most of the other children in school were wary of me, my high reading age, abnormally large vocabulary and already proven high IQ gave many of them a sense of inferiority. Despite Mum’s best efforts to ‘persuade’ me to be more sociable I simply didn’t have much in common with other 10 year olds.

Added to that I’d had no older male in my life since my daddy ran away when I was 4 and I spent my formative years in a female dominated household. I was easy prey for any older boy or man who was nice to me.

I was also, for want of any other description, quite a ‘dainty’ boy and physically delicate which brought out the paternal side of most of the men in the village but brought out a different side in some of the older boys.

I have no doubt that K targeted me carefully for planned abuse and he conducted the whole matter with what can best be described as professional skill. One thing he did, from day one, was constantly stress the need for secrecy, I wasn’t to tell anyone what had been going on.

Knowing in my heart that these things were wrong and that I’d be severely punished if Mum found out, I readily complied and in the early days was quite excited to have such a secret to keep.

From the first day he molested me in the village bus shelter K was very careful to ensure my compliance in our activities and was at great pains to avoid frightening me in any way. Each time we were together things went a little bit further to the point where he finally persuaded me to be completely naked for him.

That was the day everything went wrong for me and it was partly my own fault. Having begun to enjoy our little ‘games’ I paraded for him as provocatively as I knew how, deliberately wiggling my bottom at him.

I can only assume that teenage urges overrode his carefully devised strategy and without any warning I found myself impaled on him with my feet clear of the ground.

Wriggling around, frantically trying to get away from the pain, I tried kicking him but couldn’t really get any power into it, my arms were hampered by his arm round my chest so I couldn’t hit him. I tried to scream but he’d got his other hand over my mouth. I even tried to bite his hand but he was holding me in such a way that I couldn’t.

At last he got what he wanted and let me down to the ground again where I collapsed howling with pain and terror. Realising that he’d gone too far he hastily dressed me then sat me on his lap, rocking me the way Mum would do when I had a bad dream.

It took him a very long time to calm me down and he kept saying ‘sorry’ over and over again and then he said something that can only be described as shifting the blame onto me, the sight of me naked had been too much for him to resist.

He actually begged my forgiveness and it’s a measure of how I was brought up that I felt obliged to forgive him. I’d been taught that if someone was genuinely sorry then you had to forgive them or you were as bad as them.

For several weeks after he’d raped me K scaled things back and didn’t try to do anything that would frighten or hurt me. Naively I allowed things to continue and inevitably other unpleasant incidents occurred but he’d induced such a sense of fear and fatalism in me that I did nothing to dissuade him.

This isn’t a memory that’s suddenly sprung up in the course of my mental archaeology; this is something that’s been gnawing away at me for a very long time. This is not a funny story and some of you are going to, at the very least, wince as you read it.

On Wednesday I had an outpatient appointment to discuss the treatment of a varicocele that I’ve had since I was 16. This is not an uncommon condition in adolescents and often clears up of its own accord however in my case it wasn’t a natural occurrence.

I’ve indicated in the past that bullying as well as sexual abuse had a tremendous psychological impact on my childhood and teens but there is a physical cost as well. I’m not talking about the three or four small scars, one quite prominent one on the bridge of my nose. This varicocele was the legacy of an appalling act of cruelty.

During a confrontation at school, the details of which aren’t relevant, my antagonist knocked me to the ground and with, a speed that makes me suspect he’d planned it, grabbed me by the balls and lifted me clear off the ground. Now I’m not a heavy person, I’ve been clinically underweight all my life, but the pain of being held dangling like that was indescribable.

Only when he was satisfied that my screams of agony were as anguished as they were going to get did my assailant simply let go and drop me, completely careless of the fact that I barely saved myself from hitting my head on a concrete floor.

That particular torture was inflicted on three more occasions and the last attack was so vicious that I almost passed out but to my utter horror I also got what I hoped was a completely random erection. This so disgusted my attacker that he dropped me and I was unable to avoid banging my head when I landed. I spent most of the rest of that day feeling ashamed, dazed, nauseous and in awful pain.

A few days later I noticed the abnormality but said nothing. For better or for worse nothing went wrong with me during the next two years that needed a doctor to investigate there, otherwise my parents would have been alerted.

During an email conversation today a friend of mine expressed astonishment that something like this could have happened with nobody being any the wiser but, as is so often the case, events conspire to benefit miscreants.

One of the things that sexual abuse taught me, at the age of ten, was how to keep secrets and this secrecy became second nature to me in almost all aspects of my life. Nobody in my family had the least idea what I was going through at school, all that ever got home was the good stuff about how well I was doing and how happy I was until I started losing control at about fifteen, but that was put down to me being a “bad” boy.

Similarly no member of staff ever witnessed the many acts of cruelty and violence committed against me and I, being who I was, didn’t say anything. I just counted off the many days until I could finish my last A level paper and get the fuck out of that god-awful place.

One of the things I’ve realised about bullies is that they are an entirely different species from mere thugs. Like abusers, bullies are cunning and opportunistic, always prepared to wait for a brief moment when the intended victim is completely isolated. Of course all of that opportunism would come to nothing if the victim couldn’t be relied upon to keep silent, enter the sexually abused and secretive child.

In 1976 I spoke to a GU Consultant about the injury and, after he’d got over his shock, he advised me that treatment was still somewhat uncertain and that the only real disadvantage to leaving things as they were was a severely depleted sperm count. I’d long since abolished confusion as to my sexuality so that didn’t seem like a particularly serious issue. I decided to leave well alone.

Treatment now is a great deal better and considerably less invasive than in 1976 so, as I’ve been getting a bit of pain recently, I’ve decided that it’s time to eradicate this visible legacy of a desperately unhappy school life.

Love

Possibly the worst aspect of this episode was that I found myself caught in a loop of anger that seemed to be stuck at about the age of twelve and I was at quite serious risk of losing myself in the plethora of painful and quite often degrading memories. It’s probably quite easy as an observer to say that I should be over all that by now, it happened a long time ago, but trust me that’s a great deal easier said than done. The events of my childhood, from the age of ten onwards, had a profound effect on me and my family. Even though the family had no inkling of what was happening they suffered by association as my behavioural problems deepened.

I won’t claim that the abuse, bullying and the difficulties of facing my sexuality ruined my life, that’s would be a simplistic and inaccurate assessment. What those events did was change the course of my life quite radically and led to a period of uncontrolled drinking, drug taking and almost compulsive casual sex. When one is confused and vulnerable it’s very easy to mistake physical intimacy for affection and affection for love with often emotionally painful results. On many occasions I drew the wrong conclusion from someone’s interest in me and got myself hurt.

I’m not particularly proud of a great many things I did in my youth but then again I’m not ashamed of most of them either. Certain actions were necessary to ensure my own survival in the face of what seemed like insuperable odds. I am, if not ashamed, then certainly saddened by the people I hurt especially three, yes three, girls who for reasons of their own elected to fall in love with me. That I trampled on their emotions so seemingly casually is still an aspect of myself that I find distasteful in the extreme.

So where am I now? Well, having perforce taken a week off writing I feel ready to enter that fray again. Undifferentiated anger is not a good place to write from, it makes everything too introverted and erratic. I’ll also get back to posting here regularly as this seems to be the place where I discover the lighter side of those dreadful days and it’s important to remember that there were lighter, at times hilarious, moments along the way.

Once again thank you all for your support, love and care.

Mac

I cried when I was ten and a big hulking teenager hurt me so badly that he made me bleed.

I cried almost every night after that until I reached the point, at the age of twelve, when I seriously thought about killing myself so he couldn’t touch me again, I couldn’t see any other way out.

I cried as an eleven year old because all the boys in my form picked on me because I had ginger hair.

I cried again just before I was thirteen because I knew beyond all doubt that I was queer and believed that the abuser had made me that way and from that day until I left grammar school at the age of eighteen I don’t think I ever stopped crying.

I tried drinking and that just made me cry even more so I tried drugs and for a little while I didn’t cry but then I realised that was because I’d lost all feeling from my brain downwards so I quit that.

Finally I tried accepting that I was a filthy little queer who was just there to be used and lo, the tears went away for a while and I was temporarily healed.

That’s not a suggestion on how to live a life, just an observation of fact.

Love

This was all part of my reaction to my sense of utter worthlessness and it’s quite possible that my deteriorating relationship with my Dad was part of this same disturbed behaviour, I knew what his limits were and I certainly pushed him beyond them every time we argued. Apart from being a “just” punishment for a dirty, unlovable and bad child, pain gave me an anchor, something to remind me that I was alive even though most of the time I wished I wasn’t. The method I used was also a desperate cry for attention, surely someone would notice such outlandish behaviour wouldn’t they?

So what new and disturbing event have I managed to unearth now? When I was 15, not long after nature had finally given in and decided that I could reach puberty after all, I was doing my usual provocation act on a suitable target who was proving much more of a challenge than usual. I was not being denied though, I needed my just punishment and he was bloody well going to give it to me! It took nearly half an hour of being supercilious and offensive but at last his self control snapped and he knocked me to the floor, so far so good. Expecting a kicking I was completely unprepared for him grabbing me by the balls and lifting me clear off the floor. It was without doubt the most hellish pain I’d ever experienced but much more horrifying was the fact that I got an instant erection and bloody near came on the spot.

This descent into what I could only see as perversion really scared me but at the same time opened the door to a whole new world of possibilities, ways in which I could really bring upon myself the utter humiliation that I believed I deserved and I embraced the opportunity with enthusiasm.

It wasn’t until I was 19 and got picked up by a man about 10 years older than me, who actually cared about me, that I managed to break out of that awful mindset. Amongst other things he taught me that I wasn’t worthless, dirty or bad, that I wasn’t the ugliest kid alive and probably most important of all he taught me that not only could I get some pleasure out of sex, I should and he always made sure that it happened. Before him I’d just assumed that being used and hurt was the way things worked.

He also warned me not to fall in love with him and that if I did I’d get hurt so of course I fell in love with him and I got hurt but that was hardly his fault.

Love

When I first found the courage to talk about the events in my childhood I was immediately incensed with the number of people who stepped up to tell me how I should feel. No self-appointed expert can possibly understand the sense of shame, dirtiness and revulsion at being forced, under threat of violence, to perform oral sex on a teenager with a very sketchy understanding of personal hygiene, my greatest fear at the time was that I’d be sick on him and get a beating anyway. If you haven’t been forcibly sodomised and made to bleed you really don’t have the right to tell me how I should have felt, all I can say is that I was in a great deal of pain, full of shame and had to sneakily hand-wash my underpants so that my Mother wouldn’t see the blood stains, throwing them away wasn’t an option as she knew exactly how many pairs I had.

Similarly it’s incredibly insulting and patronising to be told that I should be over it by now and that I should move on. The things that we experience as children make a deep impression, unfortunately some of the things I experienced were very bad and the scars may never properly heal, as I’ve said in the introduction to my book In some respects I will always be a victim of sexual abuse.

There are no straightforward answers to these issues and I would not have the arrogance to tell fellow travellers on this road how they should feel, all I can do is offer what so many of you have given me support, love and the knowledge that you’re not alone.

Love