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.