Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to “respect our physical needs,” how sex was “a very beautiful gift” as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially “out of bounds” in the evenings, as were the ar... (查看原文)
I say this, but the only real case I personally knew of like that was when Jenny C. and Rob D. got interrupted in Room 14. They were doing it after lunch, right there over one of the desks, and Mr. Jack had come in to get something. According to Jenny, Mr. Jack had turned red and gone right out again, but they’d been put off and had stopped. They’d more or less dressed themselves when Mr. Jack came back, just as though for the first time, and pretended to be surprised and shocked.
“It’s very clear to me what you’ve been doing and it’s not appropriate,” he’d said, and told them both to go and see Miss Emily. But once they’d got to Miss Emily’s office, she’d told them she was on her way to an important meeting and didn’t have time to talk to them.
“But you know you shouldn’t have been do... (查看原文)
Gay sex, incidentally, was something we were even more confused about. For some reason, we called it “umbrella sex”; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were “an umbrella.” I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff. The boys especially could do the cruellest things. According to Ruth this was because quite a few of them had done things with each other when they’d been younger, before they’d realised what they were doing. So now they were ridiculously tense about it. I don’t know if she was right, but for sure, accusing someone of “getting all umbrella” could easily end in a fight. (查看原文)
For all that, I’d been holding it off for ages, repeating to myself Miss Emily’s advice—“If you can’t find someone with whom you truly wish to share this experience, then don’t!” But around the spring of the year I’m talking about now, I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right. What I mean is, if Miss Emily was correct and sex was this really big deal between people, then I didn’t want to be doing it for the first time when it was really important how well it went.
……
So I’d chosen Harry, and... (查看原文)
I realise this may sound like I was getting obsessive, but I remember I also spent a lot of time re-reading passages from books where people had sex, going over the lines again and again, trying to tease out clues. The trouble was, the books we had at Hailsham weren’t at all helpful. We had a lot of nineteenth-century stuff by Thomas Hardy and people like that, which was more or less useless. Some modern books, by people like Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble, had some sex in them, but it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details. (查看原文)
it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details. (查看原文)
We’d got a video player in the billiards room a couple of years earlier, and by that spring had built up quite a good collection of movies. A lot of them had sex in them, but most scenes would end just as the sex was starting up, or else you’d only see their faces and their backs. And when there was a useful scene, it was difficult to see it more than fleetingly because there were usually twenty others in the room watching with you. We’d evolved this system where we called for particular favourite scenes to be played again—like, for instance, the moment the American jumps over the barbed wire on his bike in The Great Escape. There’d be a chant of: “Rewind! Rewind!” until someone got the remote and we’d see the portion again, sometimes three, four times. But I could hardly, by myself, star... (查看原文)
So I kept delaying week by week, while I went on preparing, until the summer came and I decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. By then, I was even feeling reasonably confident about it, and began dropping hints to Harry. Everything was going fine and according to plan, when Ruth and Tommy split up and it all got confused. (查看原文)
"sometimes I dreamt of us, staying in a river, holding hands together. But the thing is , the current is too strong, Kath, albeit we are trying to hold as hard as we can, eventually, we hv got to go, being drift apart". (查看原文)
" this was the spot where everything i ve ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and now i am standing here in front of it, and if i waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually larger until Id see it was Tommy" (查看原文)
