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flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped towards me, cropped and clean and shining, bearing in their golden-haired hands the ever-more elaborate straps and protuberances of pseudo-cricket boxes. But then, what did I know about women? From the look of them, and were it not for the occasional classical statue, you’d have imagined that the bosom was a single fleshy appendage. And as for what went on in that smooth marble space between their legs… I was as innocent as most people were then, and knew little enough about the functioning of even my own anatomy. The ability, for example, to pull back my foreskin from the glans of my penis was something that I imagined as a cross I had to bear; my own special deformity.
    It was thus at some expense and considerable embarrassment that I took the trouble of going down to Birmingham one summer weekend to purchase some photographs in the hope that would give me a clearer idea. I had convinced myself by then that, with the right knowledge of the female anatomy, I would finally understand. But when I opened the envelope back in my bedroom that night, I found that I was shocked, confused, embarrassed. Breasts, I knew about—at least in theory. But this was the holy grail? I immediately renounced all thoughts of sex and resigned myself to a lifetime of selfless celibacy.
    A week later, I was back on the train to Birmingham, and then along the same smelly Digbeth streets, shaking with nerves as I entered the plain-fronted shop offering Novelty Art-Works and Souvenirs. I explained that, man of the world that I was, my lady friend had expressed an interest in acquiring a similar set of photographs to the ones that I had purchased; but this time, of men. I had glimpsed the things, tantalisingly, the week before, sliding about in one of the long felt-lined drawers that the shop’s proprietor had opened. Thicker arms, smoother bellies—and could that really be the casual flop against a hairy thigh of an actual penis ? Reptile-eyed, unspeaking but for the matter of money, the proprietor handed me an envelope. Several days later, in a fit of self-disgust, I destroyed these, too. But by then it was too late. Things were as firmly set in my mind as they had long been in my body. I was—now that I finally got around to looking up the name in one of the bigger medical dictionaries that dared to include such monstrous afflictions—a homosexual; an invert.
    That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, was the sole extent of my sexual development. There were no mad choirmasters, no smooth-talking deviant older friends, no ambushes by rapacious tramps, no bumps on the head sustained while bicycling, or desperate anonymous letters to Baden-Powell. There was just me and my guilty semi-celibacy, and helping my suddenly frail mother look after her house, and watching the lads I’d known at school grow up, leave home, marry, start families.
    Just as I had resigned myself to puzzled but inactive deviancy, so, by the time I was in my early twenties, I had also come to accept my position as a Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. Even getting promoted to First Class Teacher seemed unlikely, at least until the tyrant His Majesty’s Inspector Mr. Rathbate retired. My horizons were limited. South Staffordshire, then as now, was predominantly a mining and agricultural community. Despite the regulations, many of the children were no longer attending school by the age of ten, but assisting their mothers and fathers in a trade. Some of those who did bother to stay on until thirteen did so because they were intelligent and hoped to transfer into Secondary or even Grammar school. Others remained because they were too retarded to do anything else—Billy Choggin, I remember, was only thrown out from behind the desk where he sat hunched and picking at his warts when someone realised he’d turned seventeen.
    In the articles with which I began my