2.5: Sex: unearthing the erotic mould

I felt close to my mother in that somehow, during these early years, I always knew that she loved me the best of all. But it was Nanny whom I declared that I would someday marry, not that she was ever sexy in her behaviour towards me. Quite the contrary in fact, in that she was quick to rebuke any of us if she thought we might be doing something "dirty". She was a tolerant, but straight-laced spinster, whom I believe to have been still a virgin to her dying day. She used to tell us that she had once been engaged, but that she discovered he was a bad sort of man. She still wore his gold ring however, while telling us that she had tried to remove it, but that it was stuck - whereupon Cal produced a hacksaw and severed it from her finger. The very sight of it had provoked feelings of infidelity to ourselves.

In point of fact, there may have been an erotic side to my relationship with Nanny. I shared a bedroom with her - until the arrival of little Baba deprived me of that pleasure. On waking up in the early hours of the morning, I would often transfer myself from my cot to her large bed: sometimes with wet pyjamas. I have a vivid memory of the delightful warmth of her body, when I hitched my leg over her thigh, thus ridding myself of the wet and clammy sensation until it had dried up. She never scolded me for such intimacy, although I'm sure that she was aware what game I was up to. It was something that she permitted me to do because we both liked it.

If it is fair to regard such activity as sexual, then it must be confessed that I was not entirely faithful to her. Nanny had an elder sister called Lizzie, who came on visits and got terribly bossed around. She may have been a trifle on the simple side, and was less outgoing than Nanny: far more the straight-laced spinster. And there were occasions when she stood in for Nanny when the latter was on holiday. But one might have expected that I'd refrain from cocking my leg over Lizzie, to dry my pyjamas, even if I did transfer myself to her bed. I can recall how her whole body went stiff, which was in sharp contrast to my previous experience. But she still permitted me to do what I wanted.

With others however, I was to prove myself quite obstinately faithful to Nanny. I would not permit the nursery-maids to give me a bath, for example. In that respect, I regarded my body as being Nanny's alone to touch. The moment the nursery-maid approached me, I would set up a howling cry such as might deter the patron saint of cleanliness - whoever that might be. But my father had decreed that I should submit to his household arrangements, and permit this abuse of my body at the hands of a comparative stranger: stating the punishment that would be inflicted if I proved disobedient. So when he entered the nursery to discover that I was howling once again, for just that reason, he implemented his threat by banning me from the next family treat - which happened to be my own fourth birthday party.

Nor was I in the least inclined towards infidelity when the usual run of temporary nannies were employed: other than with Lizzie, that is to say. Their behaviour towards me wasn't even remotely sexy, if words of explanation are required, for they were disciplinarians. For example, I disliked baked apple, but there was one of these ladies who would pinch my nose until my mouth fell open (for the purpose of drawing breath,) and she would shovel the baked apple into the cavern before I had sufficient opportunity to perceive what she was doing. There was no question of me drying my pyjamas on a lady like that, nor even inviting her to bathe me.

There was however an additional infidelity when my parents took me on that cruise to Jamaica. I was then given a cabin to share with Evelyne, who was Daphne's lady's maid. My pyjama-drying technique was repeated in her company too, and I recollect that it was an enjoyable experience.

I am not suggesting that I was absorbing any manner of infidelity example from my mother during this voyage, but I do have a distinct recollection of her flirtatiousness with a stranger, (or so I judged him,) while we were on board `The Araguanay'. In any case, it's a story that's worth telling.

Daphne and I were often seated in the ship's dining-room without Henry yet being present, and I can remember how the man at the table next to ours utilised his games with me, to achieve his self-introduction to my mother. It was the game of pretending that his second and third fingers, when extended in my direction, were the twin barrels of an old-fashioned pistol which exploded with a sharp click of his tongue, at the depression of his thumb. We had a lovely pistol battle between the two tables - with Daphne distinctly smiling her encouragement - until Henry showed up on the scene.

The point which I found personally difficult to comprehend was the way in which Daphne's encouragement for our game was now rapidly withdrawn. I did attempt to continue it, firing several accurate shots in my partner's direction. But Daddy was now looking displeased, and Mummy lent over to whisper that it wasn't a very nice man that I'd been playing with. I found it confusing why attitudes had suddenly changed. The softly coy little expression in her eyes and on her lips, had also vanished. Yet somehow Daddy wasn't to be made privy to these changes.

I don't think I associated Daphne's behaviour with sexiness, or even flirtatiousness, and I certainly never thought of her as an appropriate body on which to dry out my wet pyjamas. Indeed, I can only remember one occasion when, during my father's absence, I was actually invited to share her bed, and that was for a single night - even though the original invitation had been for an entire week-end. It didn't work out well for us. She was perpetually waking me up with petulant demands that I cease rolling around in my sleep: to such an extent that I confided to Evelyne next morning, that I'd prefer to be put in my father's dressing-room next door. I was concerned not to hurt Daphne's feelings however, and suggested that the best explanation for the switch of beds was that I didn't like sleeping in pink sheets: a message that was duly delivered - and appreciated.

My relationship with Daphne was an intimate one, notwithstanding. There was no question of me getting invited to watch Nanny naked in her bath, but this was quite usual in the case of my mother. She even informed me on how the fountain on a bidet was most properly employed. And when I commented on her breasts, she explained how I had sucked milk from them when I was a small baby: not that this was presented as any privilege special unto myself. Even little Baba was to be permitted that degree of intimacy.

Henry too would invite me to come and chat with him while he was in the bath. So there was never any excessive mystery, or secrecy, about our bodies. I noted how his genitals were that much larger than my own, but this seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances. So were his hands, or his feet for that matter.

I was perhaps more aware how my own sexual characteristics differed from those of Cal - because we had the opportunity to observe each other so frequently in the bath. (Neither penis/vagina, prick/pussy nor cock/cunt were yet introduced into our vocabularies.) We required distinctive labels, linguistically, to make it apparent to each other that we had observed such difference. But Cal was never forthcoming as to what she supposed hers might be called. I had my own ideas about mine, however - because Nanny always instructed me to be "a clean boy" whenever I went to pee. So by association, the thing I did it with became (in my vocabulary) a `kleenboy'.

Of greater demonstration of the direction in which my sexual orientation was fixating, I should perhaps bring the Zu-Zu twins into focus: more properly known as the Metcalfe twins. But they were the two little girls, of approximately my own age, who first inspired in me a feeling of possessiveness. They were usually there, at the same parties I attended, dressed in long white dresses, with scarlet red sashes. I judged them as pretty too. When I was attempting to converse with them, I found myself turning to Nanny to enquire what it was they had said. What it sounded like to me was: "Zu-zu-zu-zu-zu-zu." (Hence my private name for them.) Twins have a private language, and this was explained to me: which I found delightfully mysterious, of course. But the idea of other little boys attempting to interpret what they were saying struck me as an affront to my own identity. So I had a special pained way of watching them when they were doing this to me.

I was still only four when Miss Russell was appointed to be Caroline's governess - several years prior to the advent of Miss Vigers. In sharp contrast to the latter, the former was a youngish, good-looking lady. She may have been even more beautiful than that, for I do seem to remember her as such. I wasn't actually taking lessons from her, but I sometimes sat in with Cal, receiving instruction in drawing and the like. I can remember Miss Russell praising my picture of a blinded Sampson pulling down the pillars of the temple, so perhaps she was reading me stories from the bible as well.

I adored Miss Russell, and she was good with Nanny besides. I can remember us all playing together in the garden at Sturford, during the summer of the Abdication crisis, the game being for Mr Baldwin's team to keep King Edward and Mrs Simpson apart. Miss Russell had a good way of combining games with tuition in current affairs. She stimulated me intellectually, quite apart from furnishing me with a visual image for a romantic prototype which was perhaps to recur with some frequency in my life. She had shoulder-length, blondish hair, and an overt friendliness; (or was it just that she had a good way with children?) But the relationship was entirely asexual - much as that might be cause for personal regret.

She was only with us for a year. There came a day during the following Christmas visit to Longleat, when Nanny informed me sadly that Miss Russell would not be playing with us any more. She had departed without so much as a hug, or a word of adieu. I just rolled on the floor, screaming my head off.

No one explained the situation to me any deeper than that, and it was only years later when I was told, by Aunt Kathleen, how Aunt Emma had reported to my father seeing the governess accompanying Thomas, my grandfather, on his constitutional walk in the Pleasure Grounds at Longleat: Thomas being a seventy-five year old widower at the time. The idea of Miss Russell being a suitable governess for us children was no longer a matter to be taken into account: nor even the idea that the revered head of the family might be entitled to a small romance in the Indian summer of his life. There were now other considerations which the clan must have found disturbing - like the prospect of an additional brood of male-line Thynnes, emerging to grasp some portion of the inheritance from under our very noses.

No, I quite understand that the nubile Miss Russell had to go. I also understand why, in selecting Miss Vigers as her replacement, due notice was doubtless taken of the fact that she was both old, and ugly.

My first erotic fantasies were inspired by Charles Kingsley's `Water Babies', which Daphne read to me. I created the fantasy around the visual image of one Susan, whom I met (but hardly ever spoke to) at Captain Olsen's gym in Bath, which we attended for both gymnastic and swimming instruction. All that I can clearly remember is that she had long blond hair, and was probably a couple of years older than myself. What I pictured to myself when I was lying half asleep was that Susan and myself, amongst others, were members of a group of water babies called `Livers'. We swam the high seas, naked, while evading the nets of adults, who were fishing for us from above in boats. Their intention was to eat us, yet prior to that they packed us into tins like sardines - where I always found myself packed next to Susan.

Escape was invariably devised by my own ingenuity, and we would find ourselves swimming in the depths of the sea once again, naked as ever, and strung out in long chains, the one behind the other - grasped to the one in front. Being the leader of the band, I swam at the head of the chain of course; and the one immediately behind me was inevitably Susan, grasping me between the legs by the most convenient handle. And thus we swam idyllically, for days and nights on end - until the whole process of capture and escape would get monotonously repeated.

Two points of interest emerge. In that my band of `Livers' consisted exclusively of little girls, it might be argued that I was already inclined towards polygamy. And in my choice of a name for the band, it derived partly from Cal's expressed opinion that human flesh would probably taste similar to liver, and partly to a predisposition for some existentialist brand of attitude - in the sense of `living it up', as opposed to waiting to see what might happen to us.

Whether or not I experienced erections during the process of these fantasies is a point which I cannot truthfully answer. But there were a whole series of erections, subsequently, which I can accurately date - because they occurred while I was in hospital in Bath, suffering from severe mastoid trouble. This came shortly after our return from the holiday in Piraillon, in 1938, when I was six years old. I had responded to ear-ache by sticking a lead pencil down the offending ear-hole to obtain that deliciously cool scratching sensation upon the inflamed drum - with the result that the infection flared up. Antibiotics had yet to be invented, but the decision to perform a full-scale mastoid operation was delayed for a while, since it was regarded as distinctly dangerous for a young child; and I was, after all, the Thynne family's precious son and heir.

During the period that I was in Bath hospital, I was tended by a nurse to whom I gave the nick-name of Fuchsia. She wore her hair in two tufts, gathered on either side of her head, which was the fashion in which the Fuchsia fairy was portrayed, in a book upon flower fairies which had been read to me by Cal during the period when I believed such creatures to be her kith and kin. I realised how fortunate I was to be cared for so attentively by such a person. I felt close in spirit to her too. Maybe it was the naughty twinkle in her eye, but I have a clear memory of the game that developed during the blanket baths she gave me. While lying there naked, I would provoke her reaction by bringing my penis erect. And she would dab at it with a sponge, exclaiming: "Oh you naughty little boy!"

The day came however, when Fuchsia arrived at my bedside with a solemn face. She told me that although it was quite all right for me to play these games with herself, if some other nurse was to give me a blanket bath, then she might be shocked. I was made to promise that I would reserve this kind of behaviour for herself alone. She had some cause to feel alarmed in that word had come that I was to be transferred to a London hospital for the dreaded mastoid operation. Our secret was safe in my hands however. The nurse who tended me up in London was a dour Scotswoman, without any manner of naughty twinkle in her eye, and I never felt the remotest urge to erect my penis in her company.

The mastoid operation had been successful, incidentally, although there was a period of convalescence, during which I was taken by Matron to cheer up the ladies in other private beds. There was one in particular who struck me as beautiful: in her late teens perhaps, and with long golden hair, reminiscent to me nowadays of the Boticelli Venus, whose print did just happen to be framed upon the nursery wall. It was the image of Susan (or even of Miss Russell) reinforced, I daresay. I was taken to sit with her on several occasions, and felt bitterly disappointed when Matron fobbed me off one morning upon a young lady of less angelic appearance. Just one of my stereotypes for attraction had taken root, it might seem, with only limited leeway for divergent types.

It was also during this period of convalescence that I first developed a friendship with my fair cousin, Sally- Anne Vivian, daughter of Daphne's brother who was my Uncle Tony. (Sal, as she was then called.) Living in London at that time, she would come and visit me in hospital, and we became particularly friendly. I think we got as far as telling each other that we liked no cousin better. Once again the romantic stereotype was coming together, in a fashion to influence my taste in such matters - although there was still plenty of room for additional stereotypes to get implanted, over the course of my subsequent history.

I was seven years old when I was first told the facts of life - by Cal, who had just been told them belatedly by her friend Diana Phipps, who had been told them by her brother Nicholas. By the time these facts had been relayed to myself however, they were marginally different from the original instruction. In essence, I was given to believe that I had coagulated from out of my father's urine, after he had peed into my mother's womb: which didn't strike me as a particularly nice way for anyone to be conceived. But it was some years before my education in this field was taken any further.

I loved Cal perhaps better than anyone else in the world. She was my most intimate confidante, and our relationship did just occasionally border upon the sexual: watching each other urinate, or the daring examination of each other's genitals perhaps, but nothing more overtly erotic than just that.

With the outbreak of war, came my first self-consciously romantic relationship, and this was with Sheila, Lady Milbank, my mother's best friend of that period. Their menfolk had been shipped abroad, to Palestine in my father's case, and our summer holidays were now spent down in Cornwall: initially at a village called Trebetherick, on Trearnon Bay.

Sheila was similar to Daphne in many ways: a coyly flirtatious brunette with straight shoulder length hair, and a warmly personal way of chatting and confiding, even with children, so that her subject was made to feel special and uniquely rewarded by her attention. The two of them would play a comic act with me. When I composed a short lyric, in grudging acceptance of the newly imposed war-time diet, (of animals trapped by our own gamekeepers,) they would perform a little dance around me, singing out the words to me in silly girlish tones.

"Rabbits for lunch, rabbits for tea,

rabbits are good for you and me!"

I decided that I was in love with Sheila and, just before returning home to Sturford, I found a stone which happened to be in the shape of a heart. Daphne was encouraging the liaison, so was happy to buy for me a small tin of glossy red paint, in which colour I immersed my `heart'. Then I wrapped it in brown paper, and left it on her doorstep as a valentine.

On remeeting Sheila some thirty years later, she was to surprise me greatly by taking me upstairs to her bedroom and revealing how she still treasured this heart in a little casket, especially dedicated to its preservation. She also disclosed to me at the same time, how my grandfather, Thomas, was a little bit romantically inclined towards her over the same period as myself. I certainly wasn't aware of his rivalry at the time, nor do I know if he was aware of mine.

If I was discovering that I exercised a certain charm, and sex-appeal, in some people's eyes, then I was also learning that such an assessment of me was by no means universal. As soon as the bombing of London began, houses in the countryside were invited to volunteer to make room for evacuees. Daphne's generous offer that we should all move into the front of the house, making the nursery and other rooms available for such displaced people, was taken up by a London hospital for crippled children - if only for a short spell. And during those weeks, we were indeed deprived of much of our former privacy, yet by way of compensation, I became slightly enamoured of the young nurse who accompanied these children.

Once again, it was her way with children I suppose, which was her special attraction. All of those in her care appeared to adore her; and one has to remember that I had been brought up to suppose that I was a superior kind of little boy. So it might have been argued that my chances with her were good - against these, well.... invalides. I spent hours with her, for days on end, hoping to obtain her acknowledgement that I had won her admiration, if not her heart.

The young nurse was made of sterner metal than I'd been anticipating, however. None of the remarks I made to her, which were calculated to open her eyes to the fact that I was of superior status to her charges, seemed to be going down very well. "What a little snob!" was even a comment which I just managed to hear her say. So I eventually tried out the tactic of solidarity, intimating that my mother, (not that I really listened to her,) had advised me not to play with these children - in case I caught something from them. Seldom have I found myself so wrong-footed in courtship. The next time I went up to the nursery in search for her, the pretty young nurse was eventually revealed to be hiding behind a door. And it was only shortly afterwards that their hospital decided to transfer them to other premises.

Something that was, just remotely, sinking in upon my consciousness was that other men were more intimate with Mummy than they had been in the past. Daddy's enforced distance from the family scene may have accounted for all that, but there was still a sense of unease in my mind when I went up to her bedroom to kiss her good morning, in the habitual manner, to find one of the men who were staying in the house, standing there beside her bed in a dressing-gown. She also told me, somewhat severely, that I should knock before entering: something that she had never required that I should do before then. There was a feeling that things were getting out of place within our lives, although it wasn't for myself to analyse what this might be.

The man in the dressing-gown was [X]. He was Daphne's special friend over this period, and I remember how emotional she became when he was wounded in a shooting accident upon Salisbury Plain. Some fighter pilot had mistaken his company on parade as the cardboard targets for his strafing run of machine-gun fire. There were many casualties, and [X] himself was on the danger list for a while. It did enter my mind to wonder if she'd have been equally distressed if we'd been told similar news about Daddy.

Life wasn't quite as it once had been, and we were aware how the war was in some way responsible for all that. But the war was a passing phase, and the family would soon get back into the old rhythm of things. Or that is what I thought at the time.

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