It wasn't just my family, but the household as a whole that now viewed me in a different light, as a result of the beating. The message was in the air that my personality should be subjected to tough measures, so as to achieve the right formative effect. I was without `gumption', and it was now even being said that I was gutless: a charge which no one at school would ever have brought against me, where I had a reputation for putting up a courageous fight in the boxing ring - even when I was losing. But Henry had somehow got it into his head that I needed to be given more of a backbone. And the message was made apparent to me largely through the treatment I was now receiving from Donald, who was more than just his butler; something closer to being his henchman in effect, since he had finally convinced himself that my father was going to live long enough to guarantee the security of his own office.

Valentine was currently at an age when he enjoyed the puppy-like behaviour of brawling with an adult. Donald furnished him admirably with such sparring practice. They would roll around together on the front lawn, with Val trying in vain to wrestle himself free from the other's holds. Donald would praise him in my hearing as being "full of guts." Then turning to me, he would make some such comment as : "Unlike his elder brother there!" The taunt was always insinuated that I myself had never wrestled with Donald, and that I would never dare to do so.

This taunt was getting too much for me, stated as it generally was in the presence of both my younger brothers. Not that Chris was in the habit of wrestling with Donald either, but it was me, I suppose, who set the standard of our restraint. For I knew perfectly well that it was not in my best interests to permit him to have his physical superiority in strength demonstrated to my detriment. I was still endeavouring to rest my identity on the pre-war standard of being a member of the family who employed him, and therefore not an appropriate object for his physical aggression - even if in play. Even my family status was now in jeopardy however, so I knew that it was required that I should do something about it.

Matters came to a head in the dining-room one morning, after all the breakfast things had been cleared away. Val was indulging in his usual bout of horse-play with Donald, who then sneered at me once again for being gutless. So I took him up on it, asking him what he meant. The gist of his answer was that I didn't dare fight with him: not like my little brother here. The conversation then took the line of me pointing out that I had no cause to fight with him, and what would it serve? But he stuck to the angle of it being a case of me not daring to fight him, and that he only had to lift a finger against me to make me squeal out for mercy. So I told him to try, and he did. I wasn't resisting him, but I was trying to prove that he could never make me submit to his will. So he got me down on to the floor in one of his wrestling locks - meeting with no resistance on my side - and proceeded over the next ten minutes to attempt the extraction of a squeal for mercy from my lips.

Never before or after in my life have I been subjected to torture, so this ranks as my sole such experience. I was face down on the floor, with my two legs twisted up over my back, and with Donald twisting my feet so as to cause me an increasing degree of pain. I reckon that it came to the point when one of my legs was just on the point of breaking - during which entire time I had kept my teeth determinedly gritted in silence.

Then a noise came from my throat which might conceivably be described as a faint groan. Donald immediately sprang to his feet claiming that he had proved his point. With more difficulty than himself, I climbed back on my own feet and a fierce altercation now ensued for, by now, I was close to losing my temper. It would still have been against my best interest to permit the matter to degenerate into a fight. He would have triumphed merely by praising me verbally on the fact that he had at last managed to goad me into displaying the demanded degree of gutsy behaviour.

I knew in my heart however, that this point was already proven - for his inner appreciation, if not openly. So I could afford now to win the day by taunting him with his inability to fulfil his threat of making me squeal. He said he would continue with the process. I even put myself down on the floor with my legs in a position ready for his torture. Briefly he did so, while I was still throwing taunts over my shoulder. Then it must have sunk home that my leg bones really were on the point of snapping, and that the consequences then might be too serious. Suddenly he desisted, and climbed to his feet. The line now was to say a bit grudgingly that it was all right, since I had passed the test. And taunt him as I tried, I just had to leave it at that.

On jovial coercion, prized open were my pink
fingers, while my face felt flattened in the mud,
and blooded inside, but still resisting the kiss
of infamous submission to witless pitted power.
A sour harvest in bedraggled pride choked
my gullet and poked smoke in my lungs, while my tongue
had nothing to utter, adequate in statement to revoke
the hateful notion of impotence at ridicule.
Fool to think of things that could be done!
Munching humiliation, I bide my time
till the crunch will come, and I punch home with a bigger
vigour the whole crass asinine rules to win.
Then even if my costume is absurd,
I'll stand repeating every single word.

My relationship with Donald did improve enormously thereafter. He now knew that he couldn't push me too far. He was even concerned to come and chat with me in my room, probing to see if I was intending to make trouble for him with my parents: also telling me incidentally that he'd been impressed by my performance. But he had nothing to fear in reality. I knew that the situation with my father wouldn't change, just because I might complain to him that his underlings were bullying me. And why involve my mother when she'd surrendered the upbringing of us boys into Henry's hands? I never said a word about the incident to either of them until long afterwards, when I learnt that they knew about it already from Donald informing Henry, in private, of his own version of what had occurred - with the account featuring myself quite attractively for a change. It was in my own best interest at this given point in time, that I could take all such knocks in my stride, without seeking any manner of revenge.

Something which Donald had acquired during the war - looted while in Germany I believe - was a magnificent 2.2 rifle with repeater action. He and Mr Mather drove me and my brothers over to the lake at Longleat one day, with a load of empty bottles to use as target practice as they bobbed up and down in the water.

My relationship with Chris especially, was in a new state of uncertainty, due to this beating that I had received, for it had brought home to him that I wasn't quite so much of a winner as he might have once been led to suppose. But he could see for himself that I didn't have Daddy's esteem. And when he came to think about it, I daresay that he saw many aspects in life where my performance was no better, or even marginally worse than his own. In addition to that he had seen me blubbing in my bedroom after that beating. No doubt he considered that the time was ripe to assert his own identity for a change.

The imposition of undeserved shame
inflames a passionate indignation in the massed
gases bursting towards explosion in my heart
which, artless, jumps around with nowhere to hide.
Striding the wire on the high lonely tightrope,
I fight to recover my balance in the flak fired
by his tiresome minions, each seeking to drop me,
opportunistic in their open season for my humbling.
With upturned daggers in each clenched fist,
I listen with fragile temper, ready to stab
the jabbing fingers, so quick to deride my pride
as I cling to the basic rudiments of human dignity.
Beware my upper lip in snarling curl,
and read from it my battle flags unfurl.

Well things came to a head on a particular outing, while we were shooting at bottles on the Half Mile lake at Longleat. We had been doing this for some while when he enquired how many bottles I'd managed to sink. I told him the figure which I believed to be correct. Let us say it was twelve. But Chris just sniggered and said it was eleven. He declared that he had been counting, and that he just asked me to see if I told the truth. Instead of taking the matter lightly, even making a joke of it, I suddenly found myself losing my temper with him - insisting that I knew precisely just how many bottles I'd managed to sink, and that I was a bloody good shot besides. "You're not!" "I am!"..... and so on - until finally I was boasting that I'd prove it to him by shooting the buttons from his coat sleeve. And I flung myself down upon the ground, with the rifle in hand, and took a very steady aim at the target I'd named, with more than half an intention to pull the trigger.

Somewhat ungallantly, Chris caught Val by the arm and drew him close to him while ambling away from me. And it was at this juncture that Donald and Harold rushed up to me and wrested the rifle from my hands. But we had also brought my air rifle with me, and it was within reach. Chris was now separate from Val, so I snatched it up and fired a pellet at his backside. He winced, but declared stubbornly that it hadn't hurt. The others then succeeded in calming my enraged passions, and restoring some semblance of amity between us brothers. So we all climbed back into the car and set off back home.

The friendliness must have been skin deep however, or perhaps the devil was truly rampaging in my heart. The best I can do to present my behaviour in a reasonable light is to suggest that, over this period, I was indeed having a tough fight to maintain any semblance of my former status within the family. Maybe this entailed feelings of persecution that I was partially inventing for myself, but it struck me that everyone was collecting to try and take me down a peg or two in life. And I just wasn't going to have it that Chris in particular was going to supplant me in the family esteem. His sneers about my shooting skills were still all too fresh within my mind.

Well it so happened that, next day, I was strolling in the garden at Sturford down by the garage, with my air rifle in hand when I espied Chris and Val walking on ahead of me - about fifty yards away. Now was the opportunity to test whether it really hadn't hurt him when I fired a pellet at his arse, by repeating the performance right now when he was least expecting it. I took careful aim, but I should have recollected how this rifle always did have a tendency to pull to the right. And Val was walking on to the immediate right of Chris. So when I pulled the trigger, it was little Val, rather than Chris, who collapsed in a heap yelling his head off. A healthy sign I daresay, in that it showed there was still some life in him. But I was now genuinely scared, and so was Chris. After divesting Val of his trousers however, we were greatly relieved to discover that his genitals were still intact, and that there was nothing but a small pinkish spot on his left thigh. And once this had been explained to him, the yelling ceased. But I for one had learned my lesson. If I carried on like this, I'd end up in a place like Borstal rather than Eton!

Where my relationship with Caroline was concerned, my status was under threat merely from the reason that she was leaving me so far behind. She was truly out and about within the adult world nowadays, and had little time or thought to spend upon a well liked, but no longer intimate younger brother. I hadn't even been able to attend her coming out ball that summer, and the names of her supposed boy friends meant nothing to me. Relatively innocent relationship I have since been told, but she prided herself on the quantity of marriage proposals that she was receiving, totting them up in her private journal, and perhaps even endeavouring to tease them out of an admirer so as to augment her head count.

Fêted as the current deb of the year, she was indeed being much wooed, and I had watched with some amusement when [Y] brought his uncouth son [Y[ to dinner with us one evening. Their talk was all about pets: how much nicer dogs were than cats, and all that kind of thing. But [Y[ had the interesting line that piglets make far better pets than any of them. To hear Caroline enthusing upon the subject of how little pigs must be entrancing almost had me in giggles at one time. But it wasn't really so funny when Roger turned up at Sturford next morning with a perfectly delightful little black and white piglet. Caroline was no longer quite so pleased with the situation. But it was resolved in the simplest possible way by Henry putting piglet on the menu for his guests next week.

Then came the occasion when Caroline and I went to stay for that week-end at the[Z]'s family house house near Dublin. Caroline was a late arrival, in that she arrived at Heathrow with me, only to find that she'd left her passport behind at Sturford. I therefore found myself pitched into my first ever flight upon an airliner, with no one to share my fears so to speak. But she did come on out to join us the following day.

In the meantime I'd been approached by one of the people on their week-end guest list, a young man called Arthur, with an enquiry as to whether my beautiful sister was vain. Without supposing myself to be disloyal, I told him that I thought she might be. So when in Dublin, he bought an expensive evening handbag to offer her as a gift on the evening of the ball. Caroline told me about this gift, but wanted me to assist her in avoiding having to pay the consequences of accepting his generosity: asking me to make sure that I always moved in quickly to sit beside her when we were travelling anywhere in a car. Arthur wouldn't stand for this of course, and rapidly sent me to sit in the front, whilst he took my place. But it did strike me that Caroline was behaving badly in having accepted his gift in the first place - while expecting me to save her from the consequences. The point I am really making is that she was becoming a trifle callous in all her relationships at this time. One might even say that she had had things too easy in life, and was now a bit spoilt. But I still loved her dearly.

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