3.3: Sex: establishing my sexual repute

So I was arriving out in Germany with the event of losing my virginity safely behind me. But I knew how there was really very little prospect of developing my sex life any further, with the assistance of girl-friends that is to say, while I was posted out here at Wolfenbütel. The same officers who had made regular trips up to London to visit The Bag of Nails however, soon discovered where it was they had to go to receive similar services out here.

Or it wasn’t really the same kind of service. At The Bag of Nails we had participated in a pleasant evening at a night-club, in the company of a young woman who was both pretty and sociable. And what occurred afterwards was in her own private apartments. Here in Brunswick, there was a special street which was officially out of bounds to all British troops. If for any reason the military police had stopped me to ask for an identification, I had heard that the excuse to be offered for being there was that I was checking up on a suspicion that my own troopers were paying visits to the alley. Not that such a crisis was ever really likely to occur. It was a place where the whores sat at open windows - or lounged against the wall outside - dressed in the flimsiest of underwear, while a crowd of males prowled the cobbled street swapping lewd comments to one another in anticipation of the carnal meal. And having chosen a partner, the financial transaction was quickly completed, and cheaply by London standards, in that it could be for as little as five marks. The curtains were then drawn, and the copulation rendered, with no time to be lost in that it might lose her the next customer.

It was so much a part of traditional upper class behaviour in Britain that, as a young man, I should resort to prostitutes if alternative intercourse was not available, that I never felt any qualms of conscience on the issue. I have only seen cause to question my values in life subsequent to this; and even then, none too severely. It happened, and I leave it at that. And there was no shortage of companions on these trips that I made down to Cobbler’s Alley, as we called it.

[L] who had now rejoined the Regiment, hitched a lift with me more frequently than most. He and I were now in fact good friends. He no longer regarded himself as a suitor for [X]’s attentions, although we refrained from discussing her explicitly. We each had our favourite girl in Cobbler’s Alley. Mine was called Sonia, and it was a help that she could speak English. I could have liked her quite well, if the circumstances and the opportunities had been different. And I think that she took an interest in me too - probably because someone in the Life Guards must have spotted me visiting her, and then informed her something about my background. Other officers revealed how she would sometimes enquire after the Herr Baron. It pleased her no doubt that I was always at pains to treat her with respect, in a manner that she informed me was apparently all too rare in the attitudes that she encountered.

But there were occasions when Sonia was either occupied, or absent. And this led to a variety of questionable experiences - quite humorous on occasions. There was the time when the lady in question was attempting to get me to enthuse with her on our performance, exclaiming: "Prima! Prima!" But my knowledge of German was even less than elementary in those days. Prima should be translated as superb, or wonderful, as I now know. But at the time I thought the word must relate to the Latin language, and that she was asking me if this was the first occasion that I had ever copulated. So I was full of indignation, fiercely retorting: "Nicht prima! Nein, nicht prima!" And the poor lady looked quite disconsolate.

And there were other occasions when I picked up memories which were to be savoured even less; and one in particular, which resulted from my politeness of disposition, in feeling that I had to go through with it, after discovering in the full electric light of the room, that I had made an error of judgement in my choice. The lady was far older than I had first supposed, and I was left with a distasteful record of the sequel in my memory. A memory which had the vitality to conjure up unpleasant fantasy thoughts.

Sagging her shrivelled skin and flagging breasts,
she wrestles to embrace my glacial face in a slug’s
hug, while I struggle to flick the fingers of her clasping
grasp on my shoulders, heaving to retrieve their freedom.
Speedily spun into dream fabric, the gleam
of unsightly nightmare sears my fearful vision
with derision, cackled in a haridan’s hard features,
replete with decaying teeth and slime on the tongue.
Her spongy cunt spews gooey spiders,
which slide side-step on galloping hairy legs,
to peg my palpitating heart to the floor
in a nauseous pool, convulsing in shudders of revulsion.
Beneath me lies a skeleton that’s mute,
with flesh disrobed from ribs like rotten fruit.

Brunswick wasn’t the only town with a special street for prostitutes, like Cobbler’s Alley. I took a couple of week-end passes to visit Hamburg, and discovered that there was a more elegant class of alley to be found, where some of the ladies were really quite glamorous. But there isn’t much point in me dwelling further on these matters. I estimate that there were no more than about ten occasions when I resorted to this method of sexual relief. For the rest of the time it was masturbation - as before.

In any case the whole novelty of taking a prostitute for sex soon palled on me. And towards the end of my time in Germany, I was beginning to perceive that there was much indignity in resorting to this manner of intercourse. What it did do was to reinforce both my personal, and my public image as a heterosexual copulatory male. And one should bear in mind just how vulnerable I had felt myself to be on this issue. Stories how I had been seen entering Cobbler’s Alley certainly reached the ears of my own troopers. There were ribbald conversations when they tried vainly to draw me out on what I got up to in these places. But in any case there were no more snide comments - from people in the Life Guards that is to say - about my sexual orientation.

There was a dearth of scope for sophisticated entertainment, such as might have been available to us if we had still been within easy reach of the London scene. So there was occasionally an element of crudity within the entertainments that we devised for ourselves - as when a group of officers, (sometimes including a few of the wives who were stationed out in Wolfenbüttel,) would go down to Cobblers’ Alley and pay to see a sexual exhibition, consisting of Lesbian love-play between two of the fattest and ugliest ladies on the street.

Or there were other occasions when something of an equally crude nature was set up spontaneously within the officers’ mess - like the time when Ben, who was an officer’s Springer Spaniel, was furnished with a stool so that he could gain sufficient height to mount Calamity Jane, who was another officer’s Great Dane. But as soon as he had achieved his orgasm, someone sadistically kicked away the stool - leaving poor Ben in a vain endeavour to retain his position humped upon her back. Despite falling off, they were unable to disengage from the act of copulation. The only happy note to this story is that Calamity Jane did get pregnant.

I found it interesting to note how the spirit of debauchery was resisted at first by my friend Laurence Kelly, for reasons of it being contrary to the spirit of Catholicism - such as he had acquired during his schooling at Downside. At the time when he was first commissioned, he was still talking about the fornicatory habits of some of the other officers in terms of them being lapsed Catholics. But it didn’t take very long before he ceased such judgement, in that he too had fallen from grace.

I had my own contributions to make to the crudities within the officers’ mess, in my composition of blue verses, to be sung to well known tunes of the day. I had best draw a curtain over some of these, so as to avoid giving unnecessary offence to the memory of particular contemporaries whom I had thus ridiculously lampooned. But on a milder note I furnished the words for a rendering of the song Sweet Violets - some of them taken from a fragment which one of the officers had heard sung in a London cabaret. But I composed the rest of the verses so as to complete the song’s bawdy intent.

 

[Omission]

It was one thing to have acquired a reputation as being an officer who "liked his bit of skirt", but it was quite another to be someone who could count on getting "a free roger". Not that there were great opportunities for such things out here. But many of us held high expectations for what might happen when we took a holiday up in Scandanavia; or in Copenhagen to be more precise. There was talk about free love being a way of life up there, and the very thought of it was most exciting to us British: especially the ones who had only recently left school. It was as if we had anticipated that the end of the war would have opened the doors to rapid behavioural evolution in sexual matters, but were finding it to be disappointingly slow in its appearance upon the scene.

Anyway I teamed up with Bendor Drummond and Rivvy Llewellyn-Davies in August for a trip to Copenhagen. We were travelling the four hundred odd miles in Bendor’s car, and he was a most dangerous driver. There was one particular occasion when we all felt lucky to get round a corner on screeching tyres, for to have left the road would have meant probable death - over the edge of a steep drop. But I daresay we held life as being less valuable at that age.

Another memorable episode on this journey was on one of the ferry crossings. There was a fierce little skipper in charge of the ferry, and he gesticulated to Bendor to move his car into a position that he preferred - causing Rivvy to exclaim: "What a bastard!" The ferryman, who couldn’t have been much more than five foot tall, took offence at this and started screaming at Rivvy: "What? You call me bastard? I understand you! I fight you! Stand up here! I hit you!"

This was all most un-British, and took Rivvy completely by surprise - especially in that the man had now reached in through the car window to grab him by his tie. Rivvy was apparently looking to me to do something about it, in that I had a certain reputation as a boxer; but I was damned if I was going to fight other peoples’ battles for them. It was Bendor who redeemed the situation. With an expression of supreme complacency, he enquired of the ferryman: "Now what’s the matter?..... I think there has been some mistake. Nobody has called you a bastard. All he said was: ‘We’ve passed it!’ You know - the line. You were telling me to park closer to the line." The ferryman was now out of his depth in this foreign language. So he released his grip on Rivvy’s tie and the tension lifted. But it had been a close shave, and one that impressed me considerably with regard to the sparky ferocity in Danish character.

By the time we arrived in Copenhagen, it was late in the evening and we had quite a problem to find anywhere with a room left vacant. So we ended up sharing one between the three of us. We had only two nights to our credit, so we launched straight into the business of trying to find ourselves a free roger. I won’t dwell at any length on our frustrations. After visiting half a dozen bars and night-clubs to no avail, we were becoming depressed. Scandanavian girls appeared to be no different to any others that we’d met, when it came to declining sexual advances. Bendor and myself eventually decided to waste no further time by returning to the hotel. When we were finally joined by Rivvy however, he spun us a tale of the marvellous sexual adventure he had experienced shortly after our departure. We had him recount the story in all its details to us.

Apparently he had gone to sit in a late night cafeteria, where he had espied an attractive girl reading a book at a neighbouring table. He had asked her what book it was, and the conversation led on to her inviting him to come back to her flat with her. Shortly after that, she had changed into "something more comfortable", which turned out to be a night-dress. And shortly after that, they were making love.

Now it didn’t really occur to me that Rivvy might be making it all up as he went along. And in response to my interest, the story was embellished with even more exciting detail - like the positions from the Kama Sutra in which they had ventured into the realm of experiment. He made it all sound so easy, and it put Bendor and myself to shame. So we were both very much on our metal when it came to the second night’s outing. We needed to display our seductive proficiency, or we stood to lose face in the stories that would be recounted back in the officers’ mess.

We kept to our own devices on this occasion, but my own endeavours met with abysmal failures similar to what had been my previous experience. Bits of it were quite humiliating - like the way women were cadging drinks off me at bar, and then slipping away with absurd comments about just having spotted that there husbands had arrived. And there was one tart who kept asking me if I was a bucker - which I failed to comprehend until it dawned upon me that I was being taken for a bugger once again. There was something too passive in my whole approach to this business. But it discouraged me greatly, and I didn’t wait around for much more of it.

Once the others returned to the hotel however, I had them both telling me how they’d scored successes in their seductions. Bendor claimed that he’d had a virgin in the back seat of his car, and Rivvy had the nerve to claim that he’d had the best roger of his life. I was told how he’d gone back to a girl’s flat, to find that there was a second girl waiting for them. By my constant questioning as to what exactly had taken place, I soon lay myself open to Rivvy’s ridicule. "Why are you so interested, Alex?.... Is it that you’ve never had a free roger?" I hoped that in replying that I probably hadn’t had as many as himself, I was managing to circumvent the need for an admission.

Back at Wolfenbüttel, I sensed how not all the officers were prepared to swallow Rivvy’s vaunted account of his sexual exploits. In fact he became strangely silent in the face of their cynicism. But it was my sheer gullibility which rendered me so vulnerable. I perceived myself as deficient in sex appeal, whenever upon unknown territory, because I felt unable to discount the veracity of all that he said.

Only one officer noted the nature of my inner discomfort, and this was Jan Barnes. He told me that he too, when he’d been a young subaltern, had doubted that the time would ever come when sexual seductions would come easily to him. He was now a captain, and he assured me that the time would come when the complications would disappear. "You’ll have successes all right. Everything will eventually fall into place for you." I noted his words. But I felt dubious if he really understood just how much ground I still had to catch up before my techniques in seduction might be regarded as mature.

It was the absence of sufficient womenfolk out here in Germany, which rendered my sex life so frustrating. It is true that there were the occasional visits from girls back in London, who had been invited to stay by one of the officers’ wives who had accompanied the Regiment to Germany. I wasn’t really in a position to suggest that anyone at all should receive such an invitation. I just had to sit back and watch whom others might persuade to come out and visit them.

One of my principal concerns over this period was to ensure that my name simply didn’t get forgotten by all those hostesses back in London, through whom I was going to meet beautiful young debutantes once I was back on their scene. So I felt that I should try to make some impression on their memories, from my distance in exile, with eccentrically worded answers to the numerous invitations to dances which were sent to me. They took the following form.

Lord Weymouth thanks Lady X for her kind invitation for ....., but he regrets that his Squadron-Leader is being exceedingly troublesome at the moment, refusing all his applications for leave until such a time as his inefficiency as a troop-leader has decreased. So Lord Weymouth is extremely unlikely to be able to attend - although there is still a remote possibility that he might.

I was always careful to keep the possibility open that I might suddenly turn up on the scene, imagining that it would give them something to think about, or even to hope for. In any case it would keep them wondering about the nature of my personality, and encourage them perhaps to issue other invitations at a later date.

What came as a set-back however, was a letter from Caroline Childe-Villiers to say that she was engaged to Gibby (Viscount) Melgund, who was Dommie Elliot’s elder brother. I didn’t know him personally, but it came as a surprise to me that things in Caroline’s life could have moved so fast during this brief spell that I had been away. I regretted it of course, inasmuch as it cut back on my options. But the truth of the matter is that my sights were set upon [X], so that I knew how I had no right to feel slighted. Indeed I wrote her a warm letter of congratulations.

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