Simon and the Professional

“Hi,” said the newcomer.

“Oh, hi,” I responded mechanically. This was my first sight of Jason Johnson and I was pretty sure from the word 'Go', that I wasn’t going to like him.

Jason had very fair curly hair, a pink-and-white complexion, and blue eyes – he might have stepped right out of one of those ghastly Victorian paintings of pretty boys like “Bubbles” or “When Did You Last See Your Father”. On the lapel of his jacket was a badge that proclaimed “To Know Me Is To Love Me”. I put him at about thirteen. By no means a little boy, he was a bit shorter than me, though not a lot.

“Show Jason the ropes,” said Mr Jackson, and went away again. (He was duty master and had other things to do).

But I’ll have to leave Jason for a bit, and tell you something about me. Otherwise there’s no point to this story.

In the past three or four years a lot of people – senior boys at my school, and adult men – have seemed to think I would enjoy being their bum-boy. It’s not true, and I don’t believe I would admit to it if it were.

How did it all start? As if I could ever forget. In my mind’s eye I can still see Uncle Carl (he wasn’t really my uncle but something a lot more remote): his big tall figure, his bronzed, out-of-doors complexion, his designer after-shave, the fast cars he always drove. He was often around when I first came to Britain, and I learned a lot from him. It might have been better if I hadn’t.

I was flattered, at the advanced age of eleven, that Uncle Carl took any notice of me. I was a scruffy kid then, my face usually needing washing and my hair always untidy. I slopped around in an old t-shirt and a pair of cotton PE shorts with no regard for my appearance. Beneath these I never wore underpants and if I wasn’t careful, people could see right up the leg. In those days I had a schoolboy penis, partly circumcised, two inches when “up”, and two balls the size of robin’s eggs in a little bag between my legs. How long ago that seems now!

Uncle Carl answered questions I dared not ask anyone else. They’d have called me a dirty-minded kid and told me to go away. Such as: why did boys and girls enjoy doing sex? What, exactly, was the “gelding” operation that made my cousin’s pony unable to “do it” with the filly in the next field? Finally, was anything like that ever done on boys?

Uncle Carl answered my first questions and clearly decided that young as I was, I was game for a lot more. To answer the last one, he suggested we go into the tack-room in the pony’s paddock. Here, he pulled my shorts down. As I’d said, I was full of dirty-minded curiosity and didn’t mind showing off my “privates” or my bum.

Uncle Carl’s finger was probing between my bum-cheeks. “This is just ordinary cold cream” he'd said as he smeared a liberal amount around and inside my anus. He motioned me to kneel on the floor, on all fours. My bum-cheeks opened and I felt something between them that wasn’t a finger. Something hard, hot and very big.

I wasn’t horrified. Far from it. At that age, anything “rude” is funny. The ruder something was, the funnier it seemed. Bums and penises were very, very rude, so what Uncle Carl was doing was really, really funny, and quite ridiculous – he was putting his penis up my bottom! I began to laugh. “Uncle Carl, what are you doing? Oh Uncle Carl, you rat!” I was laughing when my sphincter-muscle popped open, helpless when his penis slipped up my rectum, speechless when he shot his load into my bowels.

“Oh Uncle Carl, I liked doing that” I’d said. (Without it actually giving me a nice feeling it had been a thrill. Probably because we both knew it was quite illegal.) “It felt funny at first but then I loved it. I feel just like a girl”. (Over the next few months, if my guts had been like a girl’s insides, I’d have got pregnant time and again.)

The next time this was done to me was at my first boarding school. There was a culture there of “house tarts” and “flowers”. In other words, junior boys who substituted for girls when there were no real ones to be had. Girls are, after all, hard to come by at boarding schools. Very early on, the Captain of Football made me his “flower,” i.e. his personal bum-boy, and the object of a sort of furtive love. Ramsay – that was his name – often told me he was “keen on me”. Sometimes he’d try to kiss my face and neck. He was generous in a kind of way, often taking me for cream teas and buying me little presents.

These outings always ended in the same way: biking to a derelict building at the edge of the town, where I’d take off my shorts and pants and bend over a broken chair, for Ramsay to put his penis up my bum. But this is the point. It wasn’t anything to do with him buying me a cream tea or a new Mont Blanc pen. I’d have let him have me even if he’d given me nothing at all. Because it was expected. And he never, ever, offered me money. But he never hurt me, either.

Without saying I really enjoyed all this, it was exciting. I knew that senior boys loved doing it to me, so why not adults? Thinking like this led me to the one and only act I was ever ashamed of – seducing Uncle Max. Uncle Max with his trim military figure, neat small moustache, and tweed cap. How did I do it? Listen.

One day during a school cricket match, a lot of us, while waiting to go in, began to air scraps of knowledge about castrating boys and how it was done. There seemed to be general agreement that these days a doctor could prick a boy’s balls with a hypodermic and inject something that made them dry up. It was a fascinating idea and one I wanted to know more about.

So, when in the holidays, Uncle Max suggested a walk down the field to the railway line to watch a famous train go past, I’d something else in mind. “Uncle Max,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes at him. “I want to ask you something very private. Is it true that they (it’s always ‘they’!) can prick a boy’s balls and then they dry up, and he can’t get a baby?”

Uncle Max agreed it was. I went on, “Could it ever happen to me, Uncle Max? Do you think I’m old enough to have my balls pricked?” More fluttering of the eyelashes.

Uncle Max thought he had better take a look at me. In a disused shed nearby he took off my shorts and pants and began fondling my privates, saying in a queer husky voice that he loved playing with boys’ balls. “I know something you’ll love even more, Uncle Max,” I’d whispered – and got down on all fours. Presented with my open buttocks like that, Uncle Max lost any inhibitions he may have had. He got astride me, penetrated my anus and rode me like a beast. (Just so you know.)

That little encounter sparked off a train of other events which led my guardians to decide I was sexually precocious, depraved, had serious behaviour problems, and was generally a menace. As everyone knows, I was taken to a clinic and neutered – just as I’d learned at that afternoon cricket match. A doctor injected my balls with a drug and they dried up. The effect was just the same as having them cut right out, as they used to in the old days. The advantage was that there was no blood, little recovery time to speak of, and the effect was the same.

Getting neutered was meant to put a stop to all of my sexual frolics and for a time, it seemed to. My cock was for peeing through and my bum for sitting on - and NO more. Immediately afterwards I was transferred to a different school, where senior boys were not part of this equation. The Upper School – boys of GCSE age and above – was on the same campus but was run as a separate establishment. Morning service in the School Chapel was the only time and place that upper-school and lower-school boys came together. What senior boys did for sex, I neither knew nor cared.

But before long I came under the dismal and evil influence of Dr. Jolly, the music director. Dr. Jolly (that was not his real name and his degrees were false also) discovered I could sing – that my voice had improved after I’d lost my balls. He recruited me into the choir, where in a short time, I was promoted to Head Chorister. Another boy, Mark Maitland, who was already carving out quite a career as a singer outside of school, joined the choir at the same time. No surprises there, since his CD's already had most current-day recording boy-artists on the run!

We – Mark and I – were supposed to meet Dr. Jolly in his rooms to discuss choir business over tea and cream cakes once a week: myself on Fridays, Mark on Wednesdays. Before tea, there was another kind of meeting, in Dr. Jolly’s bedroom – bent over a chair with my pants down round my ankles. In time I discovered that Mark was being subjected to the same thing. Only, in Mark’s case, Dr. Jolly threatened to take his scholarship away if he refused. I never quite understood that one, what with his royalties from his recordings.

But me? I’m not sure. The act didn’t do much for me physically, and the early excitement of being taken like that had long since worn off. It's a common belief that boys (especially eunuch boys) experience sexual pleasure at this. Perhaps some do; I wasn't one of them. Usually when Dr. Jolly steered me into the bedroom with a glint in his eye and a bulge in the front of his trousers I used to think only, “Here we go again – let’s get it over with!” But it was doing something else for Dr. Jolly. He discovered – inevitably – that I’d been neutered and so had Mark.

With that knowledge, Dr. Jolly seemed to have flipped, mentally. In his mind he formed the preposterous idea of having a sort of “harem” of boy-eunuchs. He embarked on an amazing and horrible scheme. Whenever he could get any boys of unusual good looks, and without the complication of parents who might object, he would arrange for them to be neutered. He used the choir as a cover, and he would also use them as sex slaves.

Well, not exactly slaves - there weren't any cages or chains, but you get the idea.

That was until little Harry Ricketts blew the whistle on him. Harry's gelding went wrong, but that's another story you probably already know. At least it got rid of Dr. Jolly, but I digress.

However, with Dr. Jolly’s departure last Easter all of this stopped. I’ve made my point. I’d been sodomised time and again but never, never had I been offered money to drop my pants and bend over. And I didn’t know anyone who had. I was also still wondering just WHY everyone thought that I enjoyed having things (penises, enema nozzles, dildos, etc.) put up my bum.

Three pages about myself and nothing so far about Jason Johnson, the new boy, with whom I was to spend the next hour or two, “showing him the ropes”. I began by asking him a bit about himself.

He wasn't exactly forthcoming.

Jason’s home had been in the Middle West – in small-town America. He did tell me the name of the place, but it didn’t register with me. He’d only arrived in Britain the week before and had been staying, till that morning, with some business friends of his father's, who was “a merchant”. His real "Mommy" had died years before, and his father had re-married a girl from the American South called, apparently, Lalla. Layla. Lynda...something like that. Whatever.

What a name. I can only imagine.

For the moment, this was all of the information to be got out of Jason, and it was like drawing teeth. Bidden by Mr. Jackson to “show him the ropes,” I’d found Jason an empty cubicle in the dorm and waited while he put his things away. I showed him where the bathrooms were, and explained the routines at getting-up-time and going to bed. Jason just nodded and said “Uh-huh”.

It was at this point that I began to wonder about the attention span of the average American boy.

I continued “showing him the ropes,” with a tour of the campus. The refectory...the junior TV room – deserted at this time of day. Then outside. The science block...the Chapel (locked since it was a Wednesday)...the swimming pool (drained for cleaning). To each and every one of these Jason commented “Uh-huh”.

This, of course, put me in mind of the conversational skills of another boy I'd known, one 'Jazza', but he's another story, too. At least Jason wasn't crude, though.

We then reached the playing fields. Down at the far end and off-limits to junior boys, the First Game were having a practice match, which would result in the First XV and Second XV being selected. These were all big chaps of eighteen or so, and they were giving it everything. Suddenly Jason got quite animated. “Why don’t they wear helmets?” he asked after a particularly rough maul. “And they’ve just got jerseys on – no protection!”

All I knew about American football was from pictures, but I knew what he meant. “That’s how we play, over here,” I said. “The most protection anyone ever wears is a scrum cap – to prevent your ears getting torn off."

Jason was hardly listening. There had been some nifty passing in the mid-field before the Greens’ winger was tackled by the Whites’ full-back. Both crashed to the ground. “Don’t they ever get hurt?" asked Jason.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Especially in cold weather when the ground’s hard. Broken collar bones, mostly.”

But Jason had stopped listening again, intent on watching the players. “There are some big guys out there,” he said wistfully. “Really big guys”. (There was no one in the “pack” under 200 pounds and some much more). He wanted to linger but we still had things to do. It was a long time before anyone discovered what the attraction of “big guys” was.

We’d arrived at the junior games pavilion – deserted today, since junior games were played on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons. I showed Jason where he would change into his games kit, and where the showers were. I thought about showing him the san. and introducing him to Nurse and/or Matron, but I changed my mind. He'd meet THEM soon enough, and I didn't think it right of me to spoil the surprise. There didn’t seem much else I could show him. But Jason had a different idea. One I could never have guessed.

Like I said, the pavilion was deserted. There wasn’t even anyone walking nearby. Jason was looking me up and down in a very strange way.

“I guess you’ve brought me here,” he said “because you want my ass. All boys want my ass."

I should probably mention that it sounded more like, "I guess'yah brought me out'eer 'cuz ya want my ass." He'd said it in that thick, Midwestern American accent. It was also the most he'd said all this time, and he was quite hard to understand.

I guess they don't speak English in America - they speak "American."

However, I’d nothing to say to this! When I didn’t reply immediately, Jason dropped his shorts. Underneath, he was wearing not boys' underpants, but a girl’s pink nylon briefs. Looking me in the face, he wriggled his bottom out of his knickers. Now I could see the reason for the cherubic complexion, the silky blonde hair. Between his legs, a pink knob the shape of a small sea anemone – just a little smooth blob with a hole in the centre. A tiny boy-penis retracted right in, with no foreskin whatsoever to cover the glans. And nothing else. No balls, no scrotum – nothing. Jason was a boy-eunuch!

Jason spun round. “Do you like my ass?” he asked winsomely.

It was a very nice “ass”, that is, to anyone interested in boys’ bottoms, that is. Which I wasn’t - obviously. I decided to put a stop to the exhibition by shock tactics. Quickly I pulled down my own shorts – I had my PE kit on – and showed him everything I’d got. Or rather everything I hadn’t got. Jason’s jaw dropped. Then he looked sort of relieved.

“Oh wow!” he breathed. “I thought your voice sounded kinda funny. “You’ve had yours stung out, too?”

I’ve heard a few expressions for it. “Cut out” of course is the commonest; everyone thinks you have to "cut" a boy. Once at school I heard “drilled out” – in the belief that a boy’s testicles have a hard centre and once removed, the soft surrounding tissue withers away. But “Stung out” was something new! But I just nodded. “Quite a time ago. You look to be well healed. Do you want to tell me about it?”.

“Here’s how it was,” said Jason. He sat down and I followed suit. Naked below the waist we were, and not a pair of balls between us.

His Poppa’s second wife, the mysterious Lalla/Layla/Lynda ... whatever, was apparently devoted to her little stepson. But she had an obsession, as Jason quickly found out. He’d been eight years old when Lalla first came into his life – young enough for Lalla to bath him. And when it came to drying him, her hand would linger around his genital area, and she’d whisper, “When you’re just a little older, honey, we’ll get the doctor to sting out those nasty balls, and then you’ll always be Momma’s sweet honey-lamb and have fun!”

From then on Jason was brainwashed and not only by Lalla. With his Poppa’s marriage, Sue Ellen had come on the scene. She was Lalla’s own daughter from a now-dissolved teenage marriage. She was twelve, going on thirteen. She had a school friend, Abby, who had a farming background. Together they’d regale Jason with what they’d seen and all with a single theme – castration.

“I hated Abby!” said Jason firmly, in his high piping voice.

On Abby’s farm they bred Palominos. “When we’ve finished showing them,” said Abby “any that haven’t found a buyer, we put to work on the farm. Only first they are seen by the vet, to have their balls cut off. Poor things! It completely alters their nature”. (This, giving Jason a hard look).

Another time, “I watched them doing the pigs today. All boy-pigs get to have their balls cut out, to stop them putting their rods up the girl pigs”. Jason might have wondered, if he’d thought it through, how any animals came into the world at all!

In time things got more personal. Lalla hinted she was going to get Jason’s father “fixed”, i.e., vasectomised - since she didn’t want the bother of any more kids. Sue Ellen directed her barbs at Jason. “Mommy, it isn’t right that Jason should come into the bathroom when I’m using the shower. Can’t he be done like Abby’s horses are? It’d be alright then." And much more of the same rhetoric.

'Sue Ellen.' What a name.

This was on Lalla’s agenda the whole time, of course. On Jason’s eleventh birthday she took him to the city, to a clinic run by a Dr. Benjamin. Dr Benjamin’s main line of surgery was circumcising Jewish children but when boy-neutering drugs became widespread, he had developed a lucrative sideline in castrating boys, mainly Gentile. It seemed that the Jews had this thing about castration, but it only applied to Jewish boys. Circumcision was fine, but castration wasn't.

“At this age,” he had reassured Lalla, “Neutering is a very minor affair for the boy. What he’s never had, he’ll never miss. No more embarrassing bulges in his pants. Or,” (with a knowing smile at Jason) “any need to bother with those silly girls”.

And so, into Dr. Benjamin’s surgery where, Jason said, he had his balls "stung out." It sounded identical to what I’d been put through: he’d actually seen the doctor stick the needle into his balls, to “sting them out”. Within a week of being “stung out”, his testicles were visibly shrunken. Within a month they had withered away. His scrotum was at first a fold of darkish-coloured skin but this had grown out and become smooth. Dr. Benjamin must have been using regular Neutersol, and not the Rapid Version. Over the same period his cock, which had at first just gone limp, retracted into the little knob he had now. Almost.

I'd interrupted him here, however, being of the belief that the Americans are just wild about circumcising any boy - and especially babies - that they can find. Jason assured me that he'd been circumcised at birth, like most American baby boys, but that he'd had to have it 'adjusted' later to take up the slack skin of his shrinking penis. Of course, Dr. Benjamin, practiced as he was, had done a very fine and tight job of him. He'd even taken out the connective flap below the tip, the frenulum, leaving as little as he could.

"I didn't think circumcision was that common over here," Jason had said, looking at me. "But you are."

"They said it was to keep me from fiddling with it so much," I'd replied, "It didn't work. They didn't take much off."

"Oh."

I just nodded, trying to get him to go on.

“Why do you keep saying “stung out”?" I asked. “It doesn’t ‘sting’, and I should know. Over here, boys say they’ve 'had their balls pricked'. Which is all it is, really. Two pricks of a hypodermic under local anaesthetic and that’s it. Girls are off the agenda, so’s wanking, and a lot of other things”.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Jason thoughtfully. But in his mind, clearly, the thought remained fixed. Lalla had said he would “have those nasty balls stung out” and so, “stung out” they had been.

Lalla followed up Jason’s neutering in two ways, firstly by making sure he encountered Sue Ellen in the bath, in the shower – anywhere where she had no clothes on – to watch for any signs of sexual arousal. “I just couldn’t get a hard-on anymore,” said Jason. “I tried and tried, but Sue Ellen just laughed at me”.

He told me how this horrible girl used to open her legs to tease him, and then jeer at him when he could do nothing. When Lalla was satisfied about this, he went on - she arranged for him to join a Saturday morning boys’ club in the city. “Never mind the girls, honey,” she’d said. “You need to meet more boys”.

It’s uncertain just how much Lalla knew about what went on there. She may have had visions of a sort of Boy Scouts of America without the regimentation. Boys who were enrolled there were kitted-out with PE vests and shorts – the latter made of satin – so she may – taking a generous view – have supposed they spent their time in gymnastics.

The truth was rather different and only came to light publicly, a short time before Jason came to the UK; it was in fact the reason for his coming. “There was no gym or PE,” said Jason. “All we ever did was feel up clothes and play with one another’s bits. It was kinda boring”. Aroused by the soft silky material that their PE shorts were made from, much of the boys’ time was spent in fondling one another’s genitals and bottoms. Neutered boys like Jason were very popular and in the majority. This was in the “Reception” group.

“What happened next?” I asked, but in fact I dreaded hearing any more. I suppose it was out of a morbid sense of curiosity that I had to ask.

“D’you know what a butt-plug is?” asked Jason.

I didn’t. Jason’s explanation of how children as young as ten and eleven were prepared for sodomy, by stretching their anuses, was one of the most disgusting things I’d ever heard. Melanie's favorite dildo was nothing compared to it, and it made me nauseous to hear him describe how the thing (literally, a plug for a boy's butt - just like a plug for a drain) had been put in him at regular intervals and left in him.

I couldn't begin to imagine trying to go about my business of the day with something like that stuck up in me, but there was more to it, Jason went on.

Boys who were reckoned by the “doctor” (I guess he was no more a doctor than I am) to be sufficiently “broken in” were eligible for so-called “camp meeting” weekends. There was no connection – positively none – with campfires and tents. At weekends the club became a magnet for sick old pervs (Jason’s expression) who’d pay for the privilege of slobbering over a plump little boy with a painted face and bangles (they were dressed up to look the part of eunuch slaves). At intervals during the day and night, the boys received powerful soap-and-water enemas to make sure their bums were nice and clean.

So much for Matron's surprise, I thought.

Jason attended only two of these weekends. He learned, he said, two things. First, while it was being done to him, to shut his eyes and think of something else. Second and more important, that there was money in it.

And so, aged twelve, he went freelance, and entered on a dangerous twilight world of street corners and public toilets, being picked up and taken to vacant lots and hotel bedrooms. He had his own tariff, “Ten bucks for a blow-job (the client’s penis or his own), twenty-five for in-and-out, with a rubber on”. He was street-wise: “Bought my own condoms from vending machines,” he said.

The cops watched him for a long time. And when they were ready, they picked him up and asked a lot of questions.

Involved in this, Jason’s Poppa was not well pleased. Whilst he couldn’t prove that Lalla had deliberately exposed Jason to danger, there was always the suspicion that she had. Meanwhile the “boys’ club” had been splashed all over the papers and then closed down. There had been wholesale arrests. Doctor Benjamin disappeared from human ken. How his Poppa felt about his being neutered, Jason never mentioned.

But a totally fresh start, his Poppa reasoned, would be best – and so set the wheels in motion that ended in his coming, in mid-term, to my school. But his personality had been hopelessly warped. Before coming to Britain he’d begun hanging out with the local school football team (“really big guys!”). To some of these he’d proposed his city-street tariff – ten bucks for a blowjob, etcetera) – and had been accepted.

“I guess I could do that anywhere, any time,” he finished. “All boys want my ass”.

“Well, I’d be careful who you say that to, round here,” I said. “In some quarters it wouldn’t go down very well. Look, it’s a quarter to five and tea’s at half past, so get your pants on (pulling my own up) and I’ll take you across to join your own Group, the Thirds.” (mine was the Fourth).

I began by saying I was sure I wouldn’t like Jason. This first meeting didn’t alter things much. I was unsure if I even pitied him. But for the present I didn’t have to bother. He was in a different Group and a different House. Days and weeks went by. Then one morning I got a message from Roddy, who for some reason was in the school Infirmary. I went over there at visiting time, finding him on his own.

He wasn’t in bed, but sitting in a chair in his pyjamas. “What’s your problem?” I asked, looking him over. He didn't LOOK sick or hurt.

“Been circumcised,” said Roddy shyly.

“Whatever for?” I gasped.

“My own fault. You know when we have to go for soap-and-water, once a week?”

I nodded. He was talking about Matron’s weekly performance with the enema syringe. Once a week, any junior boy who couldn’t satisfy Matron that he’d used the bathroom regularly, got a litre of warm soapy water up his bottom. Two if you were unlucky or leaked too much. I’d had mine the day before. Matron was very obsessed with boys' bowels, I've mentioned.

“Well, Matron noticed I was a bit red and inflamed and asked me if it felt tight," Roddy went on, "And I said yes – so next thing, it was into her car and down to the accident-and-emergency place, and they chopped it off – with a sort of guillotine. Skinned it right down, they did! Didn’t half hurt, too! Given the choice I’d prefer to be castrated again. That didn’t hurt at all! But this hurts all the time. Going for a pee is terrible!"

"How much?" I asked, still a bit stunned.

"Much as they could," Roddy replied, taking his pyjamas down and showing me. His penis was little more than an exposed tiny red acorn now, on the tip of a very short and limp shaft. There was a ring of neat stitches up very near his body, and a few more just under the tip. It was, I later looked it up, called "high and tight with a complete frenulum removal."

“I’d better be careful what I say to Matron,” I said, thinking about my own 'token' and loose circumcision. Especially now that my penis was so much smaller and seemed to have more loose skin around it.

Roddy smiled and pulled his bottoms back up. “I don’t think you’ve got enough to worry about,” he said. This was true. At eight or nine I’d been circumcised to stop me “fiddling with it” as people said. It had left me with a truncated foreskin and I’d continued to fiddle. Right up to getting my balls pricked. There wasn’t a lot of point to it after that.

Still, judging from Roddy, it wasn't something that I wanted to experience. It almost looked as if they'd only done one more little cut (and from what he had left) that they could just have easily made a proper and full boy-eunuch of him! The thought of nothing at all 'down there' frightened me, though, and he must have seen it on my face.

"Can you stay a bit, Simon?" He then asked, sort of in a sad tone, "It's awfully boring, and I can't leave."

So we had a game of chess, at which Roddy easily beat me, and I was on the point of leaving when Roddy said, “I nearly forgot. You know that American boy, Jason?"

“I’ve met him,” I said carefully.

“Well, it was one night last week – Friday, was it? Or Saturday? Anyway, I’d been asleep and was woken by rain on the window”.

“Saturday then,” I said. “It came down hard in the night. Go on – I’m interested”.

“Jason was out of bed. I know, because his cubicle door squeaks in a peculiar way. I guessed he’d had to go to the bathroom. Only he didn’t come back – not for ages. By the time he did, I was busting for a pee myself, so I waited till his door closed, then got up myself.

“Well, at the end of the dorm where the bathroom is, there’s vinyl down on the floor and I saw a trail of wet footprints. But the bathroom floor was perfectly dry: I looked. The footprints seemed to come from the opposite direction. But that’s a dead end, it only goes to the linen cupboard. The big walk-in place, with a window”.

“Maybe he peed on his feet,” I said. Roddy laughed, and for the moment we left it. Roddy then had a analgesic for the pain, and I had duties, so I took my leave of him.

Roddy’s circumcision healed up quickly and he soon returned to school. When I saw him next, he had more strange news about Jason. Once a week, a mobile savings-bank called at the school. A lot of boys had accounts there, and drew their weekly pocket money. Jason had been just in front of Roddy in the line-up for the teller. Only he wasn’t drawing out. He was paying in. There was a wad of notes in his hand.

“That’s a nice lot,” Roddy had said admiringly. There had seemed to be over £100 in Jason’s hand.

“I get an ‘lowance, okay?” Jason had replied, in an aggressive sort of way. Roddy let the matter drop, and kept it to himself till he saw me again, when he told me about it.

"He said 'an allow-ance," I told Roddy slowly.

"Damn accent of his," Roddy replied.

But Roddy had tales of more strange doings in the night: this time no more than a scratching, scraping sound, like something heavy being dragged against the wall. I’d no explanation, but that morning I saw two unusual things for myself.

It was my turn on the roster as form monitor to collect the mail and bring it to the main building. This meant going halfway along towards the main entrance to the place where the mail van turned round. Here, there was a small wooden shed or store, where the mail-man left the bags for collection. Apart from this single visit every morning, no one ever went there. A nasty little place, the loose corrugated-iron roof flapping in the wind.

But someone had. There were two or three used condoms on the floor. Someone, perhaps one of the maids (we had quite a number of sluttish-looking ones) had used this place for sex, up against the wall with her knickers down......

On the way back I caught a glint of metal and looking up at the building I saw that a long aluminium ladder, part of the fire escape system, was partly extended, hanging down. Mr. Trefusis was on duty so I thought I’d ask about it. He was busy with something. “Sir!” I said.

Mr. Trefusis looked up. “Oh, it’s you, Scott. Well, what is it?”

“Sir, are we due for a fire drill? Only part of the fire-ladder is extended”.

“Fire drill?” he responded. “No, not that I know of. But you say the escape ladder’s down? Show me”.

I showed Mr. Trefusis the ladder, and he went off grumbling, to get someone to stow it away again. But it was not the last we were to hear about fire drills.

I should explain that the building which housed the refectories, kitchens, dorms, dayrooms and a few other things, was shaped like a large letter “E”, without the middle bit. The Upper School had one half, the Lower School the other. Inside the building there was, normally, no communication between the two halves. But on the dormitory floors, in case of fire, emergency fireproof doors could be opened, making it possible to pass from one side to the other. The locks were all on the Upper School side. On our side you needed a key.

It was at getting-up-time next day that loud shouts were heard coming from the Third Form dormitory level (the floor below mine). One of the Upper School prefects was bellowing, “Who the bloody hell opened this fire door? Come on, who was it?” Then the door shut to, with a crash.

Wet footprints from a dry floor. Scratching noises in the night. A fire ladder left in the “down” position and a fire door left open. I couldn’t see any connection between these things. Still less with used condoms in the mail-shed, and Jason paying lots of money into the bank.

But there was a connection. One we were soon to find out.

It was the lunch break. The refectory windows looked out on a patch of gravel, where staff sometimes parked their cars. Today there were no cars, but instead, a quartet of boys who arrived walking very quickly, and went into a huddle. Three seniors and one junior. The junior boy was Jason.

We knew all of the seniors by sight. Brian Horrocks and Ian Murray were enormous prop-forwards in the First XV, impressive-looking by any standards. But it was the fourth member of the quartet who dominated the little party.

Gerard Hopkins was Head of Upper School and Captain of the first cricket XI. He was nowhere near as tall as Horrocks or Murray – five-nine to their six-two – but there was no doubt who was the boss. He was conspicuous for a start, always wearing his green-red-and-white striped First XI blazer winter and summer. To look at, he might have stepped out of an oil painting called “A Handsome Young Man” – or something like that.

He had an entrance scholarship to Cambridge, where his papers had so impressed the examiners that Professor Stephen Hawking had asked to see them. Lastly, he was Welsh, a strict Baptist, and funny-tempered with it. And all of us were a bit afraid of him.

Hopkins appeared to be questioning the other two seniors. If it was meant to be a confidential get-together, he’d got it wrong. He had an audience of 300 junior boys.

Very little could be heard of what the Head of Upper School was saying, until he turned to Jason with a question. At the reply- whatever it was – his face turned white. For a few seconds he seemed lost for words. Then he found them. We all heard what he said.

“You – little – WHORE!” shrieked Gerard Hopkins.

He grabbed Jason’s shoulders and began shaking him violently. But then big Mr. Waterbury, the senior geography master, and a dining room assistant called Moon, hurried outside to stop the rot. Mr. Waterbury took charge of Jason and shepherded him away somewhere. The senior boys went off in the opposite direction and Moon, a nondescript character, returned to help with serving the pudding: treacle roll as I remember.

That was the last we ever saw of Jason. For a time, a wall of silence descended. But little by little the story came out – as it was bound to in the end.

Overcome by the obsession that he had a market (“All boys want my ass!”) Jason hadn’t been idle. Under cover of darkness and rain, he’d explored the school roof, using the linen cupboard window from where there was only a short drop onto a walkway in the roof-valley. From there he had located the corresponding window in Upper School. Finding it open, he’d left graffiti in the Fifth Form and Remove Form toilets, before returning. Roddy had spotted his wet footprints on the floor.

Another night he’d prospected an alternative route, using the fire ladder, but had been unable to extend it fully. The sounds I’d heard were his unsuccessful efforts to put it back.

On his secret visits to Upper School he’d “serviced” three or four boys a night. He’d even managed a few during the day – leaving used condoms in the mail hut. It was relatively simple to make a tryst there, unseen – if you went at a time when the whole school was supposed to be doing something else, like having dinner.

He’d converted his old street-corner tariff to pounds; the fee for having him fully was £15, no problem to anybody. Inside a week he’d earned well over £100. Roddy had seen him paying it in to his bank account.

But then, rumours had reached the likes of Horrocks and Murray. Both nearly 19 they had long term relationships with girls: Murray was actually engaged!. They in turn went to Gerard Hopkins with their suspicions. Hopkins had his own, and his Welsh Baptist sensibilities were outraged. Tackling Jason that day, Jason had replied, “All boys will screw another boy's ass, if there’s no pussy available,” and that put the lid on it. That scream of “You little whore!” still rang in my ears.

Some days later, four of us sat or sprawled in various attitudes in Roddy’s big sitting-room. It was an impromptu meeting of the Knickers Club, which I’d founded a few weeks earlier, on being given a white g-string by Nurse (in the infirmary) and finding it was nice to wear. The only rule at meetings was: no trousers (or jeans, or shorts, or skirts) to be worn.

Melanie was down in the kitchen. I’d seen her earlier and the sight of her tiny black thong, pulled tightly up between her thighs, gave me – I swear – a tingle where my balls once were. Girls were honorary members of the Club, since they wore knickers anyway.

Mark sprawled on the hearthrug, wearing the shiny white briefs that his girlfriend, Wendy, gave him. He’d put on a bit of weight and I thought he could have been mistaken for a short-haired girl. Wendy sat on the sofa, dressed (below the waist) in a tiny white tanga with a big red heart over the crotch. We’d been talking about Jason.

“Poor little soul!” said Wendy, who was a kind-hearted girl. “With that upbringing he never had a chance. Where is he now?”

“Dr. Holroyd got him admitted to a re-hab place,” said Mark. (Dr. Holroyd was the Headmaster). “He’s got a lot of contacts in that direction. They may be able to straighten Jason out in time, get him some help."

Wendy got up and went to help Melanie. “Now she’s gone,” said Mark “I’ve something to tell you. I’m going to get myself seen to”.

“You mean, HRT?” I asked.

Mark nodded. “That and a bit more. It’s mainly on account of Wendy. She’s a normal healthy girl, and all I can do is feel her up, and fumble, and kiss, like a singing eunuch. And that’s all I am, a singing eunuch.”

Sitting there with his legs apart, his knickers pulled up tight, I could see what he meant. Or as the school nurse used to whisper confidingly in my ear, “a big strong boy who couldn’t DO it”.

Mark went on.“The other day I asked myself how much longer I wanted to sing soprano. I went “commercial” at 10½ - almost five years ago. Aled Jones went on till seventeen only I think he was singing falsetto towards the end. If I go on too long I’ll be a freak, and freaks don’t sell records.

“I asked my trustees – you know, the bunch of bods who look after my income till I’m 18, just as a joke, if I had enough for a Ferrari, when I’m old enough to drive a car. They gave me an old fashioned look and told me there was enough for a house on the river at Henley-on-Thames!

“Royalties have been pouring in. And they are likely to go on doing so, even when I stop singing. So I thought, I’d spend a bit on myself- see if anything could be done”.

“You mean – reversal?” I asked, hardly able to believe my ears. I'd always thought that Mark was so happy as he was.

“Yes. HRT would put hair on my chest and change my voice but probably not much more. One of my trustees, the one who seems to be the boss, is a doctor; I spoke to him and he sent me to see someone in Oxford, and he told me about this German chap – a Professor Zuniger, who’s been doing stem cell research.

“There’s been a lot in the papers about horses. How, sometimes, a young horse has been gelded because he seems just ordinary, and then on the turf he turns out a winner again and again. Till now, that was just too bad; the blood line was lost for ever. Well, Professor Zuniger found an eight-year-old, a gelding of course, whose dam was still around and when she foaled again they kept the placenta in deep-freeze.

“The professor did a culture, and implanted something – I don’t understand it all – and the results were astonishing. It hasn’t regenerated a complete pair of balls of course, but it’s regenerated something. That old horse is rampaging around like a stud stallion – his androgen count has gone through the roof!

“Professor Zuniger has done some work on humans – mostly road accidents, or disease,” (Mark and I had a classmate, Colin, whose balls had atrophied after a bad attack of mumps). “The Oxford man – I forget his name – is going to get in touch and suggest he sees me next. I’ll be the first subject he will have seen, to have had a deliberate neutering operation. I think he’s bound to agree”.

“It seems that, provided there’s just a trace of hormone-bearing tissue left, the professor has something to work on. So there’s hope”.

“I’ll keep fingers crossed for you” I said dismally, not sure why my stomach felt like it did.

There didn’t seem a lot to say after that. If it were Melanie, I thought, it would be a different matter. With Melanie, the fact that I couldn’t penetrate her, put my penis up her vagina, shoot hot sperm inside her – was fascinating- the main attraction. She never tired of hearing how I’d had my balls pricked. It almost gave her an orgasm on the spot. But Wendy, as Mark said, was a normal healthy girl...

So far, Roddy had made no contribution. Seated at the table, he was deep in his stamp collection. Roddy, who alone of the three of us, had really wanted to get his balls pricked; who seemed contented to be what he now was.

“What do you think, Roddy?” I asked.

“I think,” said Roddy slowly “there are some things you should never do, just for money?”.

“Meaning?” I returned. (Jason’s nocturnal goings-on, I supposed – or did he mean Mark? Mark, after all, had been neutered ‘just for money’ so that his singing career could continue.)

Just then the girls returned, bearing huge platters of ham-and-eggs, sunny-side-up.

“What a lazy lot!” said Melanie. “You might have helped!”

So we never did learn what Roddy thought.

THE END