The speaker was a 12-year-old boy, round-faced, rather plain, with untidy light-brown hair, and I knew him. He was the ward of my neighbour-across-the-road, Jennifer. She was a cousin of mine at several removes, and David – for that was the boy’s name – in much the same relationship. David’s parents, living abroad, had foisted him on Jennifer a few months before, requesting her to get him into a local school. So “Uncle Max” was more or less correct if you took a few liberties with the family tree.

There was more to “Help me with my maths homework” than met the eye. It meant that Jennifer had gone out and would I please see that David did his prep and had his bath in good time. If this meant doing David’s maths for him, then so be it. (Maths was known to be my subject so I was a soft target). In return I could help myself to Jennifer’s gin. That was a long-standing deal.

I locked up and followed David across the road. I tried to explain the principles of his maths- quadratic equations- but might as well have talked to a brick wall. David was really very stupid. Jennifer was trying to get him into a boarding prep school but it was proving hard work. I ended up doing all the equations and making him copy them out. At nine o’clock I sent him for his bath.

At nine-thirty it occurred to me that he must still be there. A faint noise of splashing indicated he was still in the water, so I followed the noise, intending to get him out of the bath and into bed before his guardian returned. “You’ve been in there long enough” I called out, as I marched in. David stood up in the bath, just as he was. It was the first time I’d seen him without clothes - and I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. There was no other way of putting it. David had no balls. He had a little short penis wagging between his legs - but no balls. He was a boy-eunuch.

Three years on and I wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Three years on, social attitudes changed, reflected in the law. What had been strictly illegal was now – within certain parameters – acceptable. It was now permissible to have a boy’s balls taken out with no questions asked. Many foster parents and guardians knew the advantages of sending boys for the “snip”. Neutered boys were more attentive in class and studied harder; they were more docile and obedient, and were never a nuisance with girls. You’d see them on school buses, where they tended to congregate in little groups, identifiable by their high voices and peaches-and-cream complexions. Three years on and science made matters easier still, , with the release of the drug “Neutersol” for the routine castration of pre-teen boys. In place of messy, invasive (and expensive) surgery, a boy’s future manhood could be cancelled-out in seconds, by two pricks of a hypodermic.

But to return to the present. I couldn’t take my eyes off David’s genitals. His testicles appeared to have been cut out, rather than lost through illness or injury as some boys’ are. His penis was of the trimmed variety , a silly little circumcised pink doodle – not unusual for boys, but this one was so small that it was more suited to a four-year-old than an eleven-year-old. Beneath it, his scrotum had been pruned away entirely – only a ridge of scar tissue remaining .I told him to dry himself, trying not to look interested in what I saw, although I have to confess I was fascinated by the sight of this emasculated boy. When and why had his balls been taken out, leaving him with his penis forever limp, and unable ever to “do it” with a girl? I had to know.

For the earlier part of my life my inclinations were wholly hetero, and were fixed – as I thought, years before, when I was barely sixteen. Some freak of the school timetable had resulted in being alone with a classmate, Sue, in a remote, unused part of the buildings. Before the hour was up, I had a hand up Sue’s school skirt, tickling her fanny. Not many minutes later her skirt hem was round her waist, her Aertex knickers round her feet, and my penis was shooting hot sperm right inside her vagina. I’d thought there could be no sensation that would come anywhere near the sheer bliss of what I was doing, even through the rubber Sue had made me put on “to save her starting a baby” as she artlessly put it. (All boys carried rubbers “just in case” and quite a few girls too. The most marvellous thing ever invented, to my teenage mind: boys and girls could have sex whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted, and be perfectly safe).

For a long time I’d had no reason ever to alter my view of what made good sex. At a Sandhurst dance, my partner Lucy had whispered “I’ve been horny all evening - let’s find an empty room”. We hadn’t found one; instead we’d found a garden lounger, where Lucy had hoisted up her ball gown and pulled her tiny black briefs to one side. A few seconds’ joyous thrusting followed, before we returned to the dance floor, respectively with an aching prick and a tingling fanny, the only evidence a used and knotted durex in a flower-bed.

But then came my commission and a posting overseas. I was quickly warned against the local girls - those who sold sex - – that all were infected with STDs of one sort or another. The chances of meeting unattached females were very slim. My frustrations must have been obvious, because one evening, after mess, a small hand caught hold of mine, and a shy voice whispered “Lieutenant, you like wanky-wanky? I wanky-wanky you, you wanky-wanky me? You like?"

The speaker was my houseboy, Soo, a tousled urchin whose daytime duties were to sweep out my quarters and do other little chores. Once or twice I’d had to chase him out of the troops’ showers, which he wasn’t supposed to use, and saw that he had a slender penis, a tiny scrotum, and no trace of pubic hair. He was probably about twelve, although Chinese children mature later than their opposite numbers in the West and he might have been older.

It was in the sports store, late that night, that I waited for Soo. I soon heard the sound of his bare feet on the concrete floor. Practised hands undid my jungle-green slacks. “Wah! Velly big one!” was his comment on what he found there. “You plenty money?”

I peeled a note off the sticky wad in my top pocket and gave it to him. Soo took it, eyes shining. “Lieutenant” he whispered “you want look-see me?”

I did want. Soo slipped off his faded blue cotton shorts which fell to the floor. In the dim light I saw a rounded bottom and reached out a hand to fondle it. I thought I’d never touched anything so smooth. Turning him around I saw his penis was already erect – all two inches of it. Between my finger and thumb it felt as hard as bone and as soft as satin. Very gently I rolled back his foreskin and took his penis in my mouth. All boys like to have their cocks sucked, and Soo was no exception, quivering all over. I continued to caress his backside.

But now Soo was speaking again. In a very low whisper he confided “Lieutenant, I do velly good turn, all same-same girl, back way. You want?”

Silently he handed me a tube of ointment from his shirt pocket and turned around. I had a full view of that beautiful behind. Soo flexed his knees, parting the cheeks of his bottom. I guided myself to the spot; Soo’s modest weight did the rest. His anus opened and I felt his soft buttocks come to rest on my legs as my penis slid right up into his back-passage. Seconds later I came inside him, pumping and pumping to the last drop. Soo moaned out loud with sex pleasure.

That first time, and the many that followed, taught me something. First that Soo wasn’t “male” except in the very narrow sense of his tiny undeveloped “bits”. He belonged to a third sex, neither boy nor girl. The pleasure of shooting hot sperm into a boy’s rectum was as great as doing it up a girl’s vagina , and however many times I did it, he would never become pregnant! There were several other advantages. Though I sometimes told Soo “I love you, same-same girl” I didn’t have to promise to marry him. I didn’t have to buy him diamond rings and expensive perfume.

For a long time afterwards I sought out boys for sex. Most often they were Chinese boys from round the camp but sometimes they were the children of other servicemen. The average 11 – 12 – year-old, I figured, was a dirty-minded kid, insatiably curious about sex, eager to know more, and ready for anything. Once, it’s true, I got it wrong. I selected a promising kid – a NCO’s child – and propositioned him along the lines that we’d go to a quiet spot, I’d give him a nice time, and he would pull his pants down, for me to put my penis up his bottom. If that went well and he liked it, then I meant, in time, hopefully, to train him up as a bum-boy. He proved to be the wrong boy, at the wrong time. There was a row, I got posted home, and I had to lie low for a bit.

David however was true to the usual type and got the message – that I liked boys’ bottoms. His expression changed to a cheeky grin. “Would you like my bum, Uncle Max? You can have my bum if you want”.

He stood up in the bath and climbed out, wet as he was, and bending over, offered me his plump buttocks. The temptation was enormous but I wasn’t about to take his virginity. “Have you done it before?” I asked.

“Lots of times. With several of the senior boys, and Mr Vandermeer, the games master”.

So that was alright. David was experienced and showed it by what he said next. “There’s some Vaseline in the bathroom cupboard”. I found the Vaseline and used it, on him and on me. When we were both lubricated I spread David’s buttocks, found the opening, and gently eased myself in.

Whilst I was inside him, I’d reached round and played with his limp little cock. As my sperm jetted up into his bowels, I enjoyed a wonderful relief from the frustrations of the past few weeks. I pulled my subsiding erection out of him with an audible “pop”.

“It smells!” said David with a giggle. It did, so I went to the basin to remove all traces. Giving myself a good wash, I jerked a finger towards David’s private area. “Isn’t it time you told me what happened to you down there? I asked.

“It was like this, Uncle Max” he began, and stammered out the saga of his castration.

David’s story was a combination of bits of bad luck. It was a coincidence that on that particular day, on the beach near his home, there had been a plague of sandflies, and another coincidence that these particular insects were notorious for carrying a bacterial infection of a particularly vicious kind, such that people who got bitten on a hand or foot invariably got blood poisoning and might lose fingers or toes. One of these flies had found its way up the leg of David’s shorts and when he tried to brush it away it had bitten him on his scrotum.

At first his organs merely became red and swollen, but a day or two later he was running a high temperature and was in great pain from his genitals which had begun to turn black. By the time he was admitted to hospital, necrosis had advanced too far. His temperature dropped only after the surgeon had cut out both the dead and diseased testicles and cleared up most of the surrounding infected tissue with a laser. Like a slave-boy of an earlier time, David returned home as a boy-eunuch, ball-less, impotent and sterile.

“I was able to keep my piss-piss, but not my balls. And now I won’t ever be able to get married or have children. My nice – little - piss-piss” he said dreamily, fingering his penis in an absent-minded way. “It can’t ever make cream but it can still make lemonade.”

This was a reference to a rude poem popular among children of both sexes:

“Eyes, nose, mouth, chin, down the road to Uncle Jim!

“Uncle Jim makes lemonade, round the corner chocolate’s made”.

In another part of the country, little girls exploring inside little boys’ shorts were said to recite “Herb beer sold here, sausage round the corner!”

Cream was outside their experience at that age.

But David had a further question.

“Would you like to suck it?”

“If you want” I said. “Only don’t pee in my mouth”. I bent and sucked him. He stayed limp as I expected.

“Anyway” I said, after I’d finished, “you aren’t the first boy, and you won’t be the last, to have that done”.

He brightened up at that. “Is that operation often done on boys?” he asked. “Wait” I replied.

I felt in my notecase for the print I always carried: a sketch attributed to Caravaggio which illustrated the emasculation of a boy, the artist’s favourite- a curly-headed cherub of twelve or so - some time in the early 17th century, when any barber-surgeon included among his basic skills, knowing how to remove boys’ testicles. It was one of the commonest minor operations of those days. Among the enormous peasant families in 17th century Italy, once there was an eldest son to carry on the family name, it was the regular practice to castrate the younger ones and see how they turned out.

In the picture the young “patient” lay on a table, his legs held well apart on an iron frame, and secured with straps at the knee and ankle. Innocent of any trace of pubic hair, he nonetheless had a well-filled scrotum. His sturdy penis, was held out of the barber’s way by a decorative clamp ornamented by a lion's head Nearby, the barber reached for his castrating-irons, to stretch the boy’s scrotum and make it easier to cut out his testicles, while in a small brazier, other irons were heating, to burn out the spermatic cords and destroy all possible future activities he might have had as a man. After he was healed, he would pose as Cupid, his penis reduced to a pretty little article that would never do anything so rude as becoming erect, to offend the artist’s clients.

David studied it carefully. “That boy has big balls” he said. “What are they going to do to him?”

“He’s going to have his balls taken right out” I said “because they don’t want him to be able to do the thing with a girl, that makes her start a baby.”

“But that looks a long time ago, from their clothes” objected David. “What about nowadays?”

I didn’t reply direct, but began to tell him of the thousands of boys who, down the centuries, had lost their genital organs for one reason or another. Some of this David knew already. “Isn’t it true, Uncle Max” he butted in “that boys who were going to be page boys, in a house where there were girls, were always taken to the doctor to have their balls cut off, so they couldn’t do rude things with the girls?”

“Yes, that’s quite true” I said. “A boy who became a page to, say, a duke’s daughter would have to attend her in her bedroom and even in her bath. It would be a terrible temptation for him, and the girl might even encourage him. Girls do, you know. You know, when a girl is about fourteen she develops a posy of hair between her legs, and that’s a sign that she is old enough to have a child. That’s when the boy would be taken to the doctor to have that operation.”

David butted in. “The doctor would cut the page-boy’s balls out, and then his piss-piss would shrink up, and be too short to go into the girl’s love-hole. Too soft, also. It’s got to be really long and hard to go inside a girl”.

“You know all about that, I suppose?” I asked. David ignored me and went on.

“Mine never goes stiff now. I’ve tried to make it go hard, I’ve tried and tried, but it just won’t. Look”. He took hold of his tiny penis and began trying to wank himself. Nothing happened, his erectile nerves had been destroyed.

“And there’s another reason” I went on, ignoring him “If a boy has that procedure done on him, he gets to keep his treble voice. In Italy, at one time, they used to “do” about three thousand children every year, so that their voices would never change. Some of them became very successful as operatic singers”. Having got David’s attention I told him about some of the famous eunuchs in history. I deliberately didn’t tell him that for every Farinelli there were myriads of tearful altos in dim church choirs, who’d never made the big time, scores of ploughboys and olive pickers with high voices who’d never even reached that humble level.

I told him of my time in the Middle East, the scores of neutered children scurrying along corridors and through courtyards on errands. Some would be fair-haired, pink-cheeked and placid, others olive-skinned, with dark intense eyes. They might have been abducted and passed on to slave-dealers or sold by bankrupt parents, but on reaching the Arab world all would have been stripped naked and their legs held apart, and would have learned, at first hand and painfully, how gelding-irons were used. For this was part of Arab culture, and domestic eunuchs were still commonplace.

I told him all about the Gulf States, where I’d lived for some years. There, castrating boys was not at all unusual. Youngsters with any form of learning disability, like Downes syndrome, were always castrated. In country districts it was also done to many orphans, to prevent them trying to inherit from more distant relatives in later life (only “entire” men could be validly named in wills.) More importantly it was the lot of juvenile delinquents to be castrated – the State Government thought that this was the most effective way of taking criminal elements out of the gene pool. Ordinary people felt that naughty boys, like frisky horses or stubborn donkeys, would be better behaved with that part of them gone.

“So they all have their balls off” said David. “Like me”.

“It’s a bit different now” I said. “In the last couple of years doctors have worked out a new method. They prick a boy’s balls and inject a drug which makes the blood vessels close up and the organs wither away. The effect’s just the same”.

David hung on my every word, eager to hear more. “It’s very easy and quick” I said. “After a boy has had his balls pricked he just pulls his pants up again, and goes back to whatever he was doing, games, lessons or whatever”.

“But afterwards he can never do anything with a girl” broke in David in an excited voice.

He asked to see the picture again. I produced the sketch and he studied it closely. The glowing brazier fascinated him. “After that boy’s balls have been cut out, he is going to be finished off with hot irons” he commented, “to make quite sure he’ll never be able to do anything. His piss-piss will shrink up afterwards” He paused, reflecting. “They used a laser on my cords also, but I was asleep and didn’t feel anything. That’s why my piss-piss is so short. It’s quite difficult to do this”.

“This” was something David had to do every night before putting his pyjamas on. He showed me how he had to thread his penis through a tight ivory ring. Jennifer made him wear it. Elsewhere in the world I’d come across this practice, intended to discourage “nocturnal emissions”. David of course would never experience these, and in his case it was to prevent him wetting the bed, as he’d regularly done a few months back. “I can’t do a wee” he explained “without taking it off”. (It is a fact that neutered boys can experience bladder weakness).

How this conversation might have gone on, I don’t know, for the front door opened and a high affected “Hilloo! Hilloo!” resounded up the stairs. Jennifer was back.

A surprise development in the next few weeks was David’s admission to a boarding choir school with, seemingly, flying colours. His academic work was as doubtful as ever but his voice test had been impressive - he had held some amazing high notes. Losing his testicles nearly a year earlier had totally removed his testosterone source and this was having the proverbial effect in enhancing his soprano voice. Unknowingly, the choir school had admitted its one-and-only castrato. If the school matron discovered David’s ball-less condition she kept it to herself.

At the end of term he reappeared and came to see me. I must confess that the first hour of that visit was spent in my bedroom, with David’s shorts round his ankles and my penis right up his bottom. But afterwards while pulling his shorts and pants up, “I’ve something to tell you, Uncle Max” David confided. One of the prefects had asked him to become his “flower” - in other words the older boy’s partner for anal sex. Other schools have different words for the same thing. The prefect, discovering that David was already an experienced bum-boy, eagerly appropriated him, buying him small presents and treating him to cream teas in the town. In return David used to go with him to a derelict cottage where the prefect would put his penis up David’s bottom and ejaculate into his bowels. “If he does it much more I’ll shit tree-trunks” David laughed.

The prefect’s delight at finding a willing sex-partner was increased beyond measure on discovering that David had an incomplete set of genitals. In the junior school this was common knowledge. All the junior boys saw David in the shower or - it being summer – at the swimming pool, several times a week. If they registered his lack of testicles they would only have wondered if it hurt, having them off. But to the upper school, David was something exotic, a boy-eunuch from the Thousand and One Nights, or from Herodotus.

In the autumn term David had returned to school to find himself promoted to the front row of the trebles and in line for leading chorister. His protector meanwhile had stayed on to try for university entrance and had been unable to keep to himself the secret of his “flower”. David, unknown to himself, was the object both of jealousy for his privileged position and of curiosity about his operation. There was a disaster waiting to happen.

David’s lack of male hormones preserved his beautiful voice and fresh, boyish complexion, but in other ways this played him false. At the age when his body should normally have been muscling-up, he still had a juvenile physique. He had put on weight, round his tummy and also on his thighs and buttocks. One afternoon there was a cross-country run. David lacked both the speed and stamina for this and soon found himself trailing the pack, so much so that he was caught up by the front runners of the senior boys’ section, that had started later.

Not all the front runners passed him. David found himself being steered along a side path by two hefty fifth-formers.

I got to know about what happened in a variety of ways which it would be a breach of confidence to tell you about. For the same reason I shall refer to the fifth-formers as Smith and Jones which is as good as anything else.

“Well, if it isn’t the ball-less wonder” said Smith. “What say we find out the truth - is he or isn’t he?” He reached over and pulled down David’s running shorts. One look at David’s limp little “doodle” was enough. “So it’s true then” he muttered. “Let’s have a better look at you. Turn around. H’mm - nice bum.”

“Fancy him, do you?” asked Jones. “Look, you go first. I’ll hold him steady and keep a look out”.

The path ended at a derelict hut, where David was forced on to his knees whilst the fifteen-year-old dropped his shorts, and he was then thrown on to his face. The bigger boy spat on his hands and rubbed spittle on his penis. With only this for lubrication, he forced his erection into David’s bottom. No sooner had he climaxed than other footsteps were heard.

There must have been ten or a dozen boys waiting in the trees, perhaps more. One after another they crouched over David’s sprawling form and penetrated his anus. One after another they pulled up their shorts and ran on, their urges relieved, leaving him there.

David limped back to school two hours overdue, straight into the arms of an anxious duty-master, who at first only registered that the boy was unwell in some way, before passing him over to the Matron. She, more thorough, soon discovered that the seat of David’s running shorts was a mass of blood, semen and faeces. She reported this to the Head, and unable to keep it to herself, also pointed out David’s ball-less condition.

The Head was in a quandary. As a humanist he knew that teenage boys over-produced testosterone and sperm, that they had erections several times a day, and if they were not able to satisfy their urges in one way, then they would find others. Sodomy, he knew, was widespread in the school for that reason. At the same time he knew, as a realist, that sodomy was a criminal offence.

David was kept isolated in the sanatorium with warm baths and soothing ointments and enemas, while the Headmaster deliberated. He did not want half the Upper School to end up in Youth Custody. In the end, Smith and Jones, as the instigators of the gang-bang, were asked to transfer to another school where the Head had influence in finding them places.

When this had been effected, Jennifer was asked to remove David. Explaining his motives the Headmaster blamed Jennifer for breach of faith in placing David in a single sex boys’ school. If he had not been a boy-eunuch he would not have been so inclined to become a senior boy’s sex slave. The fact of his being a boy-eunuch had roused all the other senior boys’ prurient curiosity to breaking point. Without this knowledge it seemed unlikely that the episode on the cross country run would ever have taken place.

By the time I got to hear of all this, David was on his way back home, and my life was poorer for the departure of one of the first boy-eunuchs of modern times.