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I was aware that the boredom was lessened from time to time, or the mixture of guilt and boredom changed to become more interesting. A religious would have said, ‘The Devil entered into us’, or, at an earlier stage, ‘Satan found work for idle hands to do’ if – as the implication was – we did not find something to do ourselves. It was clear that the ‘something’ should not be interesting. But it is difficult, when you are bored, to set out to find something ‘different’ but equally boring.
One night when I was lying on my bed with pyjamas on waiting for Dudley to get into his bed, he suddenly discarded the towel he had round his waist and jumped astride me as if challenging me to wrestle. “Now how do you feel?” he said. I felt nothing physically; mentally a sense of boredom and anti-climax, which soon communicated itself to Dudley who, after a few futile attempts to provoke a struggle, got off. I was bitterly disappointed. I had no idea what I wanted, but I did know – and the realization grew with time – that I wanted it badly. I wished I had encouraged Dudley to go on and then I would have found out what he was going to do. But now I think Dudley did not know any more than I did.
When I expressed this to my psychoanalyst years later he was convinced I knew. This seems to me now to be a failure to understand the horrible and painful nature of frustration, its powerful contribution, with fear and guilt, to an absolute hatred and loathing of sexuality in any shape or form. Furtiveness, guilt, frustration, in alternation or all together – such was my experience for many years, the most impressionable years of my life, the matrix from which passionate love supposedly will spring.
Dudley and I continued to duel and wrestle with a growing sense of pointlessness. The only overt and unmistakable emotional
experience was when futility flared into mutual dislike, or more correctly, hate. I did stay with him again – a visit which differed from the past in our avoidance of any tant