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In those pre-Freudian days sex, nurtured and cosseted and titillated by the segregation of boys in public schools, was a PROBLEM. At considerable expense of mental pain, money and time, this problem was then all set for solution. The machinery for its solution was, by a happy coincidence, the same as that used for its creation – religion and law – so that I never thought that religion had any other function than the regulation of my and other people's sexual activities. My increasing development ran parallel with increasing loathing and hatred of sex and religion and rules – all equally fatuous. It did not occur to me that there might be something wrong with a creator who created sex and did not allow you to exercise it till some unspecified date in the distant future, or that there was something wrong with sex and its rules.
There were words which were associated with the domain of ‘self-abuse’. We did not use the term ‘masturbation’, and were too ‘refined’ to use others available to ‘rough’ boys. Even when I came to know it later, ‘masturbation’ had much of the same Hellish Grandeur of ‘expelled’. Our vocabulary had an iridescence of terror, satanic splendour and Biblical mystery. Onan's story used to stimulate emotional ripples; the powers of Darkness, still prowling and prowling around, returned with their former glory refurbished; ‘Fight the good Fight/With all thy might’ also seemed to revive the dying embers of sexuality – crushed beneath the load of boredom. It must have been my first experience of the rejuvenating quality of guilt, though at the time I experienced it more as the beneficent glow of Salvation. Saint Paul was a great stand-by with his ‘whole armour’ of Faith.
Jones in the prayer meetings had contributed a warm, cosy, though slightly humid emotion to the sexual orchestra. “Oh God”, he would
start. “Oh God indeed”, my sinking heart would respond. “Thou knowest …”
“Good God, said God, I've got my work cut out.” – but there had to be a J. C. Squir