In The Navy

My Father had always wanted his sons to go into the Army on leaving school as he and his Father had done. He was there fore appalled when my Brother, Luke announced that he had signed up for the Navy.

My Brother Luke joined the Royal Navy

Relations between them had not been good for years and although my brother was always more of a rebel than me, we had always been under my Father's thumb. The moments of rebellion were easily sorted with a thrashing, so it surprised me as well to learn of his career choice especially as he had not told me about it before hand.

My brother and I were close as children and into adulthood as our Mother had died when we were young. I think we took comfort in each other as we had an uncaring, unloving Father and there was no one else to turn to. Luke was always very protective of me as a boy and on more than one occasion he tried to intervene to prevent me from getting a thrashing. This had resulted in him experiencing my Father's stick as well as me.

When we were younger he would often get into my bed and cuddle into my back during the night, especially if it was a cold winter as we had no central heating in the 1960's and 70's. Later in life after he had joined up, my Father had got rid of his bed from our shared room, and when coming home on leave he would have to sleep on the sofa for a few nights. Quite often he would get into my single bed during the night, saying he was cold and remain there until the early hours. There was not a lot of room with two lads in a single bed but I didn't mind as I found it a comfort and I was still living with my Father's regimes. Luke had at least escaped that tyranny in part.

When I visited Luke in his bedsits and flats, we used to sleep together in his single bed as he had no mattress to put me up on and no chair big enough to stretch out.

The problem with My Father was that he in the Army and saw the Navy as being the poor cousin to the other Services and a bit 'gay'. Whether this was true of not I don't know. I asked my Brother if he was gay at once. He had told me of some of the things he had got up to in the Navy and I thought they were a bit suspect myself. His reply was to laugh and then he went to fetch his kit bag. It was then that he produced a copy of 'Blue Climax' magazine which he gave to me. I took this to mean that he wasn't and that he still loved straight sex. My eye widened when I saw the pictures of men and women having intercourse. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. He warned me that I must keep it well hidden because if my Father found it.......!

I managed this successfully for the next few years until it was discovered. I refused to tell my Father where I had got it from although he must have suspected Luke having been to many foreign countries by this time. He gave me several back handers whilst he was questioning me. I was told I had a dirty disgusting mind and with that he went to fetch his stick.

My Father would cane us over the slightest mistake

I never saw the magazine again although I have many fond memories of its contents and I was lucky enough to find some scans of the pages on the internet.

Incidentally that was the very last time my Father ever beat me. Soon after, I had left home for good.

'Pool Party Pranks' was one of my favourite photo stories from the magazine.

   

  I love the way the women chow down on those big cocks and one guy is sucked off on the edge of the pool. The fashion now is for shaved cunts, but I prefer them natural, less artificial. One of the most horny things about this type of magazine, 'Colour Climax' especially, is the language and the stories. I love the way they convey the characters lust and the dirty talk. It really gets me going and that is something you don't see with modern pornography.

I of course never went into the Army either. My Father took me for an interview and medical when I was 16 with a view to me signing up.

 

My Army medical was not quite like this!

 I also went for a kind of trial weekend trial in Windsor at the barracks there to see how I got on working with the horses. I think my Father wangled it as a kind of favour to him and I spent the weekend mucking out and polishing tack! The thing was I had to sleep in a dormitory on my own with the door locked on the outside so the squaddies couldn't interfere with me during the night!

 

I had to be locked into my dormitory in case of molestation.

I tried to be enthusiastic but I knew I didn't want to do this. I had had enough of regimes, being told what to do and when to do it. I was told when to have my haircut and when to go to bed, when to do my homework and whether I could go out or not.
When my Father received the letter saying they didn't think I was the right material they were looking for, he was not pleased and made my life hell for the next few weeks.

I was keen on sport at school and particularly football. I was considered good enough to play for the school team. This meant going to practice and matches out of school hours which I was keen to do. However, my Father had other ideas and would prevent me from doing this whenever possible, insisting that I came home after school to do my homework and sometimes forbidding me to go out on Saturday mornings to practice depending on his mood. Consequently I was dropped from the first team.

This is where he was full of contradictions. He wanted me to go into the Army for which an interest in sport would have been useful, but he insisted on me studying just to spite me. He wouldn't have ever considered letting me stay at school for A levels, yet he got me to study instead of letting me play football.

I don't think my PE teacher Mr Griffin understood there was a conflict at home. In fact he was a bit of a sadist to some boys. If he had understood and seen my problems, he might have supported me more, even spoken to my Father about my sport, but he didn't.

Once, after I had been beaten I was changing after a games lesson. The red welts were still visible across my backside and I was trying to avoid taking a shower. I didn't want the other boys to see. Mr Griffin realised I hadn't showered and insisted that I get my kit off. When the other boys saw my discomfort it caused much hilarity and great fun was made of my situation. None of this was helped by Mr Griffin who threatened to thrash me himself if I didn't get in those showers pronto!

This was no idle threat as I had in the past been slippered by him for forgetting my PE kit I had to use a spare pair of shorts from a box in his office and do the lesson in my school shirt and shoes.

On another occasion, I was unfairly tackled in a game by one of the boys who constantly made my life a misery, Andrew Hedges. The game was stopped and Mr Griffin having seen what had happened, sent Andrew off to the showers. He complained and called me several names to which I told him to go and multiply! I was also unfairly sent to the showers.

Alone in the changing rooms and amid more abuse from this boy, he went into the showers first and I hung back a bit. When I came out after him he was already partially dressed and as I was drying myself, he flicked my backside with his towel. I saw red and bollock naked, flew at him knocking him to the floor. It was at this point that Mr Griffin arrived and separated us, but it was me that was sent to the Headmaster's office for fighting. If anyone was sent there at all, it usually resulted in a caning but first he had to speak to my Father. This meant phoning him at work and after that had been achieved, I received six strokes. Of course my Father was livid and I received a more severe thrashing when I got home.

I was caned by the Headmaster for fighting

More Than Military!

STRICT REGIME:

I have already mentioned my Father was an Army Sergeant and had been when he met my Mother. He remained in the Army until the mid 1970's when he started working for the Prison Service.
My Father's idea of bringing up two boys was to run each day as if his home were an army camp where his word was law.

Part of his regime was to make sure my Brother and I had a haircut every 3-4 weeks. On the face of it, that might not seem too bad, and in the 1960's, short hair could still be tolerated in young boys as I was then. However, by the time the 70's had begun, long hair was very much in fashion and it was devastating to be dragged to the Barbers to have a 'short back and sides'. This is somewhat an understatement as my hair was often shaved at the back and sides upon the instruction of my Father, on the face of it because he wanted to treat us like his squaddies. Looking back now, I can see that this was just another form of his control.

The haircutting regime, plus other factors such as my clothes, (more of which later) had a devastating effect on me. When I started Secondary school in 1972, long hair was very much in vogue and when I came along, despite being a First Former, I stuck out like a sore thumb. For the next three years I was almost constantly bullied for the way I looked, sometimes getting in fights and trouble at the school. My main nemesis was a boy called Andrew Hedges who was bigger, tougher and probably had problems of his own to contend with. Not that that excuses his behaviour. I believe that the way you bring up your children is very important and if you bully them and beat them, that is how they behave in kind. This was certainly the case with my Father and very probably with Andrew Hedges too.

If there was to be a haircut, my Father would meet me from school in the car, a white Viva estate. I remember it had blue plastic seats which were unbearably hot in summer, especially if you were wearing shorts! There would be no prior warning such as ‘I will take you for a haircut tonight’, he would just arrive and be waiting for me after school. This happened regularly every 4-5 weeks at the outside.

Apart from my problems with the haircut regime, I had worse with the Barber himself.
For some reason I was bullied and intimidated by the man from the time I started going there at about the age of six, until I was about 15 or 16.

His shop was at the end of a little row with what must have been a Victorian frontage, a door on the right and a large window on the left as you faced it. The chairs and mirrors were down the left hand side of the shop with bench seats around the back wall and right hand side of the room. There were magazines and comics to read, some of which were ‘Playboy’ and ‘Mayfair’.

I think this guy must have been ex-military, because my Father seemed to know him, although they were not friends as such and a lot of squaddies from the camp would go there for their haircuts. I would see them sitting around waiting on the benches.

The Barber wore the typical purple nylon coat with a black collar, white shirt and knitted tie and his hair was always ‘slicked’ down which gave him a sort of Italian look. I would think when I was going there he would have been in about his early to mid 40’s.

When I had got into the chair and was gowned-up, he would either ask, or my Father would tell him ‘the usual please’, meaning the short cut. I was never spoken to directly or treated with any dignity at all. He would begin cutting my hair with clippers and shove my head back and forth as required, sometimes quite roughly. If I didn’t keep my head as still as he wanted, he would tell me so.

“Keep your head still son!” and a bit later, “If you cant keep your head still I am going to have to get cross with you in a minute!”

He would say such things as if he despised me and loud enough so that the customers and my Father could all hear. These were not silent threats.

He would scrape the back of my neck with the clippers until it was sore and drew blood on more than one occasion I recall. Once, he even gave my ear a vicious pinch for not keeping still which brought tears to my eyes.

The odd thing was, I was always tried my hardest to keep my head still and I am sure I succeeded because I knew what would follow if I didn’t. It used to make my physically sick when I knew we were going there and I had that ‘butterfly’ stomach feeling throughout the ordeal. If I thought about it when I knew that time of the month was coming, I would physically wretch with anxiety.

I have no idea why this man treated me so. I didn’t do anything to him and I never spoke back to him. Usually my Father was in earshot and would have killed me if I had done so.

I recently spoke to my Brother, Luke about this man to see if he could remember anything about him. Although we were taken there together in the late 60’s, early 70’s, I never saw Luke or anyone else treated so harshly. Without giving too much away about my reasons, Luke could add very little to the story.

By the time I was 15 or 16 my Father trusted me enough to go by myself after school and didn’t come to get me. I was ‘told’ when I was to go and get my haircut. I think I went once or twice by myself with the same treatment and then I discovered another barber a short bus ride away and never went back. I didn’t tell my Father that I had changed establishments and I was never questioned about it. As long as I came back with the required cut, there were no inquisitions. However, it still fills me with a certain dread when I think of it now.

MY ABSOLUTION

I've been feeling depressed lately. Nothing new there, I have had bouts of depression since I was a boy, all connected with feelings of guilt and shame. The reasons for this are long and complex. I had a harsh upbringing in a Christian family, my Mother passed away when I was quite young. I fell into another physically abusive relationship when I was in my twenties. After talking to a friend about the whole mess of my life, I decided getting my problems out of my head and into the open might help, hence the blog.


I don't know if it will work. I don't know if I can absolve myself of the sins I have committed which make me feel guilty. I don't know if I can finally get my head straightened out or not, but I am going to have a try!

My Messed up Life!


My Childhood Home:
I was brought up by my Father, Michael and my Mother, Susan who were both Christians. I have one Brother, older than me by four years. The names chosen for me and my brother came from the Bible, good Christian names, Luke and Adam.
My Father was in the Army when he met and married and continued to be so until a year or so after my Mother's death from Cancer. I was 6 years old at the time.
We moved around a couple of times in my early years with Dad's job and by the time I was old enough to go to school, we found ourselves in Bulford, Wiltshire where I started school at the age of five. 
Our house was a 3 bed semi built I think sometime in the 1950's, small hallway leading through to the kitchen and back door to the garden. There was a lounge to the right of the hall and upstairs, two reasonable size bedrooms, a small box room and a bathroom/toilet.
Luke and I shared the back bedroom whilst my parents slept in the front.
Our two single beds consisted of a sprung metal frame on wooden legs which was the base for the mattress, with no headboard. I think these were Military type beds that my Father had gotten from somewhere in the Army barracks. Our beds faced the door with mine being closest, and Luke's under the window. The beds were close enough for you to be able to jump from one to the other quite easily. Between our two beds was a small cupboard, like a wardrobe in which to hang clothes and behind the door, a chest of drawers with a mirror on top.
The house face onto a kind of communal 'green' area and at the back was a small garden of lawn with a shed at the bottom. 
All the houses in the rows of Family accomadation looked the same. It was only the road itself that you recognised in order to be able to get home!




An early memory, possibly my first, is of waking up on the kitchen table, having fallen asleep there. My Mum was nowhere to be seen. She had actually gone to collect Luke from school. I started crying as I didn't know where she had gone.
My Father, who must have on on night shift, came running down the stairs after a few minutes in an angry mood. I must have woken him up. His first tactic was to try and sooth me, which didn't work as I wanted my Mother. The next was shouting at me as he wanted to go back to sleep, and when that didn't work, he lifted me up, put me over his knee and gave me several slaps across my backside!
That had the opposite effect to calming me and by the time, my Mother was back, she had a fully hysterical child to deal with!


I don't think my Father had wanted children. After my Mother had died and he was forced to bring up two boys by himself, this became even more apparant. Luke and I lived with his forced 'regimes' through our teens. We went to Church on Sundays, we were not allowed to play with our school friends unless he wanted us out of the house, we had always to be in shirt and trousers at home. I didn't own a pair of jeans until I was able to start buying my own clothes! He would punish us with the slightest provocation, sometimes even looking for a excuse to do so. It was in effect, a form of mental and physical abuse for both Luke and myself.
Luke joined the Royal Navy when he was eighteen and escaped, only coming back for the brief visit. That was in 1975. I had to stay at home alone until 1978 and those years by myself were even worse. I was an inconvenience to my Father.