The horror of being abused and accused

At the time it didn’t feel like abuse. Yes, there was a clandestine cloak over the event, in the shape of the pump shed behind the school pool, but to me and my mate, more than anything, it just felt  exciting.

Well, that’s what I thought at the time, yet invisible to my teenage consciousness, deep innate within me, a moral code governed my memory.

Hence there I was, la la la, driving the backroads of Ballygonefishing a few years ago, when my brain decided that after 40 years, the time had come to return that event to my life.

Oh yeh, that happened.

Yeh?

Blimey.

We were 13 year-old boys, in our final year at Prep School, and I was flying high: Patrol Leader, Dormitory Prefect, almost top of the class, loaded with friends and having fun.

Our boy bodies were changing. We never met any girls, and knew all there was to know about sex, as long it was between locusts.

You needed no experience to teach at private English schools. The only requirement was an Oxbridge degree, to placate paying parents, so Prep and Public schools were magnets for sexual predators.

He was young, charismatic and as popular with the boys as a Master was permitted to be. He asked me and my mate if we’d ever fooled around, and then he took us to that pump shed and showed us photos of his ejaculation.

We’d never even seen an erect mature penis, so were grateful to him for contributing to our wholly inadequate sex education. There was no physical contact and although it evidently had to remain a secret, I did not feel wronged.

Yet, of its own accord, my brain erased all memory of it from my life for 40 years. Had I felt traumatised at the time I’d understand. For me it proves we have an innate sense of right and wrong, an in-built ethos that precludes the necessity of artificial religious codes.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.