9

On the following morning my father came into my bedroom and woke me. He had never done that before. If I overslept, he called me from the bottom of the stairs. But that morning he was standing over me when I opened my eyes.

He said, ‘I’m going to watch you get up and get dressed to see you don’t put anything on. I’m going to do it every morning.’

I was afraid. I could not think what to do. I must not let him see that I was fixed up. I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to put on.’

‘I’m going to watch you just the same.’

I said, ‘Then I won’t get up.’

‘I’ll have you out of there,’ he shouted. He took hold of the bed clothes.

The horrible thought came into my mind that he was sexually interested in me. I shut it out. I could not think what to do. ‘Leave me alone,’ I wailed. ‘You’ll kill me if you don’t leave me alone.’

‘I will bloody well kill you, and I’ll be well shot!’ He wrenched at the covers.

I held them down as best I could.

‘You’re not bloody well dressed up under there, are you?’ he demanded.

‘No.’

‘Well, get out.’

I slid my legs out on the far side from him and sat up. I unfastened my pyjama jacket and took it off. Soon he would see that I was fixed up. I wished that I had not made myself look so real. He would get more excited. He might keep hitting me until he killed me. I sat on the edge of the bed quite still. I decided that I would not take my pyjama trousers off. I would just sit there, and he could do what he liked. I looked at the wall and stopped thinking.

Then I heard him going downstairs. It was over. I did not know why he had relented. Perhaps I looked as frail and helpless as I felt, and he had pitied me.

At breakfast he seemed to want to be kind. As we were finishing he said, ‘I don’t suppose you can help it, you poor bugger.’

It was Tuesday.

After dinner he said, ‘I want your keys.’

I asked him why.

‘I’m going to lock you out of the house when I go. You can take yourself off to the pictures or somewhere, but you’re not staying in here.’

When it was time for him to go he took me out the back door with him and locked it. ‘You can go where you like,’ he said, ‘but don’t come back here until after eleven tonight.’

I wandered to the city centre.

There were crowds of women. They could go into any shop and buy what they wanted. Here were shops full of women’s clothes, dress shops, shoe shops, hat shops, shops where cheap but pretty frocks hung in parties, stores where dresses hung in regiments. There were shoes and coats and skirts and night­dresses and slips and bras and panties and girdles and belts and stockings and blouses and gloves and suits. There were fur coats. There was silk and chiffon and satin and cotton and nylon and wool and linen and poplin and suede and ribbon and lace. None of it was for me.

I went into a coffee bar and sat over a milk shake. In the sunshine the women were passing; young women in high-heels, complete and self-loving; older women going about the pleasure of looking after their families so as to get the most love for themselves; all intent on happiness either through pride or self-sacrifice, their skirts moving as they walked, swinging or creasing to and fro, confident in their superiority or cunningly humble. I played a game in which I tried to pick out girls who could be boys dressed up.

I left the coffee bar and walked to the city square. Opposite the Civic Hall there was a pigeon-whitened Queen Victoria standing on top of public lavatories. I always thought that the Civic Hall looked like a cinema where nothing but epics about the Roman Empire were shown. There was the tomb-like art gallery. But dominating all was the Dock Offices building, a work of imagination in the Italian style with domed turrets and high, rounded windows. To look at it one might have supposed that Hull was a Mediterranean city that had sent ships to fight at Lepanto. On the same side as the art gallery there was a long railing through which one could see part of the Albert Dock. There were two big trawlers moored side by side, fitting out, garnish with patches of orange paint.

I went round behind the Dock Offices and into Queens Gar­dens. The gardens had once been Queens Dock, but the dock had been filled in. There were paths and pools with cultivated reeds and there were fountains playing. At the far end of the gardens was the massive block of the new technical college with the Wilberforce Column in front of it. I remembered that William Wilberforce was a drug addict. I was a drag addict. Along the side of the gardens was the central police station. It was a rather temporary looking piece of modern-shoddy work. One felt that a violent drunk might knock it all down while he was being got inside. I hoped they would never get me inside.

The old buildings enclosing the gardens had once been dock-side warehouses. Some of them had been turned into shops or offices, but most of them had remained as warehouses, but now they were filled with the attractive things that were sold in the shops. Perhaps one of them was full of nylon stockings.

Hundreds of men had worked at digging the dock. Then men had worked hard, year in year out, unloading cargoes. Then hundreds of men had worked to fill in the dock. Now there were gardens with flowers and fountains, and a young woman might walk there with the pleasure of being herself.

I sat for some time watching a fountain.

When a patrolling policeman looked at me I got up and started walking.

I reached the river. The Humber was sliding along with a fast ebb tide. Some big ships were anchored down river. The Lincolnshire side looked very green. Down at Saltend the oil storage tanks were shining in the sun. It was all as it was expected to be.

I thought about throwing myself in.

I supposed many people thought of it. Occasionally people actually did it.

The summer was ending.

I had my tea at the café in Hammond’s store opposite the railway station and then I went to the pictures.

When I got back home I had to stand in the back yard for about half-an-hour waiting for my father.

He was cheerful when he arrived. ‘What sort of time have you had?’

‘All right.’

‘Anyway, it got you out a bit.’

On the Thursday it rained. I went to the reference room of the public library and looked up everything there was about Sporus/Sabina. Then I studied a book on anatomy that I had often studied before. I considered how much fat there was on the female: fat at the back of the neck, fat behind the deltoid muscle, fat on the flanks, gluteal fat, sub trochanteric accumu­lation of fat, fat of breast, fat of abdomen, collection of fat in front of pubis, fat on the fronts of the thighs. The rain streamed down the windows. I looked at the collected poetical works of Housman. The pane was blind with showers.

He continued to lock me out of the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Sometimes while we were doing the potatoes he would talk in an attempt to persuade me of the advantages of manliness. He told me how he had once solved a difficult problem by the use of his fists when he had been a young man. He spoke about the intricacies of cricket and the excitements of football. All that he said reinforced my view that I would make a poor man. I wanted to tell him that I did not doubt that the male was stronger and faster and more intelligent and more intense than the female—but I knew what I wanted.

I would have to leave home. We could not go on living together. There was no reason why he should have to endure me. I was not a son. His efforts to change my mind embar­rassed me. I felt that I was humiliating him. I felt as a mongol child might feel if it knew that it was a mongol child.

Once I saw him put his hand to his forehead with a move­ment that suggested despair.

On the morning of my twenty-first birthday he called upstairs, ‘Many happy returns of the day, Roy!’

I hated myself. I felt ill with unhappiness.

When I got downstairs he said it again: ‘Many happy returns of the day.’ He smiled as well as he could. It seemed like the smile of a man greeting a Martian to whom he was determined to show a friendly face despite the Martian’s repulsive strange­ness.

On the table next to my plate was a small rectangular box. It was a wrist watch.

He said, ‘Go on, open it.’

I opened the box. There was a slim gold watch. I thought that it must have cost about fifty pounds.

He said, ‘My father bought me a gold watch for my twenty-first. Many happy returns. You’re a man now.’

I put my elbows on the table and pushed my face into my hands.

I heard him ask me what was the matter. I did not answer.

Then I told myself that I must behave myself decently no matter what I felt like. I took my hands away.

He was looking out of the window gloomily.

I thanked him for the watch and said that I would save it for best.

He was encouraged. ‘I bet there isn’t a better watch in Hull than that you’ve got there. It’s shock-proof and water-proof. It’s not gold-plated. It’s gold metal right through. It’s a self-winder y’know. You don’t have to wind it up. It winds itself up when you move your arm. It’s absolutely water-proof. The man said that it was so well made that you could wear it in the bath.’

‘I’ll save it for wearing in the bath,’ I said.

The joke pleased him.

He was in good spirits while we were working that morning. He told his favourite war story about how he had taken a prisoner: ‘. . . so we crept along this hedge, dead quiet. And there was this young lad sat there. He was just sat in this slit trench. And he had this bit of stick in his hand and he was drawing on the side. He was just sat there drawing with this bit of stick. So we just reached in and grabbed him and pulled him out. God, was he surprised! It was the shock of his life. He wondered what the hell had happened to him. Then he started yelling his head off in German. So I just stuck my sten gun in his ribs, and he went as quiet as a lamb. He was a Panzer Grenadier. He had one of those black, double-breasted jackets. And then we found this tin in the trench with holes punched in the lid. And inside there was a little mouse. He’d been feeding it with bits of bread. We didn’t half laugh. But he starts near begging for us to give him this mouse. So we gives him it. And he puts it in his tunic pocket real careful. I reckon he’d been in the line too long and he was going a bit balmy. I reckon all Germans are a bit balmy. They must have been. Anyway, after Caen, we just went forward smashing everything.’

Mrs Wilson came at tea time bearing a birthday cake that she had made. It was iced in white with twenty-one in pink icing on the top. I had a desire to run out of the house.

While the tea party was going on I started laughing and got a piece of cake stuck in my throat. My father slapped me on the back and I recovered. They asked me what I had been laughing at. I said I did not know. I felt I needed to wear women’s clothes very much.

My father said, ‘When you’re twenty-one you have to have the key of the door.’ He gave me back the keys he had taken from me. He said, ‘Now that you’re a man I have to trust you, Roy. I’m sure that you won’t ever let me down.’

Mrs Wilson said, ‘I’m sure he won’t.’

I told myself that I must get away from these people before they ate me like they were eating the cake.

Mrs Wilson asked me what I would be doing with my mother’s money that I would be receiving.

I said that I did not know.

‘Five hundred pounds is a lot of money,’ she said. ‘You must use it sensibly.’

I said that I would use it sensibly.

I told myself that I would use it to go away and live as a woman.