Chapter 1 An Accidental Afterthought or Blessed Surprise?

An Accidental Afterthought or Blessed Surprise?

Grandma Kerr would get really shitty whenever Grandpa referred to Uncle Frank as ‘an accidental afterthought’. But he was. My Dad was twelve years older than Frank, and Mum and him were thirty when they had me, just as WWII ended.

None of that is important, except that the age difference between Frank and Dad meant that Frank was still in High School when Dad went off to war, and was just about to enlist when the war ended, and Dad came home wounded and badly affected. These days we call it PTSD, but back then, people referred to it as ‘shell shock’. Whatever you call it, it made Dad moody and distant and very short tempered (particularly when he was tired).

So Uncle Frank was lots more fun than Dad. He was single, engaged, then single again, and lived with Grandma and Grandpa in the house he was born in. He trained as a teacher after the war, and taught Primary school for a few years before finding that he could earn nearly twice as much as a handyman and jobbing carpenter around the Auckland suburb where my grandparents had lived for nearly forty years.

I lived with Mum and Dad about three miles away, so we had lots of contact with them. From the time I was eight I could get on the tram and ‘go to Grandma’s’. New Zealand was very different and much safer in 1953! I was the only nephew/grandchild, and was doted on by Frank and my grandparents. Mum was far too loyal to Dad to ever acknowledge that his PTSD made him unable to parent very well, but I think she knew that Uncle Frank was giving me some of the ‘fathering’ that Dad couldn’t.

I spent every school holidays with them, and from the time I was about ten, I would go out with Frank and work on whatever job he was doing. I learned lots of skills and he used to pay me too. The equivalent of five cents an hour at first, but by the time I started seventh grade it was double that. Ten cents an hour doesn’t sound like much, but in 1957, twenty cents would get a kid into a movie and buy an icecream at half time as well.

NZ Schools didn’t do Sex Ed in those days. There was no internet, no Playboy, and no books available either. After a national scandal and moral panic in 1954 when it was discovered that a dozen or so teenagers in the Hutt Valley were offering sex to older men for ‘twenty five cents a root’, there was a Parliamentary Enquiry.

As a result, some ‘comics’ were banned, legislation was passed to make it illegal to supply contraceptives to anyone under sixteen, or to ‘instruct such persons to use any contraceptive’. There was only one radio network, Government run, and it banned Elvis Presley’s music, and the Department of Health put out an ‘educational’ booklet about sex.

Unfortunately, the information it contained was limited and cryptic. On the topic of contraception for example, it said ‘We hear sometimes, about methods to prevent conception. There are various views on the employment of these methods, but all agree that their use outside marriage is wrong.’ So it wasn’t surprising that my first wet dream half way through seventh grade, caught me unawares and unprepared. I was first to come to puberty in my peer group, and wet dreams, or ‘nocturnal emissions’ as the Health Department booklet my mother later gave me to read called them, were a totally new phenomenon.

I woke up as I was cumming, and I enjoyed the sensations bigtime, but I was worried about the crusty yellowish stains on the front of my pyjama pants. Of course, Mum found them when she did the washing, and Dad warned me sternly against ‘masturbation’. Since I didn’t know what that was, I just nodded and kept my mouth shut.

But Mum must have said something to Uncle Frank, ‘cos when I spent the next weekend at Grandma’s, he suggested we go fishing, and we sat on the wharf in the sun and talked. He didn’t beat about the bush.

“You’ve just had your first wet dream – did you enjoy it?” I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded. I expect I blushed too. He grinned. “It feels even nicer if you make it happen when you’re properly awake.”

“How do you make it happen?”

“You take your stiffy in your hand, like this.” He reversed his rod and demonstrated with the butt. “You hold it tight enough so you move the skin over the muscle underneath, and you move your hand up and down so it feels nice.” I was still embarrassed by the topic, but now I was excited as well. Just imagining doing what Frank showed me was making me stiff.

“Is that maturbayshun?”

“Masturbation, pulling yourself, tossing yourself off. There are probably other words for it too.”

“Dad said it’s bad for me.”

“He’s wrong, but don’t tell him I said so.” Frank chuckled. “I caught him pulling himself lotsa times before he left home. Grandma and Grandpa are strict Presbyterians even though they don’t go to church any more, and they still think it’s wrong.” He took a breath and I waited for him to go on. He thought for a moment and then did. “Look mate – there’s a lot of stuff I can tell you, but you can’t talk about it with your Mum and Dad, or Grandma and Grandpa.

“You mean it’s a secret?”

“Sort of. Grandma and Grandpa brought both of us up not knowing anything much about sex. Your Dad got more heavy messages about it than I did, and they took him to church every Sunday until I came along.

“He doesn’t go now, none of us do.”

“Yeah – something happened in the church when I was very young, and they all quit, but Grandma and Grandpa are still believers, and they are strict about sex.”

“What about Dad?”

“His war injuries really affected him. He hasn’t really changed his ideas since he left home. That’s funny in a way. I stayed home and my ideas about sex and that stuff have changed lots. Your Mum is ok about me talking to you about sex and she will just ‘not mention it’ to your Dad, but if you talk to him about stuff I tell you, he’ll be pissed off with me and he might even tell Grandma or Grandpa and there’ll be a family row. So we only talk when we’re on our own - ok?”

“Ok – and it stays between us.” We shook solemnly. There were lots more things I wanted to know, but my most immediate concern was about masturbation. “How often can I pull myself?”

“As often as you want to. Everybody does it. All guys anyway, and lotsa girls too, but nobody talks about it. I generally do it in the shower. If I do it in bed at night, I catch the spunk in a sock or handkerchief. Or if I remember, I take some toilet paper to bed. Then I flush that in the morning.”

“I won’t stunt my growth?”

“No - and it won’t make you go blind either!” I was reassured enough to ask about my next concern.

“How big should a penis be?”

“Every guy worries that he is too small but there’s no right size. What I can promise you is that by this time next year, it will be a lot bigger than it is now!”

“Dad says people shouldn’t have sex unless they’re married. What do you think?”

“It’s even nicer than pulling yourself, but it’s more complicated because there are two people involved. Sex can make babies, and people should be married to have babies.”

“Pauline Edwards lives down the road from us with her parents. She’s only seventeen but she’s got a bun in the oven. Dad says she’s a tart!”

“Maybe. You have lots to learn over the next few years, but I can help you with this stuff. You can ask me anything, and if I don’t know I’ll try to find out.”

We didn’t catch any fish or talk any more about sex, but I stayed excited and stiff off and on, pretty much for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn’t wait for bedtime! When I eventually went to bed in what had been my father’s old room down the hall from Frank’s, I tucked a sock under my pillow. As soon as the house was quiet except for Grandpa’s snoring, I had my first ever wank, though I would not hear that word for it for another ten years.

Looking back, it was like a dam had broken. For the next eighteen months, I wanked pretty much every day, usually in the shower, and I was very interested indeed in my own physical development. I counted my pubic hairs as they appeared and measured my stiffy every week as four inches gradually became four and a half, then five (well nearly!). My balls got bigger too!

There was no middle school in NZ in those days. Kids started in ‘Primary School’ at five, and stayed there through to eighth grade before moving up to High School for year nine. The girls in my seventh-grade class were (as I later got to understand) well ahead of the boys in their physical development. By the middle of seventh grade, I was the only boy in the class to be making sperm, but there were four or five girls who had already got their period. Not that I knew anything about any of that at the time, since menstruation was something of a ‘dirty secret’ in those days. But many of the girls were starting to develop bumps under their blouses, and Alison Woods bumps were more like little lemons until she started wearing a bra. Once I got to look up a loose sleeve and see her armpit hair, and that gave me a stiffy for the rest of the afternoon.

Everyone else was just as ignorant as I was – some kids even more so. When Cynthia Simmonds sat at her desk all lunchtime, crying because she was bleeding from an organ she didn’t know she had, and was too scared to tell anyone she was bleeding ‘down there’, some of the girls knew what was happening, but many had no more clue than the boys. Eventually, some girls took her to a woman teacher for a ‘napkin’ (whatever that was).

We got a new Deputy Principal a little more than halfway through that year. Mr Keyes, the old one (and I do mean old – he was over sixty) got cancer. He retired on medical grounds, and there was a big farewell and presentation. He looked terrible, and we heard he had died a few weeks later. The new DP, Mr Gunderson, took over Mr Keyes eighth grade class, and introduced some new ideas of his own.

He had the revolutionary idea that the school should cater for our social education, and that as at least some children in years seven and eight were adolescent, with puberty well under way, we should have a ‘Social’ (capital S)! We first found out about it through Pauline Gosling.

Her father was on the School Committee, and when Mr Gunderson told the Principal about his idea for a Social, he kicked it upstairs to the School Committee. What a drama! Over the next few weeks, we got a ‘blow by blow’ account of progress as they wrestled with the problem of upholding the ‘moral tone’ of the school, protecting the ‘innocence’ of the pupils, and catering for our ‘social needs’.