In Spite of Everything
by Charles Lacey
Chapter 12
Aiden.
I think if I'd known just how much sheer hard work was needed for medical training, I don't think I'd ever have started. But my dearest Paul had moved to Liverpool just to support me, and he was prepared to keep doing so for as long as needed. So I resolved to put my back into it, and I think Paul was even more pleased than I was at the exam results at the end of each stage of my training. He was still working as a joiner for a firm of builders, but he'd put up a good sized shed in the garden of the house we were renting, and he made most of the furniture we had in the house, including a beautiful double bed, which was the most comfortable bed I'd ever slept in.
Very early on in our stay in Liverpool we'd begun to have sex together regularly. At first it was no more than just mutual masturbation, until the evening when I was sitting on the edge of our bed putting on my pyjamas, and Paul came in wearing his. Suddenly, his erect penis popped out, inches from my face. I looked at it for a few moments, then thought I might kiss it, but somehow it got into my mouth, and I found my tongue rubbing around the head. Suddenly he ejaculated, and I found my mouth full of his semen. The taste was strange to me, but not unpleasant, and I swallowed most of it. But having done that, it seemed only fair to change positions. That night we slept in each other's arms as if stunned. Before long we had worked out that if we lay in opposite directions we could operate on each other at the same time.
By now our physical intimacy was complete. We slept together in the same bed. As the W.C. was in the bathroom one of us might be in the bath while the other one had a pee. We saw one another naked on a more or less daily basis. In fact, comparing notes with one or two fellow students, I think we were more intimate even than most married couples. Along the way we had learned the techniques of so-called 'French' kissing.
The biggest danger was that we might do something in public that would give away our secret. Because of course what we were doing was still illegal, and every now and then a case would be reported in the newspapers where two men were imprisoned, having been caught, or entrapped, by the police. I'm glad to say that we broke the law together on a regular basis, but it was a shocking situation. A lot of it was fomented by that fool of a home secretary Maxwell Fyfe. He shouldn't have been allowed to run a dolls' tea party, never mind a country. But he allowed his prejudices to run riot and wreck a good many lives. The only good thing to come out of that period was the growing realization that what people did in their own bedrooms was quite simply no-one else's business.
But there was no way in which we could have done other than we did. Paul's body excited me beyond description. His work on building sites had given him great physical strength. Apart from the scars from his wartime service, his skin was as smooth as a baby's, and the sensation of touching that silken surface with the strong muscles sliding beneath it brought me to fever pitch. And I think Paul felt the same way about me. Though I was much less muscular than Paul, and had a little more body hair, when we were in bed together he would soon begin to get as worked up as I was.
And then in 1949 Jan and Krzystof came from Poland to stay with us for a week. When I met them at the Docks I didn't recognize Jan. The last time I'd seen him, four years earlier, he had been emaciated to the limit of endurance. He'd been bald, since his hair had fallen out; the bones of his head had shown through the skin and the skin itself had been yellowish and papery. But suddenly this handsome young man was embracing me, and his friend was shaking my hand. Jan was now a little taller than I, fair haired and blue eyed, with a round, chubby face. But while they were with us I noticed that Jan tired very quickly and needed to rest. Krzystof told me quietly that Jan's heart had been badly damaged by the starvation and disease at Belsen and that he had to be very careful not to overdo things. The evil that the Nazis did lived on long after they had all been hanged.
But I was astonished to learn that after the German occupation of Poland had ended, the Polish legal code of 1932 had come back into force, and same-sex relationships were no longer illegal. How wonderful, we thought, to be able to walk openly hand in hand, and not to have to pretend, as we did, that we were sharing a house so as to save money.
Paul was still working on building sites, but one or two people had come to our house and seen pieces of furniture he had made, and commissioned him to make some for them. I knew that in his heart Paul really wanted to make beautiful things, and I made up my mind that once I was qualified and working we would have a larger house with a good sized workshop, and that he would no longer have to go out to work but could spend his time creatively. Bless his dear heart, he never once complained, but there were times when I could sense his frustration.
We'd started our studies, my fellow students and I, with Anatomy. As the demonstrator put it in characteristically macabre fashion,, "Before we let you anywhere near a live patient, you'll learn the elements of your trade harmlessly on dead ones." I suppose I probably had more experience than most of us, and I certainly had no anxieties as to my reaction to the inside of the human body; I'd seen it all before in the Army. Once we'd passed the Anatomy course, we started to 'walk the wards' with staff physicians and surgeons, varied with lectures on physiology, general medicine, pharmacology… it was a high pressure course designed to produce competent practitioners in as short a time as possible.
But it was lovely being able to live at home with Paul. Most of my fellow students were living in lodgings, and by all accounts some of them were pretty grim. We'd turned the smaller bedroom upstairs into a study for me as Paul didn't like the look of some of my textbooks! He made a desk and a chair for me which were very comfortable. As a rule we didn't invite people to our house as we didn't want to advertise our relationship, but one of the students in my year group was a woman, and we became quite friendly. When students were required to work in pairs we usually teamed up. The first time this happened she chose me deliberately, saying as she did so, "you're the only one I can trust not to play the fool." I replied, "I suppose I'm a bit older than the other men…"
"No," she said, "you know perfectly well what I mean. You're not going to try anything on with me. Do you have a boyfriend?"
I looked at her in horror. She fixed me with a bright blue eye.
"Relax," she continued, "what you do at home is no-one's business but your own. I'm not going to sneak. But I'm interested."
So I invited Deborah – she hated being called Debbie – home to dinner. She and Paul took to one another straight away, and she became the first close friend we had as a couple. She married eventually, and I was very touched that she asked me to be Godfather to her first child, a boy.
The following summer we took a week out to visit Jan and Krzystof In Krakow. I say a week, but it was nearly two days travelling each way by train. I was surprised that Jan had been able to do it, with his damaged heart. But they made us very welcome and showed us some of the beauties of their city. We both felt rather ashamed of Derby, when we compared it with Krakow. Just as I had seen and handled Paul's body when he was in hospital, so I had Jan's when we went into Belsen. He told me that he remembered my soft, warm hands! Of course, there was never the slightest hint of unfaithfulness; Paul and I loved each other far too much for anything of that kind, and Jan and Krzystof had the same feeling for each other. But one night when we were – I have to admit – slightly the worse for wear, having accounted for two bottles of wine between us, the conversation turned on love-making between men. It was all very discreet and general, of course, none of us would have dreamed of disclosing the secrets of the bedchamber, but something Krzystof said made me realize that there was a possible mode of love-making which we had never tried.
By this time I was tolerably familiar with the inside of the human body, and knew about the prostate gland, which lies at the base of the bladder and can be felt by a finger placed in the anus. Paul, though he knew much less about it, was clearly struck with the same idea when Krzystof mentioned it. At any rate, we decided to give it a try, and found that after the initial discomfort it can be a very enjoyable way of making love. It probably helps that neither of us is exceptionally large "down there". But it's probably true to say that the real loving comes after the physical climax, when we lie in each other's arms, or side by side, holding hands, just being together and enjoying our closeness.
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