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Generations

by Zambezi

Amongst the many things that I learned on that trip, two should have been obvious to anyone. First, never - ever - fly Air Zimbabwe. It's just not a terribly good idea. And I say that as a former AZ pilot myself. Second, if you ever have to arrive in England, then avoid Gatwick airport like the plague. If God ever gave Britain an enema, then I was sure this is where they would stick the pipe. "What a dump!" was my son Marc's first impression of the country his father came from.

I suppose the flight had been a bad start. When I retired two years ago, the rather irritating lack of foreign currency for spare parts was still mildly amusing, if slightly distracting. If I had flown a 737 from Harare over to Lilongwe or down to Jan Smuts at Jo'burg with an engine held together with bubble gum once, I'd done it a dozen times. Things were worse - downright dangerous - now.

I'd known my other son Iggy - Ignacy Tutlewski - from when he was a boy of about ten or twelve: when he wasn't boarding at Prince Edward School in Salisbury he served the drinks on the old Douglas Dakota his ex-Polish Air Force Dad flew most days between Victoria Falls and Salisbury, as it was then. Janusz Tutlewski, rest his soul, used to distil this God-awful vodka in his garden shed from a combination of potatoes and maize that he'd pick up on his travels. He'd happily drink a bottle of this stuff before tipping a jerrycan of it in the fuel tanks ("Good for the engine," he'd say) and getting in the cockpit. Once, for fun, I had one of the weaker bottles of it tested in the lab at police headquarters in Salisbury. It was 120 degrees proof. Amazingly, it wasn't the flying that got him in the end. Perhaps unbelievably, he and his wife had been knocked down by a drink driver in the middle of Vic Falls town. At the time, 1968, I had been sharing quarters in Salisbury with Dodgy Dave, the admin manager to the chief licensing officer, and we took pity on our little friend Iggy, who was then a few weeks short of seventeen, and asked him to move in with us. As will become clear later, the concept of a loving family is one that for me is always the highest priority and my own memories of being that age were painfully clear so my preternaturally caring contribution, at the tender age of 24, had been to legally and emotionally adopt him. Dodgy Dave's had been to issue him with the pilot's licence he would need to take over his father's business, despite his never having passed an exam or even taking a formal lesson. But Dave and I had both been flown quite competently on numerous occasions by the young slip of a lad, and back in those days no one cared about much anyway. Over time Iggy taught me to fly too, Dave obliged again with a licence, and when independence came in 1980 and I found my skin wasn't well enough tanned for much further progression in the police I went commercial and followed him into Air Zim.

We'd been up in the air about five hours and Marc and I had been enjoying the unadulterated luxury of Air Zimbabwe business class when Captain Iggy came looking for me, sweat running down his forehead. Since these days most flights in and out of Zim operated virtually empty no-one minded if an old boy like me 'deadheaded' in the cabin for a free ride. In any case, Iggy and the rest of the airline probably owed me more than a few favours. When we got to the flight deck I could plainly see his problem. Every single instrument on the 767's panel was dead. Dead as a Dodo. Dead as a white farmer negotiating with a war veteran, if one was feeling particularly tasteless. We were blasting across darkest Africa at something in the region of forty thousand feet, at more than a few hundred knots, blind as a bat. "Thank the Lord for deadheading spare Captains, Dad" he'd said, as we plotted how best to get the ship down.

Not fancying any of the real banana republics of West Africa immediately below us, we opted to fly slow and blind on to relatively friendly Guinea-Bissau for an unscheduled stop for one of those mysterious "operational" reasons which seemed to afflict AZ with increasing regularity. If we dawdled enough it would be light by the time we came in, which would certainly help in judging the approach. And if push came to shove on the ground, I spoke passable Portuguese, although my sleeping teenage son six rows back spoke it as well as he did English. I'd married Marc's mother, Maria, in 1976 - just after all the Portuguese fled Mozambique. We had met at a pro-colonialism rally in Salisbury: she was marching, I was theoretically directing some deliberately ineffectual crowd control on direct orders from Ian Smith himself. At the time, I rationalised that I did it so that she could stay in Rhodesia and not have to go back to European Portugal where it looked like the Communists might have a nasty surprise in store for returning colonists. Passionless as it was, I suppose with the benefit of hindsight I must have truly loved her, for in 1986 she fell pregnant with Marc, who was born the following year when I had just reached the grand old age of 43. I was absent for the birth, of course. Premature labour could only happen when I was in Cape Town. And if I felt like a distant father then, it became immeasurably worse a decade or so later when my beloved Maria was murdered in cold blood in Lourenço Marques - or Maputo as it was by then called - for the clothes on her back as she visited the Sisters in her old convent school. Although I swear my paternal instinct was as strong then as it had always been - and fifty-something Ignacy happily bears witness to the strength of that instinct today - I span out of control with grief and dealt with it the only way I knew I could cope with it myself. I sent my son off to boarding school in what had by then become Harare.

Marc, Marco to his mother, was now fifteen and a half and enjoying life at Eaglesvale High School, having been warned off Prince Edward by Iggy. Or so he said. For the last couple of years Marc had become somewhat withdrawn, and possibly even slightly secretive, although we actually enjoyed the time we did get to spend together. Somehow, I just knew why he was so reticent, although we'd never spoken about it, and I had faith that he would talk to me when he was ready. I didn't really want to confront the reasons myself, for a whole variety of my own reasons. In many ways he was a typical western teenager: he communicated in grunts a lot, never got out of bed in the morning (unless he had to), and pretended - badly - to hate authority. In truth, he was probably institutionalised, and couldn't cope without set routines and boundaries. So strangely, when he was back at home on the ranch we owned just outside Mutare in Manicaland, I was encouraging him to rebel and stretch rules, to find himself. Like I said, we actually enjoyed the time we spent together.

He moaned like hell when I woke him up at Bissau to try and persuade the local engineers that a Bank of Harare US dollar cheque, drawn on the Air Zim head office account, was actually worth more than its face value of paper. Iggy had been about to have his personal Amex card swiped for the repairs until I stopped him. He'd never been good with his finances.

Eventually, Marc somehow persuaded them to accept the cheque, apparently guaranteed by our Shell fuel card. Unbelievable. Just for fun, we took on an extra 20,000kg of avgas, paid for it with the maxed-out card, gunned the twin Pratt and Whitney 4056 turbofans, and hightailed it out of there towards the Atlantic before any of them twigged. Long since irretrievably Rhodesian in outlook, my motto had been "Do it and see what happens" for much longer than was healthy. Since Iggy had now also maxed out his allowable flight hours, I took the controls, falsified the log book, and set course for London Gatwick, despite having never been trained on the 767 and with no up to date medical or any such vulgarity. Like I said, Air Zimbabwe was never a terribly good idea.

And so we landed at Gatwick. I had left Britain over forty years previously - from Heathrow - and had never returned, not once. Then, I had left on the old BEA stopper plane - a Britannia prop-driven thing if memory serves - to Cape Town: Munich, Rome, Cairo, Khartoum, Nairobi, Dar Es Salaam, Lilongwe, Lusaka, and finally Salisbury before it went on to Pretoria and Cape Town. The Salisbury leg took two days. Even with our unscheduled stop this time, it had taken less than half that now. Funny how in 2003 we seem to have half as much time as we did back then, even though we move twice as quickly. And they call it progress.

Our first problem was passport control. I had consciously given up renewing my British passport and was now a proud Rhodesian. OK, I was really a Zimbabwean but that had never really made much of a difference around darkest Africa.

"Christ man, I was born on Ilkley Moor," I pleaded. "I am only here for two weeks for my old man's funeral. Here's the return portion of my ticket."

The one jobsworth in the one, packed, 'Other Passports' booth in the entire terminal never really saw my point. "I suppose if you're not here to take our jobs and claim our benefits it's all right. We have enough trouble with them asylum seekers." He graciously stamped my passport with a tourist visa ("Leave to enter for six months - EMPLOYMENT PROHIBITED" it said) and I was thus 'welcomed' back into the country of my birth and my first seventeen years. If ever I wanted to shout "I married an asylum seeker!" that was the moment.

Portuguese passport holder Marc, who had never been to Europe in his life and had no connections with anywhere in Europe other than through me, was waved through one of the five empty European Union booths without a second glance, legally protected from xenophobia. Go figure.

The arrivals hall at Gatwick is a fairly shitty place by world standards. It is adorned with grey concrete composite made to look like fake marble. Cigarette smoke blew over from the man leaning on a no smoking sign. Lovely. As Marc observed, the place truly was a dump. My sister Clare was waiting for us. I had seen her once in those forty-odd years when she was in South Africa for the rugby World Cup seven or eight years ago. We met in Durban when she was there with her new husband Colin. She'd been what, ten or eleven when I left? I barely remember. That 1995 meeting in Durban had effectively been meeting a stranger. We wrote letters during those decades of course, even sent a tape or a video of our voices and faces now and then. Iggy and I paid for her wedding. But she could never tell father about it, and around me no-one cared. She had never met Marc until the arrivals hall at Gatwick, Hell On Earth. The whole building smelled of body odour and horse shit.

Of course, we were some ten hours late arriving, and Gatwick is tucked away in the bottom corner of Britain, miles away from anywhere interesting apart from London. So setting off back to Yorkshire was out of the question. Apparently nobody tried to drive 230 miles in Britain at 4pm. Marc laughed - we'd easily do that to visit the neighbours for breakfast, if we could find enough petrol these days. Clare, Marc, and I took a room at the Renaissance Hotel while Iggy went off to another with the rest of the crew before flying back the next day. I'm glad Clare had a job in banking that paid well. When your pension is in Zim dollars, sterling prices are pretty frightening. Honestly - $25,000 for a beer? Waitress Sharlene, all the way from sunny Harare herself, served us in the coffee shop by happy coincidence. She shook her head in disgust and bafflement when we reported the latest goings on back home.

The following morning was a drag. The only heating in the room was an electric reverse cycle air conditioner. Having arrived straight from an African summer to a dismal Sussex January afternoon, Marc and I had felt the cold, so put the heater on its highest setting, naturally. Clare, on the third bed in the family room, found it too hot. Marc and I, after the stillness of nights in Mutare, had found it too noisy. So none of us had slept well. Wanting a bit of time together out of Marc's earshot, Clare and I ate breakfast the following morning in the main restaurant, where the Spanish chef did us some great eggs. When we met back up with Marc in our room on the fifth floor - the Club Floor - he whispered in my ear, "Better be careful about that waiter Ian in there. I think he was trying to get into my pants."

Of course, in the interests of protecting my son, I wondered down to the Club Lounge halfway along the corridor. Ian was certainly bulging in the right places I noticed, as I picked up a copy of the Times newspaper. Ah, a free press. You guys have no idea how good you have it...

...Except life in Britain is truly shit. Clare's car was frozen solid when we reached the car park. Hutch from the reception desk (another Zim - despite his best efforts Mugabe will probably achieve world domination best by driving us all out!) gave us a Renaissance Hotels ice-scraper as we checked out. Great. The car still felt like an igloo when we got in ten minutes later. Marc told me he had never felt so cold in his life. Clare's car had heated seats, and when she turned them on this powerful odour that could only really be described as flatulent filled the car. How could people live like this?

I never really thought of a couple of hundred miles as a lot. Sure, when I was a kid and dinosaurs roamed the Earth (way back in the Fifties and Sixties) it took all day, but over forty years things have got better, haven't they? In most of the world yes, but not in Britain. It's worse than it ever was! Slow roads, heavy traffic, suicidal - and aggressive - driving. As I looked at Marc behind me in the car, I felt ashamed to be bringing him 'home' to this.

It was already dark by the time we arrived in the village. I didn't recognise it at all. Sure I did, in the sense that as we drove on the way through from Leeds I vaguely remembered the twists and turns of the road and the small towns we passed. I remembered the big T-junction in front of the Manor House as it met the main road - now a roundabout in front of what had become an old folks' home. A by-pass, first mooted before I was born, had finally been built. And the newsagent three doors up from our tiny house on Station Road, I certainly remembered that. But everything else was different. Smaller, for a start. I used to play street cricket round the corner on Aireville Terrace and it seemed huge. Now, two cars couldn't pass each other without one pulling over. What had once been a thriving main street, with maybe a dozen shops, was dead.

Our old terraced house, from which I had walked out of the front door and on up to the train station without looking back more than four decades previously, was obviously the same size as it had always been. But whereas I rattled around in it as a kid, I had to be careful not to knock things over now. That might be partly due to the way my father lived. To be honest, he had clearly lived like a pig for far too long. Everywhere one looked there were piles of... Well... Shit. Newspapers, magazines, Argos catalogues, junk, you name it. I don't think he had thrown anything away since my mother had died twenty five years previously. Every time I moved something I half-expected bats to fly out. And yet, somehow, it also seemed cared-for. Just not by him.

Incredibly, three years into the twenty-first century, the house had outdoor sanitation and a total absence of central heating. There was the same coal fire (what did they call it, a range?) I remembered as a child in the back room of the ground floor, and a newer gas fire in the front, but that was it. I recalled offering - in a letter to Mum and Clare which I sent via Mr Briers the fishmonger - to pay for a system a few years after I had arrived in Rhodesia. They couldn't accept it without arousing suspicion they said in reply, so I had eventually spent the money on a Land Rover for Iggy's 21st birthday after the money had languished in a bank account for a few years. Within ten years, my mother had died of pneumonia in the cold, damp and unforgiving house. Anyway, that was in the past now. Having just settled up in Skipton, Clare had little interest in keeping the house; I had less still. The central heating which father had always refused would arrive within weeks, along with an indoor toilet for the first time ever. The house was pretty obviously unsellable, even in England, without them.

So the old bastard had finally croaked, the years of imbibing pint after pint of Tetley's Mild with a brandy chaser and smoking those foul-smelling Woodbines finally catching up on him. Clare - from whose arse the sun shone in his strange little world - told me he never wanted to see me before he died, which was why he was already cold on a stone slab when I found out about the terminal squamous cell carcinoma the previous weekend. Marco was back in Mutare on summer vacation, so it was a no-brainer that we would both come together. Iggy obliged, scarily as it turned out, with a pair of Air Zim staff family tickets.

And so, on a snow-swept Thursday afternoon in West Yorkshire, Clare, Colin (who immediately ingratiated himself to me by admitting he hated the old bastard too), Marc, and myself watched father's coffin picked up and marched out of the chapel of the United Reformed Church in the village. The lay chaplain said a few words of bullshit and we all vacated the freezing chapel and headed round the corner to the hall. Marc and I had just entered the building and were about to walk over to the kitchenette to grab a cup of that famous - if foul - English tea everyone talks about.

And then I saw him.

"Chris! Long time no see, although obviously I wish it could have been under better circumstances," he began as he walked over to place a hand on my shoulder.

I didn't know how to reply. "I never thought..."

"Never thought that I cared? I wouldn't have missed this for anything. If anything was going to bring you back to the village, this was it," he said, a sincere and true but ultimately irrelevant statement. An emotional steamroller had just been driven over me, and the memories came flooding back. I suppose I'd better start at the beginning...

---

I had just managed to obtain a place at grammar school in the city. I was thirteen and about to start Third Form, which was still a reasonably good time to start in a grammar school those days as the few remaining old middle schools turfed their best out onto the scrap heap. This dates the start of these events in September 1957, although it might have been the Middle Ages for all I cared. Or was encouraged and allowed to care.

Christopher Rawls - me - was probably not much to care about at thirteen either. My father was demobbed from the army the year before with virtually nothing to offer an employer apart from a drinking problem, snarling sarcasm, violence, and his experience as a driver. Amazingly, he was offered - and somehow managed to keep - a job with the Samuel Leggard bus company, which at least kept him out of our hair more often than not. I was still very much a little kid: skinny, pale, and not much more although now that I look back at it, and the school photographs, I realise I was no different from the others. But father sure had a way of making me feel inferior. Often it was just a look, sometimes a nasty sideways glance. One just knew what was running through his mind. He hated me, and he hated me for everything I stood for. The funny thing was, I had no idea what that was.

I first met Marcus West in Latin class. He was such a good laugh and a free spirit, it was like he had grown up in a totally different world to me. He hadn't, because I found out that first day he lived in the village as well, much further up Station Road and out towards the moors, which he reckoned explained why we had never met before. I knew better: it was because I never mixed with the other boys because I never dared invite them back into my parents' house. Marcus and I rode the bus back and forth to school together, and quickly became best mates. I knew, even at thirteen, that all things being equal we'd be best friends forever.

He really cared about me in a way no-one had ever really done before, except for mother when she and I weren't being beaten to a pulp. He kept an eye out for me at school when I got picked on. He picked up all my homework and helped me study when I was laid low with appendicitis. And above all, although we never really spoke about it, he knew that what went on in my family life was never to be repeated to anyone at school. For the first month or so after we met I didn't let him into the house, despite the fact he walked past it at least twice a day on his way to and from the bus stop. In fact, because I used the door at the back, I managed to conceal which one was actually ours for most of that month: I always waited on the path for him to arrive in the morning, and disappeared around the back in the afternoon. Eventually he noticed, simply asked which one it was, and I burst into tears.

He'd immediately pulled me into the snicket which ran down the side of the terrace end to link up with the rear path and hugged me tight when that happened, and it was like being jolted by electricity. I had never been hugged by another male before, and just sort of collapsed into his arms. As he held and comforted me, he just whispered "It's OK, we don't have to talk about it until you're ready." I cried into his chest for about ten minutes.

When I thought about it that night, I realised he must have known all about us. Walk into any pub in the village and ask anyone in there, and they'd have told you about the famous drunken Rawls brawls. As the village GP and his wife, Marcus's parents would have known, guessed that home life was much the same, and of course he would have been told too. And he cared for me as the person I was so much he'd never asked me about it. The following day I resolved to ask him in some time, although I primed him about what he could expect and Mum and I deliberately arranged for a time we knew father wasn't going to be there as his first introduction to the twisted world of the Rawls household.

I cared for Marcus too. No, wait a minute, I loved him. He was my first crush and then after that the only real physical love of my life. Not even Maria had made me stir the way he did. Within weeks, all I could think of was running my hands over that strong, smooth body of his. When we showered after rugby at school I scanned his total perfection from the corner of my eye, wanting to drink in and savour the sight, never daring to look. He was always about two inches taller than I was, blue-eyed, muscular, with golden blond hair parted on the left side like everyone else. His hair was on his head only when we first met, but by Fourth Form it was definitely elsewhere as three further bushes sprung up. At first I was scared that the really interesting one might cover his glorious cock, with which I was developing a growing obsession. Thankfully it didn't.

For most of the three years we were at school together it was either divine or tortuous being around him. Divine because when we were together - which was a lot - then nothing could hurt me, because the pleasure just drowned it out, no matter what happened. I trusted him with my life, and told him so frequently. He told me the same. It was tortuous because even at fourteen or fifteen I knew I was in love with him. I never really knew much about homosexuality. It certainly wasn't a frequent topic of conversation in the genteel villages of West Yorkshire in the late Fifties. When the subject did come up, and somehow it never did around Marcus, it was usually in the context of Queers: dirty old men in the city who wore long raincoats and seduced vulnerable boys in the bogs and made them do things. I certainly didn't want to grow up into one of those; even then I always saw myself as a protector of vulnerable people. Like I said, I had never experienced any kind of male nurture until I was thirteen, and after experiencing it from Marcus developed a compelling need to give it to fill the huge hole in my emotional foundations.

I wasn't sure that I was ever going to be a Queer, but I was definitely a homosexual. My desire to work out what was going on was as epic as my gullibility; I even looked homosexuality up in the health section of the library. As for being in love, I needed no research on that. I knew I wanted to be held in Marcus West's strong arms every night when we fell asleep after committing the criminal act of buggery. Now and again I wanted to hold him too. I didn't even have a proper word for it, but I really wanted him to suck my cock until I came in his mouth, and then do the same to him. I had no idea if that was something people actually did, but I really wanted to try. And if we really were the first to ever do it, then we'd be famous! In one of my wildest fantasies we even sucked each other at the same time. In my fantasy world with Marcus I wouldn't have had to constantly dream about leaving home and running far away like I did in reality, because in his arms it wouldn't matter.

I had no way of knowing whether or not he felt the same way, and meticulously planned several questionable seduction scenarios, but realistically I was never going to broach the subject with him so it didn't matter. I would just silently worship him from outside our imaginary bed and according to the book I'd eventually outgrow my homosexual phase, get married to a nice girl, and live happily ever after. I made two cack-handed attempts to discuss it with the two people I trusted most apart from Marcus, and who conveniently never crossed paths with my home life. Rather amateurishly, I took the "I have a friend who was wondering..." approach. Matron at school humoured me and told me exactly what the book said, almost word for word. She choose the books in the health section. The chaplain, Reverend Watson, licked his lips and put his hand on my bottom as he started to talk about the sin of anal intercourse. I ran like the wind the moment I could leave politely.

And so our platonic relationship staggered into Fifth Form, at the end of which were O levels and then the wide world beyond. My grades throughout school were astonishingly good, doubly so given my family circumstances. I had always found studying - with Marcus, often at his home - a sanctuary. Equally blessed intellectually, we were both destined for great things: A levels and university first, the world after.

My father was not so accommodating. In this day and age of parents' ambition being lived vicariously through their children, and pressure placed on the kids themselves, it seems astonishing that, in what I recall as just about the only adult conversation we ever had with each other, he told me I should drop out of school and learn a trade so that I could support my mother and sister when someone eventually got irretrievably sick of him and put him out of the picture. The temptation was to interpret that as him saying he was about to abandon us, but after seeing the pathetic way the rest of his life had turned out I think he had finally realised that he was just a reviled waste of space, and genuinely believed he would eventually get his comeuppance and be put out of his misery.

I recall the first time my life changed forever with amazing clarity. We'd had a few careers sessions at school, and just before we sat exams in that glorious summer of 1960 I recall a very nice Mr Hetherington from the Foreign and Colonial Office giving a talk about joining the overseas service. I took his card but was genuinely torn between putting as many continents as possible between me and father and taking his advice and staying put for Mum and Clare. That afternoon, we had a Colts cricket match against one of the public schools from further north, so north we travelled. I had really strengthened out over the previous year or so but was still a bit on the skinny side, although by then I was a tolerably competent all round cricketer. Marcus, ever more a Greek God in my besotted eyes, fancied himself as an allrounder but barely knew one end of the bat from the other by the time we were sixteen. He could bowl like a slingshot though. Since we were the only boys from outside the city, we were known within the team that fateful summer as the Village People. It's almost comical with hindsight.

Somehow, we both managed to pick up injuries in that game: I got hit by a fast pull from the middle of the bat on the inside of my left thigh while fielding at silly midwicket ("so that's why they call it that!" I joked), while he did something to a muscle in his right shoulder as he strained to take the winning wicket in the dying minutes. The bus that brought as back from way out in the sticks went through our village, so we asked to be dropped off to save us going all the way into town and back again on the bus. Since it was a Sammy Leggard bus they had chartered the driver readily concurred. Maybe he feared a Rawls brawl back at the depot if I didn't get my way. He took us all the way to the Wests' front door. Marcus's family were of considerable means and had a rather impressive detached house, so without even discussing it he asked for us to be dropped there rather than in front of my more convenient hovel.

Marcus bounded, and I limped, up the stairs to his bedroom. He announced he was going to hit the bath first and disappeared across the corridor while I looked around the room. I noticed something I had never seen before by his bedside: a photograph of me. It was a bit strange, but I thought little more of it. He came back into the room wrapped in his towel and told me to go and run a fresh bath for myself. He had even left a clean fluffy towel out for me: Marcus is still the most considerate person I have ever met. I managed to heave myself in and out of the bath - my inner thigh was quite badly bruised by this stage - and returned to his room to put some clean clothes on. He was still in his towel, and not much else.

"Chris mate, my shoulder's so bloody sore I can barely move it."

"Well, your Dad's the doctor," I responded. "You've got a better idea than I have about how to make it better."

He looked up at me with a new look I had never seen in his eyes before: vulnerability. He was scared of something. "Mum and Dad are away for the night. Could you massage it for me?" he asked, his voice cracking slightly. My left eyebrow rose. "Please?"

I was scared rigid of putting my hands on his bare skin, but by then I was already a total sucker for vulnerability and needed to make him feel better. I'd have never slept peacefully again if I didn't. I started to knead his flesh, slowly working around the knotted muscle and then spreading the tension out down his back and arms. He whimpered a bit at first, and moaned softly a couple of times as well. Then he sort of purred, just like Mrs Partridge's cat did.

Frankly I'd have been amazed if I hadn't become aroused by this, and sure enough within seconds I was not only scared rigid, but physically rigid between my legs too. Luckily, the huge white towel wrapped around me easily concealed my erection as it stood up flat against my lower belly, even though he couldn't have seen from where he was sitting in his chair, with me standing behind. To this day, that evening remains the only occasion in my entire life where physical nurture and sexual desire have come together and danced their grotesque waltz against my will.

I must have rubbed his shoulders, neck, and back for about twenty minutes, by which time my young fingers were tiring. So I called a halt and Marcus slumped forward at his desk. "That was beautiful Chris," he declared. I recall thinking that these were strange words from one sixteen year old boy to another after what had just happened, when I also noticed the picture of me was gone. It clicked: the reason I had never seen it before was that in nearly three years I had never arrived unexpectedly until today. He must have been hiding it every time I came around and done it again while I was in the bath.

Then he spoke again, in a soft whisper I had never heard him use before. "Let me rub your leg in return."

"I'm fine, really," I lied. I was sure it was killing me.

"Don't be silly, you daft 'aypeth," he retorted. "I'll do your shoulders first to help you relax. Now sit on the chair." He turned around and grabbed me as he got up, forcing me into the chair he had just occupied. He immediately stood behind me and started massaging, before I could see if his towel was tented. I thought - prayed - that it had to be. When I heard him adjusting himself, I figured he was probably hard as well.

After five minutes of sensual ecstasy from his strong hands the moment of truth came. "Get on the bed Chris, and I'll do your leg." It was that delicious soft whisper again.

"Marcus, it's all right, really," I pleaded, desperately hoping that he'd force me to submit and yet terrified that I'd lose control of myself. I was already harder than I ever remembered being.

"If you really don't want it, fine," he continued calmly. "But you know there's nothing to be afraid of. I'd never hurt someone I love."

My eyes went as wide as saucers

"You what?"

"You heard." All this time his hands were still roving over my shoulders, but it was now a gentle caress, no more. "I know how you are always looking at me, trying not to be obvious about it. I think that you love me as a person, however homo that does or doesn't sound, but I also think that you fancy me. There's no other explanation, is there? If there is, just please say so and I'll pretend this never happened if you do. But if what I'm saying makes sense, please tell me. You owe me that much as a friend."

He looked even more vulnerable now. The full enormity of the gamble he had just made didn't dawn on me fully until years later. He had opened himself up to me and then offered an escape route if I wanted to back out. But how could I? He loved me, and I loved him. We had kept it a secret from each other up to now, and no-one else suspected. We were just two of the lads. Surely we could make it work? I had hangups about being homosexual, but that was around what father and others would say if they found out.

If.

Intimacy with, and love for, another boy I had accepted and craved months or years before, and I was increasingly secure about. Father couldn't eat away at my self-esteem in my sexuality when he didn't know it existed.

I stood up and faced Marcus properly for the first time since I had emerged from the bath. While I had been sitting, my engorged cock had somehow deflated enough to point south, and was now hardening again, creating a fairly obvious tent as it headed skywards. "Look what you did Marcus," I said softly, looking down.

The kiss, when it came, was packed with sensation all around my lips. It was how I imagined an orgasm in my mouth, although I'd experience one of those later that evening and it was considerably different! His hands now explored all around my body, and mine over his. His chest was like marble. I kissed him over every inch of his body that was not covered by the towel. He was tenting badly as well but I was terrified of taking the lead and going any further, even though I had fantasised about this day for two years or more. So of course he led, like he always did.

"It's beautiful," he remarked as he opened the towel and let it fall, beholding my erection for the first time. Like a shadow I repeated the action on him, and when I saw his for the first time it was simply breathtaking. Just like I had imagined it.

We started to jack each other off but I was going to come in seconds if he did that so I pushed his hand away and placed it on my chest. I wanted him to feel my heart beating for England. Then, with no warning, he lowered me onto his bed and without uttering a further word started to kiss up my left leg from the knee. I started to wince as a reflex as he went over the massive bruise, but it had stopped hurting altogether; just like everything did when I was with him. When he was within an inch of my balls he stopped, and started at the other knee, repeating the trail of kisses back up to my crotch, where this time he stayed and kissed. Then there was a lick, and suddenly his tongue was moving up the underside of my shaft until, finally, his entire mouth went around my throbbing head and his lips sank further down the shaft. I came almost instantly, straight into his mouth, which was probably just as well as I would have auto-asphyxiated had I been left any longer. Breathing had stopped some time before.

When I finally opened my eyes, I looked at him and muttered, "Sorry. I should have warned you." He just grinned and licked his lips to say he enjoyed it. The air of vulnerability which had been there before was gone, replaced by one of reflective triumph. Despite months of my fantasies and plans, the little bugger had seduced me!

By the time I returned home after returning the favour to him and lying in his arms for an hour I was practically skipping down the street. It still stands shoulder to shoulder with Marc's birth more than a quarter of a century later as one of the happiest days of my life.

School the following day was weird. I desperately wanted to be around him, but he seemed distant and preoccupied. We could barely look each other in the eye. We certainly didn't talk about the night before, although since we were probably both petrified of being found out it was probably just as well.

We did chat on the bus on the way home. Or rather we sat in the back seat, he put his hand on my thigh, and he asked if I was all right with what had happened. He was worried about how I felt! He somehow assumed he had corrupted me and that I was avoiding him.

"Marcus, what happened last night was the most caring, loving thing that has ever happened to me." I replied after checking no-one could hear us. "You were in my first sexual fantasy, and you've been in every one since."

"Shit Chris. Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"Same reason you didn't tell me."

We looked at each other, smiled, and didn't need to say any more.

We both did really well in our GCE O level exams that summer. Marcus, of course, was going on to Sixth Form and then university, destined to become a doctor like his father. My results were comparable, but my future direction was considerably less clear. I had always planned on leaving the village, if not Britain, to escape the living hell under which I laboured as a member of the Rawls 'family'. But with my new found happiness with Marcus I was torn, and father's words about having to provide for Mum and - especially - Clare still rang around in my mind. After a few weeks of dithering, I stayed.

One of the few people in the village who Mum and I truly let into our lives was Mr Briers, who was the fishmonger on the other side of the newsagent. During the war, particularly when Mum was pregnant with me, he had apparently always saved one of the better pieces of fish for her, outside the rationing system. At a time when one didn't see protein from one week's end to the next it was a Godsend to anyone, let alone a pregnant woman. I never really knew why he was so interested in us - especially since he barely concealed his contempt for father as I had got older and begun to agree with him. Anyhow, Mr Briers employed me in his shop when I left school, and kind of became the Dad I never had. The job came with generous pay and company transport - an ancient pre-war push bike with a fishy-smelling wicker basket on the front - for making deliveries around the village. When I mentioned the smell as an aside, he bought a new bike for me the next day.

I had use of the bike outside work too. For the first time, Marcus and I were able to go cycling together and we did: up on the moors towards the Rocks, or down to the river and across to the other side. Throughout that summer of 1960 I was actually thinking that life wasn't too bad, a hitherto unknown feeling for me. I had a surprisingly well-paid job with a benevolent, paternal, boss, and I had a boyfriend. We'd spend Wednesday afternoons and all weekend together, either playing cricket for the village club, or out in the countryside with a picnic stashed away in my basket. We made sweet, gentle love whenever we could. Usually it was at his home when his parents were out: as I look back with hindsight I reckon they must have figured us out and wanted to either provide us the space or spare their own blushes. Other times we were out in the country and we'd have a roll in the long grass by the river, or perhaps in a deserted meadow.

With what was left of my wages after father had taken 'rent' off me - usually on a Friday night before he hit the White Horse or the Con Club - I was able to treat Marcus now and again to a trip to the cinema in town rather than the months-old crap that was shown in the Scout Hut on a Saturday night. We'd watch the newsreels which came in from around the Empire before a newly-released flick. Often, Marcus would 'forget' the glasses he didn't wear for his imaginary long-sightedness, and ask for a seat on the back row. In the dark, we'd hold hands in secret and feel like we had one over on the rest of the world.

If you have memories of one perfect summer as an teenager, coming of age, this was one of those.

Summer soon turned to autumn and Marcus started back at school. We saw less of each other, of course, but we certainly appreciated the time we had together. We planned how we were going to live happily ever after. We still made sweet love whenever we could, and I found myself loving him more than ever, if that was even possible.

Christmas came and went, and I blew most of my savings on a gold plated signet ring for him. He looked horrified that I had done that - from his comparatively meagre pocket money he had bought me something so transient I do not even recall what it was now. But we still loved each other. That was never in doubt.

The second life-changing day of my then short life occurred in the dying days of that winter. There had been a late sustained frost which, deep and penetrating, had encased the Wharfe river with a jacket of ice, leading to a dearth of freshwater fish from the anglers who sold the stuff to us in the shop. Luckily, most of the villagers were aware of the root cause of the problem - a sharp contrast to today's unrelentingly demanding consumers with their 'rights' - and we shut up shop early. I had just locked the front door and stepped out onto Station Road to walk the few yards back to the house when Marcus blazed past on his way up to his home at Woodhead. We weren't expecting to see each other, and just stared goggle-eyed at each other. He was wearing ear muffs to keep the cold out and looked so, well, cute.

"Want to come in?" I asked, on the spur of the moment. Clare was at Brownies after school, Mum was working an extended shift at the mill, and father was on the buses.

"Aye," he responded in the Yorkshire vernacular, an expectant smile on his face.

We made straight for the room I shared with my sister at the back of the house and collapsed onto the bed in a tangle of arms, legs, and clothes. The house was always freezing cold and that day was no exception, so we crawled under the blankets the moment we'd fully divested ourselves of clothing.

I must have replayed the events of that frosty March afternoon back in my mind a thousand times over the forty two years that followed. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for father to come home unexpectedly early, what caused him to sneak up the stairs so quietly that we had no idea he had come inside the house until he kicked the bedroom door open. It could have been the fact that my coat was on the rack by the back door but I was nowhere to be seen. It could have been the grunts and moans, but we had both learned to be silent when lovemaking. It could have been the bed creaking.

Whatever risk it was we hadn't closed out didn't matter though. When father came into my bedroom and found Marcus West and I in a sixty-nine position, our cocks in each other's mouths, my life in that family, and community, ended.

I recall Marcus taking the first hit, and then trying to shield me from the maelstrom of punches and kicks that followed. Father was much more determined to deal with me in the only way he knew; I remember screaming at Marcus to run and eventually he did, taking his clothes with him.

I have very few memories of what happened immediately after Marcus ran through the door or the weeks that followed, and what I did remember I had disciplined my mind to ignore years ago. I know that I spent nearly two months in the Royal Infirmary in the city as my broken ribs and punctured lung slowly healed, and I began to get the movement back in my left leg. The small tear in the lining of my brain, which was to theoretically leave me wide open to meningitis for the rest of my life, wasn't even discovered until CT scanning became part of my medical screening when I did an exchange with SAA thirty years later.

I seem to remember Mum visiting most days, and she came with Clare on the weekends. Father didn't. I asked why, praying that he'd been taken away to prison for what he did. He hadn't: the police just weren't interested in what I had to say and the complaints from the doctors and nurses at the hospital fell on deaf ears. The only good to come out of that particular strand of the whole affair was that it defined my attitude towards protecting people for the twenty years I wore the policeman's badge. Father, it turned out to no-one's surprise, just wasn't interested in visiting the homo son he had nearly killed.

Marcus visited a few times, usually after school since he would be in the city anyway. The few injuries he had picked up were treated secretly by his Dad, to whom my boyfriend had tearfully relayed all the events of our relationship. Dr West had always struck me as a committed and caring father, and although Marcus reckoned he wasn't overjoyed about us, he certainly wasn't wholly indignant about Marcus being homosexual. On one visit, Mum came in just as Marcus was leaving. Their eyes caught each other in a mixture of contempt, sympathy, and pity. Mum put her hand on his shoulder, he smiled, and walked out of the ward. He didn't visit again, terrified father would be there next time.

There were only two other visitors I recall. Mr Briers was there often, almost whenever the shop was shut. He read to me from the newspaper while my sight was still blurred, and we talked about anything other than the reasons I was in hospital. I could tell he knew what had happened, but he didn't care. He was just determined to be there for me, and if my own determination to care for and nurture those around me had already largely been mapped out, he put the finishing touches to it. He had never married or had children of his own, and I suppose I was all that he had outside his shop. Mr Briers also arranged for the only other person who visited me in hospital, Mr Hetherington from the Foreign and Colonial Office, who came over from Leeds as my recovery neared completion and it looked like there would be no long term damage.

As we discussed possibilities the Cayman Islands sounded good, if a touch boring. Hong Kong would certainly be interesting. The Falklands were a non-starter: too remote and bleak. The major problem, however, was that for all of those you had to be eighteen to go; I had only just turned seventeen while I was in hospital. Only Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia took new expat recruits into the police at seventeen. Northern Rhodesia was already showing signs of heading towards the independence that would come three and a half years later, so Rhodesia it was. Now that I think about it a bit more, my "try it and see what happens" approach to life wasn't African at all. It was born right there in that hospital ward when I signed those forms. Since I was still a minor Mr Briers counter-signed them as my guardian. The nurses certainly weren't going to say anything to drop us in it, and Mr Hetherington showed no signs of checking too carefully anyway.

When I went back home on being discharged father didn't say a word. He made a point of addressing me through Mum whenever he wanted me to do something. Mum constantly looked like she would burst into tears and collapse at any moment, while Clare looked little better. I knew that I had destroyed the fragile balance of sanity which passed off as normal Rawls family life. Needless to say, Marcus was not welcome in our house and it was made abundantly clear that I shouldn't visit his, however welcome I might be there. We were able to see each other when he invariably came into the shop on his way home from school. Mr Briers would encourage us to go into the back room, or even to his flat above, to spend a bit of time together, although to say we exercised monk-like self-control didn't do justice to it.

The papers and tickets arrived at the shop from the Foreign Office about three weeks after I got home from hospital. I still hadn't told Mum and father I had signed up for a three year tour, although Mum had known for years I was thinking of it and must have guessed that I wouldn't now be around any longer than I had to. When they arrived, I saw Marcus cry for the first time in my life. Mr Briers almost did too, but was far too dignified to break down in front of us.

I packed my few possessions that night in an old suitcase Mr Briers gave me. Clare saw, of course, so I had to tell her and make her keep it a secret. When we turned off the light she crawled over to my bed and got in with me and we cried each other to sleep. I had told Mum earlier in the evening.

I announced my imminent emigration to father at the breakfast table the following morning. For better or worse he was on the late shift that day; if he had been on the early he would have been gone by the time I rose, and I would have been gone by the time he got back. He lowered the newspaper he was reading enough to look at me, nodded, and spoke to me for the last time. "At least you'll have no family there to shame. I'm sure your sister will appreciate some money now and again for a new coat." The newspaper went back up, and I never set eyes on his face again.

Ten minutes later, we used the front door for the first time I consciously remembered. Mum had always said it was for special occasions like the front room. I just wasn't sure if this was a happy one or a sad one. She and Clare stood in the doorway as I hugged and kissed them both, stepped out and turned right to head up towards the station. I didn't look back, because I would have gone to pieces and it would upset them as much as me. Mr Briers was standing in the shop door, tears streaming down his face, as I walked past. He looked a shadow of the man he had been a month before. Just as I reached the station I spotted Marcus standing there, as we had arranged. My final act as a resident of the village was to cry onto his shoulder, hold him, and kiss him in the deserted waiting room. We both had raging erections but couldn't do anything about it, and as we parted I felt that a huge part of me died. I think I cried all the way into Leeds, all of the way to London, and a good portion of the way to Salisbury.

I wrote directly to Marcus every couple of weeks, but after a year or so his replies suddenly stopped with no warning. I continued writing for another year or so after that, and they never got returned so I assumed he was receiving them. I couldn't very well ask Mum and Clare what had happened to him. Mr Briers was unable, or unwilling, to say what had happened to him either and although I always wondered, and continued to grieve for my relationship with him, in time I stopped overanalysing it and resolved to get on with the rest of my life. I told Marcus that I was writing my final letter if there was no reply, and I stopped after that.

I kept in touch with Mum and Clare, via Mr Briers. I also followed father's final words of advice and twice every year I sent a money order to buy Clare something for her birthday and for her Christmas box. Although Clare couldn't make it I brought Mum out to Rhodesia for my wedding fifteen years later. They told father she was staying with Clare, who had by then moved away to live in London and couldn't get time off work. Mum developed pneumonia and died within weeks of getting home, basically giving up on life now that she knew I was settled and "no longer queer" as Clare described in her letter. I couldn't face coming back to the village as long as father was alive, and never returned for the funeral.

My final contact with the village ended in the mid Nineties, when my monthly letters to Mr Briers suddenly started getting returned undelivered. He'd have been well into his seventies by then, so I just assumed he had passed on as well. When I returned for father's funeral, I was effectively a total stranger in my own past.

* * *

As I looked him up and down for the first time since that morning at the railway station, I saw that the forty two intervening years had been nearly as kind to Marcus as they had to me. He was still two inches taller, blue eyed and blond, and although he had bulked out a bit he was still in my eyes a Greek God, albeit one pushing sixty years old. Whereas I was still in good shape from an active outdoor life and careful self control, he was just naturally healthy, and recognisably the same Marcus I had loved over four decades previously.

I held out my hand and when he took it, I noticed he still wore the signet ring I had given him that last Christmas before I left. My heart melted.

"I've missed you," I said, slightly stiltedly, as I glanced around the hall to make sure nobody could hear us. Old habits die hard. "Every day at first, less as time passed, but thinking about you still makes my heart flutter."

"Can we talk later?" he asked. "Away from here?"

I nodded and we parted after a long look in each others' eyes and we had rested a hand on the other's shoulder. I wanted to speak to an old man I had spotted at the back of the chapel in a wheelchair who had looked very familiar, but whom I couldn't quite place. The man was gone, however.

There was a very cute blond kid of about Marc's age wondering around like a spare part, but the two of them had gravitated together and I left them to talk to each other as I mingled with people I hardly knew.

Eventually, the small crowd of mourners dispersed. They were mainly drinking pals from the various pubs in the village, plus one or two from old folks' welfare and social services. A couple of them remembered me, more still knew of me despite having never met me. All skated around the issue of my total absence for half my father's life.

When we finished and the church elders wanted to lock up Marcus reappeared at my side and we donned our coats, crossed the main street, and headed out towards the river. Standing on what I remembered as the vast open playing fields of the Rec - recreation ground - were row after row of tiny, soulless, identikit new houses. I thought of it as a sort of modern English equivalent of a Harare township.

"I wasn't expecting you here today," I said, as we walked through that housing estate down towards the now-disused riverside mill where Mum had worked all her life. "I just assumed you had left the village and didn't know - or care - what was happening any more."

"I certified him dead on Friday actually," he began. "I did leave, but I'm back. I'm living in our old house at Woodhead. Although for obvious reasons I wasn't his GP, I was on call when he was found dead by one of the volunteer kids who used to go and visit him a couple of times a week."

"I'd like to meet that volunteer sometime and thank him or her. Could you arrange it?"

"Him. Probably," he smiled.

"So what happened?" I asked, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer. I did, but I didn't, if you understand.

"He'd had cancer for about six months-"

"No, I'm not interested in that," I interrupted. "Why did you stop writing? Don't answer if you can't, but I really want to know, just for my own peace of mind as much as anything."

"I'm so sorry Chris. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I went up to university after leaving school, and with a fresh start and everything I was determined not to be gay if I couldn't be with you. I met a girl in my fresher year and got her pregnant within a couple of months, so we moved in together. I couldn't bear to let her find out about you, so we stayed in Cambridge and I tried to cut everything off from my past here with you."

"OK."

"I still loved you, dreamed about you every day. But I had to get over you. I'm so sorry."

At his request, I explained a bit about how my life had turned out, including my marriage to Maria and how every day I wished it was him. I described Marc's arrival, and how I had wanted to name him Marcus in honour of the love of my life. Marcos was close enough.

Marcus laughed. "I wanted to call our child Christopher, after you, but we had a daughter and that would have been a bit weird." I laughed back. "We called her Christine instead."

Tears were rolling openly down our faces by now and he pulled out a packet of tissues and offered me one, still the same considerate Marcus of old. We stood hugging by the river bank where we had skimmed stones across the water as young lovers, as our hardening cocks pressed against each other the same way they had done on that very spot all those years ago.

When we broke the hug Marcus continued: "Elizabeth died giving birth to our second daughter, who didn't survive either. I was devastated; it was a rare hereditary condition which the Addenbrooke's obstetrician couldn't have done anything about even if he'd known. I was left with Christine, who was all of eleven years old. I had just qualified as a GP and Dad was due to retire, so I came back to the village and took over the practice. Mum and Dad were both really great helping with Christine, who grew up into a lovely girl.

"Where is she now?" I enquired. I hadn't seen anyone who could have been her at the funeral.

"With Mum and Dad in God's Acre."

"Oh Marcus, I'm so sorry." I couldn't even begin to contemplate losing either of my sons.

"Sexual morals have gone out the window here Chris. She was wild by our standards, but no worse than anyone else at the time and in truth pretty tame by today's standards. She got pregnant in some one night stand when she was in her mid-twenties. We had no idea who the father was, and had no idea she had the same condition as her mother. She died giving birth to my grandson, who survived this time to once again leave me holding the baby, and again with Mum and Dad helping me out until they died within a couple of months of each other about five years ago. And I did name him Christopher."

I ran a few sums in my head. "That makes him in what, his mid teens?"

"Fifteen. Same age as your Marc. It was Chris who used to visit your father on his community service programme, read to him, do his laundry and washing up, that sort of thing. Your father used to call him the grandson he'd never had. He seemed to have mellowed a bit in his old age, more so when he fell ill. It was Chris who found him dead last Friday, and of course he phoned me straight away."

I mumbled some words of apology for Chris having to deal with that at such a tender age, but I was still incredulous. "How did father ever let a West through the front door?"

"Back door, still. Chris isn't a West. Elizabeth and I never married and Christine used her mother's name. Christopher Franklin never raised an eyebrow."

I couldn't help chuckling. Marcus and I had had the last laugh: in many ways young Chris literally was the grandson - or great grandson - father had never had.

We chucked a few stones into the water. Apparently it had been quite a dry winter, and the water levels were low enough to expose the stepping stones over to the island in the middle. We walked across, and standing in the long grass on that island in the stream where he had slowly and tenderly fucked me for the first time he dropped another bombshell on me.

"I've got a letter for you from Mr Briers."

Mr Briers! I'd just assumed that he was pushing up daisies in God's Acre as well, and although I thought about him when I saw the old shop, it never occurred to me to ask around about him - I wouldn't even have known who to ask. Then it struck me that he must have been the old man in the wheelchair, whisked away from the funeral before I could catch up.

Marcus continued, "He asked me to wait until after he'd died to give it to you, but I know what's in it, and I think it would greatly help both of you if you read it now, before you go home. Now that your father's gone it makes no difference to him, but it might help the two of you who are left."

Just the way he said it, I thought I knew what was in the letter. A two minute flick through the hand-written pages and it all fell into place. I looked back at Marcus, tears in my eyes again. "How long have you known?"

"Since I put him in care six years ago, when he told me because he thought his days were numbered. I suspected from around about the time you got put in hospital because of the way he reacted. Mum was still alive when he told me, and when I asked her she told me she and Dad knew as well. He really cares about you, you know."

"Where is he now?" I asked. "I need to see him."

"He'll kill me for telling you, but I agree. The council would only pay for him to go to an old people's warehouse down in Shipley, so I pay his fees at the BUPA place here, up from the Malt Shovel."

"Can we go tomorrow?"

"Of course."

We headed back along the bridle path towards the other end of the village, arm in arm, remembering the times we had been down there before. Each spot where we had nearly been caught kissing, or we had copped a feel of each other in the bushes, was eagerly pointed out and the event in question recalled in graphic detail. As we hit the main street and headed back towards the junction with Station Road we placed an arm around each other.

"There's something else you should know about, Chris," he said, as we neared my old home. I was sure nothing he could say was going to spook me now. "My grandson came out to me a few months ago. He says he's always known he was gay, and he's out to a few friends at school as well. There are a few incidents, of course, but no-one close to him seems to mind. He's getting to the stage now where he needs to be able to talk to gay people about it without any pressure, like we never had a chance to. I've not told him about us, but I'd like to, and I'd like you to be there if you don't mind."

"Sure," I responded, spooked. I didn't need to think about that one. I continued: "I've had my suspicions about Marc for a while too, but also never told him about me or us. It might be useful if we could all meet and talk together."

"I agree, but the kids have already met. They spoke at the reception this afternoon."

So that was the blond cutie. The one who spent an hour and a half talking to my son while they ignored everyone else. It would be an interesting discussion.

When we got back to the house Clare and Colin beat a hasty retreat. It was getting dark and she was not a huge fan of driving at night. Having seen British roads, I didn't blame her. Marc and the blond boy were sitting rather close together by the roaring gas fire in the front room. When I had lived there Mum and father always said that room was to be used "for weddings and funerals". I chuckled at the irony of it. We all chatted together a bit as we introduced ourselves without going into every particular detail before young Chris, obviously destined to be as kind and considerate as his grandfather, suggested to Marcus that they invite Marc and I up to their place for dinner. We readily accepted.

Some of the house was radically different, while other parts hadn't changed much at all. A bit like the rest of the village, I mused. Chris now used the bedroom in which his grandfather and I consummated our relationship back in 1960, and Marcus - I assumed - had graduated to the master. The lounge had new sofas, but the solid oak dining table was exactly as I remembered.

Dinner was an enjoyable, leisurely affair which Marcus and I cooked together like an old couple while we caught up on forty years. The boys sat staring at each other, rolling their eyes and grinning at each other as the grown ups chatted away and reminisced about the crazy things we had done as kids.

After dinner, we talked late into the night, and when I called Marc down from Chris's bedroom where he had been for some five hours I noticed a tear in his eye.

"Are you all right?" I enquired as I put an arm around his shoulder.

"Don't really want to talk about it," he grunted, looking at Marcus to let me know that he did, just not in company.

"Assuntos do coração?" I asked, although I knew the answer. I knew my son.

"Sim. Pode falar amanha?"

I nodded and we left, with a slightly puzzled looking Marcus waving from the front door.

When I hit the bed I was using in my parents' bedroom that night I didn't feel like I had come home. Home was now a continent away. But I felt complete for the first time in forty two years. The part of me that had died when I had left in 1961 had come back to life. I slept solidly through the night.

The following afternoon at lunch Marcus came over to the tiny terraced house after his surgery and we walked the half mile over to the residential home where Mr Briers had been looked after for the last six years. His mental acuity was all there, Marcus explained as we walked: it was only his body that couldn't cope any more, and that he would probably be OK living by himself if he had someone to check up on him every day. I mentally cursed myself for not being there, although I also knew how pointless that sentiment was. Emotions may make us human, but our very humanity makes us imperfect.

When we arrived at his room, I recognised him straight away, although I hadn't the day before. I felt a touch guilty about that too.

When our eyes met and he knew instantly why I was there, he merely smiled and said he never thought I'd come.

"Daddy?" was the best I could offer in return before being enveloped in a huge hug that prompted a ten minute cry amongst the three of us.

Although I had been constantly searching for a reason why father and I - Rawls senior and junior - had been so different, I always put it down to my reaction to the old bastard's general shittiness. I had genuinely never considered the possibility that Mr Briers was my biological father, but now that I had read it in his letter and seen his reaction everything made sense: the extra fish while Mum was pregnant, my ludicrously overpaid job, the visits in hospital, his help in getting me out of the hellhole, his role as the go-between for Mum, Clare, and I, and the way he had protected me from Marcus's relationship with Elizabeth. A dignified, gentle, kind man, he had cared for me as much as anybody could have done without giving himself away. And right there in Marcus's arms as we sat talking to him I finally realised that I was, after all, my father's son.

He told us how he, as a gay man in West Yorkshire in the Thirties and Forties, was determined to prove his masculinity to himself and had somehow persuaded my already married but miserable mother to sleep with him. The experience had confirmed his sexual orientation once and for all, but within a month or two it became clear they were now left with the problem of me. His widower father had been lost at Dunkerque, and he had taken over the family fishmonger's firstly to avoid his call up and latterly to keep an eye on Mum, whom he had adored despite being unable to give himself fully to her. Father, apparently, had known all along but stuck by my mother, although he obviously hated me. The conversation that afternoon was like filling in the missing pieces of a jigsaw.

Dad described how he had never been able to love me or indeed anyone else openly until it was too late and was now - with no family to speak of - waiting to die and stop being a burden to those around him who had no obligation towards him. I cried like a baby, and Dad and Marcus both held me in their arms again.

My gung-ho approach to life hadn't deserted me yet, and within an hour of meeting Mr Briers - Dad - again, I knew what had to be done.

When we got back to the tiny house we entered through the back door - it wasn't a wedding or funeral today. I was about to sit down in the chair by the range in the back room when I saw a glint in Marcus's eyes and he held his finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet. He looked up at the kitchen ceiling, from which a fairly unmistakable sound was coming. So it had been the bed creaking that had given us away that day in 1961.

When Marc and Chris came down half an hour later they were slightly surprised to see us, and reddened instantly. Marcus and I could barely control ourselves as we were consumed with a combination of laughter and pride, but we assured them that exploring their growing sexuality was fine by us, if illegal. To underline the point, we began our talk. We talked about everything: meeting each other, our lives, keeping our love for each other secret, and how we had got on with the rest of our lives despite still loving each other. It was a very cathartic session, and after a lot of crying, hugging, and more than one kiss we headed our separate ways for the evening, and we were not split along family lines. When I went to bed that night, I not only felt complete, but I also felt content. I was happy to face my own maker knowing that there was nothing left to sort out.

Before I flew back to Zimbabwe with my entire family - Iggy had managed to get a few days off as well and joined us in the village - I discussed with Marcus where our relationship was headed. We're still trying to sort that out now, and we've crossed all our fingers and toes for the right result.

As we crawled down the M1 towards London for the flight home I was in a very reflective mood as one ancient and painful chapter in my life came to a belated close and a new one began. I looked out at everything around us, and thought about human progress in my life time.

I saw the huge power stations in South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire billowing out clouds of noxious crap as they fuelled the mindless computer games of a lost generation of obese children who chatted every day to someone they had never met in Los Angeles or Sydney but who didn't know their own next door neighbour, and had never been to the park to play on the swings because their neurotic parents imagined paedophiles lurking in every bush. I thought of the future these kids had, as their education system turfed them out of university at twenty one unable to function as adults and barely able to read and write. None of them were ever going to serve the Empire as policemen at seventeen. When I was twenty four I had been away from home for seven years and adopted a teenage child. Twenty four year olds today are considered precocious and independent if Mummy and Daddy don't buy their cars, Reeboks, and pay their mobile phone bills for them.

I remembered the pleasures of a bicycle ride down deserted country lanes as I surveyed the nose-to-tail congestion of the climate-controlled, fuel injected, turbocharged traffic jam.

I thought about the chaos of majority rule, and total breakdown of democracy and civil society that awaited us back in Zimbabwe.

Could we really say that we have made things better now?

And then I turned and looked around Marcus's Nissan jeep at the people I loved.

Dad Briers, who had never been allowed to love another man and had hidden his desires and so many truths until it was basically too late, was fast asleep on the leather bench as he headed off to see out the rest of his days under African skies with the son he hadn't been able to acknowledge for sixty years and the grandchildren he'd never met. As we picked him up from the home that morning, he had confided that he was now complete too, for the first time in his life. And he was coming home.

Marcus and I, next to each other the front, were finally able to at least consider a life with each other after all these years. There are still some practicalities to resolve, but the principle is sound.

Next to Dad was Ignacy, who... Never mind. Iggy was as mad as a box of frogs. I wasn't even sure he had ever had sex, let alone fallen in love. He just wasn't a sexual person that way. But he could love, he was loved, and he always will be, no matter how unconventional his relationships. And none of us judged him for being who he was.

And in the very back row of the jeep were Chris and Marc. They were sitting together making the most of the few hours they had left together, holding each other and making out as only teenagers in love can do, not caring who saw them as we sailed down the road.

As I looked back upon the generations: the years of history, past and future, sitting in that car I finally understood what human progress - and family - really meant.

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We support Ukraine — Мы поддерживаем Украину — Ми підтримуємо Україну
We support Ukraine — Мы поддерживаем Украину — Ми підтримуємо Україну