The Hand-Reared Boy. Brian Aldiss

asked us once if Rosemary could attend a session – ‘not touching, just looking’ – but Nelson and I refused; we disliked Rosemary. Nelson told Ann that some boys looked different because they had skin over the ends of their cocks; there were boys at school like that. She begged Nelson to bring someone of that kind home, so that she ‘could have a go with it’. Nelson told me later that he had approached a boy he knew and suggested it, but the boy refused.

      This ur-sex with our sister was entirely a one-way transaction. We took it for granted that she had no instrument, and there was an end to it; she seemed to labour under the same delusion. Neither Nelson nor I, to my recollection, ever tried to examine her crack, although we both had enough knowledge by then to grasp that that crack represented a decided presence and not just an absence. But we weren’t interested.

      No doubt our own little cocks seemed far more fascinating than anything Ann could offer, for at this age we were passing through a proto-homosexual phase often noticeable in the boys. But I believe there was something more to it than that: the question of personality entered, personality of which sex is only a part. Children respond instinctively to each other’s characters, often in a way baffling to adults, who will cry plaintively, ‘But Jimmy’s such a nice little boy, dear!’, or ‘I do wish you could find a better playmate than Freddie!’, in their inability to see the real nature of Jimmy and Freddie.