Dedicated to the memory of Alan Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912--7 June 1954) the greatest gay scientific genius of the twentieth century.
[This story can be read on its own, but it is better to have read the earlier ones in the series first. You are warned that in addition to the gay sex that you are looking for, there is much in the story about music, science, religion, English college life and alcohol. There is also some crude language. Should any of these topics not suit you, then read no further!]
[To understand parts of this story, you need to know that the union of two persons of the same sex/gender only became legally recognized in the United Kingdom by the Civil Partnerships Act of 2004. This story takes place some 20 years earlier.]
Chapter 39 David
A new member in the chapel choir
The October morning sun shone brilliantly on Camford. In Jesserod Meadow, the leaves on the trees were beginning to change colour and assume brilliant gold, yellow, red and brown colours. The swans on the river started to look cold, and the morning frost still sparkled on the grass as Jon and I walked hand-in-hand along the gravel walk, noticed, if at all, by only a few early morning dog-walkers and a number of joggers. The weather had tempted us to walk to our respective labs, rather than go on our bikes as we usually did. Jesserod Meadow had a special significance for us. There, some five-and-half years before, Jon, my good friend of six months, had asked me, a first year student, certain of my academic choices, but uncertain about my sexuality, some searching questions about it which led within a few days to my realization that not only was I gay, but that I was desperately in love with him, so desperate indeed that I went to him and told him so.
As this part of the story begins, Jon was 29, and a postdoctoral research worker in the Camford University Chemical Laboratory, and I was 24 and just starting my third and final year as a Ph.D. student in the Pharmacology Department. We had been living together permanently since I had finished my undergraduate studies just over two years earlier. Jon is the most important person in my life, which would have been very different if I had never met him. I came to Camford with really only four preoccupations: my Christian faith and my knowledge of music, literature and chemistry. Pretty well everything else that I have learned about life in the world has been taught me by him in the last six years. Of course I have learned a lot more about chemistry and for the last two years about singing, in my time in Camford, but Jon has been my tutor for everything else, including fucking. The classical Greek man-ephebe relationship has worked out spectacularly well in our case. To quote the old joke, we've been practising gays for years and are now rather good at it!
Jon had just got back from a seven-day trip round England visiting the sites where trees had been planted and drystone walls repaired. He had set up a few years before two charitable trusts to promote afforestation and drystone wall repair, funded by his private income, and each employed a small labour force to carry out these objectives, and David tried to inspect each site at least once a year. Seven nights seemed a long time for me to sleep alone. Earlier in our relationship, Jon and I had of necessity had to spend weeks or months apart, and although it was irksome, it was not painful. But now after long periods together, separation seemed to take much longer to adjust to.
The mobile telephone network was expanding rapidly around this time. The era when one had to look for car parks and garage forecourts to use a cellphone was almost gone. Cell base station towers were springing up like mushrooms over the whole land, many attached to church towers and other high landmarks. As I mentioned earlier, Jon had given me a massive first generation phone, heavy and unwieldy, but this September was the first time that we could make regular use of our phones. Every night about 11 pm, we would have a phone sex session.
It is embarrassing now to recall the things that we used to say to one another in these sessions, and I will not bore you with a lot of details, but here is a typical conversation:
D: "Hello, Jon, it's your dirty-minded faggot-boy here. Have you missed me? I've really missed you. I'm lying here in bed with a massive hard-on caused just by thinking about you and your beautiful arse. I wish that you were lying here beside me so that I could turn you over and rim your delicious hole and cover your arse-cheeks with kisses. I want to rub my face in the small of your back and turn you over again and lick your balls. I want that dick of yours in my mouth, I want it up my shithole, I want to hug you, squeeze you and come all over you!"
J: "Hello, slut boy. I hope you have not been offering that arsehole of yours to anyone else. If I thought that anyone else was fucking you, I would go mad with rage. I would have to thrash you for disobedience. The very thought of some other man poking his dick up that wonderful hole of yours fills me with anger and misdirected envy. You are MINE, and I intend to keep it that way! I want you now, I want to fuck you within an inch of your life. I want to blast my spunk deep into your guts, I want to hear the bubbling noise as you fart it out again, I want you, I want you, I want you!"
These conversations, terribly embarrassing to relate now, would go on for up to twenty minutes and by then we were both ready to come, and we could hear over the phone the grunts and shouts that the other made as he came. We always had a good supply of tissues to hand before beginning a call! With hindsight, I can only hope that the hotel rooms that Jon was sleeping in were well insulated for sound, particularly as the chances were that Robin Banks (gay manager of the afforestation scheme) would be sleeping in the adjacent room. You will note that these long-distance conversations were totally different to our conversations together face to face. All rationality and humour were absent, they had reduced our communication to mere expressions of lust, totally unedifying, as well as uninteresting, and merely a new mode of pornography leading to a mutual wank session. Perhaps then, not the most inviting way to begin a new section of these memoirs!
It was the Saturday of the first week of the Martinmas Term. The night before, the St Boniface's College Chapel Choir had assembled for its first practice. There were several new faces from hopefully enthusiastic freshers, and a few grins and/or yawns from the old hands of the choir. The organ scholar looked happy at the number of new volunteers, as indeed I did myself, as I was by far the most senior member. The organ scholar led the choir, playing the organ was delegated to his deputy. He proposed a Purcell anthem for the next Sunday, which meant that we had just two days to learn it. "It's quite a simple one!" he said encouragingly. I had sung it before, so it was not a problem for me, and I was not surprised to be assigned the tenor solo. After the practice, we all adjourned to the beer cellar, and one of the male freshmen came up to me and said, "Do you remember me?" I looked at him hard and remembered him.
"You're Simon from Guildsham, but I don't remember your surname!" I said. "I didn't expect to see you in Camford until next year!" He was the beautiful baritone son of the secretary of the music society where I had performed the previous year in what was my first professional singing engagement. "It's great that you decided to come to Boni's!" (Boni's, pronounced "Boney's" is the nickname of St Boniface's). I was totally amazed that I had not spotted him earlier, as I always survey the male talent in the choir, and he still looked as ravishingly prick-raising as he had the year before. "But how do you come to be here?"
"What I didn't tell you when we met last year was that I had already done my A levels. Although I had long missed the UCCA deadline, after I had talked to you I made a few phone calls and the medical tutor here made me an offer as I had already got the necessary grades." This was perhaps not surprising, as he had struck me as being very bright. But the lad obviously had a great sense of initiative to have taken his future so cheekily into his own hands.
"Well, you've ended up in the best college in Camford!" I said with a grin. "And, although we are not the biggest or most well known chapel choir, we have high standards and enjoy ourselves enormously. Some men join just to chat up the birds, but most of us are quite deeply committed, some to religion, most to music, and some of us to both. And during my time in the choir, we have had several trips away in the summer to sing in cathedrals or concerts abroad. So I guess you are starting your medical studies with a degree in Physiology?"
"That's right," he replied.
"I always dine in Hall on Sundays after evensong," I said, "and many of the choir members sit together to eat. You're welcome to join us on Sunday nights, and we often go on for a drink in the Lion later in the evening. I have no official role in the choir, the organ scholar, Daniel, is in charge, but I am the most senior member, as I'm now in my seventh year.
"One thing I can assure you of: you are going to have a challenging but enormously enjoyable six years here, much better than if you had gone to a crummy London medical school! And if you are into sport or fitness, while the college has good facilities, in two years' time there's going to be an exciting new Men's Fitness Centre opening in town, with excellent state-of-the-art provision, including a 25-metre pool. And you will never be bored in Boni's, never lonely and never have time on your hands!" I felt that I had to put in a plug for the Fitness Centre, now under construction.
Simon smiled gratefully, which made him look even sweeter than previously. "Come and have coffee," he said. We had finished our beer, so we left and went to his room, which was a small and poky bed-sitter, but had been well modernized so that there was adequate storage and work space, and it was right next to a bathroom that he only had to share with two others. I noted his room number and his name from the list at the bottom of the staircase. His surname was Mitchell. I looked around the room to see if I could find any indication of his sexual orientation, such as books, pictures or programme cards for GLBT societies, but could see nothing. Every time I looked at him, I felt my cock stiffening in my pants. I decided that it would be unfair to tell him I was gay: it would be better if he found out through other people. We agreed to sit together at dinner after Chapel on the Sunday, and I left after half-an-hour.
As we walked through the Meadow, I told Jon about the beautiful boy who had joined the choir and what I had said to him. Jon said, "Well, I'll be meeting him tomorrow in the beer cellar after Chapel. Unless you want to be misleading, you will have to introduce me as your boyfriend. If you don't, someone in the choir will soon tell him, as soon as they see you together, and that would make him think that you were deceitful, and possibly predatory! Why didn't you tell him that you were gay? Do you fancy him? If you do, and he's not gay, you will probably scare him off, and if he is gay, he needs to know that we are an item." Duh! There I was again, making stupid and potentially serious mistakes. Thank heaven that I have Jon to advise me and look after me. Shortly thereafter, we parted company for our respective labs.
Chapter 40 David
Saturday night sex 1
We met again at lunchtime and had a quick snack in the Chemistry canteen before walking home, collecting our bikes and riding off to the Olympic Pool for our Saturday swim. As we undressed, I said to Jon, "Don't mention Simon Mitchell's name until we get home. I don't want to get an erection when I'm wearing swimming trunks!"
"That boy must be extremely prick-raising!" said Jon.
"Just wait until you see him!" I replied "You'll need to keep your gown over your crotch!"
