[This story continues 'Luke's early years.' All persons and institutions in the story are fictitious. Some places are real, others are fictitious.]
Chapter 13
Buckingham College, Camford
As I stood there on the pavement in Buckingham Street, looking at the golden-yellow stonework of the seventeenth-century frontage of the college, beautiful in the October sun, I began to re-evaluate the city in or near which I had spent most of my life. I tried to see it through the eyes of most eighteen-year-olds who had set foot in it only once or twice before. I was struck with its beauty, albeit impaired by the masses of cars, buses and bicycles that passed through it daily, and was thankful that I was joining a community going back hundreds of years. I picked up my suitcase and went to find my room allocation.
My room was rather old-fashioned. It was a first-floor room in the second quadrangle of the college, in the centre of which was an eighteenth-century fountain, surrounded by a flower-bed. It was a duplex room of the type commonly allocated to freshman students: a shared spacious sitting room/study with two desks, and two separate single bedrooms opening off. Each bedroom had a washbasin, but no toilet. Consequently, it was fairly universal practice after a night's drinking to use the washbasin to piss into. The room shared a bathroom, which had two toilets and two showers, with two other similar student rooms on the same level of the staircase, for a total of six students. My roommate had not yet arrived, so I had a choice of bedrooms. I unpacked my suitcase, put the bed-linen etc. into drawers in my chosen bedroom and my clothes in other drawers.
I then went out and did what dozens of freshman students have traditionally done at universities over the whole land, I went into a men's outfitters and bought a dark green hoody, embellished with a Buckingham College crest. The days of college scarves and ties were gone in those early years of the twenty-first century and hoodies were in. The college crest (armorial bearings) was: 'argent, a pile inverted gules encircled by a ducal coronet, between two bezants.' This was intended to symbolize the ducal foundation of the college, but it was evident if you had the right kind of mind (a dirty one) to see it as a symbol of fellatio! The motto beneath the armorial bearings, 'Virtus virilis' (manly strength or virtue) could also have a gay interpretation.
In 1623, to mark his elevation by the king to the Dukedom of Buckingham, George Villiers, regretting his lack of a university education, had founded Buckingham College. 'The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,' as a contemporary described him, was an appropriate description of the founder of what became notorious as a gay college. King James VI/I had taken a fancy to Villiers from the moment of their meeting in 1614, and while there is not a lot of strong evidence, apart from a hidden passage linking their bedrooms, he was almost certainly James's lover.
This association of the college with man-man sex was never forgotten. College accounts from the Restoration era record fines and rustications of undergraduates for supplementing their beer money by soliciting as rent boys. In the eighteenth century there was a series of scandals about sexual relationships between the fellows and teenage undergraduates. The prudery of the Victorians led to attempts to sweep this reputation of the college under the carpet, particularly after Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, commonly known as the Labouchère Amendment, criminalized sexual acts between male persons ('gross indecency'), and it was the better part of a century before this injustice was removed. In the twenty-first century, the resolute determination of both the Governing Body and the undergraduates not to admit women students, reinforced the gay reputation of the college.
Chapter 14
The first few weeks
I was of course extremely interested to see what my roommate was like. It was the next day before he turned up. He was quite attractive-looking, but seemed very quiet and reserved. He had short, crew-cut dark hair, was very tall (a good 2 metres), broad shouldered and pretty muscular. I hoped that he would not be into rowing, rugby or boxing, and was relieved when he said that was not a sporty type. He told me that he was reading chemistry. It was not easy to get him to talk, I had to smile and make a big effort to get him to say very much. I asked him if he swam, and he said that he was very keen on swimming and hoped to get into the water at least once a week. I was pleased that we had at least one thing in common.
I will skip over the first few days in which the freshmen were recruited to various college and university clubs and activities, and just relate that I joined the chapel choir. My new roommate, whose name was Thomas Appleton, did not tell me about any new activities that he was going to try. His taciturnity decreased somewhat after the first week, and we started going into dinner together. Most evenings before dinner we had a drink in the college beer cellar and after his first drink, Tom always became much more communicative.
My choice of two languages to study meant that I had a much more hectic timetable than most humanities students. I had two tutorials per week, one in French and one in Italian. These were not always one-to-one tutorials, often they were small groups, and in Italian involved students from other colleges. The assignments were not always essays: sometimes they were translation exercises. The tutorials also were varied, with conversation classes and interpreting classes, as well as essay reading and criticism. We were expected to attend a selection of lectures: some of our own choice, others heavily recommended by our tutors, and were expected to read at least five books per term. This meant that I spent a lot of time working in our room, whereas Tom was out at lectures or lab classes most of the day, which was a happy arrangement.
You might wonder why I had chosen such a relatively obscure discipline to study at university level as Italian. There were a number of contributing factors. Firstly, my mother had studied Italian and lived in Italy, second, my unknown biological father, the man responsible for my Mediterranean complexion, had been Italian, thirdly both my fathers spoke the language, as of course did Uncle Marcello. But the most influential factor is what happened when we were young. After the adoption of Cathy, my parents were essentially confined to the house in the evenings for several years with two young children. At that stage they already spoke quite a lot of the language already, having been to a summer school in Emilia-Romagna. They asked Marcello if he knew of an Italian tutor who would come to the house and give them language tuition. Of course Marcello did know such a person and for five years they both had weekly lessons in Italian. As a result of this, whenever they were in Marcello's company they spoke Italian, and in order to practise, they spoke it between themselves at home. They did this a lot, and we kids started to pick up bits of the language, and before long could say a lot of everyday words and sentences. I missed these conversations when I was at boarding school, and when I got into the senior school and found that I could study Italian to both GCSE and A Level, I jumped at the opportunity. I felt very strongly that if both my fathers could speak two other languages apart from English, when they had both been educated as chemists, I should have no problems doing the same when the languages were my main field of study.
My fathers had another language too, the language of gay endearments, which used to embarrass me when I was in my early teens, but as I got older and discovered that I was gay myself, I began to appreciate their use. Dad used to call Pop 'stud-boy' and Pop used to call Dad 'fag-boy'. Along with more usual terms like 'love', 'darling', 'Ganymede' and 'pretty youth', they seemed to me, as an adult, perfectly normal terms for a man. They did not use such terms in public, of course.
I was a keen and conscientious student, so I was not aware of any great need for sex that could not be satisfied by a good wank, and my social life was quite low key. I did not feel the need to chat up my fellow students during dinner, though I did look round at them appraisingly. On Saturday mornings I went swimming with Tom, and got the chance to see him undressed. He looked pretty good, but I did not feel any desire to make advances. We used to go to the Camford Olympic Pool, because Tom could not afford to join the Men's Fitness Club. My parents had paid for my membership as soon as I became eighteen. They had been instrumental in getting the Club started, and Pop had contributed a million towards its construction costs, and he sat on the committee. I used to go there at lunchtime on my own a couple of times a week and swim twenty or so lengths. If I had been looking for sex, it would have been a good place to go, because it had been designed to be gay-friendly. Occasionally, if he was free at lunchtime, Pop would join me in swimming. Although now in his early fifties, he was extremely fit, though I could easily have overtaken him if we had been swimming competitively. I sometimes wondered if the gay regulars at the Centre thought that I was his male toy-boy rather than his son! One evening a week I had choir practice, which was always followed by a session at a nearby pub. The choir's repertoire of music was very limited by the lack of women's or boys' voices, and placed a heavy reliance on tenors, and those rare species, male altos. I regretted that I had not inherited Dad's tenor voice (then it struck me, could I have inherited such a thing from him? My Y-chromosome was Italian! But that may merely reflect my poor knowledge of genetics.)
After a culture-starved couple of weeks, I persuaded Tom to come with me to see an Italian film at the Rialto on a Saturday afternoon. Saturday dinner in Hall was always a cold meal, as it was the kitchen staff's night off, so we signed out of dinner, and after the film, went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Tom was not affluent, and was, being a Yorkshireman like Dad, careful with his money, but hungry students got a good meal at the Hang Zhou Restaurant. To my surprise, Tom said how much he had enjoyed the film, and could we go regularly to the Rialto each week. I assented enthusiastically, as I did not find going to concerts or the cinema on my own much fun. To my disappointment, there was of course no hand-holding with Tom, as he seemed to be rather straight, or maybe just inhibited. But he did go out with his fellow chemists on Friday nights after Hall.
My parents had ensured that I had been properly educated in the matter of beer. Although I had not been one for visiting pubs under age, Dad and Pop had trained me to drink proper cask- or bottled-conditioned beer, which is unpasteurized and contains live yeast. To my delight, Buckingham College beer cellar stocked two kinds of traditionally brewed and served beer, and I spent my first month at college educating Tom to enjoy proper beer. No-one, male or female, likes beer the first time that they taste it, and practice and proper education are essential to learn to appreciate beer fully. Moreover, Dad had told me where in Camford I could get Belgian beer, and Tom and I explored the amazing variety of bottled beers from Flanders and Wallonia in the comfort of our college room. I was never short of money. My parents made me an allowance of £1000 per month, to pay for my food and clothes, drink and travel, but they paid my accommodation costs separately. I spent quite a lot of my allowance on beer, and Tom was quite happy to drink whatever I offered him. I was really buying his company, I suppose. We developed the habit of spending an evening each week visiting Camford's numerous different pubs and trying out their beers. With a drop of alcohol inside him, and it really did not have to be much, Tom became a different and much more likeable person. We soon became good friends. This was evidenced by the fact that we both felt able to fart in each other's company without any embarrassment or giggling.
