MY SECRET LIFE
recollection of it is now painful. “Oh don’t, pray don’t, Fred,” I said, “oh if Papa should hear!” He kept on saying he would. I was too young to see the improbability of his doing anything of the sort. “If you do, I’ll tell him what we did when the pedler woman piddled. He did not care. “Now, it’s a lie, isn’t it, you did not feel her cunt?” In fear, I con- fessed it was a lie. “I know it was,” said Fred. He had kept me in a state of terror about the affair for days, till I told a lie, to get quit of the subject.
I was evidently always secret, even then, about any- thing amorous, excepting with Fred (as will be seen) and have continued so all my life. I rarely bragged, or told anyone of my doings; perhaps this little affair with the governess, was a lesson to me, and confirmed me in a habit natural to me from my infancy. I have kept to myself everything I did with the opposite sex.
We now frequently examined our pricks, and Fred jeered me so about my prepuce being tight, that I re- solved that no other boy should see it; and though I did not keep strictly to that intention, it left a deep- seated mortification on me. I used to look at my prick with a sense of shame, and pull the prepuce up and down, as far as I could constantly, to loosen it, and would treat other boys’ cocks in the same way, if they would let me, without expecting me to make a return; but the time was approaching when I was to learn much more.
One of my uncles, who lived in London, took a house in the country for the summer near Hampton-Court Palace. Fred and I went to stay there with them. There were several daughters and sons, the sons quite
young. People then came down from London in vans,
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