The House at the Bottom of the Hill

THE HOUSE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL

By Castor

Copyright 2016 Castor

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1 The beginning

My life was unremarkable in my early years. I took most things for granted and accepted what I had to do, who I was and where I was. I had a somewhat distant relationship with my parents and, to some extent, my own peer group. My situation was not helped by the fact that my father had a certain degree of status in the community and my mother regrettably put on airs and graces which reflected a bygone age. We lived in a well to do community where all the houses were large and situated on at least an acre or more of land. The whole area was well wooded and the adjacent village was a relaxed and relatively quiet place. To some extent the world had passed this small pocket by, although clearly modern communications and a motorway not that far away meant that everyone was part of the late twentieth century.

Despite what might be going on elsewhere, our community was safe and assured, prosperous and rather dull. Children of any age could freely ride their bikes around the streets without any fear since all the drivers in the area were law-abiding and conscious of our presence on the roads. The area in general was undulating countryside, the only significant feature being a large, concrete, sometimes open, drain that ran for several miles and which transported huge quantities of run-off water when it rained. That drain was a source of endless fascination and fun for me and my acquaintances and we would explore its passage completely oblivious to the danger of being drowned should there be a major weather event somewhere further up the valley.

At the bottom of my street the drain emerged from underground and ran through a very large property before it disappeared underground again. Because of the size of the drain the property through which had ran had never been subdivided and was therefore about 10 acres in size and covered in the most magnificent forest. There was a house in the centre of the property and access roads from both North and South which were always closed and locked.

I recall from my earliest days being told that this particular property was never to be entered under any circumstances. To my mind the repeated warnings about the subject gave me the impression that the house must be owned by some maniacal old man who probably ate children for breakfast. Now that I was significantly older (just having turned eighteen), inquisitive and indeed mischievous, the warnings and the locked gates were no obstacle and I frequently explored the property and rode my bike along the drain. Somewhere in my mind there was a residual fear about the occupant of the house, and so I never ventured near it. In hot weather the trees which covered a large portion of the property provided a wonderful escape from the heat and a very private place where I could do what young men my age did.

By the time I was fourteen I already knew that I was somehow different from my peers and indeed thought I was unique in what I was thinking and feeling. I was thus isolated in a world in which I didn’t want to be, given one’s natural desire for conformity. At school no one made fun of my self-imposed isolation and indeed gathered around when I excelled at sports and gave me the obligatory congratulations. And yet, while they accepted me, I could not accept myself.

Sometimes my behaviour caused a certain amount of frustration both at home and at school. When that frustration manifested itself in discipline, pain was the inevitable corollary.

I suppose I was probably punished, perhaps mildly, in previous years but my first memory of significant discipline was in my last year of prep school when I was called out by my social studies Master, Mr Maitland, for not paying attention. I suppose I was only ten or eleven at the time and I had to stand there with my hand stretched out and Mr Maitland used a cane, which to me looked like the size of a phone pole, but obviously wasn’t, which he applied once to my right hand and once to my left. I can recall being startled by the intensity of the pain and I can also recall just how facile I thought the situation was when, as I returned to my desk with my injured hands, Mr Maitland instructed us to take up our pens and copy some notes from the blackboard. I really thought the man an idiot for expecting me to be able to hold a pen after he had just thrashed both of my hands.

In the years after that first incident I didn’t incur the wrath of any of my teachers, but I did offend my father on quite a number of occasions. We locked horns most of the time on the matter of politics. My father was an ardent fan of Margaret Thatcher but I detested the woman and her policies with a passion that verged on blind hatred. One of my aunts shared my views on politics and we would regularly discuss political issues at the dining table, knowing full well that my mother and father found our views completely unacceptable. Occasionally I would let my youthful spirit get the better of me and use language which was far from polite regarding the Tories and after supper on a number of occasions my backside suffered the consequences.

At that stage the use of corporal punishment was a matter for public and parliamentary debate and my father was having nothing to do with its abolition. He didn’t have a cane but he had a wide leather belt which I can attest to being more than adequately painful: the fucking thing hurt like hell. To me it seemed that during those debates, in reality yelling matches, and the increasingly frequent punishments that resulted, I was as close as I would ever get to my father. Now it might be thought that my mother might have a tender side and find my father’s iron rule somewhat excessive, but in fact that the opposite was the case.

My mother, for reasons I never have understood, had a phobia about masturbation. Now that I was at that age when I could happily engage in such activity many times a day, my mother made a habit of trying to catch me in the act by sneaking up to my bedroom and lurching through the closed door with a speed and that was terrifying and allowed little time for reaction. I recall one evening when I was lying on my bed reading what I thought was a rather salacious story involving corporal punishment in a boy’s school when she managed to catch me with my 5 inch erection in hand and on the point of that sublime satisfaction one gets from an orgasm. Her reaction was to make leave my bedroom and go downstairs and sit in the drawing room, where clearly I was not going to undertake such activity, while she waited for my father to come home.

I think that was probably the only occasion when I heard my parents have a significant disagreement. My mother made it very clear that she thought that my father should immediately take his belt to my backside and remove every inch of skin to be found there, but my father seemed to find my activity unsurprising and inoffensive and refused to beat me for that particular action. From that point on I had to make sure that I confined my sexual pleasures to either outdoors or in my bed at night when I was very unlikely to be disturbed.

At school the cane ruled supreme. There were three forms of punishment. One was detention, which was really an exercise in total boredom, one was punishment by the prefects who could wield either plimsoll or cane, and the third was the heavy cane which was administered by the Headmaster or the junior cane administered by his deputy.

I was caned early in the first term that I spent in the senior school by the deputy Headmaster for being caught by a newly appointed teacher in the act of throwing a wad of paper across the classroom in response to having received same wad a moment before. It didn’t occur to me at the time that this was a set up to the extent that our new teacher needed to assert his authority, and so one of my friends and I were both sent to wait outside the deputy Headmaster’s study for what was inevitably going to be a caning. We both thought the situation slightly absurd and unjust as we quietly discussed our predicament as we walked the relatively short distance to a destination along the empty corridor.

When the deputy head left his classroom, which was opposite the one we had been in, and came towards us without having been consulted by our teacher I realised that our respective bums were to be, as it were, sacrificial lambs in order to establish the new teacher’s authority. I had the pleasure of going first and had to stand in front of the deputy Headmaster’s desk, and glancing out the windows to the trees beyond, while he wrote on a printed card my name and the date. Then, in red ink, he crossed out the word ‘detention’ and wrote ‘caning’ above it which confirmed my worst expectation.

Procedurally one was required to put one’s hands on the seat of a large leather armchair and push one’s backside out as if desiring that it be injured. The three strokes I received were astonishingly painful, which I think reflected the fine quality of the trousers I was wearing: there is a downside to coming from a well-to-do family. I then had to leave the room while my companion in crime went in and the procedure was repeated. We returned to class suitably humiliated, and for the next five years I never had a civil word with the teacher who had been so cowardly in trying to establish his authority through such a deceitful method. Part of that enmity arose from the requirement to present the card with my punishment recorded upon it to my father who had to sign it and then I had to return it to the deputy Headmaster the following day.

My father’s reaction was excessive to say the least. He was in the drawing room with my mother having a glass of Scotch prior to supper when I presented the card to him. I had expected a lecture and indeed some expression of approbation, but I had not expected to be sent to my bedroom and instructed to ensure that my backside was uncovered by the time my father arrived.

I trudged to my bedroom and removed my trousers and underwear as instructed. Expecting my father to take his time I viewed the cane stripes in my dressing mirror. The fact that there were three parallel bruises on my relatively small backside was apparently of total irrelevance to my father who arrived in due course and proceeded to administer six strokes with his belt on my naked flesh which, at least to that time, was the most intense pain I had ever felt. Oddly my body responded with a monumental erection which demanded attention and so, once my father had departed, I went to my bathroom and relieved my pressing need, all the while confused by my reaction to an otherwise exceptionally unpleasant experience.

At school I had fantasies about many of my fellow students which were of course inflamed and fuelled by the sight of them in the showers after sport about when I had just turned 18 I developed a fixation on one of the prefects. He was tall and lean like me and had the most beautiful face and lovely hair. We were both athletic and therefore had many opportunities for discourse. Whenever we were doing training I would always linger in the dank but not unpleasant changing rooms afterwards so that I could view Peter’s wonderful body and he rather quickly became the sole focus of my masturbatory fantasies at night. Generally the prefects used their caning privileges on a rather limited basis since caning was considered to be somewhat old-fashioned, yet I had a strange yearning for Peter to do precisely that to me.

I never did work out why this odd feeling developed or why it became increasingly significant in my mind. Perhaps there had been stories I had read which conjured up images of an athletic, rather beautiful, boy beating another which triggered desires deep within my psyche, but if that were the case I was unaware of the rationale. All I knew was that I had an increasingly pressing need for Peter to chastise me – the more seriously, the better.

At night I would walk the streets towards midnight sort of praying to an unseen almighty power crying to be freed from my inherent nature and my increasingly, in my view, perverse desires. It seemed that God was feckless in the extreme for allowing me to be cursed in such a manner, but I persevered in my nightly walks for quite some time before I realised the futility of my actions. It was at that point that I gave in to my nature and contrived situations where Peter would have no option but to punish me. Running in the school courtyard was the easiest infringement to earn a prefect’s wrath, but matters such as being tardy in arrival or untidy in appearance were viewed as being equally sinful, warranting appropriate retribution.

It took some time to effectively incur Peter’s wrath to the point where he summoned me to his rooms. The greatest challenge as I walked up the stairs to where he held court was to find a means of hiding my rather noticeable arousal. The obvious stratagem was to make sure of that one’s organ was in a vertical position and thus held reasonably close to one’s body by one’s underwear. When I knocked on the door to Peter’s study and was asked to enter I believe I was almost on the verge of losing self-control entirely. Peter admonished me and rebuked me for my repeated failings and I accepted the rebuke most willingly. He then made what was to prove a mistake of rather heroic proportions.

So Brad, Peter asked, what should I do with you?

I was totally flummoxed by the question, since it presented me with any number of possibilities and I was in a mood and of a mind to make the most of the opportunity, as surprising as it was. Indeed, on reflection, that question should have been a moment when the air was filled with the glory of Beethoven’s Alleluia chorus from the ninth Symphony; but alas the moment passed without appropriate musical accompaniment.

I apologise Peter, I said in the most unconvincing manner possible, and I expect you will need to give me a good thrashing.

I saw a confused look on Peter’s face but I knew precisely where I wanted the meeting to go and so, without giving him the opportunity to reject my observation, I locked the door and then proceeded to lower my trousers and my underpants. As I did so I heard Peter gasp in shock and I knew that he must be totally confused by my action.

Since you must punish me, you may as well do it properly, I said and then bent over the side of his chair with my hands on its seat, clearly inviting him to make the most of the opportunity.

In the normal course of events Peter may have used a plimsoll to give me a few whacks, but my rather provocative behaviour clearly had him at sixes and sevens. Realising that I had caused total confusion in Peter’s mind I stood up and, with my trousers and underwear about my ankles and my penis pointing more or less to the heavens, I shuffled around to face him.

For fuck’s sake Peter, I said with a degree of uncharacteristic bravado, you must have seen me after sport drooling over you. Please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is. Please give me a decent beating and then perhaps we might do something slightly more adventurous.

Peter just stared at me for a moment, totally confused I presume by my precocious nature. He then collected his wits and ordered me to pull my trousers and to get out.

I was mortified by the rejection and terrified by the possibility that Peter might say something and thus my perverted nature would become general knowledge. I needn’t have worried because when I was next in the changing rooms with Peter he made a point of coming to me.

Brad, he said as he gently placed a hand on my naked shoulder, I was really flattered by your actions the other day, but we are both students here. Although I know some of the other boys have various assignations, I think it is not appropriate the two senior boys to do so. Either find somebody else or wait until you have left school. Please, I like you as a person Brad and if you were not still in school I would have taken you up on your offer. I hope you understand.

Although I was disappointed, Peter’s reaction gave me some comfort regarding my own insecurities and my reputation.

In mid spring I had the unpleasant experience of visiting the deputy Headmaster for the second time. The school had many daft rules, one of the most absurd in my opinion being that we had to wear our hats whenever we were out of school property until we arrived at our home. Now I have to admit that I hated wearing a hat (and still do) and I adopted the practice of carrying it most of the time and putting it on only when in sight of the school. Clearly somebody took exception to this practice and reported the matter to the deputy head who proceeded to summon me into his august presence where he gave me a lecture about obedience and then took one of the dreaded cards and substituted ‘caning’ for the word ‘detention’.

Within a minute or two I was bent over the chair with my hands on its seat looking at the leather and waiting for the pain. For reasons I still can’t understand the tariff imposed was five strokes which managed to align themselves neatly across my fairly pert backside with tremendous ferocity and, as a consequence, brought tears to my eyes. As was expected I am sure, I managed to avoid giving voice to my agony, but only by the skin of my teeth.

That night my father and his belt ensured that I would remember the error of my ways for quite some days to come, and indeed it took the whole week before the stripes finally disappeared. I thought the whole episode to be ‘a storm in a teacup’, but clearly the powers that be thought my actions only marginally less serious than those of an axe murderer. I resigned myself to wearing the odious hat from that point on.

That second engagement with the deputy Headmaster had one unexpected outcome in that it caused very considerable excitement in my private parts. That night, after the belt had done its work, I went to bed and rather enjoyed giving my still excitable member appropriate attention with a rather thrilling climax.

Chapter 2 Exploring

Before the Easter/end of term holiday that year my father decided that we should go camping. I didn’t find the idea at all appealing and I didn’t think it was particularly practical either since I suspected my mother would have had difficulty boiling water let alone cooking a meal. As it turned out my father and mother had no intention of giving up too many creature comforts and when we got to the lake where we were to camp there was an enormous tent very comfortably furnished and our cook and my mother’s maid were there to attend to the basic necessities. I found the whole situation quite absurd, but I enjoyed the scenery and the ability to go for long walks on my own.

There were other people camping in the area and we had been there for perhaps four or five days when I encountered two young men sharing a small tent not that far from where our monstrosity was situated. I watched the two men swimming and couldn’t help but admire their well-developed physiques and, more importantly, their seemingly very well developed groins which were covered in the prescribed fashion by swimming trunks. I sat and watched them for quite a while as they swam out on the lake and had mock fights with one another. My fertile imagination was well and truly engaged as I watch and I was faced with the options of entering the rather cold water or finding a place for a quick wank in order to address my fairly noticeable, pressing need.

I was a good swimmer so I stripped down to my underpants and quickly entered the water perhaps 20 yards from where the two were swimming. Fortunately they were looking in the opposite direction as I made the dash for the water and therefore they didn’t see my embarrassing arousal. I swam out some distance and then returned towards the shore and it was only natural that we should speak to one another and exchange pleasantries. The two men made their way towards the shore, having had enough pleasure in the water and I made up my mind to do likewise. To be candid, I tarried behind a little so that I could take in the view of two exceptionally fine backsides. I was cold and one of the young men, Thomas, seeing that I didn’t have a towel offered me one so that I could dry myself. I naturally accepted the offer as Thomas introduced me to the other man, David.

As I dried myself my eyes appraised the two men. For whatever reason I formed the impression that David was possibly the more assertive of the two. Both of them were painfully handsome although, to my mind, Thomas seemed somewhat more beautiful. Fortunately for me the cold from the water kept my hormones in check and my cock behaved itself. Had it not done so my wet underpants would not have been able to hide the evidence from the two men.

Thomas and David planned to have a rest in their tent at that point and I asked whether I might join them. I think David was a little concerned by my request but the two allowed me to lie down on the soft grass with David on one side, Thomas in the middle and me beside Thomas. David and Thomas lay on their sleeping bags and we chatted about nothing in particular for a little while before we all fell silent. I lay there looking at the canvas above me, rather content and pleased to be in the company of two such fine looking people.

I would swear that David and Thomas were both asleep in next to no time and I found myself almost drooling over the magnificent bulge in the light brown shorts Thomas had donned before we lay down. David showed an equally impressive bulge in the shorts he had put on as he lay on his back, sleeping. I moved a little as if to test whether Thomas was truly asleep and there was no reaction. What possessed me, apart from naked lust, to put my hand on Thomas’ groin I don’t know because I had never been so self-assertive in all my life. And yet I needed to explore the prominent bulge. Initially I was content just to have my hand on it but curiosity got the better of me. I moved a little and lowered Thomas’ zipper very slowly and gently freed his exceptionally fine member from the confines of his shorts.

At school I think every boy was circumcised and I found the fact that Thomas was not incredibly fascinating. In a way it was a little disconcerting to me because it disguised the length of the shaft. I had extracted, I suppose, about five inches but there was still a lot more inside, but how much I couldn’t tell. His organ became somewhat thicker as I gently touched it and then David seemed to become a little restless. I started to become frightened of what would happen if I was discovered playing with Thomas and so I returned his thickening organ back to his shorts and tried to do up the zipper.

It didn’t occur to me until that moment that it was far easier to pull the zipper down than to move it in the opposite direction and there was no way of earth that I could complete the exercise without Thomas clearly becoming aware of what I was doing. Afraid, and certainly more than a little embarrassed, I snuck out of the little tent leaving the two young men to their slumber and rather fearfully returned to our preposterous campsite. Fortunately my parents, and seemingly the two members of the staff, were out rambling and I had some time to have a decent wank thinking about my recent escapade. I think I knew at that moment that the sight of the two exceptionally handsome men and their fine, firm backsides would remain with me for the rest of my life.

The following day I went for another walk, enjoying the scenery but clearly intending to renew my acquaintance with the two strangers. I was shocked when I got to the site to find that Thomas and David had packed up their tent and left, even though they had mentioned the previous day that they intended to stay for several days. I was quite disconsolate at their departure since, as had been the case with Peter earlier, it was my fervent hope that I might learn something about my sexuality from them.

I sat where their tent had been and thought about the situation and realised that they had probably been aware of what I was doing whilst they were ‘sleeping’ and had decided, given my age, that entertaining my desires was far too much of a risk. I cursed my own stupidity, not only for my precociousness but also for scaring away two of the most handsome men I had ever seen. In hindsight I now realise the efficacy of self-flagellation as an appropriate response to crass stupidity and would have done so had I been conscious of that option at a time of such deep despair.

I spent the rest of the short break reading and walking and returned to the familiar routine of suburban life just as insecure and dissatisfied as I had left it ten days before. I felt terribly disconsolate at having screwed up what might well be the only opportunity to explore my perverse nature with two people who might actually understand. Mind you, they had done nothing to indicate any familiarity between the two other than a bit of horseplay in the water and the fact that they shared a tent. When two young men go camping it would seem logical that they share a tent and I am sure such an arrangement would not appear out of the ordinary to any sensible person. I knew it was just my own needs that read into the situation something that most likely was not there.

Down the street from my home, probably equidistant between my house and the house at the bottom of the hill in the private forest, there was a very pleasant family who happened to be Jewish. They had a single child, Ivor, who had the most perfect skin, a beautiful face and the roundest, firmest backside that I had ever seen. Ivor was rather shy, like me, but we spoke to each other and occasionally went for a ride on our bicycles with me often trailing slightly behind so that I could admire the wonderful rump in front of me. Ivor invited me to his home and his parents were most welcoming, although Ivor’s father did appear to have gone to the same school of discipline as had my own father. I have never seen a bedroom so tidy and ordered as Ivor’s and when I commented upon it he made it quite clear that strict regimentation and order were mandatory, even in his own bedroom.

I saw Ivor mainly on Sundays for fairly obvious religious reasons and also because he didn’t go to my school. It wasn’t that his parents couldn’t afford the exorbitant fees charged for my education, but rather that his school was exclusively for boys of the Jewish persuasion.

School had resumed for the summer term and I increasingly looked forward to being able to spend time with Ivor who, like me, had just celebrated his 18th birthday. That term was notable as the first occasion on which my posterior received six strokes of the cane from the Headmaster. With all my insecurities, it was only natural that I should readily accept an offer by some of the boys to join them as they left the school boundaries in order to enjoy a cigarette or three. I had no desire to smoke, but the simple act of being invited to enjoy their company was a wonder in itself.

Like most schoolboys, I assume, we all expected to get away without being noticed. With the benefit of hindsight I suppose a group of seven boys walking in a rather determined fashion towards the nearest boundary fence was probably a dead giveaway. Someone in authority clearly saw a large, red neon sign flashing in the air above us proclaiming, ‘Mischief Afoot’, and one of the junior Masters was duly sent to investigate.

We were caught with smoke rising into the air and all seven of us had our names taken and were instructed to wait upon the Headmaster at the conclusion of the day. We trudged back onto the school grounds having surrendered the cigarettes. As we walked back there was a great deal of discussion about the execution that awaited each of us and I was surprised when one of the ringleaders made a point of noting that I had simply accompanied them and not indulged in the tobacco. I found his concern about my largely innocent role to be rather touching.

The Headmaster apparently knew the ringleaders rather well and they were summoned one at a time into his study where they were reprimanded and then invited to remove their trousers as a prelude to the predictable caning. Through the heavy door, those of us in the corridor could hear the unmistakable sound of rattan meeting exposed flesh and each of us winced involuntarily at each distinct stroke. As one does, we silently counted to six and were rather relieved that that was the tariff being imposed. What we didn’t know until the first lad emerged was that the heavy cane was being employed with remarkable effect.

The first three boys had departed with moist eyes and hands furiously rubbing wounded backsides – a sight which was enough to get my hormones racing.

When I was invited to join the Headmaster in his lair, I did so in a state of subdued arousal. I stood before the huge desk and was quite surprised when the Headmaster told me that he had been informed that I had not indulged in the filthy habit of smoking. My crime was thus judged to be no more than being out of bounds which meant, much to my relief that I would not have to bare my buttocks in order to get to my just deserts. As I had noted when caned by the deputy Headmaster, the wearing of quality garments afforded little protection from the pain, but my relief stemmed from the fact that my somewhat mischievous organ would not have a chance to display itself.

The Headmaster had a reputation for the speed with which he could send a cane flying through the air with unerring accuracy, thereby causing excruciating pain to the miscreant involved. Mentally I prepared myself to be sliced open (where it counted) but, for whatever reason, the six strokes I received were not that vicious and I walked away from the encounter with my demeanour reasonably intact.

In due course all seven of us met in the bogs to compare stripes and to seek relief from the cold water and it was there that I thanked the group collectively for whoever had spoken in my defence. At home of course there was no defence which I could offer and none that would be accepted in any case and my backside and my father’s belt renewed their acquaintance in a manner which I found to be far too intimate.

Weekends generally were times for a little study, a great deal of masturbation and, on Sundays when Ivor was about, great friendship. He and I would go down to the ‘forbidden’ house at the bottom of the hill and wander through the forest and speculate about the owner. We both enjoyed the area immensely not only because of the privacy it afforded but also for the magical call of any number of birds which inhabited the area. We would stop and listen as various birds called out to one another and I swear that there was even a peacock or two somewhere on the grounds.

As boys of our age do it was inevitable that once issues of sport, our respective interests and the like been exhausted the matter of parental and school discipline should become a topic of conversation and it was Ivor who first raised the matter.

Brad, Ivor asked rather tentatively the Sunday following my beating by the Headmaster, do you get punished at school or at home?

At the time I was lying down beside Ivor, looking up through the trees at the clouds and the strange shapes they made, and I was a little surprised by the question which had really come out of the blue. I thought for a moment, trying to work out what had brought about the question, but I had nothing to hide and so I was quite frank.

"Sure I do, do you? I replied.

Ivor didn’t reply immediately and I wondered what was going on his mind. Something told me that it was a matter worth pursuing and so I elaborated.

"I