Part 01 should be read first.
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Chapter 18 Martin tells his story
I was born in the city of Sheffield. My mother died when I was quite young and my father brought me up single-handed with some help from a resident housekeeper in whom he had no sexual interest whatsoever. There was no shortage of money in the family, as my father had a highly paid job in local government, working in the finance department of the city council. Accordingly, I was sent to an expensive private day school. However at the comparatively young age of 14, I was expelled for "breaches of the school's disciplinary code." The school made no secret to my father of what had happened, and I told him the full story.
I had been frightened that he would explode with anger and thrash me, but instead he was very sympathetic. He said "It seems that you are gay, and that means that you may have a difficult life. I think that sending you now to a state school would be rather disastrous because it would not be long before the people at school discovered that you were gay. Accordingly I am going to find a private tutor for you, so that you can study at home." This loving and sympathetic response to teenage stupidity made me realize just how much I loved my father. For years he had struggled to be both father and mother to me, but it was not until now that I realized how much he loved me. I also realized for the first time how lonely he was, and I resolved to spend as much time in his company as I could. This led to me asking to accompany him to the one major love of his life: the opera. So we regularly went to Covent Garden and Glyndebourne and attended all the opera touring companies that came to Sheffield, and within a year I too was hooked on opera.
It took a few months for my father to find a suitable tutor for me in spite of quite extensive advertising, but eventually an elderly man was found, a retired teacher. He was very understanding and an excellent teacher. He could teach me, he said, any language that I wished to learn as well as history, mathematics, English, geography and some science. But, he told me, his big expertise was Greek and Roman history and languages. Knowing that ancient Greek society was riddled with homosexuality, I decided that I wanted to study the classics. When I got to sixteen and had to take my GCSE exams, I sat them as an external candidate in a nearby college of further education, and got A or A* in every subject.
Mr Ellerton, as he was called, then went on to teach me Latin and Greek part-time for A Level, while for other courses I went part-time to the further education college. I was rather lonely at home with no boys of my age for company, so it was good for me to mix at college with boys and girls of my own age or older. I was of course not interested in the girls.
This does not sound like the story of a boy who went on to one of the best universities in the world to study classics. How did I come to get a place at Camford? I have to thank both my father and Mr Ellerton for this. In those days some colleges had their own entrance exams. Mr Ellerton, who was an M.A. of Sanguis Christi College, knew that Sanguis had such an exam, limited to students of the classics and the humanities. I did my A Levels and got As or A*s in Latin, Greek, English and French. My father said to me, "Martin, you need to take a study year. Mr Ellerton will give you further tuition, and early in January you can do the Sanguis entrance exam. It carries with it a scholarship of £500 a year. You'll get the usual student loan to pay your fees if you get in, but I will give you £1000 a month for you to live on and another thousand a month during term for pocket money. If you get in, you will fulfil a childhood dream of mine that I never realized. In the meantime, although your study with Mr Ellerton will continue, I expect you to get a supermarket job for a couple of days per week, because you have to learn to work for a living."
Thanks to Mr Ellerton's brilliant one-to-one tuition, I did rather well in the entrance exam, and got a place and a first-year scholarship. The college arranged for me to start my studies in classics in the October. Until then, I worked as a shelf-stacker and checkout boy in the Qualmart supermarket. This contact with the general public was very good for me, and my people skills improved immensely.
The two years at further education college had given me enormous confidence. I was streets ahead of most of the other students academically, I played basketball with some success, and I had some sexual adventures with gay friends of my own age (I was eighteen by then), which made me sure and self-confident about my sexuality. Apart from the basketball, my studies took up all the rest of my time.
I felt a bit worried about my father being lonely when I went up to Sanguis, and we agreed that we would talk on the phone at least once a week, as well as E-mailing one another regularly. "I don't really mind you being away," he told me. "After all, you are fulfilling my dearest wish for you. Camford terms are only eight weeks. I can put up with the lack of company for that time. Besides, now that you are out of the house, I have time to look for a girlfriend!"
In my first term, I was a bit lonely. I did not want to come out by joining the GLBT group. I was friendly with the guys on my staircase, and we went into dinner together and once a week to the pub. But after Christmas I found myself in a lecture sitting next to a guy who instantly attracted me. He was tall but rather skinny in build with dark crew-cut hair. It is difficult to be more specific about what I found attractive in him, but we fell into conversation and I introduced myself. In reply, he told me that although he was a freshman, he was a year younger than me and was at Boni's. We compared notes about the lectures we were following, and found that we had about 70% of our lectures in common. In Camford, no student has a fixed pattern of university lectures. Although there is complete freedom of choice of lecture modules, the student's individual choice is heavily influenced by his or her tutor's recommendations. So we knew that we would see each other several times a week.
After having had lunch together for several days, I realized that I was strongly attracted to Tommy, as he was called, and it was his personality, not his body, that fascinated me. Indeed, I think that I was beginning to fall in love with him long before the first time that I saw him naked. It turned out that we were both keen on swimming, and were both members of the Camford Men's Fitness Centre. I had joined it because I was told that it was a good place to meet gays, he had joined it because his parents had given him membership as a gift. He told me later that one of his fathers had founded the Centre many years before. Of course when I did see him naked in the pool changing room, I was even more attracted. His body was slender rather than skinny, he had a huge area of black pubic hair out of which a very respectably sized cock poked alluringly. Behind, he was totally hairless, not merely on his back, but his arse as well was smooth as a baby's. His was the kind of figure that you want to wrap your arms around. No wonder that the first time I saw him naked, I got a massive boner. He had soft hair on his arms and legs that was lighter in colour than his pubic hair and every time I saw his bare arms or legs, I wanted to rub my hands over them. He was then, totally sweet and alluring, and I wanted him to be mine for ever.
Chapter 19 Tommy visits Sheffield I
Tommy was glad to be home with David and Jon. They arranged to spend Easter with David's parents at Rockwell's Barn, and his sister Cathy and her husband would also be there. A few days after he got home, a phone call from Martin invited Tommy to come to Sheffield for five days.
Tommy decided to drive. It was only about 200 km, and he would have his GPS with him. Tommy had passed the driving test the year before, and his parents had given him the car and also paid an enormous sum in insurance because he was under 26. The car was kept at Octavia Avenue and was sometimes used by his parents during term time. Because driving in Camford is difficult and parking practically non-existent, in term, Tommy walked or used his bike.
So, on a fine Monday morning, Tommy set off to drive to Sheffield and arrived at Martin's house in the early afternoon. Martin lived in a leafy suburb on top of one of the numerous hills on which the city is built. The house dated from before World War I, and was stone-built and double fronted, with both ground- and first-floor bay windows on each side of the front door. Martin's bedroom was a large room in the attic, under the roof and had two double beds and an en-suite bathroom.
