My Secret Life

As I sat crying on the floor beside her, I recollect her naked legs, and one of her hands shaking violently beneath her petticoats, and of my having some vague notion that the woman was ill; I felt timid. All was for a moment quiet, her hand ceased, still she lay on her back, and I saw her thighs, then turning round she drew me to her, kissed me and tranquillised me. As she turned round I saw one side of her backside, I leant over it and laid my face on it crying about my broken drum, the evening sunbeams made it all bright, it had at some time been raining, I recollect.

I expect I must have seen her cunt, as I sat beside her naked thigh. Looking towards her and crying about my broken drum, and when I saw her hand moving no doubt she was frigging. Yet I have not the slightest recollection of her cunt, nor of anything more than I have told. But of having seen her naked thighs I am certain, I seem often to have seen them, but cannot feel certain of that.

The oddest thing is that whilst I early recollected more or less clearly what took place two or three years, later on, and ever afterwards, on sexual matters, and what I said, heard, and did, nearly consecutively, this, my first recollection of cock and cunt, escaped my memory for full twenty years.

Then one day, talking with the husband of one of my cousins, about infantine incidents, he told me some thing which had occurred to him in his childhood; and suddenly, almost as quickly as a magic lantern throws a picture on to a wall, this which had occurred to me came into my mind. I have since thought over it a hundred times, but cannot recollect one circumstance relating to the adventure more than I have told.

My mother had been giving advice to my cousin about nursemaids. They were not to be trusted. “When Walter was a little fellow, she had dismissed a filthy creature, whom she had detected in abominable practices with one of her children*; what they were my mother never disclosed. She hated indelicacies of any sort, and usually cut short allusion to them by saying, it is not a subject to talk about, lets talk of some thing else: My cousin told her husband, and when we were together he told me, and his own experiences, and then all the circumstances, came into my mind, just as I have told here.

I could not, as the reader will hear, thoroughly uncover my prick tip without pain till I was sixteen years old, nor well then when quite stiff unless it went up a cunt. My nursemaid I expect thought this curious, and tried to remedy the error in my make, and hurt me. My mother, by her extremely delicate feeling, shut herself off from much knowledge of the world, which was the reason why she had such implicit belief in my virtue, until I had seen twenty-two years, and kept, or nearly so, a French harlot. I imagine I must have slept with this nursemaid, and certainly I did with some female, in a room called the Chinese room, on account of the color of the wall papers. I recollect a female being there in bed with me, that I awoke one morning feeling very hot and stifled, and that my head was against flesh; that flesh was all about me, my mouth and nose being embedded in hair, or some thing scrubby, which had a hot peculiar odour. I have a recollection of a pair of hands suddenly clutching and dragging me up on to the pillow, and of daylight then. I have no recollection of a word being uttered. This incident I could not long have forgotten, having told my cousin heard of it before my father did. He used to say it was the governess.

I suppose I must have slipped down in my sleep, till my head laid against her belly and cunt: Some years afterwards, when I got the smell of another woman's cunt on my fingers, it at once reminded me of the smell I had under my nose in the bed; and I knew at a flash that I had smelt cunt before and recollected where, but no more.

How long after I have no idea, but it seems like two or three years, there was a dance in our house, several relations were to stop the night with us, the house was full, there was bustle, the shifting of beds, the governess going into a servant's room to sleep, and so on. Some female cousins were amongst those stopping with us; going into the drawing-room suddenly, I heard my mother saying to one of my aunts, “Walter is after all but a child, and it's only for one night.' 'Hush-hush,' both said as they saw me, then my mother sent me out of the room, wondering why they were talking about me, and feeling curious and annoyed at being sent away.