Neither boy thought of confiding in his parents. School continued as it had, with Common Entrance drawing ominously closer all the time. Mr. King kept his distance. At a Scouts meeting at the boarding school a few weeks later, ‘Hairy’ Haslam, a Sixth Form boarder with a moustache, told the troop that King was notorious for his ‘bedroom visits’ in their dormitory, laughing them off, it seemed to Colin, as a harmless eccentricity. Mystified, Colin was forced to assume that this was part of the mysterious process of ‘growing up’ he had heard so much about in whispers, nods and nudges. These boarders were, after all, older than he was by a year or two, or at least, they looked to be. Either that, or it was bravado born of living away from the comforts and safety of home. Colin shuddered. He thanked his lucky stars he still lived at home where he was safe.
All of this happened long before the sexual revolution, long before pedophile priests became an embarrassment to the Vatican, and even before Colin’s family emigrated, leaving their dream of Public School for their son stillborn. In another country, years later, Colin had long since reconciled himself to his experience, but once, in his early twenties, in a rare moment of familial intimacy, he had told his parents about Mr. King’s ‘tutorial.’ His father, grim-faced, said he would write to the school. This man needed to be reported. The reply, he revealed a few weeks later, conveyed the disappointing disclosure that King had long since left the school, and his whereabouts were unknown. As Latin was no longer a school subject, perhaps the man’s depredations found no other victims in schools…So there the matter was allowed to rest.
It was not until long years after this that it occurred to Colin that he had never been shown his father’s letter, nor the response it allegedly evoked, which was peculiar, Colin reflected, since he had been the central figure in the drama. He wondered uneasily if his late father had simply sloughed the matter off, or had had a change of heart, a second thought, perhaps, about writing, and had broken his promise to his son. Had Colin’s own son been the victim of sexual assault, would he not have rested until justice was served, and seen to be served, and the predator punished? Despite the triumph of a dangerously permissive culture with its freer attitude to education about sex, sexual assault against minors was still a crime. A generation ago the voices of innocent victims of such assault were stifled by conventional attitudes of deference to authority, defeated by a culture of reticence that stressed discretion, by an implicit uncritical assumption of trust placed by parents in those, like teachers, coaches, Scout leaders and camp counsellors, in positions of responsibility. Children were then easier prey for pedophiles. This automatic deference to authority was now long discredited, and allegations of such violations were nowadays all properly taken seriously, but was all the inevitable publicity really an improvement for the victims, who continued to suffer the lingering trauma?
It was folly, Colin concluded finally, to apply the attitudes of the present to the afflictions of the past, to judge one by the other. The past was truly another country, and they did do things differently there. It was a curious consolation, somehow, to know this.
