A suitable boy

 

Until now it has been assumed that paedophiles mainly prey on the lost children of our care homes and council estates. But as this harrowing memoir demonstrates, they can also operate at the heart of Britain's ruling elite. Here, after a silence of more than 30 years, filmmaker  Don Boyd confronts his pain and articulates the shameful excitement of being sexually abused at one of the country's leading public schools

 

Sunday August 19, 2001

The Observer

 

Clad only in my uniform blue serge shorts, open-necked shirt and ridiculously long red  stockings, I was cold as I sneaked into North Esk Lodge, the grounds of a small preparatory school on the out skirts of the small Edinburgh suburb of Musselburgh. I was always petrified that this gateway to my secret garden – across the footbridge from my dormitory at Loretto's Upper School where I now lived - would be locked and I would have to slink back, shivering and unrequited. But I knew that someone in this garden was expecting me and that his rooms were warm and seductive. And he always made sure that I could avail myself of his peculiar variety of Pandora's box.

 

Guy Anthony Ray-Hills' bedroom in North Esk Lodge looked out on to what the boys called the Ash Court. Guy had first entered my life on the Ash Court where Loretto's prep school boys, or 'nippers' as we were called, would play shinty and soccer during our free periods. He supervised the school's outdoor PT exercises in the mornings. Fifty of us, ranging from eight years to 13, innocently playing 'O'Grady Says' in front of him, or clapping our hands above our nubile bodies in time to commands from his authoritative voice. Now, though, hurrying across the Ash Court, I was trembling with excitement and desire at the thought he was going to have sex with me.

 

Musselburgh is known principally for its racecourse, an ice-cream maker called Lucca's and for Loretto, the Scottish boarding school which I attended between 1958 and 1965. We called Musselburgh's other schoolchildren 'keelies' and were taught to ignore them. Any contact was forbidden, and would have been a beatable offence. A cane would be administered by prefects in the school bathrooms known as Big Tubrooms. Spartam Nactus Es Hanc Exorna is Loretto's school motto: 'You inherit Sparta, rise up to it'. Like the Spartans, we were supposed to be superior. We were the ruling elite. And yet there I was, one of the more f ted specimens of this special Scottish institution, trussed up like a grouse hen in my weekday uniform of  tweed jacket, shorts and stockings or, on Sundays, in my Royal Stuart kilt or tartan trews, and formal black dress jacket, a stiff-studded Eton collar piercing my neck. Superior? Elite? Privileged? The fancy dress we were forced to wear summed up the notions of our special tatus.

 

I had been sent to North Esk Lodge aged 10 from my home in East Africa and, even now, nearly 40 years on, my name appears on the list of head boys alongside that of Michael Mavor, the current headmaster. Michael evoked me in his address to the school at the memorial service held at Loretto's chapel when our headmaster Rab Bruce-Lockhart died. I wonder if Rab, a famous Scottish rugby centre three-quarter, had known that Loretto's prep school had been harbouring a paedophile for 16 years and that my time at Loretto had been characterised by years of serious, secret child abuse. A secret so shameful I would harbour it from everybody I knew for 30 years. From my parents, from my siblings, from my wife, from everybody - until finally, after the death of my father in 1995, I bleated it out in a moment of emotional vulnerability.

 

Guy was loved by the boys he taught. French classes were like street theatre, with him as a brilliant leading man. We could only speak French in class - a strict rule. We all had French names: animal names. I was Le Singe (the monkey). As soon as he rounded the corner of the building adjacent to his classroom, each form would burst into song, which heralded the beginning of our favourite lesson of the week. The ditty started with the lyrics 'Bonjour Monsieur' and we would elongate these syllables to coincide with his majestic and charismatic entrance into the class. His open tweed jacket would sweep by our tiny wooden desks, his red neck-scarf would swish by and our song would continue. 'L'emporeur et des petits princes' were subject and object in the song - all that I can remember now, although I could hum the tune as I type this.

 

The first task of the day was a ritual known as 'les renseignements' (the news or information of the day), which we would prepare in French on the blackboard before he came into the room. We would write in French the date, the weather and occasional nuggets of pre-adolescent interest: 'Le Singe est dans la peine' would signal that I was in trouble and would be due a beating that day. All of us eagerly anticipated the ritual Guy would perform every French lesson. On getting to the top of the classroom, hands rooted suggestively in his pockets, our tall, elegant professeur would summon up one of the boys and help him very slowly and sensually to rub out les renseignements, leaving certain letters on the board which would precipitate hoots of laughter among us.

 

As the blackboard was lowered to eradicate these infantile transgressions, a long piece of wood propped there deliberately would fall to the floor for our leading man and superhero to scoop up. This was 'Caroline', a naked woman with breasts, red lips and a bushy vagina which had been clumsily sculpted on to the plank of wood with a penknife and coloured chalk. We were 10 and 11 years old. We laughed ignorantly and yet we caught the gist of this overtly sexual innuendo. The first act of Guy's performance would end with the boy who had been 'naughty' enough to leave the suggestive letters on the board receiving a very tame spanking in front of the highly entertained form. He would be hugged for his spanking before walking proudly and glowingly back to his desk - one of our handsome leading man's chosen few. Guy was good-looking, almost effeminate. So witty. So worldly. Which lonely, impressionable, vulnerable, pre-pubescent boy would not want to be one of his special boys? Especially because he was simply the best prep-school French teacher in Britain bar none.

 

Le Singe was certainly lonely, precocious, vulnerable, pre-pubescent and more. Le Singe was also brilliant at French – 100 percent in Common Entrance French A and B papers. Le Singe's parents were thousands of miles away in Kenya. Unlike les autres animaux, he didn't hear from his parents by telephone; he couldn't take advantage of Sundays out with Mum or Dad. Le Singe hardly received any letters - our mail was distributed on a table in the common room every morning after breakfast and I would scour the envelopes for a sign of the telltale aerogramme from Kenya, where my father and mother lived. No luck. Le Singe was luckily  pretty good at games - this kept him apart from the bullied boys. He was as good at arithmetic as he was at French and English and history. And he was desperate to be liked. Le Singe wanted a mother, a father, and a playmate. He wanted to be singled out. And so, of course, he wanted desperately to become one of Guy's special boys.

 

I pushed myself towards this important goal. Not only did I get to rub out les renseignements, but I would be favoured with Guy's special jar of garlic salt at table in the dining room. I was the first to get invited to listen to Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet and Maurice Chevalier in my hero's shadowy study. I would win the prizes he doled out for perfect French lessons. Quarter-pound boxes of Black Magic chocolates. I would win the bottle of Kia-Ora orange squash for the best-kept cricket-scoring book in the summer (a way to keep us watching the school match more seriously than the quality of Scottish prep- school cricket deserved), and I was always the quickest to conjugate the French verbs. 

 

But in the early stages of my hero worship for Guy, I had absolutely no inkling of what was in store for me beyond someinnocent and well-deserved attention. I laughed, as all of us did, at the sexual innuendoes, without really understanding their true relevance. We even joked about our hero's love affair with one of the female teachers. We were, after all, beginning to approach puberty. Some of us were masturbating. Sex was rearing its seductive head. We were shown 'naughty' mags in his study: Men Only and Titbits. This made our visits there even more exciting. He was popular. We all loved him. I loved him unconditionally.

 

And I couldn't help beginning to notice the favouritism. For instance, I didn't get the cane properly on one occasion: Guy pretended to beat me when I knew that the other boys really had been caned by seeing the stripes on their bums in the tubroom. The anticipatory thrill of pain was superseded by an overwhelming sensation of sexual excitement when he hugged me instead of caning me. I was standing in his study in thin, white games shorts and a flimsy rugby jersey. My French teacher was holding me tight, close to his body. I could feel his penis. It was hard. Gradually, I began to get a message, which made me realise that there was more to the 'special' relationship than just a brilliant teacher/pupil rapport. A new dynamic crept into our relationship. Repeated, subtle allusions to his bedroom emerged which seemed to come secretly from other boys who had heard through the bush telegraph that a visit to his bedroom was the ultimate accolade for 'special friends'.

 

These rumours were compounded by the occasional, almost casual hint from my hero that I might like to visit him 'upstairs' one evening for a 'session'. What was a session? Very secret, he said smiling lasciviously as he raised his long finger up to the ruby lips of his louche face. I had to find out more. I asked around and got blanks. Extra tuition it wasn't. A beating - no. Sex education, possibly? Titters of ignorance greeted my use of the word, although I didn't let on who the session might be with.

 

I finally made a decision and, one evening in his study, told him that I would be interested in the prospect of such a session. I had been told that I was to become head boy the following term. I was old enough. He explained that I had now become a 'special friend'. He emphasised secrecy. 'Discreet' was one of his favourite words. He embellished the invitation with a hint of the dangers of being caught. He played on a sense of trust. He relied on the knowledge that to become part of this special club implied that those dangers were as great for an initiate as they were for him. And so he fixed a time for my induction.

 

I knew that this was going to be my first proper sexual experience. I was 12 years old. I had fallen into Guy's deliberately orchestrated trap. I was about to visit his lair. And what is horrifying in retrospect is that I wanted this more than anything in the world. I had been primed as a victim of one man's determined campaign to seduce me into his world of illicit, homosexual sex. I was about to become a victim of one of the most serious crimes anybody could possibly commit: the sexual rape of a child. Guy was a paedophile. I was his prey.

 

I hardly remember my first visit to his bedroom, although I can remember many distinct aspects of these sessions over the four years they spanned. The putrid smell of semen. The whiff of the gelatine cream which he used to make entry easier. The awkward fumbling. And his gentle encouragement as I was introduced to each new facet of sex between a man and a young boy. I will never forget seeing his erect penis for the first time and gasping with fear. He asked me to fondle it and put my mouth over it.

 

I never quite understood, and still don't to this day, what it was that got him so excited about me. I wear glasses and was hardly a classical beauty in the way that the Greeks might have characterised youthful homosexual allure. I found the homosexual act itself fairly revolting, although I enjoyed my climaxes in the way you might imagine a young sexual initiate might. I hated the taste of his semen. I loathed the pain. And yet I became a regular member of his highly secret club. My initiation into this sophisticated and exotic world compounded my need to be one of Guy's 'special friends'. I was at last getting proper attention from an adult I admired. It was exciting. I felt privileged. And so one session become two, and two became...

 

When I moved in the winter term from the prep school to the Upper School at Loretto, I assumed our 'sessions' would have to stop. I had enjoyed my term as head boy and my Common Entrance results had been good enough to put me into the A-stream class, which meant taking my first O levels while I was 13 with boys who were nearly two years older. This required adjusting to a new, more competitive environment at Loretto's main school. And so my newfound promiscuity would have to be curtailed. There was a permanent culture of homosexuality at Loretto, probably in line with all boarding schools of that time. This was 1962, the era of Profumo, Burgess and MacLean.

 

And so I began to nurse the secret of my relationship with Guy and get on with life in the senior school's atmosphere of repression and fear as best as I could. Cold baths. Beatings from prefects. And mild flirtations with pretty boys - every public-schoolboy's substitute for teenage sexual experiment. Loretto had a system called the 'Top 10' - the favoured creatures who provided fantasies for the rest of the mostly heterosexual schoolboys. I fell in love with a peaches-and-cream boy then, like everybody else. I even had the occasional masturbatory homoerotic experience with fellow Lorettonians. But out of school I began a long career of rampantly heterosexual experiences. I thought Guy was firmly in my past. A very, very secret rite of passage. But I was soon to discover that 'special friendships' didn't have to stop.

 

Guy rounded on me after chapel at the beginning of my second week in Loretto's senior school. He invited me for a 'session' the following Thursday after prep. The ease with which he explained how I could wangle this illicit excursion without getting caught suggested he had organised similar visits. This was clearly not a club for one member. All week I would be excited at the prospect of seeing him again. From the seconds after our short, cryptic exchange outside Loretto's beautiful chapel, while the rest of its kilted pupils filed meekly out of Sunday church services, to that millisecond of my cry of pain as his penis entered me, I would nurse a sexy, exciting, all-enveloping sensation which would not go away until after I had clandestinely crept out of his small bedroom close to the tubroom on the top floor of North Esk Lodge and  walked the 10-minute walk back to the

gates of Loretto School.

 

I now realise that, for all my protestations that 'it has done me no harm' and that what occurred was 'one of life's rich experiences', what Guy did to me was appallingly cynical and inexcusable. But is my secret unique? Are there other men who would have had similar sexual experiences? Are there similar predators around who are just as culpable as Guy? Is he as guilty as the men serving sentences for abusing children in the 'care' homes of our social-welfare system? Has the public-school system mysteriously protected itself from a terrible history of child abuse for too long and, if so, why has it done so?

 

I am still living with the consequences of Guy's behaviour, and have only just begun to analyse its impact on my life and my relationships. For this I find it very difficult to forgive him. At the time, I completely underplayed its significance, and because I had so effectively disguised the true nature of my relationship with him, I was manoeuvred into out-of-school activities that would allow Guy to continue sexually abusing me.  

 

My brother and I went on holiday in Austria with him during my last summer at Loretto - my parents' marriage had become intolerably alcoholic and abusive. Dad thought we would be better off away from home on that holiday. We stayed in St Gilgen on the Wolfgangsee and in Salzburg during the music festival in 1964. Between bouts of Mozart and the Marionetten Theatre, between rubbers of bridge and visits across the lake, Guy engineered two or three sessions for old  time's sake. I went along with these very reluctantly. By now I realised I was heterosexual and that Guy was something completely different. And yet our friendship thrived. He liked my company. Was this the early stages of some sort of careful monitoring process? Had he gone too far with me?

 

When I finally began my foray into the world of cinema and theatre in London, Guy arranged an apartment for me. But I had made it clear that there would never be any more sex with him. He seemed less interested and was happy to take me along to the races at Goodwood - horseracing was his other great passion. His paper of choice was The Sporting Life. During this era of my life, Guy became Tony. I had graduated from pupil to 'friend'. It seemed that at school he needed to have these two identities. But in the real world, I was no longer Le Singe; and he was no longer Guy the entertainer.

 

Soon after this, Tony's paedophile's paradise in Musselburgh came to an abrupt end. He rang me distraught one day to tell me he had finally been fired from Loretto and was working at Prince Charles's old prep school, Cheam. This didn't last: the headmaster at Cheam, who had been 'sympathetic' to his cause, had been pressurised to fire him, too – largely as a result of the scandal following Tony around. Apparently a boy at Loretto had written a letter to his parents tracing his sexual experiences at school to sex education gleaned by a friend from Tony. He explained to me he was innocent; that the boys in question were not 'special friends'. But the cat had been yanked out of the bag and Loretto's governors decided this was enough excuse to rid the prep school of the Sword of Damocles, which must have hung over North Esk Lodge for

the 16 years Tony had been in residence.

 

If they had known the full truth, Tony would probably have been hung, drawn and quartered. As it was, he limped down to London to a training job in schools television, which he hated. I only saw him sporadically, while he suffered the realities of teaching in a comprehensive as his qualifying experience for this new career. But, within a few months, he was applying for jobs in the public-school system again and I heard no more from Tony for nearly 20 years.

 

Every day for the next three decades was a day complicated by the consequences of my relationship with Tony Ray-Hills. It is easy to rationalise your behaviour when you are still a teenager at boarding school. Without girls around, how else to deal with all the testosterone thrashing about in massive playing fields all over the country? It seemed OK to condone corporal punishment - a lad needs some discipline, for God's sake. Why not cut his bum up so that it bleeds for having dirty shoes? Bullying: why not let dog eat dog? Surely the prefect's study is no different to the boardroom, where everybody has to fight his or her own corner. There are bullies in the real world, too. And then homosexuality: no harm in it. Pretty boys are just a substitute. Having a pretty boy kiss you behind the bike shed and then jerk you off a couple of times so that you feel good about it hardly demonstrates a denial of heterosexual instinct.

 

But child abuse? Does this come into a similar category? Even if you buy into the myth that corporal punishment, bullying and sex between consenting teenagers is OK as long as it stays within the dormitory, nobody could seriously argue the same for the cynical, deliberate sexual manipulation of a child by an adult charged with that child's spiritual, educational and physical welfare. We have never talked about the paedophiles in the public-school system because I suspect that, like me, those who have been harmed by them were firstly too scared and ashamed to admit that anything took place at all and, secondly, wanted to bury the memory so aggressively that the psychological wound it caused would not be blamed for the consequential behaviour and anguish. And because these crimes have been so repressed and denied, nobody has really assessed what damage they did to their victims. I can only guess at the damage it has done to me and the misery I have experienced living with the impact.

 

I have never trusted any man. I have regularly equated sexual conquest and promiscuity with a desperate need for emotional approbation. I have always romanticised deception and secrecy. I have always thought it was normal for people to lie and cheat. I refused to admit that I was wronged by Ray-Hills and consequently have a ludicrously forgiving attitude towards other paedophiles, rapists and pederasts.

 

I have lived a peculiar double life with my wife and children over the past 30 years. A duplicitous, mendacious, adulterous, selfish life which only began to change when I was forced to realise that my destructive, unsociable behaviour stemmed from the psychological wounds caused by the experience of my relationship with dear old Guy and the secret I had kept from everybody for so long. So, how did it slip out?

 

An eccentric architect obsessed with 17th-century artefacts invited me to dinner shortly after my father died. I was going through serious marital turmoil and was living away from home at the time. At the end of the evening - we were all drunk - I challenged him to load his antique blunderbuss or demonstrate an explosion with gunpowder caused by one of his precious 17th-century muskets. His bravado amazed us and the explosion triggered an emotional explosion in my brain, which led to a public confession. Within minutes, I was bleating out the story of Ray-Hills. Until then, whenever he cropped up, I would eulogise about his amazing brilliance as a teacher. I would get everybody to laugh about his pantomime-like French lessons. I would tell them about visits to the races and his infectious, high-pitched laughter. I promoted his sainthood. But at this dinner

party, I decided to tell all. I described the real nature of my relationship with him. The impact was devastating.

 

Like all abused children, I had no idea how horrified other people were about paedophilia. Like all other victims of adolescent rape, I found it impossible to see the experience as anything other than my fault. I was appalled when, after the dinner, as the guests realised that it wasn't some sort of sick joke, one of them said in all seriousness that I should go to the police immediately and get Ray-Hills arrested. I laughed. I couldn't see it in those seemingly hysterical terms. Years of the secret, years of ignoring the impact and consequences of his behaviour all conspired towards a sanguine, forgiving attitude to what he had done. How could I possibly want him to go to jail for it? 'How would you feel if you learnt that your teenage daughter had been abused by her French master?' a voice said. I had three in their teens at the time. The penny dropped as loudly as my friend's explosion had erupted round his dining room.

 

Then came the reverberations of this public 'outing' of my secret. I began to spill out various snippets of my dinner-party revelations to some members of my family and to my best friends. I delayed telling my wife Hilary, but at last I also felt I had the emotional strength to tell her the whole story in detail - something I had feared from the day I'd begun to love her, almost 25 years earlier. I had been convinced then that she would dump me on the spot.

 

I knew she suspected something weird had happened with Ray-Hills. He had come to lunch once at our flat in Chelsea soon after I mentioned him (favourably) in an interview I gave to The Independent some three years or so earlier. Hilary had refused to stay. She didn't like him at all. I remember being petrified that she had picked something up about the real nature of our relationship from this brief encounter. When I finally told her the whole story, she began to understand the true, horrifying complexity of my secret and the effect it had had on our marriage. And, of course, she made me realise that if my secret could have come out when we had met, our love affair and 25-year marriage would have been considerably easier to deal with.

 

Our only contact with him after this had been a chance meeting in a Dorset restaurant. He looked sheepish - he was with two older women who were clearly hanging on all his witticisms and charm. He oozed all of this over to Hilly at our table and her response must have told him that she knew something about our secret. He took me aside and, holding my arm, told me in a whisper how good it was to see one of his 'special friends' again, and that we should be in touch soon. Hilary threw him a look, which must have got to him because he all but ran back to his table.

 

Confused and emotionally wrought by all of this, I had even told the story to a professional journalist. I wrote to Ray-Hills telling him that because of this, he was probably going to be publicly exposed. I received a barrage of phone messages and three begging and apologetic letters. Amazingly, he accepted all my accusations. He knew it would be futile to deny them. More importantly, he wanted to see me and wanted desperately to prevent public exposure. We arranged to meet at the Hyde Park Hotel at 7pm one cold January evening.

 

He arrived early to check out the degree to which I might have been following him. He had wandered around Harrods petrified that a camera crew had pursued him – he knew that I directed documentary films to supplement my career in the cinema. And there he was. Tall, ruddy, charming, pathetic and sporting the same seductive, manipulative spirit he'd used when I had been an innocent young boy, 10 years old. Determined to have my say, I told him, as we swigged at our champagne cocktails, that he had committed a crime and that in different circumstances he would be in jail. I told him of the harm he had caused me. How disgusted I was. How ashamed I had felt. I reminded him of my vulnerability - thousands of miles away from my parents, no relations to see regularly, frightened, lonely, trusting, innocent, sexually ignorant.

 

I was angry. He listened and apologised. He used all the standard defences: 'But surely it didn't really harm you. It was all good, clean fun. You were a special friend. It happened so many years ago. There is no need to bring it all up now. I don't have relationships with boys now.' As I sat in the luxurious faux Victoriana of one of the hotel's salons, time stopped. His charm was working again. He implied he would not be able to live through any scandal. He took me through the history of his sacking from Loretto and the years that followed. He had loved his job there, teaching French to young boys like me. He told me about a reunion at which he had been a speaker, a memorial after the death of one of his Loretto teaching colleagues. Oddly enough, I had known about this event because I had bumped into another ex-Nipper who had told me how funny 'Guy's speech' had been at the memorial. Guy is a very, very funny raconteur and knows how to entertain.  

 

I asked what life was like for him now. He explained his rather solitary existence in a small flat in Twickenham. He emphasised time and again that he'd had no inkling of the harm he was accused of doing over so many years. He made some revolting reference to homoerotic pornography he had come across in a Twickenham adult bookshop. I laughed hypocritically. Old habits die hard. And slowly but surely I was coaxed into taking pity and told him I would prevent the publication of my interview. Let bygones be bygones. 

 

So, what has changed? Why do I want to deal with this saga publicly now? My only answer is that if all children have the right to be protected from sick, manipulative sexual abuse, surely we must do everything to inhibit their predators by drawing attention to all the arenas in which they have operated before, and might still be operating. Why does the public-school community hide away and deny the emotional scars it causes? Should all paedophiles be held accountable for their crimes? Why are so many public-schoolboys so repressed? Is it right we should separate a tiny percentage of our children and educate them away from home, isolated from the rest of society for half of their adolescence?

 

On a deeply personal level, writing about 'Guy' has been therapeutic and cathartic. In talking about him to my wife, my daughters, to close friends, to a psychiatrist and to Tony himself, I have arrived at the moment when I feel that I want to tell the story in public. I am prepared to deal with the consequences of this article. I don't feel ashamed any more. I don't feel any need to hide it all away. I want to air it all so that somebody might learn from it. I want to move on in life without a horrible, unresolved secret. I want to cry about it. I want to hate 'Guy' and cry for 'Tony'. I want to rid myself of 'Le Singe'. I want to love without the feeling that I have to get and give good sex to be loved. I want to enjoy my men friends without feeling that I mistrust them. And I want to believe that what happened between 'Guy' and 'Le Singe' was not my fault.

 

• My Kingdom, directed and co-written by

Don Boyd, has its premier at the Toronto

Film Festival 2001 (September 7-16).