When father's shop burnt down, it was the last straw and Tom and I ended up in the workhouse. We'd lost mother when we were young boys. We worked all day and the food was disgusting. Laziness was severely punished as was theft and any number of other misdemeanours.
One evening a boy was caught stealing an apple. After supper in the dining hall, Mr Crump asked the boy to come to the front and, in front of all the boys said, "Remove your britches, sir." The poor boy did as he was told and was then told to remove his underwear. "Bend over, sir." The boy bent over part of the lectern at the front, and Mr Crump took his sharp cane and gave the boy six strokes on his bare buttocks, after which angry red marks could be seen on them. He turned around to pull up his underwear and britches. There was a gasp as the boy displayed his manly parts in front of all of us. His genitals were well developed and he had hair on his testicles and bottom. He had to shake Mr Crump's hand.
There was very little to play with and life was boring. We were constantly tired. And yet, we were a creative lot and we had all sorts of fun in the dormitory in the evening.
There was little privacy and the older boys had no access to girls. One night there was a bright moon and I woke at about midnight to hear a rustling from the bed next to me. Andrew was 16. The rustling stopped and I saw him hide something under the bed. I made a note to investigate the following day, turned over and went back to sleep.
When Andrew was in the bathroom, I found what he'd hidden. It was a sock, but it was damp and had a strangely familiar smell to it.
One night a few months earlier, I'd made rather a strange discovery. I was in bed but needed the lavatory. The strange thing was that my male part had grown larger than I could ever remember it, felt quite hard and was strangely sensitive to the touch. Instinctively, I'd started playing with my little balls and it all felt better and better. Suddenly, my thing started to pulse and it seemed to send waves of pleasure all over my body. I was keen to replicate this strange experience and each night I would play around with my genitals until I had produced similar feelings. Very recently, I'd noticed that a few drops of piss dripped out of my thing.
I thought nothing more about it, presuming that this was just something strange about my body, but I wondered whether Andrew was doing something similar.
A few days later, he asked me, "Charles, do you know about spunking up yet?" I told him I didn't and he explained that it was a way boys had of pretending to have sexual intercourse with a woman. Of course father had told me about what a husband did with his wife, but had given not details. I had been wondering how the seed got from the male part into the female part.
"In order for the semen, the man's seed to get into the woman to make a baby, the man's "penis", that's the scientific term for the male organ, has to be stimulated until it ejaculates -- throws out the semen. Boys learn how to do that with their hands, usually at about twelve or whenever they start to get hair down there."
I thought it would be better not to mention that I had discovered how to do it. "Andrew, that sounds really interesting. Will you show me how to do it?"
"All right, Charles, only, we should keep a bit quiet about it. Most of the boys do it, but the religious ones say it's a mortal sin to do it without a woman you're married to. There was a man in the Bible called Onan who gave it a bad name and God struck him dead."
That evening, I was careful not to go to sleep. When everyone else had, Andrew pulled back the bed clothes. He opened his pyjama top and pulled down his pyjama bottoms. His penis was much bigger than mine even when soft, but he started to move his right hand up and down on it and it soon became very large and hard. I was fascinated. I pulled back my bed clothes and copied him. At the end it was much more spectacular than when I did it. I could see his spunk flying through the air, whereas so little came out of me that he didn't notice.
The following day, I thanked him for his lesson, saying how much I'd enjoyed it.