Enough to spoil the appetite
Byron Rogers
SEX AND THE PSYCHE by Brett Kahr Penguin, £25, pp. 622, ISBN 9780713999402 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Ishall never forget that glorious summer of 1959, when, on the strength of my ‘A’ levels, I was appointed shower attendant for life at Carmarthen Girls’ Grammar School. For there not a girl ages, and neither do I. Among the faucets it is forever Brigadooon.
‘How do you manage it, Rogers?’ The rolling, imperious thighs of Joan W, the hockey captain, are passing into the steam. ‘I mean, how have you kept everything going?’ Knowing my place, I answer, ‘WD-40, ma’am. And loneliness. They do wonders for the stop-cocks.’ Should you read the 600 pages of Sex and the Psyche, and especially when, as I had, you have ’flu, you will make an interesting discovery. The book, being part of the British Sexual Survey (surely the legacy the Prime Minister is seeking to leave), is based on the daydreams of 19,000 people, the equivalent of a medium-sized county town, but at the end I guarantee that you will be convinced of one thing: that your own fantasies are far more interesting than theirs.
His father once caught my old friend Ray at his mastrupation, as old John Aubrey would have put it. The father said just one thing, but that grimly. ‘You’re lucky it was me who caught you, boy. If it had been your mother she’d have been straight down to the White Bridge.’ The White Bridge is a railway viaduct over the river, from which it was customary for residents of Carmarthen to commit suicide. For 50 years Ray and I have fantasised about water meadows more full of runners than Newcastle during the Great North Run, as the mothers stampede through the reeds to the White Bridge. ‘It’s Mrs Morgan by a nose. No, it’s a late entrant. Just look at Mrs Rogers go. What has she seen?’ It has always amazed me, and will amaze anyone who has ever had to write a weekly column for a newspaper, just how much some people can find to say about sex. A respectable matron, a friend of my wife, managed, as part of her training to become a marriage counsellor, to write 5,000 words on wanking. But even this is small beer compared to the masterly Masturbation among Tramps which Havelock Ellis included in his multi-volumed Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a work given me as a wedding present by my old landlord John Moorehead.
In its pages I encountered lunacy even more inspired than among the literary critics I had once been obliged to read. There was the German doctor Rothe, who, after examining the pubic hair of 1,000 Berlin women, came to the conclusion that ‘no two women were alike in this respect’. One Italian woman, it was found, had so much that she sold it to make wigs, and brought up a family on the harvests. And then there was Realdus Columbus, who in 1593, a century after his namesake discovered the New World, claimed to have made the far more momentous discovery of the clitoris.
The headbangers caught in Brett Kahr’s trawl are nowhere near so bizarre, but they do their best. Vincente, living five floors up, gets his kicks by sticking his penis out of the window but avoids orgasm in case it should fall on someone’s head. Rusty, a former marine, is a more social individual. ‘My wife thinks it’s funny, but we’ll go to parties with other couples, and my mates’ll say, “Rusty, show us your knob”, and so I do.’ Rusty adds thoughtfully, ‘I guess you’d call me an exhibitionist.’ Buzz goes even further, being so proud of his phallus that in his dreams he, and it, end up being invited to Buckingham Palace, whereupon the Queen breaks with convention, dispenses with swords and uses it in the ceremony of knighthood.
The point is that Mr Kahr, in his consulting room, after a 6.45 a. m. start every day, has written all this down. But just listen to this. ‘I rarely have time for a proper breakfast ... in fact, although I always enjoy my food, the thought of a full English breakfast before work leaves me rather queasy.’ It would be impossible to make any of this up. But the thought of him wistful for sausages in a Hampstead dawn is one of the few things that prevent this technicoloured nonsense floating away.
That, and the odd moment when the still sad music of humanity intrudes. After all these people with megaphones, it is star tling to come upon someone whose fantasy is ‘just seeing my husband in his suit’. It is also very moving when the fantasy is ‘just having my husband alive again to make love to me’. These moments take the form of very short, very direct statements, as in one of the Ballads. ‘Remembering the past — my husband is now impotent.’ And then there is Wendell, whom I shall find it hard to forget. ‘At the age of 85 I do not get turned on, I am more inclined to laugh.’ But then the rout starts up again, and they stream by, bawling and happy and verbose, pursued by Mr Kahr.
Royalty, of course, is never far away. And it is a spring morning on the A 40 when a vast artic stops for a hitchhiker. High above me in the cab is a small woman in furs and diamonds. ‘Bore da, mwnci,’ says Queen Elizabeth II. Though sometimes she speaks in English.
Odd I was never asked about my fantasies.
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