My innocence stolen, I lost my virginity aged 12 to an Italian prostitute

MEN who learn what assistant matron Please did to me at Maidwell tend, at first, to give me a laddish thumbs up: ‘Lucky you!’ they say.

‘Would you say that if the genders were reversed?’ I ask. ‘You know, if it was a 20-year-old man sexually molesting an 11-year-old girl?’

Then they get it.

The effect of what she did to me was profound and immediate, awaking in me desires that had no place in one so young. I’d felt a vagina, when my friends were longing for a first kiss, and I’d been touched sensually during those long, heady embraces. And it had, to my shame, felt good.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as the cliche goes, and this childhood abuse meant that I wanted full sex from a too-early age.

The assistant matron had given me a taste, and I wanted the extra portion I felt she’d promised me but withheld. I lost my virginity at the age of 12, driven by a compulsion.

Late at night, on a trip to Italy with my mother and stepfather, I looked from my bedroom window on to the square below and saw a short-skirted lady standing in a corner under a street lamp. My stepfather had spotted her when we returned from supper and whispered to my mother, ‘una prostituta’, and she’d nodded.

In short order, I padded down the stairs and slipped out of the pensione without a word.

‘Quanto costa?’ I asked, using words I’d heard my mother say when opening the bargaining for a handbag earlier in the day.

‘Trentamile lire,’ she replied.

She led me up into a room, which was, like The Uppers, in an attic. As it was about to happen, I said, ‘I don’t know what to do’, and she looked at me blankly, not understanding English.

After a further pause, I let the woman take the lead, silently and firmly. It was a dynamic that felt familiar.

There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age.

I believe now that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverted attention.

Afterwards I felt hollow and cold. I didn’t sleep with a woman again for five years, until I was 17 and my girlfriend 18.