It was London in the s, times were wild and some of us were quite terrifyingly ignorant. The sexual revolution was in full swing, which, for those sentenced to live through it, was a great deal less enjoyable than you might suppose it to have been. Maybe some people were having endless fun in the era of free love.
I had learned the facts of life at school, although it had been in spite of any organized instruction rather than because of it. Maybe Mr. Los Angeles would have said something. One rainy evening, when I was home on vacation from university, wrestling grimly with Beowulf and feeling more than a passing twinge of sympathy for Grendel, my bedroom door cracked open and in slunk my year-old cousin Dominic, whose parents were visiting mine.
I was touched. I was emphatically the sort of young woman to whom people felt more impelled to offer advice than from whom to seek it; but despite what the boy at the party would have had you believe, I was really quite kind-hearted nevertheless, and, besides, had always been fond of Dominic.
An Angelus bell of alarm began to ring in my mind. This was growing serious. What little information I had gleaned since Sister Jude was about being a girl, not a boy; and Dominic was growing into a handsome boy, and who knew what challenges he might be encountering now in his sixteenth year, or from where — or, oh, lord, from whom — they might be coming? Dominic twitched his buttocks on my bed. He rocked backward and forward, then shifted from side to side. Inwardly, I emitted a howl of anguish worthy of the dying Grendel himself.
What if he told me something that I thought was OK but really was the quite disastrous reverse of OK and because of my lack of sounding the warning, he died in agony and so tragically young? How would I explain that to his parents? How would I explain it to my parents?
