Close encounter with a paedophile

In 1957 I left my primary school in London and went to a boarding school located in Suffolk run by the London County Council. While I was in the 1st or 2nd form, we had a slightly odd maths teacher. We all knew there was something not quite normal about him because he seemed to have a fetish about long finger nails, although I’m pretty sure none of us even knew the word fetish at that time!

He liked to ask all of us to hold out our hands and display our nails. If you had any that reached to the end of your fingers, he would reward you with a Wagonwheel for each one. Needless to say, I never got any Wagonwheels because I used to bite my nails. Other than that, though, he seemed normal enough.

He was a Catholic like me and I’m not sure exactly how or why, but one day he told me to attend to his room In one of the dormitory buildings at 2pm on a set day every week for catechism lessons, I think. Maybe it was in preparation for Confirmation, I don’t remember.

I don’t know how it came about, but during one lesson, he opened a book and showed me a drawing of a penis!  He was talking about the way at puberty, the foreskin of an uncircumcised boy detaches from the base of the glans penis, and this was news to me at the time.

He told me to stand up and then, before I knew it, he reached over and opened the fly of my trousers and pulled out my penis. I was frozen to the spot. He then attempted to pull back my foreskin but it didn’t go back very far because at that time it was still unseparated. He waited for a few moments, maybe to see my reaction, and then he pushed my penis back into my trousers and did up my fly.

All I can remember of my feelings at the time was that I was very frightened. It never happened again, and I’m not even sure if we had any further catechism lessons. I never told anyone.

Sometime later, months or years I’m not sure, he left the school. Many years later, I found out he had been asked to leave the school for unspecified reasons. Probably for interfering with other boys, but I don’t know. Finally, I heard he had been confined to a wheelchair and that, eventually, he had died.