After each of these near misses, Wright cools off dramatically. Suddenly, he’s busy with his mates, with his training. He’s off to Blackpool at weekends, he’s got a forty-eight or a seventy-two, he’s visiting some bird somewhere. He talks a lot about birds at these times, and I have no doubt that he does a lot more than talk. We smile and wave when we see each other, we might even pass the time of day if we happen to be standing next to each other in the lunch queue, and perhaps no one notices the drop in temperature. But I do. And of course Kelsey does. When Wright is far from me, Kelsey starts to circle, looking for an opportunity to catch me out, to give me extra fatigues, to get me on a charge if he possibly could. I don’t give him the opportunity. I am a model conscript. My boots are almost as shiny as his, my bed and locker textbook tidy. There’s nothing for him to criticise. God knows what would happen if he found this diary – but it remains well hidden, unseen, unread. I make very sure of that. The case is locked at all times, the diary well concealed in the lining, along with those dog-eared copies of Health and Strength and Man’s World and Male Classics. As for them, I might as well throw them away. I am so familiar with the images that I don’t need to see them again, I have only to close my eyes. I dream sometimes about sending off for the ‘private photos sets’ advertised in the back pages – ‘20 dynamic poses! Natural, uninhibited!’ – but that would be suicidal folly. Our post is monitored. It’s one thing to display a picture of Mervyn Wright, ‘the Reville Rebel’ as he is now billed – in a pair of satin shorts. It’s quite another to get pictures of unknown young men in posing pouches and less from PO Box addresses in London. That would confirm what many, I’m sure, suspect – that I am queer.

Am I queer? Stephen certainly thinks I am, and tells me so whenever I let him. I haven’t yet denied it, so I suppose he is right. But am I like him? I like men, and I don’t seem to be interested in women. I feel something towards Wright that is not just lust. I want to ‘be with him’, whatever that means. I daren’t think it through to its conclusion. And what about Wright? Does he want to ‘be with me’? And if he does, is he queer too? And what does that mean for all of us? A lifetime of hanging around the West End in brown shoes? Dodging plainclothes policemen in public toilets? Getting nabbed like Montagu and Wildeblood and doing eighteen months? Or living in secret, getting married, giving Mum the grandchildren she wants, hiding muscle mags at the back of my desk for the rest of my life?