This is a true story, albeit as remembered across forty odd years.

In 1958 I was living in the midlands of England. In July of that year I caught rheumatic fever. These days this is easily cured by antibiotics, but back then the cure was 2 months flat on your back and a month in a convalescent home. I was sent to our local hospital and was admitted to Princess Mary Ward

As in all hospitals there is a routine and I soon learned it. After lunch each day your temperature was taken orally by your own thermometer which was kept in a pink fluid in a glass container shaped like a test tube on the wall above your bed. You were then given any medicine that you needed and I remember daily having a liquid medicine tasting of peppermint and to this day I don't like peppermint. The ward then went quiet and you were expected to try and sleep for an hour or so.

My bed had a cradle under the bedclothes to keep the weight of the bedclothes off my tender legs and my legs were wrapped in cotton wool. If at any time you needed to go to the toilet you asked the nearest nurse for a bottle if you wanted to pee or a bedpan if you wanted to do the other. The bottles were made of thick glass and were brought to you under a cloth. When you had finished you told a nurse who then took it away, again under a cloth. I don't know whether the amount output was measured, but the fact that you had had a pee was marked on a chart held on a clipboard on the foot rail of your bed. If you had a bedpan the curtains were pulled round your bed when and when you had finished the nurse turned you on your side and wiped your bottom with cotton wool and took the bedpan away under a cloth. Again, the fact you had used a bedpan was marked on your chart. This meant that the curtains around each bed were often pulled and then opened again after a few minutes, it was normal.

The problem came if you did not open your bowels, as they put it, for three consecutive days. The first time this happened to me they did something to me that profoundly changed me and fixed my sexual interests for the rest of my life. A nurse gave me an enema.

After lunch on the third day I was given a bedpan and told to try to go. I couldn't produce anything. The bedpan was taken away and I thought nothing of it and turned over to try to sleep as was normal after lunch. After a few minutes a nurse came in with a tray covered with a cloth and put it on my bedside table. She drew the curtains around my bed and took the cloth off the tray and there was a bedpan and an enamel jug on there and a length of red rubber tubing with a funnel on the end lying in an enamel dish. She told me that she was going to give me something to make me go to the toilet and told me to lie on my left side. My pajama bottoms were then rolled down and I felt her finger inside my bottom with Vaseline on and then the rubber tube was sliding inside me. She must have run some water through the funnel first, as the tube was warm. Then the water started running into me.

I was a big fellow for my age but it felt like gallons although it was no doubt only one or perhaps two pints. But it had a most distinctive smell and I didn't find out what that was until many years later. She was holding the funnel up with one hand and pouring the water in from the jug. When she had finished she slowly pulled the tube out and put the tube and funnel down on the tray and then held a piece of cotton wool against my anus telling me to hold it in as long as possible. She tidied up the tray and then gave me the bedpan into which I exploded with three days contents of my bowels and the warm, soapy water. She took the tray away and when she came back I had finished and she wiped my bottom with cotton wool and pulled the curtains open. The curtains were normally held against the wall and were pulled round on an overhead track.

That was the first enema I ever received, the first time something had gone up my bottom. After that I watched after lunch every day and was aware that other patients had the same treatment after lunch, presumably after their third day without going.

Within a couple of weeks I had another enema exactly the same as the first time and for the same reason, but at least this time I knew what to expect.

After two months flat on my back in that ward I was sent by ambulance to a convalescent home in Derbyshire. There I learned to walk again (two months flat on your back robs you of your leg muscles) and I had my final enema from a nurse. Derbyshire was different; they used a Higginson syringe, as I now know it to be called, but the procedure was the same as was the results!

After a month in there I was sent home. Those were my first sexual experiences. I suppose I was at an impressionable age and ever since then my sexual tastes have always been geared towards the anus, and enemas in particular.