David's Final Graduate Year Ch. 01

Jon of course urgently needed my mother's help in organizing the cooking and preparation for Christmas because he had never cooked for more than three persons before! Also we had to do an enormous amount of shopping for vegetables and other materials necessary for Christmas. My mother had pre-cooked a Christmas pudding and brought that with her, so that was not a problem.

Christmas finally arrived. Dorothea had arrived the day before Christmas Eve directly from Oxbridge where she had been doing some vacation reading. I met her with the 4x4 at Ixfordingworth station. She did not look absolutely 100% fit, and I couldn't help wondering if she was burning the candle at both ends. She was now in her final year and took her studies very seriously. Anyhow, we hoped that the break over Christmas would do her good. This Christmas was the first real test of the heating in Rockwell's Barn, and to our great relief everything seemed to work perfectly and the old house was very warm. The warm-up process took about two days but the thick walls with modern insulation on the windows meant that once warm, it remained that way with a fairly minimal input of heat.

On Christmas Eve we decorated the tree and then all of us except Jon went to midnight mass at Ixton parish church. We got back home about 1 am and went to bed. I told Jeroen that unfortunately there were no chimneys in our house for Father Christmas to come down! However I said there would still be presents under the tree tomorrow.

Christmas morning went extremely smoothly, because it was not interrupted by visits to church and soon after 1 pm we all sat down to Christmas lunch. We had spent the previous hour eating nuts and drinking sherry and Prosecco and opening some of our presents, leaving the remainder to be opened after we had eaten. Jon had provided two excellent wines, one red and one white, to accompany our food and my Italian coffee machine was put to the test after the meal in producing a relatively large amount of coffee very quickly.

On Boxing Day we went for a long walk in the countryside and took a good look at the developing woodland on Arthur's land that had been the Afforestation Trust's first venture. The trees had made amazing progress in the last couple of years, and well vindicated our choice of pilot experiment. We ended up at the Jellycotes Arms for a drink before returning home to a late lunch or early dinner of cold turkey, ham and salad, washed down by several bottles of Soave. Even Jeroen was allowed a couple of small glasses of wine. My little brother seemed to have got accustomed to his newly found manhood, although he obstinately refused to answer any questions about girlfriends.

Chapter 50 Jon

New Year's Eve 1

On December 31 19--, we both got up early, showered and shaved carefully and discretely applied 'Storing pour homme.' We ate with the rest of the family and made sure that everyone had a good breakfast. Edward and Tim were separately due to arrive mid-morning and were just in time for coffee. Then we all went to get ready. David and I had decided that we would wear suit trousers with white made-to-measure embroidered silk shirts and pink silk ties, but no jackets as we were indoors and the house was quite warm. David wore the bracelet that I had bought him for his twentieth birthday on his right wrist, and as it was a special occasion, he had let me buy him the made-to-measure shirt. We had decided against any flowers, except for a small display on a hired flower stand in the chapel. Edward wore an alb with discreet lacework on the hem and a plain white stole. Music was provided by a CD player on which David had got the Boni's organ scholar to record the music for two hymns and a solo number for him. These of course he had chosen himself.

We opened the service with the Wesley hymn 'Love divine, all loves excelling.' Edward began the service by explaining to the congregation that this was a blessing of a permanent and faithful commitment between two persons of the same sex in order that they might have the support and encouragement of the church in their lives under God. He said it was not a marriage ceremony, in spite of having borrowed a few features of the marriage rite, but a service of promises in which David and I were going to make mutual vows of lifelong love together, that two rings would be blessed and we would exchange rings without any words being said. He emphasized that the ceremony had no legal status and was solely an act of worship.

Psalm 67 was then said, and we made the promises 'to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.' Edward blessed the two rings and without any words except those invoking the Holy Trinity, we then placed the rings on the fourth digit of each other's right hands, and Edward pronounced a blessing over us.

Then he donned a white chasuble and there followed a celebration of the Eucharist at which everyone except myself received the Sacrament, even Jeroen, who had been confirmed when he was 10. David sang 'Panis angelicus' by César Franck, during which I stood with tears of emotion rolling down my cheeks. After the blessing at the end of the Eucharist, we sang 'Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee' by Frances Havergal to a tune by Mozart. Then David and I kissed each other, chastely! We then both kissed his parents, then his brother and sister and shook hands with Edward and Tim, both our faces moist with tears of joy and emotion, and I noticed that tears were also shed by David's parents.

Then we all adjourned to the dining room on the ground floor and David poured out large glasses of Prosecco for all of us and Jeroen, who by now was quite hairy in the face, but not yet hairy enough to need to shave, carried them carefully round to each of us on a tray. His voice was quite clearly now not tenor, like his brother, but baritone. It was a relief to find that he did not raise any feelings of lust in me. The sweet, non-sexual appeal that he had had as a young boy had been replaced by the promise of a very heterosexual manhood. Clearly his fears that he might be gay had proved to be totally unjustified. I think that he had been somewhat embarrassed by the ceremony, as male teenagers often are about anything charged with emotion, in spite of the fact that we had gone to great lengths to avoid any overtly gay-pride symbolism, apart from the pink ties.

The caterers who had supplied the buffet had done a wonderful job, and David's mother had been busy the previous day setting everything out in the dining room. No sooner had the wine been distributed and grace been said by Edward, than Jeroen and Dorothea grabbed cardboard plates and helped themselves, and Tim and Edward rapidly followed suit. David and I and his parents were too busy coping with our emotions to do anything other than gulp our wine tearfully.

Chapter 51 David

New Year's Eve 2

December 31 19-- was the second happiest day of my life. The first of course was the day that Jon and I found that we loved one another. But the day that we promised before God to live together in love for the rest of our lives was really more memorable, certainly for other people. Jon seemed to spend much of the ceremony in tears, which rather surprised me, as I tend to think of him as being the more businesslike of the two of us. But of course because Jon had asked me to sing a solo on the occasion, I could not afford to permit myself tears, at least during the time that I was singing! But between us we certainly shed enough tears that day.

Edward did a brilliant job in conducting the service, and we owe him an enormous debt, partly due to him just being his kind, sympathetic yet shrewd self, but also for the prayerful support that he had given us and the encouragement he had given to Jon to come to see that God existed and that He could interact with us and that He loved us. The gospel reading for the Eucharist was John 11: 32-37 about Jesus weeping for his dead friend Lazarus. 'How He must have loved him!' Without swearing Edward to secrecy, we gave him to understand that we would prefer him not to make any mention on High Table about the occasion.

I know that my father would have been happier if he had seen me there marrying a woman, but God has made me gay, and my father is enough of a realist to recognize this and because he loves me so much, he has become as supportive of Jon and myself as my mother has always been. It's difficult to know the effect that the ceremony had on my brother and sister. Jeroen looked a little embarrassed, as boys at his age are liable to on an emotional occasion, but Dorothea seemed to remain inscrutable throughout the service.

After the service, we adjourned to the dining room and tucked in to an excellent buffet lunch washed down with copious quantities of Prosecco. The only person who did not have a second glass of wine was Edward, who having eaten lunch, reluctantly made his farewells and left to drive back to Camford for the New Year party that he was attending in the evening.

Just before dusk, the phone rang. It was Arthur Rockwell. Would we all like to walk across and have a celebratory glass with the Rockwell family to celebrate the coming New Year? Could Arthur cope with seven of us, I asked. He replied that it was no problem, so we put our coats on and walked in the waning light the kilometre or so to Rockwell's Farm. We took our coats off and Arthur led us into the big front parlour of the house, which was rarely used. There was a roaring open log fire with Arthur's wife and son and half a dozen people from Ixton, some of whom I vaguely recognized. It took some time for Arthur to serve us drinks and we got into conversation with the other people in the room. One of the guests who turned out to be a friend of the landlord of the Jellycotes Arms told me in the course of a discussion about builders and building that the firm for which Don was working had recently acquired a contract to build some houses in the village. That meant that Don, the gay builder, was back working in Ixton for several months and I said to Jon that we should make sure that we spent at least a couple of weekends at the house during that period so that we could find out how Don was getting on. We were regaled by Mrs Rockwell with mince pies and Christmas cake and after a couple of very enjoyable hours in their front room we returned home to see the New Year in.

Many romantic novels end with a marriage. However, my act of commitment with Jon was not marriage, and the story does not end here.

[To be continued]