A Modest Servant
By Steam Train ( steam_t2000@yahoo.com )
Chapter 14: Postscript. ~ CONCLUSION
Marcus continued to be my closest friend. We had built a friendship and a relationship that would last past school into our adult years. As we got older and study and work commitments forced us apart we saw less of each other for a while. His father finished his work commitments in Sydney and returned to Canada when Marcus was twenty-two, but Marcus decided he wanted to stay in Australia. He remained always my true love. Marcus became a solicitor and when he married at twenty four years of age a fellow solicitor whom he had met at his work I was heartbroken, however true to his negotiating skills he made sure before he committed to marry her that she knew all about our relationship and required that she freely allowed me to maintain safe sexual contact with Marcus. As I write this recollection of my early life, Marcus is sitting next to me, his teenage kids are watching TV in the next room and we are a happy family. His wife, well not all stories have a happy ending, she found some one else a few years back, I think I was the cause of the marriages demise, she could no longer bear the stress of sharing Marcus with someone else and I think she also saw that his love for me was deeper than his love for her. I was his great comfort during that time of stress and depression as his marriage broke up. His children now spend the majority of their time with their dad and call me Uncle Tom They have grown up in a family with a healthy open-minded attitude to sex, heterosexuality, bi sexuality and homosexuality.
Mum and Mr Vanderbilt are happy together. He has lots of wealth and they are constantly tripping around the world enjoying the lifestyle that mum has always enjoyed. She calls in occasionally to see me and we get together for family birthdays etc but she does not really approve of the fact that I am openly gay, living my life with another man.
Ed went on to complete a Pharmacy degree and moved to Perth where he opened a Pharmacy just south of Perth and built on this till he owned a chain of stores around Perth. He is now a wealthy man living a totally heterosexual lifestyle in Western Australia. He married one of his staff that came to work for him in his first store and they have two boys and one daughter. He lost contact with Samantha after they both left HTGS. I saw her at her father; Mr Riley's retirement dinner and we talked old times. She asked about Ed. She has never married and is now Headmistress of a Christian Girls School in the northern suburbs of Sydney.
Ed and I occasionally get together in Sydney and continue our gay relationship. When he is over from Perth he also gets together with Marcus and the three-way relationship we forged all those years ago at HTGS is still something all three of us enjoy and look forward too.
Ed and I enjoy a unique and very special relationship. I don't know if his wife suspects our sexual relationship, I suspect not as two brothers carrying on so, is still considered not proper or acceptable in the eyes of the vast majority of the community.
Those eighteen months in servitude changed our relationship forever and have forged a tight bond between us both. Though we see each other only occasionally due to the distances between Sydney and Perth, there is never a week that goes by where we do not talk on the phone and we email constantly.
Jim joined the Australian Army after completing his Higher School Certificate at HTGS. He is now a Major in the Infantry and is currently based in Darwin. I see him at family functions but we never were as close as Ed and I became. He is married with one son and three daughters and now leads a totally heterosexual life style.
When I reached adulthood and completed my university degree in Social Work majoring in Servant Behaviour, I joined the Servant Protection Unit as a Sub Inspector and rose quickly through the ranks till today I am a Chief Superintendent, the youngest ever in the Units history. I am almost the only officer with practical experience at being a servant. This has helped me greatly in being successful in this career and the prospects look good that I may go on in my later career and reach one of the exalted Commissioner ranks, where I can begin to have great impact on the entire culture of the SPU.
Through my job role in the SPU I was eventually able to track down all my half brothers. Raymond was a personal servant to a widow from a wealthy suburb in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. He was happy and well looked after when I found him. He was glad to see me but the passion had passed from our relationship and I was not in a financial position to do anything about his situation. He accepted this and thanked me for keeping my promise to him those many years ago. I also informed him about what I had learnt about his other half brothers. About five years ago he contacted me. His mistress had passed away and in her will he was set free. He asked for my protection as freed servants were often caught up in complicated legal protocol; and sometimes found themselves back indentured as servants before they could support themselves with an income as a free citizen. I ensured this did not happen. I put him in contact with his half brother Peter and found him a job. We meet for drinks and talk regularly but sex is no longer on our agenda.
Peter was a servant sex worker when I found him. He had had a number of owners since we were both sold at the same auction. The conditions he was working under at the brothel were illegal and I got great satisfaction in seeing the two brothel owners who had abused him, convicted and sent into servitude for twenty years. He went cheap at the subsequent auction of their assets and I bought him and set him free. I found him a job and have kept in touch with him. He is now married and has given me two beautiful nieces and a nephew.
Dean I found working in a servant labour gang which was doing contract work. When I had financially recovered from paying out for Peter I bought out Deans contract and had him work for me whilst I was still living with Mr Norris at HTGS. When I moved in with Marcus I set him free to join his half brothers in the free world. He did not handle being free well. In fact he was soon asking me to place him in servitude again. He was born a servant and knew nothing different. I refused to indenture him again but he works for me still as a house servant and leads a lifestyle of a servant very contentedly. The only way you can tell, he is not an indentured servant is that he no longer wears a collar. We have become very close and though Marcus gets a little jealous, Dean and I sometimes have some sexual activity. His years' working on labour gangs has made him very gay orientated. He loves me for what I did for him and tried to do for his brother Alex. He is totally dedicated these days to satisfying my needs and those of Marcus and his children.
When I obtained the records relating to Dean's brother Alex I discovered he had succumbed to a disease about three years before I had located him. The records indicated that when he could no longer perform the duties he had been performing as an indentured servant his owner had sold him to an organ bank and his healthy organs had been used to assist in saving the life of about six free citizens. His records were terminated two weeks after he was admitted to the organ bank. For a while I blamed myself for not finding him earlier. It was not to be the last of my disappointments.
Only when I became a Chief Superintendent two years ago did I gain the security clearances necessary to access data relating to my father. Dads file had been terminated when I was twenty-eight years old. The records showed he had died in his sleep. He had been a servant to a Mr And Mrs George Pleasance. I eventually made contact with them on the pretence of checking details on their current servants. They never knew I was his son though I suspect they guessed. I found them to be of a similar mould to Mr Norris. Their servants were part of a loving family and I learnt that dad had enjoyed a similar existence. Mr Pleasance when questioned about my father freely told me that Eddy as he called him had, had a tough period settling in but after a few severe beatings which Mr Pleasance informed me he hated doing but which he felt were necessary to make, Eddy realise that he could have a good life with them.
Mr Pleasance knew of Eddy's background and told me that Eddy also soon realised that his life as a servant at the Pleasance house was very stress free if he did his duties properly. Mr Pleasance informed me that Eddy had told him in later years that being a servant to him and his wife was so much better than being the Chief Executive of a large corporation. Eddy had told Mr Pleasance that he deserved his servitude. Eddy had realised after a while as a servant, that he was not cut out to manage a large company and had failed in his duty of care. This shocked me a bit but I tried to hide my reaction.
When Eddy came to this realisation he apparently became a first class servant. Mr Pleasance even showed me Eddy's certificates from several years of State Servants Review appraisals where he consistently gained highly commended awards. Mr Pleasance said his eldest son found Eddy one morning dead in his bed, when the family wondered why he was not there in the morning doing his usual early morning duties. The medical report said he died of heart failure due to natural causes.
I found it really hard to hold in my emotions when Mrs Pleasance took me out the back of their property, to her rose garden and showed me where they had spread Eddy's ashes. There standing proud was a vigorous red rose with a polished and well-kept metal plaque "Eddy" proudly displayed before it.
I think this is when they guessed my true relationship to Eddy. I struggled to hold in my emotions. I stood there remembering the last time I ever saw my father alive. It was when dad was taken from the courtroom where he had just been sentenced, down to the cells below and he glanced back at me as he descended the steps. I remembered like it was yesterday our eyes briefly meeting and I prayed again as I stood there at his grave that he saw in my eyes, my love. I hope and pray he did and that it gave him some strength to endure his life of servitude.
I lived at HTGS with Mr Norris right through my college years, as did Ed and Jim. Mr Norris went on to succeed Mr Riley as Headmaster when Mr Riley retired. When I could, even after I started working for the SPU, I would do as many of the servant's duties around the house for Mr Norris as I could. There really wasn't that much to be done as all the work was done by other young servants who Mr Norris took under his wing and pushed through school just like they had done with Ed and I. Mr Norris replaced me after I finished at HTGS and he has continued this practise right up until the present.
It was when Marcus was alone with his children in their big house after his divorce and Mr Norris was due to move into the Headmasters residence that I took the opportunity to fully break from my servant past.
David Norris was and still is the dearest thing to me apart from Marcus. After I finished at HTGS the relation ship between David and myself moved on and into other realms. What these realms were I care not to discuss here as David is still the Headmaster at HTGS and they would be inappropriate to discuss openly whilst he still teaches. He now lives in the Headmasters residence at HTGS, which is not far from where I now live with Marcus. I see him very regularly and he is very good to Marcus's children all of whom attend HTGS. He treats them as if they are my children and thus his Grandchildren.
No one was more pleased that I choose to join the Servant Protection Unit than Mrs Blackmoore. She was my mentor in my early years at the Unit until she retired as a Superintendent. She is enormously proud that I have already surpassed that rank with many years of my career remaining. We email occasionally and I see her, I have to confess, not as regularly as I should. She has retired to the Gold Coast of Queensland and the distance hinders much face-to-face contact.
Jack Strauchan passed out of my life after I left HTGS. But even before that in my senior years as a freeman again at the school, the mould had been set. I hated him and he hated me. We kept a civil distance after his temporary servitude and it was to be much later in life when I was a Chief Inspector with the SPU that our paths were to cross again. That however is another story and if, as Marcus is urging, I begin to write the chronicles of my experiences as an officer of the SPU then you may hear all about that meeting and it's results some time in the future.
What do I think of servitude now?
For some it is the best thing that can happen to them. The trouble with servitude is that some masters abuse their powers and degenerate into immoral tyrants and thugs and some servants cheat and trick their masters out of their rightful rewards and dues.
If I could I would abolish servitude. However I will never be in a position to be able to do that, but I am determined to follow David Norris's example and try to make this State the best possible place for a servant to serve, even the most modest of servants.
End Chapter 14
THE END ~ CONCLUSION.
Thank you to all those people who have emailed me about this story and encouraged me to keep writing. It is my first attempt at writing and I thank you for your support. I especially want to thank Pete Brown who was the catalyst behind my decision to make a start at writing and who read my first drafts of chapter one.
Steam.