A wet weekend in Dunoon that put me off bed-sharing for life

I THINK I last slept with a man in the summer of 1962. I was 17 then and my sleeping partner 19 or 20. I haven't seen him for 25 years and I shall never see him again; a few years ago I heard that he had died. He was always a great Senior Service smoker (and if not Seniors, then Capstan or Players, or anything else powerful and untipped, though I think he never touched a Woodbine) and even when he was at school the fore and middle fingers of his right hand were stained the colour of teak at the top, shading to a Belisha-beacon orange at the base, flashing a warning to us all. His first name was Kenny. He had spectacles and lush red hair and he was very thin and shivered easily in the east winds that blow through west Fife, the fag jiggling between his lips. We were teenage cynics - unsuccessful with girls, and at school, and in his case with jobs - and for several years he was my closest friend.

It's a libel case now running at the High Court that makes me think of our time in bed together. David Ashby, the Tory MP for Leicestershire North West is suing the Sunday Times for repeating his estranged wife's "monstrous allegations" (his phrase) that he was having a homosexual affair and shared a hotel bed with another man in the Indian resort of Goa. Mr Ashby denies this particular piece of bed-sharing, though, as he told the court last week, he has shared beds with men in other places - in New Zealand possibly with a fellow MP, and in France, with a doctor friend - because he wanted to save hotel expenses and thought it was "no big deal".

It may not be for Mr Ashby. He is, as he said in court, "a product of boarding school" who in his days as a yachtsman and camper had shared cramped boats and tents. But for me - how many other men I can't say - it has been a deal of such forbidding proportions that even in the most extreme circumstances (mining disaster in small Indian town; only room in only hotel to be shared by three reporters and a photographer) I've always contrived my own insular sleeping space. You may put this down to latent homosexuality and/or homophobia, or Calvinist repression and the rather hopeful idea that lying under the same sheets implies sexual activity; "sleeping together", after all, is what we used to say when we meant having sex. Doctor, I do not care. All I know is that it reminds me of the smell of digestive biscuits and that summer weekend in Dunoon 33 years ago.

KENNY may have been the last man I slept with, but he was certainly not the first. That, I think, was my grandfather. For a few weeks after my grandmother died and he came to stay with us, we shared a double bed. Nothing remarkable happened. My grandad would retire in his cream vest and long johns, prop himself up on the pillow to smoke the last of his evening pipe, and then turn the light out and fall asleep - an 80 year- old man beside a 10-year-old boy.

Dunoon was an altogether livelier night-time experience. We travelled to this seaside town, the least fashionable of the Clyde resorts, to stay with Kenny's uncle, aunt and grandparents. We came all the way down- river from Glasgow on a steamer ("the wee Queen Mary" - now moored as a beer hulk on the Thames) and walked from the pier to a little grey Victorian house at the back of the town, where pretty soon it began to rain; and went on raining for the next two days. Kenny's relations, like Kenny himself, were Baptist. Unlike Kenny, and certainly his dad (who combined lay preaching with long absences from home in the local working men's club), they were also Rechabites, a society whose membership has signed the pledge and sworn to abstain from alcohol.

It was a friendly but grave household of a kind that I imagine has almost completely vanished, outside the island of Lewis or the pages of Jeanette Winterson's first novel. Grace was said before the midday and evening stews; the teapot was refreshed constantly throughout the day; the biscuit plate never left the table.

"A drop more tea for Kenny's friend, Alec. And would you fancy a digestive?"

The grandfather of the house was blind, which may, now I come to think of it, have been our reason for being there. Once, back in Fife, Kenny had told me that his grandad could stand on the shore at Dunoon and differentiate between Clyde steamers by listening to the individual beat of their paddle wheels - the Caledonia from the Waverley, the Jeannie Deans from the Talisman. I doubted that this was possible, always excepting the Talisman, which was diesel-electric rather than steam, but in Dunoon the rain put paid to the trial I had in mind. The old man could not be coaxed from the house, and instead we sailed alone to Rothesay and back on the Sunday, having convinced the Baptists that the reason for this Sabbath-breaking travel was attendance at the outdoor mission - hymns and tambourines - which at that time still set up its pulpit on the promenade, among the palm trees that allowed Rothesay to advertise itself as the Madeira of the North.

THE numinous by day, then. At night the two of us pulled on our flannel pyjamas and got into the bed we had to share. It wasn't big, but physical contact could just be avoided, and was avoided till we fell asleep. Then, on successive nights, I was woken by Kenny moaning and a hand - not mine - tugging at my chest, and the breathy smell of stale Seniors and digestives.

Nightmares, I am certain. Kenny never seemed to wake. I simply disengaged his arm and moved right to the edge of the bed. Something and nothing, and never spoken of between us, and now not ever.

We were friends for years after that, arguing in snooker halls about CND and the relative merits of Kennedy and Nixon, looking for women at the Kinema Ballroom, stamping our feet on the frosty terraces of the local football side. He was a brilliant dark mixture of tastes, ideas and prejudices: for the book of Genesis and against Darwin, against the Shadows and for Shostakovitch. For a time he drove a farm tractor, and then he studied dentistry, and then he worked behind a bar serving free drinks to anyone he knew: he never much respected employers or employment. His family were from the Western Highlands, and there was a kind of Highland wildness to him.

Then we lost sight of each other. I heard that he left a wife and children. Our nights in the Kinema Ballroom did not achieve much: "Can I see you home?" "Sure, if you want to walk back from Lochgelly." But women, eventually, had been found.