I cannot remember a time when I did not want to wear a nappy but, equally, I had started bedwetting again when I was just under three and was separated from my mother who had lost a baby. I was not put back into nappies - I think my mother was of a generation which thought nappies were only for babies and older children should not wear them even if they might actually need them. However I remember when I was about 4 taking one of my father's handkerchiefs and wrapping it round me at night and pretending it was a nappy.. From time to time when I was not much older, after my younger two siblings were born I "borrowed" their nappies. Most times I managed to smuggle the wet nappy into the bucket where theirs were soaking but once I did leave one I had wet, with a pair of plastic pants, under my bed, which made my mother quite cross with me. I went on wetting my bed and was still doing so when I was sent away to my boarding prep school. I was there from 8 to 13 and was bullied and humiliated for my bedwetting by a very unkind matron - from whom, of course, the less kind boys took their cue and joined in. Oddly, I remember that, although I would have given anything to stop wetting the bed, even then I fantasised about being put back into nappies either as a punishment for wetting the bed by Matron or by some kind mother figure as a means of keeping the bed dry. Matron never put me back in nappies although she did used the public threat of treating me like a baby if I went on behaving like one as an additional humiliation - on top of the red rubber drawsheet and the cold baths for each wet bed and a spanking with a slipper for wetting my pants on a couple of occasions in my first term.
At my next school when I was 13, I was far luckier. A lot of people might have expected me to be embarrassed when the house-master's wife, who acted as the matron and had been a children's nurse at a very prestigious hospital before she was married, suggested that I "should go back to nappies" at night, which she would wash for me. I thought it was a wonderful idea because she was so very kind and understanding and I knew without any doubt that she suggested it not to humiliate me but because, as she said, it would be so much easier for us to keep my wetting secret. (It did occur to me that it was no doubt easier for her to deal with wet nappies than with wet sheets and pyjamas, especially since she had children who were still in nappies themselves and wsa doing a daily nappy wash. I think my wife believes that it was this kindness which makes me still, decades later, want to be babied. Howevrs I think it goes far further back and was all linked to those very early feelings which started me bedwetting again probably because I wanted to be secure again with both the wetting and the wanting nappies being a reaction to that separation from my mother. I do think perhaps though that the kindness of my housemaster's wife cemented the feeling that being treated as a baby and the attention bound up with being in nappies was a way to get the security I needed.
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