My mother died at the age of eighty in 2002 and now, at the tenth anniversary of her death, I feel free to reveal the details of our weird relationship. It is an example of the strange twists of terrible misfortune and luck which may befall the family member.

There is no doubt that Virginie Rosehay was my biological mother, but exactly who she was remains for me an unsolved mystery. I was unable to find her birth certificate at the Central Registry in London, nor the entry of her birth or baptism at the parish church of the small village in the fenlands of England where she claimed to have been born.

My father fell during the war - I was born in 1943 - and left us a small market garden, but I could glean nothing from his personal papers relating to my mother's origins and nor could his solicitor suggest anything. Virginie's own mother also had a French name, and Virginie looked to me as though she could have been of North African origin - Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian perhaps, but certainly not English.

At age forty my mother Virginie was vivacious and shapely, 5 feet six inches in height with lily white skin, a crown of black curly hair, a fine high-bridged nose, brown eyes, always intensified by black eye liner, and a rather firm mouth. She spoke flawless English and had absolutely no sense of humour. On the whole I think she must have been adopted at a very early age and brought to England in the 1920s. This would explain the mysterious lack of documentation.

Rosehay cottage and land had passed to her at my father's death. She had been able to hang on to it with the greatest difficulty. Following my birth by C-section she was told that she could have no more children. Now, twenty years later, things were at last coming right for my mother. Rosehay was the inevitable home of the family. Eventually it would pass to me. The cottage even had electric light nowadays. Mother's economies had pulled us through.

Although I never recalled seeing her with a man friend, I always supposed that she must have had somebody on the side whom she preferred to keep secret from me, and so I never knew how hard her life had been.

"She was overtaken, and endured that necessity which could not be avoided. For gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable women in the furnace of adversity."

She had gone through it all for me. There had never been anybody.

I suppose you could say that our affair began at Christmas 1961 when I was just eighteen. Virginie my mother had been invited to a party and could bring a friend. She would not have gone had I refused to accompany her for she was very attractive and got a lot of unwelcome attention when she was alone.

I remember she wore a red dress and black high heels that night and was quite stunning. I was a bit unsteady on my feet after five rum-and-cokes, the first alcohol I had touched in my life. I never saw my mother with an alcoholic drink. She passed me off to everybody as "a kissing cousin" and to prove the point she kissed me on the lips under a sprig of mistletoe. Everybody clapped this daring act between a mature woman and her "young cousin" who "looked no more than twenty, if that". It looked as though Virginie "had found someone" at last, though younger than he ought to be.

Rosehay was about half a mile from the sea. The estuary was a magical place. The day after the party, my mother and I went for a walk along the beach. The tide was out. No other soul was about, only the wheeling gulls overhead. The beach was flat and firm underfoot.

"Do you know," she began, "that our kiss under the mistletoe was my first in nineteen years?" Her eyes searched my face, looking for my understanding of what she meant.

"Oh," I said, "you mean you want another one from me?"

"Well, just one little kiss can't hurt, can it darling?"

I clasped her firmly, my hands at her back, and kissed her lips. My penis hardened immediately, and she felt it, for she gave me a sly, knowing grin and said that I hadn't kissed her quite right, I had to do it again. In fact it seemed I could never get it quite right and the kisses began to last longer and longer and soon I was wriggling and pressing my upright penis harder against her pubis, the shape of which I could feel with it, and finally she concluded, "If you carry on like that much longer, you'll cum in your pants, my darling." We both grinned. Amicably, hand in hand, we made our way back to Rosehay.

That night, wrapped in a warm dressing gown, she tiptoed into my room and stopped irresolutely at my bedside. She had carefully rehearsed beforehand what she meant to say, but now that the critical moment had arrived words failed her. I opened the bed covers and said, "You'd better get in, mother, before you catch your death of cold."

She climbed in awkwardly and once she was comfortable I kissed her dark curls as she lay resting against my chest.

"You were very excited down at the beach. Would you like me to give you hand relief?" she enquired.

I agreed that would be nice, not realizing the enormity of what this implied. Incest with one's mother! Boy oh boy, this had been discussed over school dinners in the Upper Sixth but nobody had thought it ever likely to happen, to Rosehay least of all.

Quickly my mother pulled down my pyjama bottoms. She gasped at the size of my erection, made a searching examination, then began to finger it gently. Within fifteen seconds I felt my ejaculation approaching and could do nothing to hold it off. It was like a strange dream, watching my own mother masturbate me.

"Ready darling?" In response I gasped her name and gave a stifled cry. Sturdy and strong in her soft fingers, my penis tossed out a huge curling string of semen over two feet long which festooned itself from her lips to her bra.

Before she had time to react a vigorous spurt the same length spattered her upper chest and the exposed hemispheres of her breasts before the rhythmical, powerful throbbing took over.

She watched the ejaculation, gently moving my penis ceaselessly in that constant divine gesture she had, my semen still spurting rather frenziedly across her wrist and fingers, glinting in the light of the bedside lamp. After thirty seconds it tailed off at last.

"There, I've initiated you," she said with a smile. "Oh darling, it's made such a mess, dripping over the sheets like that. But did you like it?" Before I could reply she held up my slackening penis, and with her forefinger caught a thin stream of semen drooling from the meatus. She mopped up the spillage like a caring mother should, and then went off to the bathroom.

These delicious sessions when she shared my bed occurred about once a week. The procedure was always much the same. She would undress me, caress and fondle my penis, kiss me on the lips, maybe ask me some intimate questions, ask did I think incest with my mother was wrong. Here my answer always had to be, "Yes, mother we should be ashamed of ourselves, I'm going to write to my Member of Parliament about it," at which she would laugh contentedly and then jerk me off. I had to gasp and cry out her name, gyrating my pelvis as my ejaculation started. I never disappointed her in this, for I couldn't help responding to her passionately.

One evening she asked if I would write something to describe my subjective experience of orgasm with her. I wrote:

"It is the ejaculation of my seminal fluid for my mother which provides my peak experience. With each spasm of my ejaculation there is an emotional surge in which my love for her is strongest. The whole episode is intensely pleasurable. Although I like to be on my back for her, to prove I accept her dominance as my mother, I dream just once of leaving my semen in her vagina. Any son who felt this way about his mother would want to."

A week or so after writing this missive, when my mother joined me in my bed she seemed changed. After undressing me as usual, she stripped off her own clothing. Pretty as she was dressed, she was a hundred times more so naked. Her full round hips, her narrow waist, her breasts big and white with their dark, almost brown nipples, even now projecting slightly upwards seductively and - charm of charms, that fascinating profusion of dark ringlets of hair on her pubis like a black bush - were all so enthralling for me.

She let me touch her down there and at once I felt with my fingers that she was a victim of the cruel Moslem rite of female circumcision. Literally everything had been surgically removed. She had just a hole around whose edges was extensive blubbery scar tissue. She had never experienced the joy and pleasure of sex - ever.

Now it just so happened that I had read about female circumcision in a magazine article - (a girly magazine) - and so I was aware that despite the most massive surgical intervention there is always some residual sensation because of the extent of the clitoral nervous system. I suggested to my mother that I would like to try something. She looked very dubious.

There was a girl I knew, Irma, who possessed a collection of strange and curious devices for the gratification of lust. The uses to which some of these objects were intended were obvious while others were a mystery. Irma had laughed when I tried to guess the purpose of some of them. Now suddenly I saw what a particular one of the mysterious items was for.

It was an inflatable ball of pliable rubber which once inside a woman's vagina could be pumped up continuously just like you would with a blood-pressure bulb. Its purpose was to bring more and more pressure on the pubic bone and clitoral nervous system from just inside the vagina. The effect of this device upon a woman was said to be fulminating, and certain to provide an orgasm if any vestige of her clitoral system remained.

I purchased the item from Irma and showed it to my mother in the sitting room. She stipped off at once and said irritably, "Oh, for God's sake, stop selling it to me and just do it."

My mother responded to my kissing her lips and touching her breasts so that within fifteen seconds she was wet enough for me to insert the deflated ball of the appliance into her vagina. I squeezed the little hand pump repeatedly and watched my mother lying still with her head to one side, eyes closed. Then suddenly she began to raise and lower her hips with greater energy and cried "Ohfuckohfuckohfuck!" I had never heard such words from her lips before.

Psychiatrists and psychologists are almost universally agreed that a woman must be able to "let go" emotionally in order to orgasm. "She is entering what is, in reality, an altered state of consciousness. Many women have described it as 'stepping off a cliff'" (J and L Bird, Sexual Loving, Doubleday, New York).

That is exactly what it reminded me of as my mother writhed and shrieked and moaned under the effect of the first orgasm in her life. Finally I felt her body relax. "Wow!" she cried. She put her arms around my neck. "You're such a clever boy. How can I ever repay you?"

"Well. there is one thing mother."

"Name it."

Within seconds the inflatable ball was out, to be replaced by my penis. I left a large deposit in her vagina and thus fulfilled my greatest ambition. After that I serviced her with the appliance whenever she required it, which was very often. And we lived happily ever after.

THE END