I was a chilly late October Saturday evening that I first met Wesley. I had taken a year out between finishing Secondary School and going to University, and had always dreamed of travelling overland from Ireland to Australia. As usual, however, my planning let me down and I had spent the time since leaving school in June travelling around Ireland, with a brief interlude in England, working at whatever I could find and sleeping wherever I could.

On that fateful Saturday I had decided that I was fed up with Galway and that Derry was nice at that time of year (it isn't - it's usually cold and rainy but that's by the by). Belfast would have been the best bet for work and accommodation - I have a lot of school friends at University there. However, there was too much chance of running into family - and my parents live only 24 miles from Belfast. I had not been in touch with them for three months. Having no funds whatsoever, I hitchhiked. Saturday is never a good day for thumbing - there is little commercial traffic and most cars are full with families. Still I had a couple of lucky lifts and made Lisnaskea, just north of the border, by 2pm. The troubles, however, have made Northern Ireland a much trickier place to hitch in than the Republic, and by teatime I had made it only to Enniskillen. I had no realistic hope of getting to Derry tonight, but if I could just make it another 20 miles to Omagh, I knew I could sleep rough reasonably well down by the bridge there. I had a couple of quid in my pocket to get a chinese takeaway as well.

However, I had already spent an hour and a quarter at the roadside, and the traffic was thinning quite dramatically. A gang of teenagers were drinking carry-out cider a few hundred metres down the road, probably from the local public housing estate. Drinking teenagers are always bad news for hitchhikers. However, the streetlights ended at this point on the road, and it was already nearing sunset, so there was little point in moving on. I would just have to try and tough it out.

At that point a maroon Mondeo, reasonably new, pulled up at the side of the road. One of the golden rules of hitchhiking is to ascertain the destination of the driver before you get into the car. However that evening, I didn't care where I was going. Anywhere had to be better than here.

The driver was a tubby, but well built wee man in his middle to late sixties. He was an old farmer by the look of it, tweed jacket, corduroy trousers, and thick pullover. His tweed cloth cap sat in the back seat. He had gorgeously fluffy white hair and wore a tie that looked like it was straight out of the 1960s. Poppy sticker on the window and the newspaper on the back seat was a News Letter. To anyone from Northern Ireland this told one a vital piece of information. His religion; he was obviously a Protestant. Mixed company then - subconsciously one avoided controversial topics in mixed company. I decided to let him know I was a Catholic so he knew to avoid them too. I told him my name.

"Hi, I'm Jarlath."

"I'm Wesley. Nice to meet you, son. Where are you headed for?"

"Derry eventually, though I doubt I'll get much beyond Omagh tonight."

"Well, I live on a farm not far from Kesh, so I can drop you off in Irvinestown if that's any use to you."

"Thanks, that'd be great."

We drove on, chatting about that day's football results from the English Premiership and the chaos in Indonesia. I always liked the countryside around here, wild and scrubby, very different from the countryside around home.

"If you don't mid me asking", Wesley commented, "you don't sound like a Londonderry man. More Portadown I would have said."

"Close enough", I replied, "I'm from Lurgan."

"Do you work up in Derry then?"

"Not really. Well not at all. I just kind of drift around from place to place at the moment."

"Where were you planning to stay the night then?" He sounded concerned now.

"Ach, well, I always find somewhere."

"What sort of nonsense is that?"

"Well sleeping rough for a night or two isn't too bad when you get used to it."

"I'll hear of no such thing!" he sounded off angrily, "You sound like a decent lad and I'm not having you spend the night in some doorway. You'll spend the night in my house!"

"Look I don't want to impose..."

"I'm not having it on my conscience if you're stabbed or the like of that. Besides, you're not imposing, I've little enough company since the wife died."

"Look, really I can look after myself."

He didn't answer, and didn't answer my pleas for him to stop when we drove straight through Irvinestown. "At the very least you're going to get a decent meal. After that if you still want to make a fool of yourself you can. But if you want to do that you'll have to make your own way from my house and it's fairly remote."

It was dark by the time we got to the farmhouse, miles from anywhere, overlooking Lower Lough Erne. I was glad I came just for the sheer natural beauty of the place. It was a clear night and the gibbous moon was just rising over Boa Island, with its famous pre-Christian stone carvings, and reflected brilliantly on the Lough. The nearest neighbours must be at least a mile away, I thought.

"Beautiful, isn't it." commented Wesley, putting his hand around on my shoulder. We stood in silent communion for a few minutes, drinking in the beauty. To my own surprise, I felt myself tumesce! I had experimented with guys my own age before but the idea of doing it with a pensioner seemed bizarre. Something attracted me to him all the same, I knew that. It probably didn't matter anyway; he was almost certainly straight. "Come on, help me get these messages into the house."

I helped carry his shopping in, then settled in front of the TV while he fixed up dinner. The TV is always terminally _s_h_i_t_e at Saturday early evening. Afterwards he sat down and we began to chat and over dinner with a glass of wine, I began to relax for the first time in, to be honest, months.

Eventually, the conversation took a more serious tone.

"So," he began in an inquisitorial tone, "how does a bright young lad like you end up sleeping rough."

"Well, I'm on my year out between school an university. I'm just hanging about to pass the time."

"That makes it even worse. You ought to be doing something useful. What course are you going on to do?"

"I was supposed to do History at Staffordshire. I could have done a lot better for myself, but I was going with this girl, and that's where she was going. We broke up and I got an A and two Bs in my A-Levels, so I turned down the offer and planned to reapply somewhere better this year. I still haven't got round to it though."

"If I remember right from my own lads, the deadline's coming up next month isn't it? With those grades you ought to get somewhere half decent."

"Yes, well, I'll have to get round to doing something about it."

"Yes, you bloody well had." I had never heard him curse until then, and later learned he didn't, even mildly, unless annoyed.

After dinner we went upstairs to get the spare bedroom ready for me. He had to tell me how you put a continental quilt in its cover properly.

"Have you never changed a bed before?" he asked with exasperation.

"Yes, but never the quilt covers. My Ma always did that for us."

"Glory! You young fellas these days have it far too easy. A wee bit more discipline would do you all the world of good. You all run about the place like you own it and you never take a scrap of responsibility."

"We should all be taken out and thrashed within an inch of our lives!" I asked, mocking with a fake English public school voice.

"Well, that's a bit exaggerated, but a good, hard, taste of the belt never did my two any harm."

"It's just as well I'm too old for that, then." I grinned.

Wesley didn't. In deadly earnest he said, "You're only nineteen. My two got it right up until they were married in their mid twenties - and they never got their education in the sort of mess you have yours in!"

"Maybe they had more sense than me."

"Yes, and maybe they knew their oul' Da would give them a good hidin' if they did!"

We changed the bedclothes, and were straightening the pillowcases out when Wesley asked gently, "This might be a wee bit personal, and you don't have to answer, but what do your parents think of your gallivanting about?"

"I'm not sure. I haven't spoken to them for three months."

"Why in the name of God not?" He sounded angry and had begun to flush a bit. I would later come to recognise this as a major danger alert sign!

"Well, we had a bit of a disagreement, and I got so mad at them I didn't ring them for a fortnight. After that, I was worried they wouldn't speak to me."

"And how did this all happen?" His voice was now up and down, up and down the register the way Fermanagh people go when they get annoyed.

"Well, they were a bit annoyed at me sleeping rough in Dublin."

"So they last they heard you were sleeping rough in Dublin? And for all they know you could be lying dead somewhere, or on the game or God knows what? You're a selfish, spoiled rotten wee brat and you need taught a good lesson."

Wesley went to the cupboard and took out a belt, but when I say a belt I mean a real monster of a thing. It looked much too wide to fit in trouser rings. It was about 7 or 8 centimetres wide and very, very thick and heavy looking. I still thought he was joking, so I didn't move out of the way quick enough when he blocked the doorway, and then doubled the belt up on itself, once and then twice, in an expert motion. He grabbed me by the shoulders and sat down on the bed, and I had no option to come down across his knee when he sat. I tried to struggle free, but fifty years hard work on the farm left him much stronger than I was, and I was soon pinned by his left arm around my midsection, his right arm forcing open my jeans and taking them down along with my underpants. I felt him gather the belt in his right hand, tensed when I thought of its fearsome look when he had stood in front of me. Felt its taste as he crashed it down hard on my exposed bare posterior. _f_u_c_k_, it hurt! I screamed in pain as I felt the skin burn and then go numb. It was only the first stroke as well.

"You're screaming like a wee child and you've only had one wee light one," Wesley spat, "By the time I've finished with you you'll have plenty to scream about."

Again and again and again, the belt worked its way methodically around my exposed rear. I began to buck and kick and tried to work myself free, but Wesley was much too strong for me, and the belt just kept crashing in.

"Stop your fightin' boy. We've all night to keep going if you don't stop strugglin'." Wesley shouted. He fell into a rapid rhythm of a stroke every two seconds or so. They were hard and he didn't ease up any as time went along. One of my uncles had strapped his kids on occasion, but never like this. I hadn't dreamt that this sort of thing happened these days. I let my body go limp after Wesley's admonition, and after twenty stripes or so, I began to wail. "I'll do whatever you want me too, please just stop. It hurts too much. Please stop, Wesley."

"Please stop, who?"

"Please stop Mr. Johnston, Sir."

About thirty strokes must have landed by then, I had lost count. It was all I could do to get my breath between the rapidly, stingingly, falling whacks and my own crying. "After we finish, lad, you'll ring our parents and let them know where you are, and apologise for your misbehaviour."

"Yes, Sir, anything, just stop." I was wailing big whooping sobs now, all resistance beaten out of me.

"If you think I'm anywhere near finished, you're far wrong, wee lad. Later, we'll have a long chat about how we're going to put you're career back on track."

"Yes, Sir."

Each stroke was agony, and my backside first stung, then numbed, and eventually reddened. I was crying buckets begging him to stop. My backside was well and truly red - I felt the sting of that beating for two days afterwards! He had worked over the whole area from side to side and from my tailbone to the bottom of my cheeks. He stopped for a moment, then gave me maybe half a dozen had wallops across the top of my thighs. It hurt even more there and I couldn't stifle a scream every time he hit me there. Then he finished, after what he later told me where sixty thumps in total with that cruel belt.

If my own father had done this to me, I'd have been out the door like a shot. However Wesley had some kind of magnetism, some kind of innate authority, and I lay across his knee, broken and contrite, while he began to stroke my hair. "There, there son, it's all right. It's all over now, just take a wee break."

I noticed my middle stump was very excited. In fact it had began to leak its early juices. Wesley stood me up and noticed that some has stained the front of his trousers. Crack! He hit he a good bare hand smack across the rear, enlivening my still sore welts and causing me to let another shriek out. "Look at what you've done my good cords, you wee monkey!" They're pretty religious down in Fermanagh - even more so than in the rest of Northern Ireland - and I was worried that this latest turn of events might net me another beating, or worse yet get me turfed out miles from nowhere.

Instead he just looked down at my rampant erection and said, "That's a big one, isn't it son. We'll have to let it relax a wee bit." With that he put his head down on it and began to massage it with his lips and tongue. It was gorgeous, particularly when his had began to massage my chastised bum and I felt the oddest, and most pleasant, mixture of sensuousness, warmth and pain.

He had no trouble working me up to my climax, and I soon got to work on him. Despite his age, I had little difficulty arousing his dick to full manhood, and he too climaxed. We lay on the bed cuddling each other for some time, basking in the afterglow until Wesley suggested we go downstairs for another drink - and so he could throw his cords in the washing machine.

"Well, I think it's about time you rang your parents, son."

I looked out of the picture window over the Lough, the view still breathtaking. A lot had changed in my life that evening. I hoped it wasn't too late to change some other things. I needed Wesley to talk to, to make some sense of how I could get myself out of this mess.

"I wish I could stay here longer than just one night." I said with a sigh.

"You can stay here for as long as you want." said the old man, hand on my shoulder, "I can always make use of an extra pair of hands around the farm. I think you need someone to give you a hand with your life too just at the moment - and a belt over your bare bum if needs be." We stroked one another's hair as we looked out the window. I felt warm and cosy beside my new friend and mentor.

He was right. He did help me straighten a lot of things out. And I did feel the taste of his belt on my bare bum on a number of occasions!