This was followed by one of the most remarkable noises I have ever heard

 From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 80. 

I have noticed over the years that mention of fags and fagging tends to raise a few eyebrows among my American friends; so perhaps it may be worthwhile to put on record that at Eton—where the system has by now long been abolished—the words carried no questionable connotation. This is not to say, of course, that homosexuality did not exist. There is a celebrated verse, which I suspect once again of being by A.P. Herbert (no relation of my housemaster), in which the name in the penultimate line could be replaced by any number of others: 

 

Long and extensive researches

By Morgan and Huxley and Ball

Have conclusively proved that the hedgehog

Can never be buggered at all;

But further extensive researches

Have incontrovertibly shown

That comparative safety at Eton

Is enjoyed by the hedgehog alone. 

 

Some years ago, when the House of Lords was discussing whether to decriminalize homosexuality, Field Marshal Lord Montgomery of Alamein confidently assured Their Lordships that nothing “of that sort” had ever occurred in any unit for which he was responsible. For a moment there was silence; this was followed by one of the most remarkable noises I have ever heard, as some thousand Peers of the Realm simultaneously bared their teeth and sucked the air in through them. On the other hand the lines quoted above are—at least where Eton in the 1940s was concerned—a wild exaggeration. At the Hopgarden I am fairly confident that actual buggery was virtually non-existent. There was inevitably a certain amount of moderately innocent fiddling and fondling: when some fifty or sixty normal teenage boys, all desperately trying to cope with puberty, maddened and bewildered by that first terrifying surge of testosterone, are closeted together for three months at a stretch with absolutely no female company, how could there possibly not be? It seems to me astonishing that the school authorities appeared to have no understanding of this, not only threatening as they did with instant expulsion any boy found in a remotely compromising situation, but saddling many of them with an almost intolerable burden of guilt by telling them that even if a little mild masturbation did not—as some believed—make your ears fall off or cause a long, black hair to grow out your left palm, it certainly put you straight on the road to hell.