Wednesday 22nd November

How can I put this?  For those of you of a nervous disposition please stop reading now.  As I approached my teenage years the ugly, or some might say – the beautiful – idea of sex came to the forefront of my mind.  It is difficult to really know, as even memories are unreliable, but even as a child I was curious.  One or two incidents remain – my three cousins lifting their skirts and revealing their bums and no knickers; a girl at Junior school who once brazenly showed me her ‘noonie’; seated cross-legged in the Hall at school listening to some classical music and I turned round and saw a girl whose ill-fitting knickers were showing her tiny sex.  And all I really ever saw was a crease where I, a boy, had a willie.  And we knew nothing back then.  There was no internet, no real pornography (a copy of health and Efficiency, the nudist mag was furtively passed around and we saw long-distance shots of airbrushed dark shadows, still leaving us in ignorance).  Which in a funny sort of way was good – unlike kids of today who think they have seen it all long before being confronted by the real thing. Mind you, that very ignorance was a spur to our endeavours for discovery.  Everyone wanted to find out about sex, or more precisely, the opposite sex.  Our parents and school had kept us in such ignorance that we were blindly groping in the dark – literally.  Snogging behind the youth club hall in some dark corner away from prying eyes as I wormed my fingers inside a bra, our kisses intense and hot was as far I got in my attempts to conquer girls.

And older boys behind the bike shed, while passing around a cigarette (I coughed and spluttered with these, much like my attempts in discovering female anatomy) would boast of their achievements or imagined conquests.

I did have a couple of girlfriends.  But I was quite scared, in reality, of going too far.  Besides kissing and a hand inside a bra was so exciting anyway and the occasional hand a bit lower but definitely outside was as far as I was either allowed, or allowed myself to dare to go.

A virgin at Seventeen, but then I am sure all my classmates were too, and anyway the next part of my life was about to start.