I suppose it should go without saying – but that never normally stops me so I’ll happily confide – that over the years I have had many fun and interesting sexual encounters with my beloved partner Jane. She has patiently put up with my requests for sex in just about every room in the house, on every item of furniture, wearing every possible combination of hats, socks, shoes, gloves, belts, Christmas tinsel and so on. It’s a peculiar thing that, dressing up for sex. You just have to walk down any high street now and you’ll see at least one shop that sells novelty nurses’ outfits or sexy witch basques or tarty versions of police uniform, with optional handcuffs, all designed solely for bedroom use. I wonder if deliveries have ever got mixed up. I’d love to see the expressions on the faces of a bunch of newly recruited traffic wardens when they’re sent off to get changed for the first time into the official outfit of intimidation and oppression – which these days seems to be a scratchy jumper and unflattering trousers – only to find they’ve been given a skimpy PVC version with vibrating truncheon.
It’s odd that the dressing-up-in-bed thing is done so much more by women for men than vice versa. I did once or twice drag on a frilly shirt, but I suspect that women’s brains are hardwired a little more interestingly than men’s. We respond with Pavlovian immediacy to a stocking like drooling idiots, even if it doesn’t have a leg inside it at the time. Women, on the other hand, don’t seem to find socks held up by garters anywhere near as enticing.
I liked sex long before I tried it. Even when I was a small child it seemed to me that girls always looked and smelt so nice that getting as close as possible to them was a good idea and should be attempted whenever possible. I would quite cheerfully have engaged in appropriate pursuits in order to enjoy such intimacy, but what? I didn’t yet play any sport, I felt and looked foolish when semi-naked, so swimming and sunbathing were out, and I didn’t meet a girl who liked comic books as much as I did until I was in my mid-twenties. The fact that she later became my wife and that we have now been married for over twenty years is obviously proof that a love of comic books provides an unshakeable bedrock for a long-term relationship. Or maybe just that she loves me enough to put up with my constant harping on about whether Batman might beat Captain America in a fight, or whether the Hulk could ever get angry enough to knock out Superman with one punch. But either way, it was never going to be my looks that would get me close to girls. A malnourished giant in too-short trousers wearing thick-lensed glasses and sporting a tufty head of greasy hair just didn’t cut it. You rarely see that kind of thing any more. Social Services must swoop in quickly and nip situations like that in the bud. But that was what I looked like, and I’m sure it goes a long way towards explaining why I didn’t get any action until fairly late in life.
Now I liked the idea of girls enough to want to be with them regardless of sex. I hoped that would happen eventually, but it would have been lovely just to hang out with some real live girls. I simply didn’t have the first idea as to how that might be accomplished, or indeed what girls might get out of it. Back in east London in the sixties, boys and girls weren’t encouraged to spend any more time together than was absolutely necessary. Apart from a happy few years at infants and then at junior school, I spent most of my childhood in single-sex education. What a miserable and hateful system that is. I imagine the thinking behind it is that boys and girls, as they head into and through puberty, find one another distracting. So, in the interests of their education, they are best kept apart. Obviously that’s a stupidly flawed theory, because the less time you spend with the other lot, the more time, inevitably, you spend thinking about them, pining for them, fantasizing about them, ultimately learning nothing whatsoever of any use about them. But that’s the way it was for me between the ages of eleven and eighteen, from the day I loped lankily off to secondary school in my too-short brown herringbone flares and thick glasses, which allowed me to focus only briefly on the young ladies heading off in the opposite direction to their own schools, or work, or housewifely chores, right up until the time when I was old enough to vote and, horribly ill-prepared, made my first fumbling gropes towards a grown-up relationship.
But before we embark on those teenage years of adventure and consistent disappointment, let me share with you the treasure trove of information I managed to gather in my early schooldays about girls and sex and about what boys needed to do to get it.
I knew from the start that girls were not like boys. I suppose I knew that because, quite sensibly, we were dressed differently by our parents. Girls were also prettier than boys, smelt nicer than boys and had things in their hair that made them look prettier still. Prettier even than pretty boys, of which I was not one. I had a crush on two girls from almost my very first day at school. One was a blonde called Maxine Stevens and the other was – oh cruel fate! – her best friend, Kay Gillingham. Kay was brunette. Both were nice enough to me and probably had no idea that I harboured secret fantasies about rescuing them from cartoon monsters or gangs of other boys who were teasing them; fantasies that ended, without exception, with Maxine and Kay being incredibly grateful and hugging me, and everyone else cheering me for being so brave and handsome. As far as I can recall, this never actually happened in real life, although I think I once nearly got to kiss Kay, many years later, when I met her in a local pub with a friend who was even more spectacularly inept around girls than I was. So Maxine and Kay remained, sadly, the unattainable goddesses against whom I judged all other girls until I was at least twelve.
The first time I got to participate in anything of a vaguely sexual nature was when I was about seven. The girl’s name was Joyce and although I can clearly remember her second name – something wonderfully exotic and filled with promise – I shall withhold it in a belated attempt to appear a gentleman. Her parents had come from somewhere in Africa – I can’t remember ever asking her for details – but she, like me, had been born in London.
The arrangement was that Joyce would permit me and my friend Stephen to have a look up her skirt and past her knickers – Joyce had obligingly offered to hold them to one side for the occasion – under the desk, providing we returned the favour. It was more a matter of curiosity than sexual desire, but whatever our motivation, when the deal was struck our hearts started to pound.
Stephen went first. After a bit of embarrassed fumbling around he ‘dropped’ his pencil from his desk and shimmied down to retrieve it. He was blushing furiously when he began his descent so it was hard to tell how much redder the experience made him, but when he re-emerged, proudly grasping his pencil and looking like he finally understood the meaning of it all, his face was like a baboon’s arse. Redder, in fact. Like a baboon’s arse after a thorough spanking and a spell in the sun during which time the baboon has unwisely forgotten to put sunblock on his exposed buttocks.
My turn next. I dropped my pencil, glanced up to make sure that Mrs Bendall, our form teacher, wasn’t paying us any undue attention, and down I dived.
Let me pause for a moment and tell you about Mrs Bendall. She was a very large, rather square, matronly Welsh lady. For several years I was convinced that she was actually Ronnie Barker in drag, and the fact that she also took us for country dancing reinforced that notion. There was one episode of The Two Ronnies which ended with big Ron and little Ron dragged up and dancing around ringing bells, which more or less confirmed I was correct. I met Ronnie Barker twice before he died, but on both occasions I was so excited to be in the presence of one of my childhood heroes that I completely forgot to ask if there was a connection.
I’m still at a loss to understand what country dancing was all about. The only purpose it can possibly have served was to get young children running around a bit and filling their lungs before the tyranny of PE took over at secondary school. I don’t imagine kids today have to endure anything remotely as pointless, but perhaps if there was more country dancing and less of whatever they force them to do today we’d have a nicer, less scary generation on the way up.
Anyway, right now she wasn’t looking, so I half slipped, half fell off my stool and found myself looking at Joyce’s smooth, black legs. I saw her hands appear, and she hoicked up the hem of her school skirt. Her clean white knickers dazzled me. I felt ashamed and excited and petrified all at the same time – a marvellous cocktail at any age – then she pulled them to one side, and I saw …
Nothing.
In addition to her hand being partly in the way, her skin was so dark and the contrast with the white of her knickers so pronounced that I couldn’t make out one solitary detail. As Watson might have put it to Sherlock Holmes, the game was hardly worth the candle. I stayed under the desk for what seemed like a decent enough time, peering feverishly at the shadowy recesses of her loins, before coming up for air, smiling, blinking and trying my best to look as if I’d just had a real eyeful of something very special indeed. Then it was Joyce’s turn. She ducked down as Stephen and I dangled our tiny and unimpressive little tinkles before her. After what felt like bloody ages, with the cold air beginning to worry my small, pink extremity, she reappeared looking a little unwell.
None of us ever spoke of it again, and I apologize if it seems ungentlemanly to give the episode an airing now, so many years after it took place, but for Christ’s sake, I’ve got a book to fill.
I didn’t see naked female flesh again, apart from in magazines, until I was eighteen or nineteen, when I finally lost my virginity to a very nice girl with whom I am still in touch today from time to time. I have no idea where Stephen wound up, or where Joyce might be, but I hope she is alive and well and still wears beautifully clean white drawers.
After that my school years were sexually uneventful, at any rate in terms of actual contact with real live humans. I saw my first breasts – or at least the first breasts that weren’t attached to my mum, before I left junior school. Someone – it might have been a boy in the next year up – had found a magazine his dad had hidden in a drawer in his bedroom, beneath his underpants, or possibly his socks. Why is it that the sock drawer is the traditional secret compartment in adult lives? I too found a copy of a mildly erotic book hidden, or at least buried, in my mum’s tights drawer when I was little. I wasn’t actually snooping, it was a legitimate search for a pair of tights to wear under my jeans for my milk round, and as a result I discovered this book. It was called My Secret Garden , not to be mistaken with The Secret Garden , a popular Edwardian kids’ story. Although the book I stumbled upon was hardly hardcore, it was a little risqué. It was made up of what I’m sure were fake case histories of women recounting their sexual awakenings. One described working in a factory and how, when bored, she would squeeze her thighs together around the pole that ran from her conveyor belt to the floor. It vibrated, so was obviously pretty useful as a means of alleviating the inevitable tedium of working on a production line. Another had a fantasy about being caught by bears in a wood. I found the whole thing very confusing and more than a little disappointing. It was returned to the tights drawer only half read.
But the discovery of legitimate porn by my friend was a different matter. My first reaction was shock and awe at the sheer daring of this kid. To have the courage to delve into the forbidden drawers in your parents’ room! In my eyes he was Raffles and Robin Hood rolled into one – a brilliantly audacious burglar who was prepared to share his incredible haul with us.
The complete magazine was considered too bulky to smuggle into school and too likely to be missed, but he had ripped out a page from near the front that he hoped would go unnoticed. It had a disappointingly large amount of text, but one of the news items was illustrated with a photograph. The story was about a showgirl currently wowing the crowds in Las Vegas, and the photograph showed her onstage, baring her teeth in a rather angry fashion and aiming her fabulous chest at the camera.
The alarming thing was that her breasts had been painted to resemble melons. They were bright green. Bright green with a faint stripe on them to represent the markings you get on certain varieties of melon but never, thank the Lord, on breasts. It gave us a little bit of a thrill, but, to be honest, it was more of a mystifying encounter than an erotic one. It left too many questions unanswered. We were smart and worldly enough, even at eight, to realize that those boobies had been pimped, to use the modern vernacular. But why? Weren’t they an exciting enough sight as Nature intended? And if the melon paint-job and go-faster stripes had been added to arouse men, then what could we expect to happen to our minds over the next ten years that would make us seek out melon-breasted ladies in preference to the real thing?
With only this small piece of research material to guide us, we speculated and pondered the matter for many days, weeks, months even, until the big brother of another boy let us take a quick flick through a copy of Men Only he claimed to have bought himself, like an actual horny adult, from a newsagent. We soon found out that he had stolen it from a local second-hand bookshop. Still, a five-page spread featuring the charms of Men Only regular Fiona Richmond was enough to reassure us that a) women’s breasts did not have to be huge or painted like melons to be arousing and b) just because a lady took all her clothes off for you, it didn’t mean you would necessarily fancy her.
Fiona was a bit masculine-looking in the face department for me. She was very strong-chinned, but more than made up for it by being incredibly obliging when it came to showing off the rest. However, I always knew that her chiselled jaw would have prevented true love ever blossoming between us – sorry, Fiona. It wasn’t until many years later, when I managed to get hold of a copy of Knave , in which a round-faced beauty who looked a little like Susan Penhaligon from A Bouquet of Barbed Wire posed provocatively wearing only a cloche hat and brown leather boots, that I first fell in love with someone I knew I’d never meet. Part of me would still like the chance to at least buy her a cup of tea and thank her for being there for me during those difficult teenage years. Although she would of course be about sixty now, so might not want to be reminded that she had once been made available for teenage boys to project both their romantic fantasies and their bodily fluids all over.
Men’s magazines, as they were and continue to be euphemistically referred to, were great if you wanted to look at pictures of pretty women naked, and they occasionally had interesting articles about thorny issues such as whether or not a real man would carry a handbag. John Peel was interviewed in that edition of Knave , and although he claimed it was OK because he needed one to carry his record albums around in, the general message was that you’d look a bit gay if you used one for anything else. But they were bloody useless when it came to supplying any information on the vital subject of what girls were actually like, and how you might meet or talk to them. Not that the women in those mags were anything like real girls, who rarely seem to enjoy lying around for hours wearing nothing but boots and a half-awake expression.
Luckily, my mum had an ancient copy of Cosmopolitan on her dressing table – obviously not considered so racy it needed to seek refuge under the tights – which lived there for about five years. It’s not that she was a slow reader, just that people didn’t seem to buy magazines with anything like the regularity they do today, and I think she was just taking her time with it. Money was probably a factor as well. Anyway, although Cosmopolitan didn’t contain anything on how to talk to girls, it did have lots of articles designed to help women
get men interested in them. These gave me a little bit of an insight into the possibility that girls might be just as keen on and just as ill-informed about the opposite sex as I was, which was a relief.
Elsewhere in the mag was what I considered at the time to be a very useful feature. It was called something like ‘How to Improve Your Lover – Sex Tips that Will Turn him from a Dud to a Stud’. That dud/stud thing made a particular impression. Yes, I was a dud. Yes, I wanted to be a stud. Teach me, oh wise Cosmo women! Most of it I only dimly recall – stuff about taking your time and not grabbing straight away for the ta-tas or the la-la. But there was this one pointer to help a man become an absolute whizz at oral sex. This was an indispensable piece of information. First of all because until I read it I’d had no idea that oral sex existed, at least when it came to men doing it to women. And secondly because I knew that if I followed the exercise as described, I would no longer be a dud, but a fully qualified, super-confident, damned-near-irresistible stud. This is what it said:
Get him to practise with his tongue on the centre of a peeled orange.
That was it. Peel an orange and stick your tongue into the hole at the top. Now, I do not wish to cast aspersions on any of the varied but never less than delightful female genital accoutrements I’ve encountered up close thus far in my life, but not one of them resembled, in either taste, texture or size, the small citrusy hole at the top of an orange. Neither has any of them ever presented me with a thick layer of chewy pith to get through, filled my mouth with pips or squirted me in the eye, I’m relieved to say.
But I can honestly say that the many hours I spent tonguing Spanish oranges and putting up with strange looks and the odd sarky comment from my friends at the time – who must have thought I was really very peculiar indeed – have in no way improved my ability when visiting the downstairs front department. Talk about irresponsible journalism. Why would they do that to a young man? Why write an article filled with such patent nonsense when it could easily fall into the hands of an impressionable youngster and gain him a reputation as a weirdo among his small circle of equally nerdy and unworldly friends? On the plus side, I’ve never had scurvy.
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 9