The following events took place around many years ago and give a lie to the oft said “things were much different when I was a boy”. Near where I lived as a boy there were fields and disused gravel and sand pits. These were great playgrounds for adventurous boys and girls. One warm day, the usual mixed gang of seven of us, all aged about a small number ending in 'een , were playing some sort of hiding and stalking game amidst the overgrown heaps of sand and bushes. Suddenly John gestured to us to be quiet and to go over to where he was crouched looking through an extra thick stand of bushes. What was so interesting? When we got together he whispered that if we wanted to see something really special we should carefully peek through the bushes. Peering through we saw a young couple lying in the long grass in an intimate embrace.

Remember if you will that this was not long after WW2, nudity was a definite no-no, nice girls didn’t do anything but kiss and the only “adult” books any of us were ever likely to see were so heavily edited and air-brushed that we had no idea that women had pubic hair or any sort of visible sex organs. The chance of playing peeping Toms and Thomasinas was too good to be true. From where we were we could only tell that it was a man and a woman with somewhat dishevelled clothes but we could see no details. Obviously we now started to stalk with a purpose; fortunately there was good cover from where we were to the clump of trees that our quarry thought was hiding them from unwanted view. The care with which we stalked wild animals was nothing compared with how we now moved.

Eventually we got close enough to see exactly what was going on. Actually we didn’t all make it because Martin and his sister chickened out and left us. At the time we thought that it was because they were afraid but later we found out why the chance of watching other people didn’t interest them, but that’s a different story! So there we were, three lads and two girls watching things develop. The woman’s blouse was undone and her skirt was pushed up to her waist. We watched amazed as four hands stroked and squeezed everything they could reach. There was a growing bulge in the guy’s trousers and her silky french knickers, very daring and very fashionable in those days, looked a bit dark and damp in the crutch. To us watchers the amazing novelty and strangeness of all this seemed to make it happen in slow motion but in reality it must have all been going at a frantic pace. Before long her bra came off and we saw our first real-life tits with very perky nipples. This sure as hell beat looking up pictures of bare-breasted African women in the illustrated encyclopaedias in the library. She then unbuttoned his fly and dragged out a very rampant penis and the girl watchers realised that pictures of Michaelangelo’s statue of David did not tell the full story. Now the woman was lying on her back and we were treated to a show of sexy sucking and squeezing. I’m not sure that we didn’t enjoy it more than them.

Although I’m not usually the sort of bloke who goes to a strip-show and watches the audience I did notice that a change had come over my friends. When we started we all tried to give the impression that this was no big deal and that we were just having a bit of a laugh. We had soon dropped this pretence and started concentrating like mad and trying to fix every new development in our memory banks. Two other things had taken place: we lads had changed position and were no longer crouched up but were lying on our fronts, the girls were looking a bit pink and were breathing more heavily. Presumably the other lads, like me had had erections before but we never talked about such things. Some of us might have had a sneaky play with ourselves. We had no idea that girls got excited in any way because obviously they did not have penises to get hard. We had noticed that they were starting to develop breasts and were less likely to make physical contact during our games.