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Bella and Gertie

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So I was the third, I am the third child from my mum, but my brother had a…his father was a wandering Spaniard, my sister’s father was my mum’s cousin’s husband who later became my sister’s and my abuser, so that was interesting. Really violent – my father was really violent, and sex was very present in the house. My mother never married - and my dad was incredibly violent and my mum was very gentle but I can see now that she was probably really irritating in her kind of need to please everybody in that setting. I remember her, she was quite slow at things and his temper would kind of just go. But there was a lot of sexuality in the house, so kind of Playboy magazines were coffee table reading, and I think my dad would bring other women into the house for my mum to watch him have sex with and, whatever went on it was very kind of dominant. And then my sister’s dad lived with us for a year and I don’t know what age my abuse started, but it was always there, there was always a kind of sexual atmosphere and even when my dad left when I was 8, my mum, who was delicious, I loved her completely, she had an affair with her best friend’s husband who was also our kind of second carer –and they had an affair for 25 years so that was all very…well we all had to collude with that secret. And he would come over and have sex under the guise of haircuts, and then we’d all go and have tea together, all have Christmas together, all go on holidays, with both mums, and what was fascinating was that both of the women in his life died within 6 weeks of each other, so he was sort of left. He was married with five kids, and his wife supposedly didn’t know about the affair, but she talked to my sister once about it, because after she’d had her …she was very very religious, she was a Salvation Army woman, and after she’d had their fifth – the last two were twins – she just wasn’t interested in sex, and there was a sense that my mum kind of fulfilled that, so he got sex with my mum and marriage with the woman. And my mum longed to be married, you know, having never been married she actually longed for that and he was endlessly promising her he’d leave but it was just this whole… And when we all grew up the three of them would go on holiday together and yeah, you know… (makes an explosive sound). And then later on I found myself in a similar situation, I had several affairs, so it was all very warped and twisted.

I definitely got my early sex education through abuse. I was abused by three different men, two much less so, and it was never kind of penetration. With the uncle it was either in their family garden, so we’d go for tea and they had this incredibly long garden and they grew loads of vegetables and somehow I would find myself at the bottom of the garden taking him a cup of tea or something and he always wandered around naked, and we’d have to kind of wank him off, or take our clothes off. He did it to my sister and I independently – she was his daughter. And he’d rub himself – take my clothes off and rub himself against me and wanking, and possibly blowjob, I’m not sure. And definitely snogging, I remember his scrawny neck, snogging thing. This is when I was 6, 7, 8… that kind of age. And then the other time was long after he’d stopped living with us he’d gone back to live with his family but he and my mum were still really close, I don’t know whether they were having sex – I don’t think so, and this was after my dad had left so when she was having the affair with the other guy, he’d come and take us for days out, so we were really poor, we didn’t have much, we didn’t have any money so it was ooh, nice day out at the beach, so it was always a really odd trade off cause we’d have this day off school, drive to Littlehampton, it was always Littlehampton, and we’d buy ham, strawberries and bread, and picnic. I have a feeling my mum was wanking him off in the car, I always remember her hand being across there (indicates lap) and then we’d picnic and I’d swim and then somehow we’d go off for a walk separately with him in the sand dunes. And where my mum’s head was…I don’t know if she knew what was going on, I have no idea. My sister thinks she did, I think there was something very gentle and naive about her, I think she was really naive, but I don’t know. So I’d find myself in a sand dune with him, wanking him off or blow job or… And then interestingly, years later when my kids were small a friend of mine lived in Littlehampton and she said let's go to the beach. And so mostly I’ve been out of my body, most of my life, and not feeling any of it actually, it was all completely in my head, and we drove to the car park and I just trembled, it was the same car park and I just was like, ugh, that was it, it all came back to me.

And then two other guys, they were both in the Salvation Army and one of them, I was walking home with him one day and my sister and his wife had gone to get fish and chips, and he just said to me ‘I bet you can’t take my clothes off’, and I was about ten and I said ‘I bet I can’. So I had to strip him and he stripped me and then I had to wank him off. And I just remember thinking where’s my sister? I’m really clear about the sensation that I had at the time – it was a cold that rushed from my feet up to my head and I just went completely out of my body. So what I’ve gotten recently is ‘This is not happening!’ and I think I’ve spent most of my life in ‘This isn’t happening’, in lots of situations. And only last weekend doing the movement work that I do, I understood how I override in sex. So if I’m – well override generally really, but particularly with men. So if I found myself within that first dating thing, and it’s like you’re sitting there and it’s that moving toward and I don’t know what to do, cause I don’t know how to be with somebody cause I’ve spent most of my life out of my body. So I’m completely out of my body and then just main line sex. So I go from good girl to dirty girl and then it’s just like boom. So actually he’s not there, and I’m not there and I’m ‘doing’ sex. There’s no kind of intimacy, love…and I’ve realized that that’s been for most sexual experiences. Cause I kind of like sex, but I’ve really understood that I haven’t been there; I’ve been doing it, rather than it being it. And I can actually feel the override; it’s just like zoom. It’s been really interesting to kind of get that.

So when I started to be interested in boys it was in this state of override. I’d find myself with boys, and men, and actually didn’t know how to be intimate – I’m just learning. Although when I was at school, so 10/11 I was kind of endlessly in the back of the sheds at school fondling boys, so I was quite sexual at that age, then everything stopped until I was 17. So from 13 to 17, secondary school, nothing, except kind of fantasy –kind of longing- you know, disappointed love, unrequited love stuff. The thing I think changed things so much was going to the wrong school, you know, if I look back it was like stupid school to go to – completely on my own, none of my friends went, and I found myself in this huge environment – completely just blew me away for five years really. So I was lonely and quite isolated and I spent a lot of time just… And there were two boys in particular – one of them I ended up as an adult having a kind of thing with, we had a big love thing for a bit – but just this longing for love and that wasn’t so much sexual, it was much more of a longing for love – so sex was always very disconnected from love – there’s a kind of longing, there’s an unrequited love and then a sexual act but the two haven’t merged together.

I lost my virginity when I was 17 – and it was over two nights.

It was with a boy who’s now my oldest child’s godfather. I love him with a passion. And both of us were 17 and everyone was losing their virginity and we hadn’t, so we were at a party with 400 children sleeping on the floor, and we kind of ended up under the same blanket. And then the following week we were invited to dinner with a friend and her boyfriend. Her parents were…her dad was a famous writer, it was a very gorgeous house and we went to bed in his office. And I kind of half lost my virginity, it was interesting. We went to bed and it was all really kind of fumbly and not great and I thought I had, I had really kind of messed his bed up. And then the following night we stayed at this guy’s house and his mum was out and then we properly had sex and I spent hours on the toilet bleeding – yeah – really like hours of bleeding. But while we were having sex the things that really stand out are that we played Chariots of Fire on a record going round and round, and the guy that I was having sex with, his father had died when he was 15, and he sat up in the middle of it saying “I can’t bear it, my dad’s watching. This is all really wrong, this is all really scary”. So it was all, you know, again very disconnected. And we had sex again a few times and we were kind of together for about a year, but it was just very clear that it was a sexual thing not a love thing, except now we have a very deep love thing. At the time it was just like, ugh, really scary, it was just like let’s do this thing. He was a virgin as well and we were very clear. He was quite ham fisted, you know, clumsy, and I don’t know, probably still is – actually I had a couple of boyfriends before that, and what comes out is this very definite – it’s like there’s a really dark intention, I’ve had some really dark sex with people. It’s very energetic; there’s a kind of shoom….absolutely no emotion. It’s like umm, it’s not so much like I’m dominant, but I guess I am, it’s covert dominance actually. It’s kind of dark, spider like, and I guess quite controlling.

Primarily the feeling I had when I lost my virginity was complete separation between – what I couldn’t bring to this boy cause I was kind of bleeding all over the place so I really felt at the time that emotional disconnection, I couldn’t kind of get it, so there was an emotional split that happened. But I remember going home and ironing some clothes and my sister and my mum were downstairs and I just remember nursing this secret, it was like, you know, I knew something had changed. And then I quite quickly had sex with quite a few different boys; it just kind of opened the door. I mean I wasn’t hugely promiscuous, but fairly promiscuous and complete love of love affairs, extra marital, that kind of thing, cause I think there's something, looking at the abuse stuff, it’s a place of power for me, to know at 6 that I can turn a man to jelly is very powerful. So that’s what comes out, so actually not dominance, it’s a kind of really a place of power. And I’m just turning that around cause it’s not the right power, but I guess it was the only power – that was where I got my energy source as a child. And it was huge to know that, as such a young child, to know that I could have that effect on men was huge. And I never got into the, I’ve never had around sex any of the kind of shame, guilt, blame – it’s not there at all. Or I haven’t touched that yet. So I’m quite up front with it.

I do enjoy sex – this is what I mean by the override, I need to explain that more. I do this movement work, and I was doing it with my partner and he came up close and he was behind me and I was really in myself and what I got actually – what’s really going on - was complete repulsion. Its total, it’s like ugh, I felt like Gollum – so that’s actually what’s happening, it’s just like ‘Get off!’ but because I had to suppress that, and that’s obviously the pattern, that’s completely denied and overridden. And sometimes I catch myself, you know, very much in my mind, and I can kind of get the repulsion. So it’s a complete split, a complete separation that was set up from day one – I split off from myself and so I had to do this thing that repulsed me and find a way of surviving it. So it’s been really fascinating – it was amazing to get the repulsion and I think that’s going to be my route back in because now where I’m at is kind of some kind of commitment to really feel that. And so what I’m playing with is my boundary, and so regaining my true power, not my override power, which feels much healthier, at the ripe old age of 43, just to get my truth.

It’s really clear to me now how my early experiences have affected my later sex life, but had you interviewed me a year ago, I'd have said ‘no, it’s had no impact at all, I’ve dealt with it, it’s completely fine. I love sex’. It’s only because I’ve just done four years of getting into my body. And I think with abuse, with any abuse, you move out and then locate there for the rest of your life (indicates movement from body to head) until people find their way back in – and I think most people don’t find their way back in, I think that just becomes their experience. The difference is it’s a mind thing – and it’s what most of us do, is view our experience from our mind. We’re looking at our experience, whether it’s a sexual experience or another experience from our mind rather than be the experience, which obviously a true expression of sex is being a sexual being rather than looking at it. And we do look at it, that’s why we create the fantasy that doesn’t live up to the reality, we’re referencing how it should be, could be, might be, wasn’t, didn’t look – so we’re not actually there.

With my own kids I was always really open sexually with them, not in the way that my mother was, but I discussed it and made them very aware of the potential for abuse – I suppose I was kind of abuse sensitive. And when my son went to boarding school one of the things I said the day he went was what do you do if somebody approaches you sexually, so he was 13, and he was great, he was just like ‘Fuck off you wanker, leave me alone’.

When they were young I made all that clear, and we talked about sex a lot. And my cousin and I, we kind of grew them together and we were clear about it – they had the language around it. And I was really up for them exploring it at any point. And when my daughter was about 14 she said to me one day ‘I want to get to know boys’. And I took her out for dinner, a friend of mine bought her two novels, kind of teen things, and I took her out for dinner and we talked. She knew all about sex but we talked much more about the possibility of her having it, and any kind of questions. And she lost her virginity at 14 and a half, but I didn’t find out till she was 15. Which was fine, it was absolutely fine. And both of them, so then my son lost his when he was 16? 16 or just 17. What’s amazing for me is that they were both completely in love when they lost their virginity and she stayed with her boy for 2 years and he’s been with his girl for 18 months. So it’s really delicious. And I’m really happy for them to sleep over in bed with them and it’s a kind of open, easy thing. Ideally I would like to think that love was included in losing your virginity, and then I also get that losing your virginity isn’t a particularly loving thing, but I have some fantasy about the sweetness for my kids of loving and that kind of first love. So I guess, yeah, an ideal would be first love, an exploration together. And that newness. I never got that – I never had that. I knew exactly what to do – I knew how to turn boys to jelly. I never got the sweet stuff.

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So I grew up in a very small village and it was just a long road basically. Um, and um we had to go to school on the bus, my sister and I – my sister’s 18 months younger – and we went to another village, adjoining village, to school so we had to get the bus every day. So we had amazing childhood in that we could roam free. And make huge mud pies in the fields and go off and pick flowers and just, and we’d go and… there was a particular wood in the spring that was just completely covered in primroses so we used to go and get huge bunches of primroses. The church was a quite central sort of contact for us – we went to choirs in the school village and my local village and I used to bell ring and play the church organ and um…so that was quite a centre point, We also had a village hall where we had you know, flower shows and barn dances and harvest festival and, um, fancy dress balls and things like that. Um we used to go on holiday to Devon camping, so it was all very sort of country oriented.

My grandparents on my mother’s side lived in the local town and um I had a particularly close relationship with my grandmother – not so much with my grandfather. But great memories of going to stay overnight with my granny and lying in bed with her and playing a game where her back would be turned to me and I’d be writing on her back and she’d have to guess what the word was. And um, she was just lovely, just a lovely lady. And so yeah, so children’s parties – we used to have children’s parties and parties at my granny’s and trifle and also my granny’s sister, Auntie Ivy, she lived probably around 15 miles away and we used to go and see her a lot and she had a stream running at the bottom of her garden, and she used to be mad on flowers and she used to have amazing flower displays outside her cottage, and we used to go fishing up the spring just at the back of her garden. And she used to love kids and she didn’t have kids of her own she had an adopted son but she used to love kids and she was quite eccentric and wacky. And we’d have marmite and crisp sandwiches with triangle, you know those triangle cheeses? Dairy Lee cheeses – we used to have sandwiches and she always used to have special plates for us and special tiny knives with different coloured handles and things, yeah. She also had a house, that the back of the house was like one storey– so the land was built up at the back and we used to play a game where we used to run up her stairs, jump out of the window at the back, run around into her backyard, and then come into the front door again. And one day I um, I got my lip caught over the washing line in the backyard (laughs) – so I was like hanging. And I used to be very accident prone, and so I’d jump out of trees and my teeth would be embedded in my knees and things like that. I was just very awkward – very tall and slim and gangly and not very aware of my body. I was very very skinny, and tall – very long thin legs. I was very musical, so I always used to play in lots of bands and orchestras and sing in lots of choirs – yeah so quite idyllic really.

My parents were together throughout that time. Um there’s a couple of instances where my – they must have had big arguments and I remember crying desperately that my dad wouldn’t leave. They did used to argue quite a lot. My dad’s sort of quite quiet – he’s from Belfast originally and he’s quite quiet until he’s sort of really pushed and then he just blows up. My mum is quite an angry lady as well so that was quite hard, yeah quite volatile, and um yeah, sort of quite violent at times, yeah. They’re both still living – they were quite young when they had us so my mum’s just 64 – something like that and my dad’s 65 and they’re still married, yeah.

I think living in a village, you know, obviously animals around, cows calving in the front fields, so we always sort of knew that side of things, bulls in the field and that sort of thing. I don’t think my parents had sex very often to be honest, I don’t think I ever heard them have sex and we had bedrooms very very close and we always used to have the doors open and there was a landing so yeah (laughing) I imagine they only had sex a couple of times in their lives – but maybe that’s me not really wanting to imagine that… but my mum was always a bit strange about male anatomy and I never saw my dad in the nude, ever. I saw my mum but never my dad. I think my sister might have done because my sister was slightly more pushy than I was in terms of sort of like going into the bathroom. But I never, don’t think I ever, saw my dad. And my mum was always sort of a bit weird about it, she didn’t really like to talk about it – or she’d talk and it’d be giggling or laughing at the male anatomy – something like that you know. So that’s obviously had an effect. And then when I was about to get my periods and my mum shoved me into the front room with a book that I think she’d probably read as well, you know like a leaflet that probably came from some medical centre or something, and shoved me in and said “well, that’s what it’s all about” and I read this book (laughs) and that was about it. No discussion, not really, although if my sister was asleep I would creep downstairs and watch things like The Duchess of Duke Street or, and there was sort of like, um, I think she was a king’s mistress, and um, and Poldark, and they were sort of – well Poldark was a bit of a bodice ripper, you know. And so I think that’s where my education came from. And I used to read a lot um and read quite advanced books for my age so I think again probably my education came from that. And I used to have fantasies about doctors, being treated by doctors and the doctors falling in love with me (laughs). So very much a feeling of wanting to be…I suppose dominated is a bit strong a word but, having a strong man, yeah, and I think I probably read Mills and Boone and historical novels like Jean Plady and things like that you know, and so that’s where it came from. And then obviously at school and… Ok, school? Yeah…

Um, I think I was always quite a flirtatious person, even in primary school. And I used to get on very well with boys rather than girls – I used to have much closer friendships with boys. But there was always a bit of a violence thing, a bit of a sort of dominating thing going on with boys like hitting them with rulers and things (laughs). And um school, we had a caretaker and we used to creep into the boiler room sometimes and under his seat, his cushions, he had lots of porn magazines and we used to get them out. At school, yeah (laughs) yeah. That’s quite bad isn’t it, really? I mean you know, in this day and age you sort of think oh my God he would have got sacked for something like that now. I just remember the boiler room really smelling of central heating, the oil smell of central heating and then these magazines we used to get out and laugh at and put back quickly in case he came back.

Um, so, school…I can’t remember having a boyfriend when I was at primary school, um but secondary school…because I was so thin and skinny I wasn’t really, I wouldn’t say that anybody really fancied me until quite, quite far into secondary school. Although there were a few bits and pieces I think. But sort of speaking to people now, people were saying they were really besotted with me. Like I just got in contact with an old school friend and he said oh I just though you were absolutely gorgeous, so I don’t know… It only really – only really when I got to 6th form and I thought it was so amazing. A guy who had had to come back into 6th form to retake his A levels – so he was upper upper 6th and I was lower 6th, and he had a beard. And we started going out and you know, on a Friday night we’d go out to the pub, do the pub-crawl. So me and another couple and this guy, and I just thought, it was just so cool to be going out with this guy. And that’s when we started to sort of explore, I suppose physically, a lot of kissing – a lot of fumbling in the back of cars. Oh there was another guy in the village who used to take me out a bit, um, and sort of a bit of fumbling under the conker tree down the road. Which I was really really upset about – about the tree not about the fumbling – because this conker tree, we used to go to the pub and on the way back from the pub there’d be a bit of fumbling an kissing under this conker tree. And um, I had a dream about this tree about a year or so ago, and I went back to the village to see my parents and the tree had been cut down, just after I’d had this dream about it. Incredible. It’s like this tree had cried out to me – it didn’t want to be cut down. Anyway and yeah, so that was sort of lower 6th form up to that point.

I don’t’ know if I even thought of my virginity as virginity, or um, I remember with this guy in the 6th form we got very very close to having sex, to the point where we were naked in bed. And then I think his parents came back actually, which is a good thing because we had no protection whatsoever and, but his parents came back or something happened. I think at one point I said what if I get pregnant, what if I get pregnant? And that was it with this guy. About this time I know that I felt I was really ready. I was ready to have sex definitely. Um it was like; yeah it was a physical need to experience it and to share that with somebody else. It was about my emancipation. My mum was really difficult at this time and uh, when I’d be going out with Jeremy, at the last minute she’d change her mind. I get all dressed up and then he’d arrive at the door and at the last minute she wouldn’t let me go out. So I think it was all connected with that – almost like ARGGGH! Yeah, yeah. So I didn’t think of it as ‘my virginity’ or something to be given away it just felt it was the right time. And also I was 17.

So it was about the same time, and I think Jeremy had gone off to university and his parents I think were going through a difficult time, and um, so we didn’t really – after he went to university he didn’t really contact me or, you know, it just sort of fell apart – fizzled out. I was doing English at school, English, History, and Music and um we had a fantastic English teacher, he was incredibly inspiring, quite intense, quite…um there were stories about him in school of throwing kids out of his class, you know, literally physically throwing them out. So he had this aura about him of being quite strong and, but he was also obviously really great with kids. You know, he loved teaching and he was one of, I suppose, a fresh group of young teachers within the school – although he’d been at the school a long time. He happened to be my tutor when I was 13 at school and um so I’d known him, had a teacher student relationship with him for quite a long time. And I got to 6th form, we were doing DH Lawrence – oh God – his autobiographical one – Sons and Lovers, we were also doing, what Shakespeare did we do? I think we were supposed to be doing Anthony and Cleopatra. And we also did TS Elliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. And we went to Nottingham, a few of us, about three of us, to set up a trip for the rest of the school to go, and so we’d go…I think it was all girls in our class, and we’d gone and stayed over night in a hotel in Nottingham and we’d done the whole trip around Nottingham and Eastward. And then another trip when me and another two girls had gone to Canterbury to organise a trip. And, um, in the mean time he’d started to have a relationship with one of the girls in our class, Mary, and I was sort of friendly with her and another girl Amanda in my village, although it was friendly, you know, you fall out and you… and over the summer between lower 6th and upper 6th, over that summer I found out from Amanda that Mary had been having a relationship with Martin, the teacher. And I think Amanda thought I knew, but I hadn’t known, and I was really really shocked, but it also set my mind thinking about, oh well if she can do it, so can I. And I had to go to his office for some reason and um, I can’t remember exactly but I think he started to talk about Mary and I started to cry that he’d been treated so badly by her.

And then there was a poetry evening, we used to have poetry evenings in the library, and he’d started to write poems with the names of girls down, you know, so the title letter of, you know, was a line of the poem. And there was a Mary poem and something else. God, he was taking such a risk, you know? And then we went on this trip, and he started saying things in the car like ‘Oh those poplar trees remind me of you because they’re tall and slim’. And then it transpired that the other two girls, I don’t know whether this was deliberate or not, but the other two girls were dropped off before me. And I went back to his house. And it was really, it must have been really late, I don’t know how late it was but it felt really late. And he read me a poem that he’d written about me. Um, which was:

‘Grasping your hand would be delicate,
It’s as fine as a rainbow and its rain.
Nuances of feeling could not fail to be transmitted
Naked and vulnerable, exquisite to enchantment,
Ignorant of your own beauty,
Easing my heart with your tears glow.*

Something like that anyway. And he read me this poem in his study in his house and I think at one point I just said ‘Make love to me’. And he did, and that was it. And I’m really glad that it was somebody like him that knew what he was doing so that it was a pleasurable experience. Yeah it was pleasurable, incredibly so, and intense and amazing. It was just amazing. And um so I am really grateful that it was somebody like him. If I think back now to a 17 year old and a 30 year old – if I think of people that I’ve worked with who are 30 in a school and they have made comments like ‘God, some of these 6th formers are so gorgeous’ and I see that you know, 17 year old/30 year old I think it’s just – it’s not on, it’s just not on. And I can see how my mother would’ve been very upset, was very upset when she found out. She did find out yeah.

So we had a relationship for a while. I don’t know how long it was. It was probably like from I don’t know, I don’t quite know how the events happened, but maybe when I went back to upper 6th that’s when it started and then by the autumn, we’d been seeing each other but by the autumn it had all come out. Either Mary, the other girl found out, or her mother, or Mary found out about it – but then all hell broke loose. We had a very strong Catholic headmaster and a very religious deputy head teacher and for some reason it all got into the papers as well, into the national newspapers. It could only have been like three people, from what they knew in the papers, it could have been Mary or her mother, it could have been the headmaster or it could have been Martin himself. Now I don’t think he would choose to do that. So I was, uhhh, I think Mary was interviewed, I was hauled out of class to be interviewed by the deputy headmistress who gave me a really hard time and I wouldn’t say anything to her. I made up all these stories about how he was helping me through some health problem or something, um as I was hauled out of the history class I was in, the history teacher said to me – sort of knew what had been going on and said to me basically there but for the grace of God go I, so he…I subsequently found out that he, you know, was doing similar things with girls at the school.

Um, then I was interviewed, I think I was interviewed by the deputy and the headmaster and I think because I wouldn’t talk to them I was expelled, or thrown out of school. I phoned my vicar and said, ‘oh please pray for me, please pray for me’ in a very melodramatic way, and then found out, like a year or so later, that he was also, you know, had designs on me as well. It was just like, Oh God!

So my mum found out about it when two Sun newspaper reporters in macs, with cameras around their necks, you know, archetypal, knocked on the door and said we’d like to talk to your daughter about an affair she’s having with her English teacher. And I had to say, “Mum, I’ve got something to tell you.” And my sister delivered the papers in the village, as you know I come from a tiny village, so it was on the front page of the Sun, and probably the Daily Mail and my sister had to deliver the papers – we didn’t get any sleep that night, my sister had to deliver the papers the next morning with this story about her sister on the front page. And for a while we denied it and said that Mary had created this fuss and I think it became obvious to my parents that it was all a big lie. Martin had to resign and he disappeared to London, and I was left to go to school the next day. He was head of 5th year and because he was such a great teacher they all loved him. So they thought that I was the reason that he’d got expelled so when I went in to school I was like, you know, I was the worst thing ever. Um and you know, obviously the teacher’s ... AAAARGGH! It was just awful! Reporters camped out in our local town and used to try to get the waitresses who were all 6th formers to talk about the whole thing. He went to London and I went back to school, and it was just… And because Anthony and Cleopatra was deemed too be too sexually explicit and romantic or whatever we had to do, what did we have to do? Winter’s Tale – where the husband basically gets, where his wife’s executed or something because of her infidelity (laughs)– I don’t know – anyway…

So we did still see each other after he moved to London. And he had to go to the Ministry of Education and he got the best of three options which was - he got a severe warning never to do it again but he could go straight back to teaching - which he chose not to do. Um, but he went and did youth work for a while and then eventually, you know, he’s gone back into teaching. He’s a teacher now again.

And for at least a couple of years we were together. Yeah. But it was very tempestuous, um and yeah, and sexually it was… in fact I was very mixed up, obviously, and there were other people involved and it just became a horrible mess. A horrible mess. With me as much to blame, well probably more to blame – not blame but you know, responsible. And my mum even now just cannot. I wouldn’t be able to mention this guy’s name in her house. And sort of 17 years on she was still going on about how I’d ruined her life.
(Long pause) They still live in the same village and… sorry (breaks off crying)

I don’t know whether it’s still legendary in the village, but I think for my mum it certainly is.

I think he came and spoke to my parents. We sort of tried to do this thing where the relationship had developed after this had all come out, you know, uh. So, but then I did do my A levels and I managed to pass English (laughs) amazingly enough. And I spent about a year after with him, after 6th form with him and we lived together in another town where he was working, which I don’t think he was very keen about. I think I did have my own place but you know, I was sort of clinging, you know, I suppose I was clinging to him. And then I ended up going to – no – then I had another relationship with somebody that…oh yeah, during this time we joined an amateur dramatic society, he and I, and I had a relationship with another older guy, um who had two kids. And there was real rivalry between Martin and this other guy and uh, you know, and that sort of broke it up. Yeah. And then I ended up, yeah, and then I went to college after that. To drama college.

It’s just my parents, because it’s such a small village and my mum, she had placed all her ambition, her hopes, on me. My sister academically wasn’t as… I think…she was dyslexic but it was never diagnosed and so at school she didn’t do as well as I did, so my mum had placed everything on me. I was up on this pedestal and then when the pedestal was sort of knocked from underneath me because of this, you know, this terrible thing – “terrible” in inverted commas, thing that I’d done – brought disgrace and shame on the family and you know, she couldn’t hold her head up in her community. Um, you know, that was it, you know. And my sister ran away to London as well because of it, because my mum was so caught up with the whole thing that I think my sister felt completely neglected. My sister got into drugs and alcohol and ended up, yeah, in London in quite a desperate situation for a while. And um, yeah. So, although it was a great first experience of sex, the repercussions of it are immense, huge.

Because I had such a great first experience, I suppose I’ve always felt fairly free, fairly free about sex since. Um, and yet I’ve ended up with a significantly older man, you know, there’s obviously a father thing going on there. You know, always looking to men to sort of be dominated in a way or, looked after or…yeah, yeah. But also seeing sex as quite a powerful thing. Um, something that I can control with. And um…which is not necessarily healthy. Yeah.

And then I went to Drama College and I met Richard who was one of my tutors (laughs) but very close to my age, but again in a position of authority, a position of power. And I knew it wasn’t right, and I knew I used my, I used my sexuality or my feminine wiles, or whatever you like to call it - I knew I used that to trap him or to have a relationship with him. And um we got married quite soon after we met and I think it was partly to do with wanting to be legitimate and wanting my parents to get off my back. To do something that was supposedly a normal, respectable thing to do. But it didn’t last very long at all. I had an affair quite soon after we got married. And he found out very easily so I was obviously wanting him to find out. I had an affair with somebody I think was possibly younger than me. And we had a very joyful sort of fun time together.

And uh, yeah so from there I moved in with a gay guy and just went out on the town and went to lots of gay clubs and you know had a sort of normal time for a bit. Just going out and clubbing and yeah…and then I met David – so I was about 26 when I met David. And uh, I was doing some backing singing and he was in a band. And I thought, he looks nice, I’d like to get to know him. Yeah, so, that was that. We were together a couple of years before we got married, yeah, about three years – 2 and a half years.

My relationship with my parents was never the same after the Sun knocked on the door, I mean it was never very…it was never a very easy relationship anyway, particularly with my mother, but it’s never really been the same since. We were, you know, close in terms of we did lots of things together but it wasn’t a good relationship really anyway so…
They are accepting of David – ish I think. I mean he’s older than my father actually, a couple of years…a year older than my father. But he’s, because he’s got such a different outlook he’s got a very youthful spirit and because of the work he does, you know, he’s much more street wise and he seems like completely a different age anyway, so, yeah.
And I still see Martin, yeah. And he’s having a baby in May, at the age of, so he’s 13 years older than me, so he’s 55 and he’s just having his first baby in May. He’s not married, no. He’s had a string of relationships that he falls in love and they leave, and he falls in love and they leave, and recently he had one that was, he sort of had a nervous breakdown over. But I just heard out of the blue that he’s now with a woman called Eleanor and they’re having a baby in May. I did say to him, you know, despite everything that happened you know, I was really pleased that he was the first one, that it was a good experience.

I don’t think I would change it if I could – I wouldn’t want all the other stuff that went with it but I wouldn’t change it – no because I was ready – I was ready. I was ready to have sex with someone.

How would I advise my own kids if I had them? Oh God (Begins to cry) I don’t know. I don’t know why that upsets me. I don’t know. I suppose cause it’s such a precious thing. That I would hope that it would be the right time, and the person, and it would be the best way possible. That they were in control of the situation. I have a friend whose mum got pregnant when she was 13. It’s a guy; he’s the child of that pregnancy. And you know before this recording we talked about sex education. It is about relationships too. Is there a right age? God it’s so hard isn’t it because it’s such an animal act as well and it’s so instinctive and yet we have all this knowledge and wisdom, or not, as well. Plus all the added things about sexually transmitted diseases– all this other stuff that is, you know, not about the beauty of it. Oh… I just…when somebody knows and they’re in control, I suppose. Yeah.

I do wonder how it would have been if I had gone all the way with Jeremy, you know, that had happened, and we’d done the normal thing like he’d gone to University and I’d go and visit him or, you know, cause I sometimes do wish I’d had the normal thing. Normal. Whatever normal is. I remember somebody that I worked with once said that his mum was really great with them and she talked about sex and she just said it’s the most fantastic feeling ever if you’re with the right person. I just wish, I sort of wish that my mum had great sexual experiences because I can’t imagine that she has. My grandmother was quite…I think my grandmother actually…her husband had an industrial accident which left him impotent, I think, although I’m not completely sure. So for a lot of their married life she didn’t have sex, but she had a very jealous husband. And she worked in a doctor’s surgery – she was beautiful, you know, and very attractive, very smiley, sparkly eyes. She was very attractive to other men and I think my granddad was very jealous. So I don’t think she was actually married to…well she was either… I think they did want to get married but, you know, because of the problems in the relationship, the physical relationship I think she felt very frustrated. And then my mum I don’t think really wanted to marry my father either, so… marry my father? I think it was just, you did it. He was there and that was it. She doesn’t really stand up for what she wants I don’t think. And so uh, yeah. Whew!!!

*The poem has been slightly altered to maintain anonymity.

Comments

I’m 19, I’ve just finished my A levels and I’m starting university in September. Gosh, I don’t really know what else. I don’t have a partner at the moment. I just got out of a bit of a sticky relationship recently so I’m just sort of enjoying being single. I live in my dad’s old house with my best friend Meg so at the moment. He’s just sold it, so when it he sells it, then I’ll have to think of somewhere else to live.

Well, my mum is a homeopath, so I’ve always been around alternative sort of things. My dad is a musician, as is my brother, so that was always fun. I don’t really know… we moved down to here from London when I was about 9. That was good, I loved it. I loved being in the countryside. There was always so much to do and stuff – it was good. I moved with just my mum and my mum’s sister and her three girls. My parents were divorced when I was about 7, and that was actually really fine – that never bothered me at all. My mum moved down here with us and her sister and the three girls, just by themselves, they just decided to pick everything up and go when my grandmother died, they just decided let’s leave it all behind, and so we moved down here. We didn’t have a telephone or a toaster or a fridge or anything at all. We just lived in this little cottage, and then she met Adam and we sort of built our life here. And my dad followed us because he didn’t want to be so far away from us. He was working in London, but he moved down here as well so he could spend more time with us, which was good. I suppose I spent a lot of time ... It was me and my brother, and we spent a lot of time with our cousins, my mum’s sister’s three girls and my uncle and his daughter, who we spent a lot of time with, so it was usually like seven or eight of us together at one time and we just used to ask a lot of Always. It was never like, ‘Oh I’ll tell you when you’re older,’ or ‘Don’t ask questions like that.’ Just anything that we asked they would tell us so – and more ... (laughs) They were always like completely normal and fine about it. I think that’s where I got all the obvious facts about sex and that sort of thing – the true stuff – but then being with that amount of people, like with 8 sort of people around the same age as you …and you sort of hear things at school and pick things, and we had an older cousin, Lauren, who’s now like 22, and she used to tell us the biggest amount of shit about everything. Like, 'this happens and this happens…' and me and David and Zoe who were the same age used to believe everything she said – like, ‘Really? That’s disgusting!’. She would tell us all this stuff that really wasn’t at all true. And then we’d go to my mum and say “Lauren told us this, is it true?’ and she’d be like ‘No.’ And then Lauren would be like, 'Well I heard it at school, so it must be true.’ And my mum was like, ‘No, it’s not true at all – it’s not true.’ Lauren loved winding us up, she used to do it to scare us. 'Cause she probably went and asked her mum before she told us, ‘Mum is this really true?’ and Jo would be like ‘No’. And then she’d be like 'I’m going to wind them up.'

It was always like we’d be sat around the dinner table and someone would just start talking about sex. So it was never like, 'Don’t talk about it, it’s inappropriate,’ or… it wasn’t like a joke, but they used to laugh at us quite a lot for the things that we thought were true. So it was always good, like, completely open. It made me feel like, never uncomfortable to talk about it. 'Cause I’m sure there are some people that I know definitely that would … like, if you asked them to do this same thing, they’d be like, ‘God no, I couldn’t do that, it’s far too embarrassing!' Whereas it took all the embarrassment out of sex, and like now I don’t have any embarrassment around it or even before, and I know a lot of people who still do, do you know what I mean?

I was 14 when I lost my virginity – about 5 years ago. It did just sort of happen, but I sort of wanted to, if you know what I mean. And I was with my boyfriend, who I was really really in love with. We were together for 2 years or something. From when I was about just 14 to when I was sort of 16, almost 17, so we were together for two years. I lost my virginity when I was 14, but just a couple of months before I was 15 – so sort of in the middle somewhere.

I’ll tell the story but I don’t know that there’s that much to sort of tell. It seems like so long ago – yours must seem like … (laughs) We went out with some of our friends, and then we went back to his house – yeah, we went back to his house, he lives on a local estate. Oh yeah, it was really funny, I remember, we got locked out so we were like, ‘Oh no, we’re locked out!' So we sat outside for ages, like, 'Oh my God, what are we going to do?' Then he was like, 'Oh, I remember, I think my mum left the back door open for me’. I was like, ‘Um, thanks, I’ve just spent ages in the freezing cold!’ So we went round and the back door was open and we let ourselves in. And then, we’d sort of not actually had sex up to that point, but always sort of done all those other sorts of things. And then it just sort of happened. It was obviously very quick. And it didn’t actually hurt at all, a lot of people were saying it hurts … There were myths about it hurts and you, like, bleed everywhere ... but it didn’t hurt at all and I didn’t bleed at all, which was good. I was like, a bit worried about that, I suppose.

He knew I was a virgin; he was as well. We were both the same age. So yeah, I suppose you don’t really know what to do, but you sort of guess. It was nice though, it was sort of, I don’t know, I felt quite, kind of like, special, because I really was very in love with him and he was with me as well, so it felt really like nice, do you know what I mean? Because we did really really love each other, I mean I don’t see him any more and we hated each other for ages, but at the time it was really nice. I suppose it was to show each other how much we did love each other, which was good. We had talked about it lots in advance, I mean we all did, my friends and stuff.

Looking back, I feel I made the right decision. I wouldn’t have changed it now. Because I did love him a lot and it felt like a sort of good time for me. I didn’t ever regret it afterwards and I felt like I’d done it with the right person so, yeah, it was good.

I think my first experience set a tone for later relationships, purely because of the love thing. I think when I enter into relationships and stuff, because obviously sex is quite a big part of relationships, I ... the love thing is very important for me. And also feeling so secure when I lost my virginity now makes me – because I felt really safe and secure and it felt really fine - so now, any sexual experience or relationship … I don’t know, I sort of have more confidence around sex, and, do you see what I mean? Because I felt confident when I did it, I didn’t feel sort of shy or embarrassed or stupid or used, so I think now around sex I have, yeah, more confidence. Which is good.

- I think with my own children I’ll do exactly what my mum did, which is tell them everything they want to know, anything they ask – tell them the truth whatever, because it’s just so much easier than not. Because then they’re going to find themselves in tricky situations… But a lot of people, when I say I was 14 when I lost my virginity, say that’s quite young. So I can’t really say there’s a good age to do it or a good time to do it. But I think definitely for me, the in-love thing was quite important. I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t fall in love until they’re like, you know, whatever age in life, so I don’t really know, I think I was probably someone who was quite lucky. Maybe just to wait - I think being in love for me was lucky - maybe just to wait until they felt completely safe with that other person, completely secure in the situation and like, you know, not at all embarrassed to talk about it before it happened, or talk about it after it happened – or you need to be able to sort of laugh afterwards. Just the confidence thing has definitely helped me in my relationships so, to feel confident is a big thing.

Comments

My mum and dad were, shall we say, refugees from unhappy families, who both were from North London, and they left at the end of the 60’s to find a better life outside London away from their families. So they had a bit of a nomadic existence for about 3 or 4 years, by which time myself and my sister were born, and then came to Herefordshire in 1972/73, something like that, and my dad worked as an electrician and my mum looked after us. I would say that my dad was a very distant figure, so he just wasn’t there – he was into family life when we were small but not much after that and... problems between him and my mum which were never really resolved. Therefore he sought his entertainment elsewhere, if you know what I mean. And so in terms of all those things you want dads to do, like teach you this, teach you that – never happened. And so I felt like I grew up in some sort of paternal vacuum. All I felt was that whatever I did was never very interesting to him. And what he wanted me to be interested in, I wasn’t interested in. So I suppose giving you the background to this particular event, that probably explains quite a lot of why I felt so really under-confident.

I became aware of my dad’s infidelity when I was 12, maybe 10, 11 or 12. And in his sock drawer he kept a letter from his mistress, or from this woman he’d been having an affair with, which I found aged about 11 or 12. And that was kind of… I knew unconsciously that he, you know, that there were issues between him and my mum, but it really brought it home to me. I don’t know if she knew about the identity of that letter and where it was, but she certainly knew that he’d been playing away - yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, and he’d had maybe 4,5,6 affairs so...

They separated Christmas 1983 and then 4 months later my mum found out that he’d been having an affair with one of her best friends for two years. And what was supposed to be just a trial separation, it became obvious that it was forever. And, yeah, it was sort of a pretty horrible, horrible year. I was 13, turning 14. And so what I remember at that point was a lot of isolation, a lot of isolation, and, well, where we lived was right out in the sticks, and so I would come home from school and I’d be really left to my own devices a lot. There was a lot of time to be with myself, but I didn’t find that comfortable at all, so I always tried to kind of express it outwardly rather than sit and reflect – I didn’t ever want to reflect on things, didn’t ever want to feel sad. So I found as many things to possibly do as I could. And… so yeah, so I was kind of insular without being introverted, if you know what I mean.

I learned about sex from friends. There was one kind of classic 1980’s sex education lesson where a youngish biology teacher said ‘Alright guys, write all the questions you want and I’ll answer them one by one.’ And it was just excruciating, excruciating. Because it was the trendy vicar syndrome and, you know, I can’t remember but somebody basically gave him a really hard time with a question, you know, like - not to this extent, but sort of a milder version of - you know: ‘When you take it in the mouth, do you swallow Sir?’ Hah, hah. So it was lame. Just awful. I didn’t learn anything at all from it.

A lot of my friends, um, were enthusiastic readers of top shelf magazines, so they’d kind of get into that – that was your anatomy lesson. But I never really… that kind of visual porn never really did it for me, so I never wanted to look at those magazines that much. So I suppose I didn’t have that sort of biological awareness of where things were that my friends obviously got – thinking OK, well I’ve seen enough of them, so I know that that’s where your aiming for, you know, that’s where the mission’s heading. So just thinking about it, I don’t know. I don’t know where I found information from – I couldn’t tell you. Nothing from my family, no, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Alright, I remember my friend Tim saying – we were on a football tour so we would have been about 12/13 - and I remember the phrase, ‘Here lads,’ and we were like ‘What?’ He says ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do it in my bed I reckon.’ And we all went ‘What?’ And he said 'I’m going to spunk up in my bed,’ and we were like ‘Hah, hah… What?’ And I remember thinking what’s he going to do? And him going into his hotel room and he was all very proud of himself and that kind of stuff, and there was this kind of - you know Swarfega? It’s got that kind of gritty substance - so I was sort of presented with this stuff that looked, that looked like it should be egg white, but it had this Swarfega quality looking at it, I mean, what the hell is that? Where did that come from? And this was Tim's spunk. Which he was very proud of. Good lad. And so I... I, so yeah, so that was that.

OK, so he produced this stuff that I was fairly freaked out about. And then about 4 months / 6 months later I had a wet dream and I was quite freaked about by that, and my main priority is that I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t want anybody to see the evidence of this. That was really embarrassing to me: the whole thing that like sheets were sticky and I didn’t wear pyjamas or anything like that. And I was thinking, if this is going to happen again… I think it did happen once or twice and I remember whipping the sheets off and trying to put them in the wash basket or put them in the washing machine so my mum didn’t even see them, so no evidence could be seen. And then about, yeah, around the same time, routing around the back of the airing cupboard, I put my hands on something plasticky and pull out a pair of plastic pants, the sort that babies and toddlers wear over nappies. And the fact was that they were really big. And I was thinking well, how come they’re so big? - and remembering that a friend of the family had come to visit and brought their son, who was probably 6 or 7 and wearing them at night. And I thought, if they fit, this would be a really good way of sorting it out. So I sort of spirited them back to my bedroom, shut the door, made sure no one else was about, and put them on. And they fitted actually quite fine. And so I thought all right, that’s good, I’m going to try wearing these tonight and see if that works. So I did it that night, and again, made sure no one else was around, made sure my light was off so no one’s going to come in, and put them on. And then thought that I would just fall asleep and that would be fine and it wouldn’t be a problem. But what happened was, putting them on, they felt really nice, so I got this fairly huge erection. And started, without knowing how to do it, started kind of masturbating. And without knowing really what I was doing, sort of just a sense memory that boys have, made myself ejaculate. And initially it felt amazing and at that point, I didn’t really understand, I just knew it felt good, and pretty much fell asleep. And then did it the next night, and then the next night. And the next night. And what I did was I started to get a bit worried that I was enjoying it, but how much were the plastic pants involved? So I took them off and tried doing it without them and it still felt good, but not anywhere near as good. So on they went again and I was sort of enthusiastically doing it for about 2 months and then they split, and I was really gutted. So I thought, OK, what do I need to do? However, I found out the solution, I went to the local chemist, and suddenly, and heart beating massively at this point, saw that there were all these plastic pants there and all in age groups, and the largest ones were 3-5. And I was thinking well, maybe that would work, so I bought them, got them home, and I was fairly skinny, I’m sort of 12/13/14? 12/13 at this point, but still skinny enough, and they fitted perfectly. And so there it was. So basically, you know, I’d wear them, masturbate in them as regularly as possible, until they’d split and then go and get a new pair.

And I was aware of girls and I knew there were certain girls I was really attracted to, but I was so scared of the whole process of getting involved, that I just couldn’t approach them. And I had this, this really tough dichotomy of being verbally incredibly articulate, and very confident, you know, as friends of mine subsequently told me, scarily so, intimidatingly so. So, the verbal ability, and yet feeling entirely the opposite physically. So, as much verbal confidence as I needed to be witty and blah, blah, blah, and put people down and assert myself, but absolutely nothing, nothing physically. And what I now realize, things that girls said to me which were kind of almost come-ons, saying, 'You know I’d be interested in having a go…' I either didn’t see it, or I didn’t acknowledge it, saying, no, they can’t possibly, they can’t possibly have felt that way. So there it is. I’ve got this kind of public persona as being, you know, kind of quite smart and quite prickly and, sort of verbally beyond my years, and then I’m going home and in my private life, feeling way younger and smaller that everyone else, and then kind of compounding it by kind of infantilising myself with these baby pants. And that’s pretty much the story of a lot of my early to mid teenage years.

The other thing that happened was that I was living this massive duality of a life. OK, that’s a really major thing and I mean real duality. And what I did was, unfortunately, I started to have these really intense relationships with girls, that never ever became sexual. There was a girl called Christine who, if you can imagine this, looked like a local 16 year old version of Daryl Hannah, and she floated my boat. So for me, it wasn’t like I had this completely all encompassing fetish that meant I didn’t care about anyone else, it’s what I did as a viable substitute, because I just didn’t feel like I was ever going to get off with anybody. But you know, I wanted Christine big time, and yet it just didn’t happen. And then I got into what Chris Rock brilliantly calls ‘The Friend Zone’ and just ruined it. And then, after Christine, I kind of realized that perhaps she wasn’t as Daryl Hannah-ish as I wanted her to be. I then suppose I started looking around for a new target, or a new object of my affections, and got very friendly with Maddie. And then the pattern was unfortunately really set. We just developed this ridiculously intense and you know, teenage relationship that was as powerful as it needed to be and ... very, very deep connection, but always, the bollocks at the centre was that there was no sex involved, So having this ridiculous emotional intimacy but none of the physical intimacy to go along with it. And I internalized this completely as she just wants to be my friend, but she thinks I’m really ugly, or thinks I’m really unattractive. And I was totally hung up on the physicality of it, that I’m too skinny, too this, and too under-developed muscularly and I now look at it and I now think that the one thing that girls cannot cope with are boys who are really physically unconfident. You can be the biggest munter in the world, and my friend Mark was a skinny little runt, but he got laid like a nutter! It pissed me off so badly...

And so what I was having was, I had this secret life where I was able to sort of gain sexual pleasure, but it wasn’t in the way I wanted. Or it wasn’t in the way I needed. Here’s the issue – not just this sense of feeling physically unconfident, but deeply sort of ashamed as well because, I don’t know, if you had a sort of, a fetish for boots or something like that, even, kind of, women’s underwear has got a sense of being adult about it – but sort of feeling like a baby? Or feeling like…there’s just no kind of like, there’s no strength in it – there’s no sense of like, “Here’s me in a rubber gimp mask.” Even that’s got something to it, but, you know: baby pants? Rubbish. So that just mirrored the sense of inadequacy inside. I don’t think it drove it; it was a symptom not the cause. But you know, what better metaphor for feeling less, and younger, and smaller, and more insignificant than everybody else?

By about 17/18 I don’t really remember having masturbated in plastic pants. I wasn’t having sex, but at least I was starting to get off with girls. And also, I sort of look back and this is the other ridiculous thing, how I could have such a negative self image, when actually I was getting off with quite attractive girls. I got off with Susie who went on to be a model – cha ching! Now you would think that that would give me enough confidence. It didn’t. And whether it was a fear of getting more intimate or whether it was a physical fear of body parts, or whether I just didn’t want to take off my clothes because I didn’t want them to see my body. It just never really got past what I suppose is second base, I don’t know – which is rubbish.

I went at 19 to University. It was a terrible year. I came back to Herefordshire. Had another terrible year. Had what I see as quite a depressed year: getting up really late, going to sleep at 5/6 o’clock in the morning- classic depression really. And I thought I really needed to sort myself out. And I went to see a counsellor for three months. And just talked about all the insecurities ... blah blah blah. Finished counselling in May, and lost my virginity two weeks later.

I was 21 – I don’t remember specifically, um, but, 21, 2 months, and 13 days. Anywhere between 19 and 16 hours depending on technically judge as the actual moment itself (laughs).

Ok so, I met a girl called Carol, and Carol was a folk singer, very, very good folk singer, and she wanted a guitarist partner... And so I played guitar with her and she sang and we had a little act and went to the folk clubs which were hilarious, but that’s another story. Part of this folk scene included a girl that we’ll call Sally, because it’s her real name*. She dumped me so she can fuck off (laughs). So, Sally was kind of cute and elfin, and quite kooky. And we used to go around the house, like a load of us, and she was particularly enamoured by the fact that I didn’t take the folk thing too seriously. A lot of them were really into it, and I used to do impressions of all of them, because I just.... they were so fucking ludicrous. You know, when the rest of it was all about acid house and that, they were stuck in this ludicrous time warp. Anyway, she had a lot going for her. She was small and cute and kooky, she was elfin, she had her own house, she thought I was hilarious and witty and intelligent and funny, and she had a very, very gorgeous black Labrador dog called Sid, who I just adored. However, I didn’t think of her as a possible sexual partner because by that time actually, to be quite honest, I was really quite enamoured of Carol. But she was married - very unhappily married - but she had a five-year-old daughter, so it wasn’t going to happen.

And anyway, after - this was about 6 months after being involved in this thing - we were at a night club and it had this folk club and we got talking about stupid things and the line that started it was - 'It really annoys me,' - she says, 'about how stupid people are when they want to have sex with each other, why do they have to go around this really absurd mating ritual?' And I was going, 'I couldn’t agree with you more…it’s so ridiculous.' Just not… being so unattuned to the female psyche that I didn’t get what she was saying in a million years. I didn’t have a clue. I thought she was just being sort of silly and flirty and just purely theoretical, abstract. Talking around it – no, didn’t understand the ways of the woman. At all. She said 'People should just come out and say "would you like to have sex?" And you know, then you could go, "Yes please."’ And I think something in me twigged, and I said, ‘Do you want to have sex?’ and she said ‘Yes please’. And I went, huh? (laughs) and then it hit me, fuck – you're serious aren’t you? And I hadn’t… I don’t know my modus operandi had been get to know somebody, get really obsessed with them and get really besotted with them and just talk and become really connected with them and, I’d had a laugh with this girl, and she was not unattractive, but it came from left field. Thinking OK…

First thing, because I was a good boy and I recognized all the AIDS messages: went to the toilets and got some condoms. I thought, ok, yeah, ok, I’m on it. And she said 'I’ve got to go do some stuff so I’ll see back at my house about 10 o’clock.' And I went 'Yeah, sure, fine, good, no problem, see you there, 10 o’clock it is, 10, o’clock, that’s the hour after 9, one before 11, 10 o’clock your house, yes, I’ll be there, you’ll be there...' And she went off, and I thought, OK, this is kind of abstract…she’s saying she wants to have sex with me – I’m going to have sex. I hadn’t planned to have sex with her… I’m going to have sex. OK.

And so then I went to her house, and it was all done in a kind of, imagine a sort of romantic comedy from the thirties. So it was like 2 actors knowing what they’re going to do, but sort of talking around it: 'Where shall we start to have sex? Oh, let’s start here, that will be fine.' So anyway, we started kissing, and that was fine, I’d done that enough times before to know I was alright with that, and so we kissed. And that was good. And I can’t remember what she said, but it was something like, 'Let’s take it upstairs...' So we went to the bedroom. And she sort of had a hippie, kooky bedroom, lots of candles… Now I can’t remember how I felt in terms of nakedness – I can’t remember, but it seems to me that I just did it. I just, yeah, took my clothes off as she took her clothes off, or we stripped down to underwear or something like that. And it was quite cool, you know, sort of, I don’t remember thinking I’m touching a naked body, I’m going further than I’ve ever gone before! It was just like, I’m on a mission and this is part of the mission, and, OK, now I’ve reached that stage, it’s complete and now I’m to the next stage...

What flipped me out was when it actually started to become real like: I’m actually going to have to put my penis in her vagina and do stuff. Now no sex education tells you… you can read Joy of Sex, but quite frankly once you looked at the beardy guy, you don’t want to look at any more – that’s not sexy – he’s got a beard! That’s wrong in so many ways. I didn’t remember any of it – it’s not like I revised it, it’s not like I went through and took the the bullet points saying summarize it, you get full marks if you actually remember you need to go around. Clitoris? Who? No – I personally I didn’t know any of this, and that’s when the nerves started to kick in and I was thinking what am I fucking doing here? What am I doing? What am I doing? Didn’t know. And then, of course, the major problem was I could not get an erection, and without feeling scared, then suddenly being aware - I am terrified, I cannot get an erection. And then thinking, after getting this far, if I say to this girl I’m really sorry, I can’t get an erection, it’s just going to be lame. I hadn’t told her I was a virgin, nothing was said. I’m thinking, I’ve got to keep her interested. You know, I’ve got to step up to the plate here.

So the one thing that really saved me is that I was a real avid reader of Cosmopolitan. That’s secret’s perhaps even more shameful than the plastic pants. I love women’s magazines! I used to read them avidly. And so things like 'What to tell your man when…' All this kind of stuff. And so I improvised. And so when I think back now, it was a great performance. I remember thinking (as if reading from Cosmo) ‘A little bit of inability to move is really exciting, try to get your lover to tie you up’ and all this kind of stuff. And because she was so petite, I was able to lie on my back, she was lying on top of me, and I basically had her arms down like that (demonstrates) and my legs were over her legs so she couldn’t move, and I was manipulating in a general area... Shall we say, she was loving it! And I did not know what I was doing, it was purely by chance. And so I kept on trying all these things that I remembered, thinking right... how about that? She must have thought she hit gold dust! And so you know, it was like the longest foreplay ever because I still couldn’t get an erection. Nothing I was doing… and I wouldn’t let her do anything to me because then she’d see no erection and think, what’s going on? Wow. It was all about me doing stuff for her. And I was thinking, I don’t know (as if reading from Cosmo) ‘a little bit of role play is really good; get your lover to smack you,’ and all this kind of stuff. So I figured, try that. So I was like, ‘Have you been bad, have you been naughty?' Thinking she’s going to just look at me and go, 'What? What are you talking about?' Instead she looks at me and goes, “Yes, I’ve been a very very bad girl!” And this kind of stuff. So I start spanking her, and that’s getting her really turned on, and so you know – it was like: keep going, keep improvising, keep going! And so I can’t believe she didn’t end up saying, 'I’m too tired now,' but she seemed to be enjoying it enough. And then finally, it was probably at least 4 in the morning, I managed to get this kind of workman-like erection and I cannot remember what it was actually like. It was more important to do it than to do it, if you know what I mean. It was more important to have it done than to do it. So that was probably the least exciting part of the whole thing. For me and for her probably, I don’t remember how long I lasted, probably not very long. But she’d been so foreplayed I suppose she wasn’t that bothered. And that was it. And then: woke up, and leaving the house it was really like: I have crossed the Rubicon; nothing will ever be the same; the world has changed. Which of course it hadn’t. For me, it had changed profoundly, because I then – I probably came on way too strong with her and it’s like ‘wow, we’ve had sex, you’re my girlfriend now right?' And that wasn’t her interest. She had an interest in basically having sex with boys younger than her, that was her thing. Because then she just totally withdrew and went off with somebody else who was even younger than me, that kind of thing. And I was sort of really pissed off about it...

I didn’t look back. I went to university and sort of had sex with about three different girls in a term, which for students isn’t that much maybe, but for me it was. So it was almost like this straight jacket that had held me back had been taken off, and I suddenly thought no there’s nothing physically wrong with me so I can’t do this, so I just did it, and I just went on, and went from famine to feast really. But it all came from that one person saying ‘I want to have sex with you, you are an OK person to have sex with.’ And that broke all my physical insecurities. And to be honest, I mean, it’s a word that people shy away from so much because they just don’t want to deal with it, but inadequacy. Inadequate. I’m not adequate enough to do this. And I think that’s the secret that lies at the heart of so many men, thinking I’m not man enough. What is a man? Do you need power tools to confer that status, do you need a shed? What do you need? It’s an internal fear, isn’t it? And, that was it. It was like, I can do this now. And the other thing was I told her, a couple of months later, Sally. She said, you came on so strong, blah blah blah, and I said, ' 'Cause I was a virgin.' She said, 'No you weren’t.' I said, 'Yes I was.' She said, 'No you weren’t.' And I think she said something like, 'You were too good to be a virgin.' Or, 'You knew too much to be a virgin.' And I was like 'Nope, virgin.' And then she went, 'Ok, that explains it.' So there you go…

Do I wish I could change me at that age? Yeah. Profoundly. If I’d had more physical confidence it would have happened a lot earlier and that would have been better. I think the optimum age is about 16 really. If I’d had more physical confidence you know, I might not have retained friendships, but actually I don’t think that would have bothered me so much. I think I’d have cared more about saying I was able to go to bed with that person, than I was a good friend to that person. Yeah, fuck friendship. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Fuck friendship man, I don’t need the friend zone. And you know what, I know this sounds awful but it would have helped if I was more of a bastard. If I had a son, I’d say, be nice, but don’t be too nice. Don’t be too nice, keep a bit back. Definitely. Because actually my experience was teenage girls do not respect boys who are totally respectful of them. They do not. They just didn’t. Maybe they would now, maybe things have changed now sufficiently that that would be very different, but then, uh uh, they just didn’t. So if you want to get some action, you don’t want to be in the friend zone, then - you know - don’t be so nice.

* Sally's name, has been changed along with other names and identifying details.

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(Answers phone) Hello, hi mum – listen can I call you back later because I’ve got someone here? Are you ok? You sound a bit huffy - are you a bit puffed out? All right – yeah, I’ll phone you in a little while. Ok, bye.

Ok then – um, ok, so I’m 45, I think, and I have two children and two grandchildren. Yeah my son is 14 and my daughter is 27, my grandson is nearly 4 and my granddaughter is nearly 2. And I’m - wait for it – an Artist! And before that I was a homeopath; well obviously, you know, it hasn’t disappeared that side of me, but I decided to stop practicing and focus on my painting, focus on my creativity and so that’s what I’m doing at the moment – being poor and painting. Uh, what else do you want to know? Well you know, you could describe yourself for hours couldn’t you?

Ok, my family background is a serious mess- there was a lot of disfunctionality in my family. My mother was the daughter of a guy who was in the navy and a woman that had a lot of mental health problems. And when my mother was born her mother kind of got seriously mentally ill and put in a hospital and her father was away in the war and so she was in an orphanage, she spent most of her childhood in an orphanage. And came out of the orphanage round about the age of 13 to discover that her father had a new partner and 7 sons that she didn’t know about, and so her relationship with her mother was always very difficult – her mother didn’t really want her. And um, and her dad was kind of never around.

So um, my father’s family – he was brought up by his uncle and aunt thinking that they were his mother and father. When he was 12 his father – his adopted father who he thought was his father – went into hospital for a minor operation and died on the operating table, which was really hard for him I think. And when he was 15 he found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was, his parents weren’t his parents, they were his aunt and uncle, and his real parents were: the black sheep of the family, who was a prostitute, and one of her clients. So that kind of did his head in.

So then my parents, my mother uh, they married when she was 19, she had my brother when she was 21, and then she got milk fever after he was born and had mental problems from then on. I mean they didn’t really know how to treat milk fever in those days; it’s what they call post-partum psychosis now. She just turned into someone else and my dad couldn’t deal with it. So she was in and out of mental hospitals and it was, you know, my brother was born in 52, I was born in 62, so it was a time when they were experimenting with a lot of things. So she had lots of different drugs, she had lots of electro-convulsive therapy she had…culminating in her having a lobotomy when I was one and a half. She was sterilized when I was 6 months old against her will, and - they didn’t want her to have any more children. So all through my early childhood she was in and out of hospitals and on and off various different types of psychoactive drugs. My father divorced her when I was 3. So from 0-3 I was passed around a lot of people, when my mother was in hospital and my father was working – so I was kind of looked after by neighbours, and then my father had a relationship with another woman so I guess she would have looked after me some of the time, and my mum some of the time – and then there was the divorce. And then um, so, after the divorce, I think, to begin with my brother: I have a brother who’s ten years older and a sister who’s 7 years older and me, and we were all living with my mum, but she was too ill to cope and my brother was kind of nicking things and getting in trouble with the police and so then my dad had all of us, and then my mum came to collect me for a weekend and just never took me back. So then I stayed with her, and my brother and sister stayed with my dad. So I was with my mum and she was in and out of mental hospitals and I was in and out of children’s homes for that early bit.

Then when I was 5 my stepfather came along and I think they met through a single’s agency, and he was a paedophile and I think the fact that she had me was one of the main reasons he was there. And he started grooming me from before the point where he got – I mean before he married her, before he was seriously kind of involved with her, he was already on my case. And he was around, so from then on until I was 11 and um (sighs) …so the next bits much more difficult to talk about really, because there was a lot of sex in my early childhood and it was all very weird, but he didn’t fuck me. So he didn’t take, he tried to take my virginity one time and he couldn’t because I was too small, but he did a lot of weird things and um, because of how my mother was, I mean I think I was quite a neglected child, and here was an adult who was prepared to give me love and attention and there was a price to pay but I think when you’re a neglected child you pay whatever price is going because you just need that love and attention. And of course at the age of 5 you don’t really have the kind of judgment of you know, this is ok and that isn’t ok. So um, a lot of things happened that I still feel really, you know, horrified about, and um, I think for a lot of people – there’s all sorts of different kinds of sexual abuse – he never hurt me, I mean he never…I mean there were times when it hurt, but he never hurt me on purpose, he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was just trying to get me hooked in to sex.
Um, so he kind of seduced me into it, so if at any point I was to say no I don’t want to do that, I – then it would stop. So everything that happened…so you’re left with this sense of why didn’t I say no? That kind of stays in there – that actually, that in some way I was…what’s the word? Um, and you can see how even talking about it makes me (anxious noise) mong out. Um – yeah – complicit…and you know, yeah… well complicit’s a good word.

And at the point when I discovered, at about the age of tenish, when I realized, recognised, that I didn’t want to do it and said, that’s it, I’m not doing this anymore, of course then it stopped. And then his relationship with my mother fell to pieces and he left.

But there were a lot – I mean you know, there’s lots of awfulness in there and I don’t want to go on about if for too long, um. I don’t think my mother consciously knew, I think she kept it unconscious because she couldn’t deal with it. And I think there were certain clues that you’d have to be wearing bl…I mean, for example, I knew that he’d had a vasectomy about two years before she did. To me, if my 9/10 year old daughter knew that my husband had had a vasectomy, and she’s know for a couple of years and I’ve just found out, that’s a little weird. And we used to spend hours, we used to spend, you know, we used to disappear off into the Nissan hut – what did she think we were doing? You know in the war they used to build these air raid shelters out of corrugated iron – into the banks – well there was one of those next to the house, you know we lived in a house that had a field either side and it had a Nissan hut and we used to go and disappear in there which is where, you know, things… What did she think we were doing? What did she think was going on, I wonder? So I don’t know that she didn’t know on any level, I feel that she may have known on some level and really really did not want to know. And just shut it out. But she was very ill, you know, she wasn’t truly compos mentis at any point. He got her off the, she was on a lot of drugs when he first came on the scene – he got her off the drugs and she stayed off drugs and out of hospital for the rest of, well no, she didn’t stay off drugs, but she stayed out of hospital for the rest of my childhood. But she was still very very manic-depressive, so she was still swinging from one extreme to the other. But there was a short period of time when they first got together that she was kind of a bit more stable, so maybe a year or two.

I guess I must have had exposure to all the same things as all my contemporaries but to give you the degree of my sexual education, when I finally lost my virginity to someone I wanted to lose it to when I was 16, my mother found out because she overheard me talking to some girls – she had this little conversation with me, you know like ‘Oh, you naughty girl, are you being careful?’ you know. To which I replied gaily – ‘Oh it’s ok, I can’t get pregnant because I never come.’ So that’s how educated I was sexually (laughs) you know, you can’t get pregnant if you don’t come. She must have taught me about periods, because I don’t remember any trauma involved in all of that, um, and…but actually my step father was not the first person to sexually abuse me, there were other people before that, and after that. Ok, so the first person was a girl who my mum had to baby-sit who used to just get a kick out of making me cry. I was very small then, I must have been three or four. And um, she would poke things up me and just enjoy making me cry and her particular thing was to make me cry and then to try and make me tell my mum that it was somebody else who made me cry when my mum came home. And eventually somehow my mum saw through this and stopped employing this girl, and very shortly after that, this girl was taken into care because she locked two small children in a shed overnight. And then they realized that she was kind of like scarily off the rails and um…her name was Monica. And um, so she was probably the first person, then there was a boyfriend of my sister’s, who…my sister lived with my dad in Jersey, and nothing really awful happened, but there was inappropriate behaviour, to the degree of – well, I must have been 4/5 and we ended up sharing a bed. He’d come… he was taking me on the airplane to visit my dad and brother and sister, I don’t know why, but anyway, he was the adult that was going to accompany me from England to Jersey and we ended up in my mother’s house in a bed together and I remember him showing me his penis and being completely overwhelmed by the enormity of it, like, my God, how can anyone walk around with something so huge and red and hard and enormous knocking around between their legs. I’d never seen one before and I was really quite… concerned (laughs). Almost horrified. And then during the period of time when my stepfather was around we lived near the sea and there were holiday camps and there was more that one occasion when some dirty old man would… I don’t know, I think when you’re an abused child somehow there’s a beacon, there’s a light flashing on your forehead that says, you know, ‘Try me because you’ll probably get away with it here.’ And so I would just be spotted by people. I think maybe if you’re just hanging around a lot and you’re a kid and obviously nobody’s there looking after you, I don’t know. But there was more than one occasion when some dirty old bloke would manage to get me behind some shed somewhere and fiddle about with me. And somehow I managed to, uh, managed to stay alive.

And, you know, but with my stepfather, it was very weird – I mean he did weird things. He showed me for example, a piece of newspaper…He told me he was part of a Satan Circle and he was trying to teach me to be able to use my will to manipulate other people. And he told me that there was a ghost that lived in the house that was with me always, always, all the time –heard everything I said, saw everything I did, knew everything I thought – and was my guardian angel and had been killed by her mother because she had fallen in love with her stepfather and had a relationship with her stepfather, so her mother had poisoned her – this ghost that was my guardian angel. And he showed me a newspaper cutting about a child – a boy, a little boy – who had been crucified and burnt to death by a Satan Circle and he said ‘This is my lot, but don’t worry they won’t do this to you because I’m looking after you,’ you know…His idea was that one day I was going to be introduced to this circle of people and I would be the princess and I would be, you know. So it was all really deeply sick. He lived through the war, he was out in Burma. He was one of, ah, 14 children, his mother had 14 children in Nottingham in sort of a mining family. Um, his mother was supposedly a medium, um…I think there was a lot a lot a lot of weirdness in his life. And I suspect that he was probably abused as a child and I suspect that he sussed me out as one of those children who is interested in magic and the mysterious, and used that completely and utterly to manipulate me. So he didn’t have to frighten me by using physical force. He hemmed me in by saying… ‘Obviously you can’t tell anybody about the things we do together because if you do then my magic circle will know about it and then you might not be safe, but don’t worry, I’ll protect you, but you know, just don’t tell anyone because…’ So it was very dark and yucky. And he would get me to do kind of ritualistic things and… so I was quite a disturbed kid. And I think the signs were there if anybody had bothered to notice. And it’s kind of weird to me now to look back and think how come nobody noticed? I was a child who came from a broken family where my mother was in and out of mental hospitals all through my early childhood, where were Social Services? How come nobody ever kind of checked up on me?

At school? I have no idea what was known and what wasn’t known. You don’t get told that kind of stuff when you’re a kid and it’s all a long time ago and a long way away and I have no idea. When I was, when I finally left home, I couldn’t bear to live with my mother any more by the time I got to 15, um, and I didn’t want to change schools and they had a little boarding – they had a girl’s boarding house and a boy’s boarding house -that ran along with school and they put me in there temporarily while they checked out my dad’s finances, so I was kind of there for a term and then when they did finally send my dad the form to fill in he was like: ‘(makes shocked noise) You can’t stay there! You have to come live with us.” And so I went to live in Hounslow. And um, I don’t know – but nobody ever talked to me, is the point, nobody ever said ‘Hi, I’m your social worker, just wanted to check in to see how you’re doing, how things are happening at home, you know’. You know, I missed a lot of school in the later years. I was a really good girl at school, worked very hard, was really into it, until about the third year when it all went (raspberry) which is funny because he’d left, he’d left by then but I just, yeah, I lost it. And I got into, a bit later on I got into smoking dope, but there was, around the 3rd/4th year (of secondary school), well especially the 4th year, I lost interest in school and so the reports that I was getting altered significantly and you’d think somebody would go, ‘Ok what’s going on with this kid, she’s top of the class for three years and now she’s off the rails, what’s going…’ Nobody, nobody ever. And you know, I told, when I was about ten, I told two of my best friends a bit about what had happened between me and my stepfather and they both said I was lying. They both told me I was lying and that I was probably a lesbian. So I never told anyone for a loooong time after that (laughs). So you know, it was never…

I don’t remember exactly when I finally told somebody, but there came a point in my very late teens/early twenties when I would kind of take delight in announcing rather shocking things at dinner parties where everyone else was all talking about this that and the other. You know, I would kind of say, yeah, hmm…just, as it came up, you know, tell us about your mother, ‘Ah well my mother had a lobotomy when I was one and a half,’ you know, ‘ya middle class shit pile, stick that in your fucking pipe and smoke it!’ (Laughs). It became a, not really in terms of being angry, just in terms of there’s a bit of me that feels as though I’ve come through a lot, really a lot, and done very well in terms of how my kids are, in terms of… I mean of course, I’m completely fucked up, I’m really fully aware of that, but I’ve had a lot of help and I’m a lot less of a mess than I could be. You know, I’m kind of somehow managing to be all right, considering. And so I think there was a time when I realized that actually there’s a few medals across my chest and that you know, people…um, it was ok, how ever shockingly I did it, it was ok to let people know that I hadn’t always had a comfortable existence (laughs).

Well, I guess around the time my stepdad left I was kind of looking at my spiritual orientation. So I’d gone to uh, Sunday school when I was very small, and ended up having a big row with the woman that ran Sunday school who tried to convince me that Jesus and God were the same person, and failed to explain it in such a way that I could understand what she meant. I got very angry with her and left. Then when I was very little I used to sneak into church when nobody was there because I liked being in church but…I didn’t really like all the blah blah. And then because I was doing all this supposedly black magic with my stepfather, and just uh, actually on my own terms really enjoying nature and enjoying being connected with the universe. We lived by the sea and the sea kind of saved my life really, and I wanted to be St Francis of Assisi and I wanted to speak the language of the birds and the animals and… not really compatible with black magic somehow (laughs). And I kind of ended up with the conclusion that really I didn’t want to do black magic; I wanted to do white magic. And I was doing a lot of reading, you know, CS Lewis and all that kind of stuff. So there was a kind of a… and then I guess I kind of had to put any overlay of kind of romanticism as a way of trying to reconnect with the innocent me. So I was very determined; I wasn’t going to lose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. You know, I believed in fairies, I believed in dragons…the whole thing of this world was just nonsense; the other imaginal world is where I spent my time because that was a kind of safe place. So it became known amongst my school friends: I was kind of the laughing stock at school really, that I refused to loose my virginity until I’d seen a unicorn. Um, and um (laughs), and then, I don’t know, what did happen? I slowly began to discover boys and the true feelings that go with real conscious sex, you know, real attraction between two equals rather than it being really about the pleasures of the flesh. It being about a kind of communion between two beings, I suppose, as I began to discover that stuff with boys… but I was still desperate for love, you know, desperate. And would still have, kind of I guess, paid whatever price… I did, you know, later on I went through quite a promiscuous period where I just thought if somebody wanted me I didn’t really know how to say no to them, you know. So yeah, there’s been phases and you know, spirals of it.

I um, I just got together with this lad who was really lovely, gentle, musician – just a lovely person and um, and I guess at 16 I was old enough to know that a unicorn was a… well I’d always been old enough, but I was able to make peace with the idea that you know, that seeing a unicorn was something that could happen on another level, and that it’s kind of symbolic of something rather than ah, needing to wait until I actually saw an actual unicorn, you know. And he was somebody who was kind of lived enough in the magical realm, and he was just gentle and lovely and so we agreed that he would take my virginity on my 16th birthday. And um, we… the school that I went to shared a swimming pool, an outdoor swimming pool, with the primary school that I had gone to. And we went to the swimming pool and had a swim and we lay in the sunshine…and he tried to take my virginity, and it kind of like, it didn’t really work and after a while we both kind of said, this isn’t really working is it, yes, well, never mind. And he got up and he set off a firework, and he said to me ‘Every year on your birthday, for the rest of my life, as long as I live, I’m going to set off a blue firework like this - I’m going to make a blue star for you’. How romantic is that! And then a few days later he took my virginity in my bed, in my house, which is a great way for things to happen. Um, so yeah, that was really nice.

I don’t think he was a virgin, but not far off it (laughs), yeah. I don’t think I told him anything about my history, but it’s a long time ago now, I may have done but I don’t think I did. I think I was still not telling anybody at that point. Just the shame, you know? You just felt forever tainted. And yeah, and particularly telling lovers is the very difficult thing to do – kind of choosing, when is it that you tell somebody who’s attracted to you or interested, at what point do you say and by the way, here’s this crock of shit that I’ve lived through. Do you wait until you’ve had wonderful sex a few times in a row (laughs)? Do you wait until you’ve already known them for a year or three? Or do you tell them straight away and frighten them off and watch them run for the hills? It’s kind of a weird one.

So I think I was, obviously, I was quite a damaged individual and I went through a few years of being just, it’s like, um, because I was lead into sex by my stepfather before I was anywhere near being of an age to lead myself into sex, there was a lot of kind of sexual awareness on one level, and no sexual awareness at all on another level. So often if a man, a boy, a man, was attracted to me, wanted me, was lusting after me, I would experience the lust without being able to locate the source of it. It was like I let people have me because they wanted me without having the realization that it was up to me too. I could decide. I could say ‘You might fancy me but actually, I don’t fancy you so I’m not going to.’ Or I could stay with that feeling of being lusted after and just wait and see what happened. And, or I could explore it a little bit and then I could say ‘Ok that’s enough now, stop, back off – come see me tomorrow and I’ll see whether I want to let you kiss me and feel me up a bit more.’ It was just like there is no boundary and obviously if someone wants me, well help yourself. There were all these kind of experiences of people – men – finding me the most fascinating person they’d ever met, hanging on my every word and being completely devoted, and then shagging you, and then handing you your coat. And I didn’t get it – I just didn’t get it. So it happened a number of times in a row, and I was so confused. I couldn’t understand why you’d want to have sex with somebody unless you really liked them; why, if you really liked them, you would suddenly stop liking them just ‘cause you’d had sex with them? What was going on? It was like some secret that… and also, because they were all so clumsy, so I wasn’t really enjoying the sex I was having. Maybe that was it (laughs). You know… I’d had – my stepfather was in his 60’s, ok, when I was – when he came on the scene. So, and he’d kind of trained me up in oral and manual sex. So all the trimmings, I knew all about. And all these young men that I was having sex with, didn’t know anything at all about the trimmings, they only knew about meat and two veg. So I was kind of left with kind of like, you know – yes I enjoyed what happened, but it was… it never really hit the spot and – but mostly kind of emotionally really confused. I just didn’t get the thing that men just want to fuck someone. That they want to have as many conquests as they can. They didn’t want to have seriously good sex – you know this is how it seems, they don’t want to actually find out how to really have good sex with a person, they just want to kind of get another notch on their belt, and then move on. And I didn’t get it, I just so didn’t get it, and yet at the same time I was completely vulnerable to it every time. So I was kind of a bit mashed by that.

And also the other thing that would happen would be that if… I’d be in a relationship for… I mean let’s face it, when you’re 17 a relationship of 3 months is quite a long one; well it was for me. But it would get to a point where if I think I was kind of emotionally asleep, as a lot of teenagers are, and I think I would, rather than face the challenges within a relationship, when something difficult arose – rather than face that I would just run out of the relationship. I would just like, ‘This isn’t working, bye’. So I was doing it too, but not on the same level. So if things got a bit tricky or started to feel a bit awkward I’d leg it. And there were always more and more volunteers, you know, when you’re kind of 17 and kind of gorgeous, they’re always lined up – ready and waiting so there weren’t any long gaps in between. Those came later (laughs).

But I would say that here I am at 45 with a whole host of failed relationships behind me and I still don’t know how to relate and I still don’t know how to be properly in charge of my sexuality. Um, so it’s you know, it’s kind of life long.

Yeah, ok, so my daughter was born when I was nearly 19, uh and, I’d been together with her dad for a couple of months maximum when I got pregnant with her. But I so wanted a baby anyway – I wouldn’t have cared if I’d have had her on my own. But anyway, we had her together and lots about it was great; her birth was fantastic, he and I kind of had some difficulties right from the start but I hung on in there because I didn’t really want to be a single parent. Um…hung on in there. We moved out to France together, we moved from Brixton, you know, slap bang middle of the city, to right out in the middle of the countryside in France. We didn’t marry – he would have liked to have married me but we didn’t marry, and by the time she was two I had fallen in love with somebody else, and then I left him. Um and uh – I first fell in love when I was about four with Peter O’Toole, and then it was Yul Brenner, and then it was the boy in the next class up, and, you know, I fall in love at the drop of a hat, and it’s deep and meaningful, and can unravel me quite easily. And I didn’t face the challenges in that relationship either. Because there were things I found quite difficult with him – he was a person who lost his temper easily and rather than being able to meet that challenge and say this kind of behaviour is, well whatever, you know, work through whatever the issues were. I just slowly withdrew from him emotionally and then fell in love with someone else and then left him.

Um, and then that was my daughter’s father, and by the time Jack came along I’d been with his father four years already and had miscarried one child already and I thought I was home and dry. Because obviously there was my daughter from a previous relationship and we’d been together and we had this really nice home and I thought, you know, ok great. Then we got pregnant the first time and he was a bit kind of like –‘I feel trapped’ and then I ended up miscarrying anyway. So we’d been through that kind of, ‘cause it was his first child, we’d been through that. But when Jack came along I thought that the practice run had kind of been sorted and that actually he’d obviously got his head round it. But when I was 8 months pregnant he slept with my best friend and uh it all really seriously fell to pieces and I was really mashed to bits. Um and it was quite a difficult birth in some ways, very long. He was a very easy baby but he did wake me up every two hours for 8 months. But he was easy in the sense that he was delightful to be around, but he did wake me up every 2 hours for 8 months, and so I got kind of (makes crazy noise). And um so that relationship ended in a big mess. In fact it ended in a big mess twice because I tried to resurrect that family – foolish idea – and it happened all over again, in the same sort of style. Anyway.

Well – I guess my relationship with my kids is very open. Uh, and, I mean yeah, they’re my teachers and they’re both amazing and Jasmine’s whole experience has been so different from mine. I mean she’s had some difficult things to deal with in the sense that I split up with her dad and then he had a relationship with someone else and that – you know, there was kind of horrible things that happened that she witnessed when she was visiting their home, you know…she’s had difficult stuff to deal with but in terms of her relationship with sex, she’s a hell of a lot more uh, grounded in her sexuality, and empowered, you know. I mean she, you know, we did a whole thing when she had her first period. I mean she knew about it but it was like, her attitude and my attitude as well, was like ‘Wow’, you know, ‘You’ve become a woman - let’s celebrate!’ and when she did occasionally come across people… I mean when she had her first period she went around telling all these women that she knew ‘I’ve got my first period – I’m a woman now!’ and some women were like ‘Yeah – fantastic wow!’ and others were like ‘You poor thing’. And when she hit that she didn’t understand what their problem was – she didn’t get it. You know when people were commiserating with her that she was being subjected to ‘The Curse’ it wasn’t, you know, because that wasn’t the relationship that she had learnt – she didn’t feel like that about it. And when she was ready to…I have this wonderful memory of – she had a boyfriend, the boy who took her virginity was – I mean it also has a tragic ending sadly; it’s not an entirely happy story but still lovely. It was someone that she’d known from when she was very small – we’d lived near them in London, and then we met up again ‘cause they lived in Bath and we lived there and anyway… they began this relationship and it was very sweet, they were both 15 going on 16 and one evening – well, he came to stay at my house and he - he was just such a lovely lad – and he came and sat down, we all three were sat down at the table like this, and he said um, ‘Lavender,’ he said, ‘Jasmine and I have been thinking about having sex and I thought I would talk to you about it and see how you felt about it.’ And so I kind of said, ‘Well, that’s great and if you both feel that you’re definitely ready and that you’re kind of old enough and you feel you can handle it and be really gentle and caring with each other and that’s what you want to do and you’re sure that’s what you want to do, then that’s fantastic, you know, work away. And do you know everything that you need to know, kind of like have you thought about everything you need to think about?’ And they were both like ‘Yeah, no, we have and we’ve decided that’s what we want to do.’ ‘So well great, have a good time!’ Except that then his parents found out and decided that he and Jasmine should never be allowed to be alone together for more than 10 minutes ever again. I don’t know how it happened or why, I don’t know what it was that they didn’t like about my daughter or the situation but they then just really wouldn’t allow them to spend any time alone together. They weren’t even allowed to, you know, sit in a room for 10 minutes. And then, this went on for a couple of weeks and then my daughter and her boyfriend both decided that under the strain of this the relationship wasn’t kind of going to work and so they decided that they wouldn’t be together any more – it was kind of mutual decision. Then a very short time after that he got himself another girlfriend and a few days after he’d asked this other girl out, he got hit by a car and went into a coma and when he came round from the coma he didn’t remember that he’d split up with my daughter and he… anyway – it was a big mash up – I mean he nearly died and he did have to live again. He had to learn how to eat, how to walk, how to do everything. So, yeah, so my daughter’s had a lot to cope with and negotiate too. Yeah – and she’s very sexually empowered I would say. She’s, yeah…

My son? Oh I would answer any… I think if a kid is ready to ask a question they’re ready to hear the answer provided you pitch the answer at where they’re able to hear it. So, you know, obviously we’ve had lots and lots and lots of talks about sex – not as in ‘Right, now sit down boy because I think it’s time’, you know, just a natural kind of, when it comes up it gets talked about, and laughed about. You know, like most small boys, he went through various different periods of time when he thought sex was absolutely hilarious and needed to be joked about every given possible minute and there was nothing funnier than… he had this see saw thing with a man with a big shlong and a woman with enormous tits and when you moved it up and down they appeared to be having sex, you know, (sarcastically) such fun!

And occasionally we get into ‘Right, now I’m going to pontificate’ mode, you know? ‘There’s something you need to hear young man,’ you know – not quite like that, but sometimes I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and so I will get on my little soap box and talk about something or other – whatever it might be. It’s usually got that slight feminist undertone (laughs), or humanist perhaps I should say? But yeah, he’s quite happy to tell me how skilled he is at undoing girls’ bras with one hand. He’s 14. This morning he said, I can’t remember how it came up, but I made the comment of ‘you’ll do anything for money.’ I don’t remember what it was, no it was last night, and he wanted to play on his X box and somebody rang up and said could he baby-sit? I knew I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him to spend an hour away from his X box, but the fact that they were going to pay him to baby-sit meant that he was quite keen to do it, and I said to him, ‘Oh, you’d do anything for money,’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do anything for money’. So we made a list of all the things he would rule out – that he wouldn’t do for money and he wouldn’t loose his virginity with an animal, was one of them he came up with (laughs). Yeah.

I hope it’s a hell of a lot healthier than the situation I inherited, yeah I hope so - I really hope so. You know, I’ve put a fair amount of effort into making sure that that was the case. Yeah.

No I’m not in a relationship right now… (Little girl voice) ‘I want my prince charming to take me to the castle and make all my dreams come true and live happily ever after.’ And I do, you know. I would like to be in a really whole, healthy, long lasting relationship that uh, that fed me and that fed the other person. And I’m not prepared to accept an unhealthy relationship that doesn’t do that and I haven’t met the person – I haven’t managed to manifest that with any of the people I have had relationships with. And so I’m just being in relationship with myself and, you know, there have been long periods of time when I’ve not been in relationship and there have been short periods of time where I’ve been, you know, since… the longest relationship that I’ve had was with my son’s father and when that fell to bits in the way that it did, since then I haven’t, I haven’t had a long term relationship, I haven’t really lived with anyone. There’ve been short-lived relationships that haven’t come to any, you know. So yeah, I’m lonely and I miss all of that lovely intimacy and sharing, but I love the autonomy of it – I love being in charge of my life and what happens and you know, it’s kind of like, I think the older you get the more difficult… the better you know yourself and so the less likely you are to want to compromise yourself to someone else. And so I would imagine that if you’ve grown up in a relationship with someone else – if you’ve met them in your youth and then you’ve matured together and you get to my age now, you know, 45, you would know somebody pretty well. And you kind of would have a good idea of what the easy bits that worked and what the difficult bits that needed to be worked on, and you know, the spaces and the full bits within the relationship and what you needed to find outside in your other relationships with friends, you know, and work and all the other things, and like I am aware that there are things missing in my life because I’m not in relationship. There’s a bit of me that… there is a bit of me that only finds fulfillment in that kind of deeply intimate relationship, and it’s a bit of me that’s starving hungry. Um, but there are lots of other bits of me and there are compensations to being (funny voice) a ‘spinster’. There are fantastic, you know, any mess that you see around you is mine or my son’s and it’s there because I’ve decided to let it be there, uh, you know. There’s lots that’s great about being alone, and lots that isn’t great. But then there’s lots that isn’t great about being in a relationship – even if it’s a great relationship, there’s still difficult things about it I guess so, yeah.

I just want to say, like you were saying before, sexual abuse is so prevalent, I mean there are such high numbers in our society and our culture and it’s so unlooked at, so undiscussed, and because it’s unlooked at and undiscussed, children continue to be vulnerable to it and will continue to be vulnerable to it until it’s a matter of general discussion. You know, it’s one of the ways in which human beings weird out, you know, people weird out in all sorts of, people wig out in all kinds of different ways and sex is one of the ways that they wig out because it’s such a big thing. Sex is huge. You know, there’s really really really really bad sex and there’s really really really really amazing sex and there’s everything in between and it’s huge, it’s huge, it’s huge on an animal level, it’s huge on a spiritual level, it’s even huge on an intellectual level. It’s a big subject. And until we get to the point of being able to educate ourselves, and free ourselves up with it enough to be able to be able to properly educate our kids… I think people mistake ignorance for innocence. I think there’s a real difference between ignorance and innocence – it’s possible to know a lot of things and yet be innocent. It’s possible to know all about sex – to know the mechanics of it and to know what it’s for – know all sorts of things about it without ever having done any of it. And it’s ok, and it’s ok for girls to know something about what may happen to them when they decide they’re ready for it, we don’t have to protect them from… protecting them from the knowledge and the understanding about it does not protect them from the reality of it. And it’s really really really important that people, you know, that parents, that teachers, anyone in a pedagogical role, understands that ignorance and innocence are not the same and that ignorance does not protect anyone. It’s really important that we talk about these things with our kids and that they get to understand that as wonderful as sex can be, it can also be about power and as an element of personal power, your sexuality is yours. And it isn’t yours unless you make it yours, unless you say ‘It’s mine’ – a kind of consciousness. You know, if you have a really wonderful, amazing, beautiful, inherited treasure that’s come down from your great great great great great great great great grandmother given to you, and it’s yours but you don’t know what it is and you flog it for tuppence ha’penny at a car boot sale, you’ve missed something. And if none of your grannies or your auntie or your mother ever tells you what a great treasure it is, you aint gonna know what it’s worth. We’ve got to tell our kids what they’re worth and what their sexuality is worth and how to protect it. That’s me off the soapbox.

Comments

I thought that my childhood was idyllic, when I was a kid, and then, it wasn't until I grew up and started understanding some of my own difficulties in life, that I realized, and I uncovered, quite a lot that wasn't great at all about my family. And I suppose that the biggest thing that shed most light on it - when I was sort of involved in this sort of digging around process - was an amazingly frank discussion with my dad when we were working together on a job in London. I was really honest with him, it started with me being really honest with him, just saying that I was sort of suffering from depression, and I was just telling him what that was like, about the symptoms of it, and I said, “Look, I just want to be honest with you.” And he said, “Look, I want to be honest with you. When you were four, I came home from a meeting early and discovered your mum in bed with another man. It had been going on for a year.” And my dad told me that he beat them both up, he beat my mum up, and this bloke up, and actually physically kicked him out of the house. And from that moment on he stopped loving my mum and only stayed together for the sake of me and my sister.

Soon after that I discovered sort of healing and just was digging around, not digging around, but just remembering, started remembering lots, and one of the main things was that we lived, we basically lived, in a pretty loveless house. There was no love between my mum and dad because my dad stopped loving my mum and my mum was feeling really hurt, and really guilty, and so we grew up in a pretty loveless house. And because, you know, because of my mum and dad's upbringing, where their parents were not expressing emotion, I was never told that I was loved. And it's really funny, actually, because yesterday my mum said to me, because my mum stayed at the weekend, and when she left she said "I love you". No she didn't, she didn't, she just said - that's right we were talking on the phone - the last thing she said was "love ya". And it was so weird, it was so weird to hear my mum say it, it was beautiful, but I couldn't really receive it because it's like, you know, yeah, yeah it's nice, but it comes on top of a lot of none of that.

So that's the context really. My mum felt really guilty, so she was depressed for a lot of my childhood, so she was seeing a psychiatrist, although with huge shame because - in those days or certainly in my mum's eyes - there was sort of a stigma attached to that. So she was seeing a psychiatrist to try and deal with her depression and my dad was totally unsupportive, and just wanted her to sort herself out, and obviously carrying a lot of anger that he wasn't able to express properly because he hasn't got any friends. And the idea of emotional expression to him is just, you know - he's so frozen, my dad's so frozen. So he basically has, and still does, cart around with him a huge amount of unexpressed anger, which he keeps down with - he's got high blood pressure and he keeps it all down with beta blockers. Basically he's whacked out all day on beta blockers, they keep upping his dose and that sort of thing - so my dad, you know, people who meet him go, ‘Oh, he's quite cool.’ But you know, he's quite good at putting on a cool front, but you hang out with him, and especially around my mum, and just the anger's bubbling out of him all the time.

So that was the sort of, that was how it was. And Mum wasn't conscious of her, and didn't take responsibility for her, depression. And me and my sister - because we did things that upset her - we copped it, and we were constantly on the end of it. She used to take sessions on us basically - by screaming at us and hitting us and all that sort of thing. And so yes, and so I grew up in an environment where the love that I felt was got when I was doing what I was expected to do. Yeah? So if I was just doing what my parents expected me to do, I could pick up what scraps of love there were around to be had. And that was withdrawn as soon as I did something that didn't agree with what she wanted, and more than withdrawn. I quite often remember being chased around my house and being caught up and, you know… so I grew up being scared of my mum. That was the overriding feeling.

I wanted to say some things, and I told my mum that my overriding feeling towards her when I was, that I remember, was fear - and my sister is still scared of her, and somewhere you know I still carry that, and it’s not, it’s not totally healed, you know, it’s an ongoing process, my stuff round my mum - and she ... her reaction was, she said “Come to think of it," she said, "I was always scared of my mum."

So you know it's not... it's just how it is, it's a family thing that's passed on. I don't ... I have felt a huge amount of anger towards my parents, you know, I understand that they are only able to deal with the material that they've been given themselves. I know that it takes someone to go ‘I'm not passing this on,’ or, ‘I'm passing as little of this on as I can.’ But they weren't around, you know, they hadn't been in that environment, or they hadn't put themselves in that environment, where that sort of thing was going on. It's a generational thing, isn't it. In their generation it wasn't really happening, you know, there was the explosion in the sixties with love and all that thing. It wasn't very grounded - it was mainly drugs - and now we're at a time when we can challenge all this stuff, but yeah, that was their environment. And pertinent or relevant to all this was that I never saw my mum and dad naked in all my life. And they weren't making love hardly because there was no love between them - so there wasn't much physical, there wasn't much intimacy going on, and... it was more that it was sort of a shameful thing, you know: sex was a shameful thing.

There was the bare sort of basics of sex education in Biology, which was, you know, giggly, laughy, you know, but that's the sort of mechanics of it. I got right into pornography when I was fourteen and became the sort of school pornography dealer having come across stashes where people had obviously just chucked them out. And so I basically became sort of like a librarian, I'd just deal it out and make sure that people gave it back a few days later. And I got caught by the teacher and he confiscated them all. Pornography was actually like - I suppose basically because there's lots of stories in pornographic magazines and they're talking about people having sex with each other and exactly what happens - so yeah, that was sex education. And yeah, and there's a connection in that with my parents, in that where I kept them at home was across my bedroom floor and underneath this sort of compartment of a cupboard which creaked slightly as I pulled it up, and I used to hide them under there as a kid. I used to get home, get them out and have a look at them, but put them back, and one day, when I went to get them, they'd gone and I knew that my mum had taken them. She hadn't said anything to me, and I didn't want to say anything to her because it was too embarrassing.

When I was 17 I went on a lad's holiday - just finished A levels and we all went to Mallorca and my mum said to me, she said, “Now, be good and if you can't be good, be careful." That said it all for me, you know, the being good thing, being good means not having sex, you know.

For me the overriding energy of it all, again, was fear - it was fear driven - I was utterly consumed with fear and the fear came from a number of places. Because of my sexual education I had a sort of insecurity complex about physically not being big enough. All those blokes in the magazines and videos that I saw, all their penises were loads bigger than mine and I thought - ‘Shit! I'm deformed!’ and I'm this or that and it's like - how am I going to ‘you know‘? That was the first thing. The second thing was just I was one of the last to develop at school. A lot of my friends developed before me and had sex before me - either that or they lied. There was this sort of pressure, this real pressure, to lose my virginity. I was desperate to as well, you know. Even though I was one of the last to develop, you know.

I can't remember, I can’t remember how old I was when I first started masturbating, but 13 or 14 probably. But I was, you know, I had a huge amount of sexual energy, but I didn’t have a clue because of there not being much love in my home, certainly, between my mum and my dad, and I suppose it’s my mum and dad who are going to show me how a man and a woman relate, and that’s going to be through the love and tenderness and doing things for each other and caring for each other - well, they fucking hated each other and they were always digging at each other, so there was no example shown. And I suppose what example I got shown was, was the window cleaner that went round. These are in the stories in magazines where the window cleaner goes round, sees a woman who answers the door in a negligee and he says “Alright Darlin’ I’ve come round to clean your windows.” And she noticed that he was looking at her in a kind of a way, and so, and she said “Hey and when you’ve finished cleaning my windows why don’t you come in and give me some attention?” Do you know what I mean? So I had this… I didn’t have a clue. I laugh at it, I can laugh at it, you know, it’s funny, but I used to stand around places sort of trying to look cool because I didn’t know what to do - I really didn’t know what to do.

So there was the pressure from school, you know. My school was a pretty typical boys’ school, I suppose - a grammar school. It was all about scrabbling around for a place in the pecking order, and people would put each other down just to make themselves higher up in the pecking order, and one really quick way to put someone down was to go like that (makes V for Victory sign) which means ‘you’re a virgin.’ Yeah, so if one of your mates had had sex, and you hadn’t, then that was a way to... the argument’s finished basically, the battle’s done and dusted. So, I was desperate to lose my virginity to get up the pecking order. It was hard enough as it was because, you know, another way they’d do it was to take the piss out of my high voice, because my voice hadn’t broken. Do you know what I mean? It was - there was so much ammunition that people can throw. I really wanted to, for that reason, and I really wanted to just because I was, you know, I was a sexual animal and I was clueless.

I’m building up to it, I’m building up to it, because these are really important these fears, and you know... And another place of fear was a sort of a physical thing again. When I was a kid, my mum came at me, when I was about five or six, came at me, said “Hang on a minute, dear, we’ve just got to do this.” She grabbed my foreskin and she pulled it back. She said, “We’ve got to make sure that you can do this because…” - for hygiene reasons or whatever. But she never ever showed me how to wash myself. My dad never showed me how to wash myself and so that was it, basically. She just had to check for herself, maybe she’d heard something. And then, when I was about 11, I can remember getting out of the bath and putting my school trousers on, but not putting any pants on, and as I did the zip up, caught my willy in it - and I don’t know whether that was a contributory factor. I didn’t tell my mum and dad anything because there was never any tenderness when I did, so it wasn’t worth it. I’d never tell them anything where I was going to feel pain because they just, you know, turn… I remember saying “I’m finding this really difficult” and because of their inability to deal with their own emotion they couldn’t deal with mine and they told me not to be silly. And so I just, you know, well, I’m not going to bother then: I’ll be independent and self sufficient. But anyway, I don’t know whether it was that, or whether I’d just never done it, but actually in my memory I’d never pulled the foreskin back over the head of my penis. So, and I knew that that was what had to happen, but I, yeah, I think actually I wouldn’t, couldn’t, do it, and so a big fear - and it’s only really only in the last year that I’ve remembered this and had to deal with it - I was scared of hurting myself. So there was a combination of having not a clue what to do to attract a woman - I knew what to do, I knew the mechanics of it because I’d read endless... but I didn’t know what to do to attract a woman, make that first step, physically I was scared of getting hurt - I was also thinking I wouldn’t be good enough.

Now, being good enough was my bottom line, because that’s where love was rationed and not being good enough that was my bottom line, so performance was really important. I knew that I had to be good, and how could I be good when I was… when the tools that I had were half the size of the tools that, you know, that you needed? And so that was what led me into it - total fear. And I mean, I met various girls and had sort of relationships and I’d get off with girls at parties and, you know, I didn’t know, I just didn’t know how to relate to women really so it never lasted very long. And the girl, eventually, that I first had sex with - and I won’t say that I made love with her because it wasn’t like that - was someone who I didn’t respect, who I didn’t really like that much, but I knew that she dished it out, you know, and I knew that she liked me as well. And so I was quite a dapper dresser when I was that age, you know, growing up, and I used to have long hair and I suppose I was quite pretty and I never had - there never was a shortage of admirers - I just didn’t know what to do with them.

With her, Linda her name was - I’d really like to get in touch with her actually, just to say, look, this is what was going on for me at the time - I didn’t tell her, I didn’t tell her anything at all. I knew that she fancied me. I was 17. I can’t remember whether I’d gone to the pub with her or not. She was part of a group of friends of mine. We’d go to the pub. But I went round to her house and I remember the exact spot - I was on her sofa in her front room. And it was a fumbling, you know, sort of … oohh … it really makes me cringe to think about it. And we were, you know, we basically, you know… I can’t remember how many of our clothes we took off but I was just so desperate, I was just so desperate to put my penis inside her and then that was it: I wasn’t a virgin any more; basically was the story. (Laughs) And so we, you know, through all that fear I think I probably got half an erection, I can’t really… but enough to get it in there and then, as sexually frustrated as I was, it didn’t last for very long. And then there certainly wasn’t any, you know, much, connection. Her eyes, and I remember being quite scared of her eyes, because she was in her heart and she really looked at me, she really liked me, and she looked at me through these beautiful eyes, you know. Part of her story was wanting to feel loved herself, which is why she had sex quite freely with lots of boys, ‘cos she wanted to get that kind of reflection, and she was really looking for a loving reflection from me and I couldn’t give it because I was so scared.

And so it didn’t last for very long and I remember straight afterwards looking down to see if I was going to be mutilated or not, and what I saw really shocked me, and I felt so embarrassed, but luckily I could sort of hide myself, you know: from not, from years, I suppose, some years, of never, ever pulling my foreskin back, you can imagine it was pretty gunky. And so I was just so completely shocked and, you know, ashamed of my body and of what, and all of that, but also blimey - you know - I just realized that I’d neglected myself for… you know. So it was all pretty shocking and I was sort of… can remember putting my clothes back on, and her saying “Please will you stay for a bit?” and me saying, “I got to get back, I got to get back.”

So I went home and as I walked home, it was about half a mile to home, I sort of walked out and it was like having succeeded in an army mission or something and I ran down the road and, I remember, I ran down the road and I punched the air like I scored the winning goal in the cup final - (laughs) - to celebrate just having got over this ordeal. And having lost my virginity. Going back to school the next day, you know I was at sixth form, everybody: ah! ah! - you know.

And after that I saw her again and I felt a lot more relaxed obviously but… and I think for a week after that we had a really beautiful time together - and I felt a lot towards her, you know, just for having been part of, you know, my journey. I couldn’t put it into words then but I remember feeling that I felt a lot closer to her after that and she asked me if that was my first time and I said “No, no, no, no!” Even in all that I still couldn’t be honest and truthful with her and I just want to go and own myself with her and just, you know, I’d given her - I’d been with her in a way that isn’t truthful - and I want to do that in all my old relationships and say - “Hey this is what was going on for me at…” I mean - it might help them grow - and so I would like to do that, but obviously not enough to have done it, because I probably could find out where she lives.

So that’s the story really. And about a week after that I stopped seeing her and then very soon after that I met somebody else who I really liked and felt… yeah, it all changed after that… er, er ,yeah… I met somebody who I was with for a year and a half, I think, before we even had sex because she was 15 and I was 17 and she was quite scared. It was interesting being the other way round being with her, and she was a virgin and so I was experienced and so it felt different and so… There was someone before her because while she was away I had a bit of a time with her best mate - so that was the second time that I ever had sex - so it was just so different, and so I realized to some extent that some of the fear that I’d had was unfounded: the fear of not being big enough and all that sort of… just realizing that that it was all alright, even though that is stuff that I did carry on.

The more conscious I’ve got, I’ve realized that when I first - if I get a new girlfriend and the first time I make love with her - I’m really scared. And it’s only a year ago, I connected it. It was only then that I connected it to this first sexual experience. It was only a year ago that I realized the extent of the connection and of the extent of the fear that I had around hurting myself and around, yeah, particularly around hurting myself. But all the other fears are there as well - about not being good enough, about not being big enough, all of that, yeah. And it’s only, it’s because, I suppose, for quite… I don’t know, I think, if I look back, it’s probably been like that with every partner that I’ve had… but I’ve been able to - that first time - I’ve been able to get over it with - either just getting pissed, you know, or using drugs or whatever, or just to not fully understanding it, you know, ‘that’s just how it is the first time you make love to somebody, you’re bound to be nervous’ - you know what I mean, but I haven’t really understood the extent of the fear that’s been there. And it’s only since I started forming more conscious relationships that I’ve - where people have been actually able to understand - what am I trying to say? - in conscious relationships, where it’s not just about having sex, it’s about having connection, so in the moment of having sex and saying - ‘hang on a minute, I just need to stop here, because I’m really feeling this and I want to share it with you.’ That hasn’t been possible until the last seven years, six or seven years, when I’ve been having a more conscious relationship where actually that’s more important than anything else - is the healing and providing space for each other, you know - heal all our old stuff, so. And that doesn’t stop because you keep uncovering more and more, and going deeper and deeper, and I don’t want it to stop. It’s like, well, part of me wants it to stop, but that’s what’s beautiful about connecting with people now is sharing those spaces and being able to help each other heal.

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Uh, that's such a difficult question 'tell me about yourself?'.  Well, my name's Rachel and I've got two daughters who are 17 and 15, and I was with their daddy until they were about 11 and 9, or something like that. So the second part of that I've been on my own with them, and I have a very good relationship with their dad and his new girlfriend and their little baby. Um, I've got a lovely boyfriend called Rob, who I spend a fair bit of time with, and I've just set up a business selling myself as a make-up artist - which is what I used to do before I left London - and making my own lip balm product which is called Balmy Lip Stain  'coming to a store near you' and I do hair as well. I cut hair. So basically I'm home most of the time trying to rustle together a bit of business, and a bit of cash to live on, and being a mummy and looking after my house and my dog and my cats and I have a really nice time actually. I'm pretty happy, lately. And I might be moving house - into a new home at some point in the near future - so that's exciting, and a little bit scary. So that is where I'm at right now. I'm 42 - I love 42.

Well, I was brought up by my mother. I had a fairly, a fairly strict Jewish upbringing. Not as in very deeply religious and fundamental but a reform. So we did go to synagogue every Saturday morning for the Sabbath; we lit the candles every Friday night; my mum keeps a proper kosher kitchen, we observed all the holidays and the festivals. And so I was brought up as a good little Jewish girl. I had long, long hair in plaits and I was a fairly well behaved - although I did kind of live in my own little world, and I didn't really feel that I fitted into the world that I was being brought up in, but I loved my mummy and so I sort of held on to her. I was very very sick as well. I had... I was born a month prematurely, and I had pneumonia when I was 6 days old, so I was in an incubator for a long time and I've suffered with respiratory problems. I had asthma, kicked in when I was about 3, so my whole childhood was spent with sort of asthma and eczema. I was really really really tiny and scrawny and itchy and wheezy and I just wanted to be normal and not be wheezy and itchy and Jewish to boot! (Laughs) I felt like I'd been dealt a terrible hand.

I grew up in Holland Park, in west London - really great, right opposite the park. I spent my entire childhood in the adventure playground, up in the top of the tree house on my own, looking down on the world hoping that no one else was going to climb up to the top of the tree house and want to be with me. I liked being by myself. I used to ride around on my bike really fast so no one could catch me. I had an older sister who was 7 years older than me, and I didn?t really get on very well with her. She was very straight and very annoying. Always wanting to be in love, you know, and listening to Donny Osmond which made me puke. (Laughs) So at 15 I rebelled and became a mental punk rocker and just... that went over really badly, which was the intended result really. I was about as naughty as I could possibly be. It sort of kicked in about 13 but was in full force by the time I was 15 when I sort of realized that I could actually do whatever I wanted. Yeah.

Do you want to know the story of my dad? This is going to take a long time. Well you see you could make another film about this because actually I have written the script. Well no, I've written the storyline. Because there I was being brought up as this very very respectable little Jewish girl with my shiny shoes and my plaits, and my sister was 7 years older than me and her daddy is called Gary, we'll call him Gary, for the sake of this story that's his name. I thought Gary was my dad, that was what I'd been told, that, you know, this was my daddy, and my mum and my dad had divorced when I was about 6 months old. No they weren?t together, it was just my mum and my sister. So it was sort of like, it was like, because my sister was much older than me, it was kind of like, my mum and my sister were a bit like my mum and my dad. And so I sort of resented them because those two were sort of like the grown ups that got on really well and I was the annoying little girl. And that's probably why I didn't like my sister, 'cause she took to that role. And um, so you know, as far as I knew, my mum and my dad were divorced when I was a baby. And I very, very rarely saw him. My sister would go and spend weekends with him and I would wonder why I wasn't going and I was just simply told that because, um, because they divorced when I was just a baby that he didn't really know me and so there was no need for him to spend time with me. He had also remarried quite soon after splitting up with my mum and he had another three children so he had quite a big family going on over there, so my sister would go over and hang out with my dad and the kids, and I just didn't know them. It was all very very bizarre. And um, and then sometimes my sister would be in a play or something and we'd go and there'd be this man who'd come up and say hello to me and I'd go to my mummy "who's that?" and she'd go "that's your father!" and I'd be like "oops!" I mean I literally wouldn't kind of be quite sure who he was sometimes. And then of course I had my own children and then I realized that actually even if couples split up when babies are little, you know, those babies still get to see their dads and those dads still want to see those babies, even if they haven?t had a relationship at all together, the baby?s just happened, you know. And so I started to really question this whole concept of Gary as my father and I never had anything in common with him or spent any time with him. So I developed all sorts of fantasies, in fact I'd had fantasies all the way through my childhood about various men that might be my father, so it had already, it was already a thing going on in my head about maybe the rabbi is my dad, or maybe the man from the electricity shop? any man that I sort of connected with and liked I would think, oh, you know, maybe that's my dad, because I never saw my dad so I had to sort of pretend other people were. And there was also Uncle Henry who I thought was my uncle and that was all a bit weird. He would turn up every now and then and um, one time I caught my mum and Uncle Henry on the floor having a snog, which was quite funny ? which she denied utterly for years afterwards, that that had never happened. She said that she?d dropped her pen on the floor and Uncle Henry was helping her to find it! (Laughs) Um, yeah, so there's the whole Uncle Henry thing?

So basically, when I was 32, my mum threw a party for the cousins that she'd grown up with that didn't know me. And uh, and at that party, a little cat was let out of the bag accidentally. That this Gary chap wasn't actually my father and that somebody else was my father that I'd never heard of at all. So to cut a really long story short, basically I've met him once. Basically my mum had had an affair with another father on the school run. A father of a friend of my sister's. Ok? And, um, what had happened was that she'd fancied? there'd been a sort of thing between the two of them, they both really fancied each other, they were both married and they each had, you know, obviously, had a 6 year old daughter who were friends together at school. And it was all a lot of, you know, kind of (sucks air through teeth) and no, no, no, no we mustn't! Because, you know, they were both also respectable Jewish families, um, in Woodford, which was a very sort of respectable area - everyone knew each other. And then my mother's parents went on holiday to America and my mum was really really really close to her dad. She absolutely adored her father. And while they were on holiday in America he had a heart attack and died. So he didn't come back from his holiday, um, but her mother came back, you know, without her husband. And my mum said to me at that point she just thought "fuck it, life's too short, I really like this bloke." And she went for it. And she had an affair with him, and he left his wife and she left her husband and they were sort of renting a flat or something, and then she got pregnant. And at first I think he was sort of quite excited and then he started getting really cold feet and wobbling out and started going back to his wife, backwards and forwards... his wife obviously wanted him to come back home. And um, he sort of... and then I think they had booked the abortion and the day before the abortion my mum decided to go check out the clinic which was a little back street abortion clinic in South London, in New Cross, in 1965, which is, you know, before the legalization. And she went and had a look at it and was just like 'there's no way I'm coming back here tomorrow.'  So I was saved once that time, that was my first save. And um, and then she just told him to sod off back to his wife because she got fed up with him not being able to make a decision. And she just thought, actually, it would just be easier for me to do this by myself. And she'd just inherited her father's business so she had some money so she could do it. And she moved to Primrose Hill, which is where I was born. Yeah, pretty posh, she says proudly. Kind of posh in a sort of a um, in a sort of middle class, posh way. I mean I'm not, you know, it's not posh posh like old English proper posh, it's kind of aspired posh, because actually my great-grandparents came here as immigrants, so they were definitely not posh, you know, they came here from Poland and my grandfather was a very, very good businessman. He bought one of the first cars in this country and he was - he set himself up as a cabbie. So he used to drive around in his car, this open top car - he had terrible asthma like me and it was smoggy and foggy so he was really really ill. Um, but with the money he made from his cabbing he opened up a garage in Dalston in East London and he had a petrol station and a mechanics, and then I think he bought sort of various warehouses in East London. So it was all a sort of cheap area but by the time he died, he had made enough money for my mum to sell up his business and then she bought flats in Knightsbridge which in the 70s she rented out to the influx of Arabs that were coming to live in London that had plenty of money. So they were renting.. she had like three or four flats that she was renting to these incredibly rich Saudis and, as a consequence, me and my sister were privately educated and we went on nice holidays. And yeah, my mum worked it all really well but, you know, it's all gone now. Sadly.

I found out about my dad when I was 32, but he wouldn't see me. I wrote him a sort of really romantic letter because I was just so excited about the fact that I actually did have a dad, you know, after all these years it turned out, and not only that, but he had my favourite name, which is Harry. The whole kind of thing in my head was just like 'well obviously my father is Harry', you know, it made complete sense to me. He had gone, after I was born he had gone back to his wife and they?d had another baby, so they had this daughter who was the same age as my sister, and then they had a little boy that was a little bit younger than me. You see? So he went back to his wife and pretended that nothing had happened, no child had been born, I didn't exist. And when he got the letter from me he sent it back to me with a note written at the bottom of my page, of the last page of my letter after I'd signed off, that said 'Frankly I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie. H' and he posted me back my letter. And I think that was when the nervous breakdown probably started. Really slowly from that point but it was really bad.

And then Mike, who I was married to at the time, wrote to him again and, sort of less romantic, you know, a male letter, sort of basically saying 'you've got to meet her, she's got to be allowed to see what you look like, I will accompany her and make sure that she doesn't flip out on you.' And I was a bit annoyed by that kind of - he didn't say 'flip out on you' but I was kind of annoyed that he was sort of saying that I needed to be accompanied, as though I couldn't actually have this relationship with this man, or a meeting with this man, without needing some sort of accompaniment - you know- and it was taking another letter from somebody else to try to get him. And he actually honoured Mike with a slightly more detailed letter, you know, which he hadn't bothered to give me, in which he sort of said you know 'I never thought I'd see Rachel's mum again,' - you know - 'I just put it all to the back of my mind... my wife doesn't know about this, nor do my children' - you know - 'No, I'm just not going there. I don't want to bring all this up.'  And so I sort of had to kind of leave it at that.

And then, about four years later when me and Mike were kind of right in the middle of sort of splitting up, and I was in a real mess, and everything was going very badly wrong, my mum wrote him a letter, my mum wrote him a letter saying - you know - 'I have not contacted you in 36 years' - by now this would be - 'I haven't asked you for anything at all, not once, and this time I'm asking and I mean it and you've got to see her.' And he did respond favourably to that letter. And I was driven up to London, cause I'd moved to Somerset by now, I was driven to London by Mike under the guise of us having an appointment with him. He was an accountant, so we were going to his office pretending to be having an appointment with him. And I met him in his office. And it was just so sad because he so obviously is my dad, you know. We've got the same sense of humour, we instantly liked each other, we could have had a really... you know I could imagine going for walks in the park with him and, you know, I would have really have liked it and I really liked him, um, but it was just clear that his main priority was that his family was never going to find out about this. And that means keeping me shut out. And um, I could cry, but I'm not going to right now. I do cry about it.

So my relationships with boys have sort have been - you know - when I found out about him, now that I can look back in retrospect at the way that I behaved with boys when I was younger, there?s a sort of underlying rejection and unwantedness  - you know, that's my history - my history was a sort of deceitful, and an unwantedness, and sort of rejection thing that was going to be my pattern throughout my early relationships with young boys.

I don't think I did get any sex education. I don't know... I think sex education is handled so badly in this country that it really, it makes me quite angry. I got a small bit of information when I was on holiday in Israel with my mum and she wouldn't go swimming. She wouldn't get in the swimming pool and I couldn't understand why and I kept on pressuring her 'oh why, why, why, why won't you go?' - you know - 'why can't you swim?' And finally she had to explain to me that she was bleeding, etc, and she probably didn't say that, um and I didn't really know what it meant. Maybe she said she had her period. She took that as a cue to explain to me about sex, which it wasn't what I was asking about as far as I remember, I was probably about 8 or 9, maybe 9,and uh, and so she decided at that point that it was time to tell me about the birds and the bees and so what she said to me was that... her words were 'the man goes to bed', no, what did she say? 'The man puts his penis in the lady's vagina and they go to bed like that'. I think that was her way of telling me that's how babies are made. So I had this very strange picture in my head of this man and this woman standing face to face in front of the bed, him somehow squishing his flaccid penis into the lady's vagina hole, and then them really carefully kind of shifting their way together towards the bed and lying down really carefully so that it didn't come out. And that was what you did when you wanted a baby and that was the only reason for it, for doing this weird strange act of not getting into bed properly (laughs) like normal. Yes, it's quite shocking. So that was it.

So to sex education at secondary school. We skip straight to that year, probably the first year of secondary school so I would've been 11/12. And you know, the drawings that they show you. I mean they give you 'sex education': they're not; they're giving you reproduction information and this is somehow supposed to educate you um, sexually. Which is bizarre. So yeah, you know, they explained about the menstrual cycle and about the blood flowing into the penis and about where the eggs are and how that gets to the egg and when it all happens in the month and I put my hand up and said, 'So if you're wanting to have a baby, the best time to do it is just before your period then, is it?' And the whole class laughed and the teacher said, 'Yes, but you know, people also do have sex because it's fun. And that was the first I'd ever heard of it, and I felt very stupid. But that was a, um, that was a bit of news to me.

So my mum had sort of kept her relationship with Uncle Henry as a secret, so there was no sex going on in our world. I went to an all girl's school, there were no brothers, there was no male, there was no male role model for me whatsoever, and um, and suddenly, there was sex.

Yeah so my virginity was then this sort of, you know, this hideous bag that I needed to dump somewhere, and get rid of. Certainly didn't want to be carrying that around with me anymore.

I had a friend called Chloe who wasn't from my school but that I knew from another friend of mine that was a neighbour, and I think she was quite sexually precocious and I think quite a lot of things came up with her. Like she was quite happy to talk about masturbating and stuff and we were like 12, and that was quite, I found that quite difficult, because, again, it was like you weren't supposed to masturbate. That was something that if you did you had to keep it really secret. And I did used to masturbate a lot, um, always with the fear that my mum might... you know once I discovered that I could make myself have an orgasm, I was just away! I was just like this is brilliant: what fun! - you know, I can do this as much as I like. So it was almost like I was sort of having this secret sexual relationship with myself, because my mum had always kept her sexuality a secret and sort of something that was considered really wrong and dirty and not to be talked about. I mean, you know, she'd bring tampaxes home from the supermarket and take the bag to her bathroom cupboard and literally sort of get them out of the shopping bag and into the cupboard without me being able to see - you know. I remember one time going into the bathroom while she was shoving a tampax up her and she freaked, you know, freaked - shouted at me to get out. So that whole sort of thing around sexuality, she totally totally kept it a secret. And I think she must have been quite ashamed about it.

So from that to checking out boys was just, you know, parties, wasn't it. Because I went to an all girl's school but we had a corresponding boy's school so we had parties which were designed purely for getting drunk and getting off with boys, basically. And um, the first boy that I kissed was really lovely, he was called Daniel Pollack and I think that he's gay now and lives in LA, from what I've heard. But I was terribly nervous, it was sort of the first party which had an equal number of boys and girls invited to it and it was a pairing off party. And I had got really dressed up. I looked killer: I had on these skin-tight, leopard-skin leggings and my sister had lent me stilettos, and I had like a leotard top underneath you know with the leggings over and like a belt. And I think my sister had even done my hair for me in sort of big flicks. And I remember walking, cause it was in my friend's basement, and I do remember walking, I must have been about 12, walking down the steps and all the boys' jaws just dropped and I was definitely the hottest looking girl out of all the lovely girls that were at the party. I knew that I looked hot. And all, everyone kind of coupled up and obviously you know, I got picked by this guy Daniel who was the loveliest of the boys. Like automatic... she's, you know, I'm having that one. And all the girls and the boys all started snogging, kissing, and I felt terribly uneasy and I didn't really want to do it. And he kept trying to kind of sneak his arm around me like this by pretending to be sort of scratching the wallpaper and I kept going - you know - 'what are you doing? What are you doing?' And he was going 'Oh nothing, nothing.'

And then there was this whole thing about the lights - everyone was going 'Turn the lights off,' and he was going to me 'Do you want the lights on or off?'and I was going 'On.' And he was going 'Leave the lights on.' And I could see him turning away going (whispers) 'Turn them off.'  So I could see what he was doing. And then um, you know, and then he stuck his tongue in my mouth and I screamed at him - I went 'What the hell are you doing?' 'Cause I had no idea that there was anything to do with tongues going to go on with this kissing malarkey! So I was appalled, and very disappointed 'cause I didn't realize we'd have to do that touching tongues thing. Disgusting. And so I think he was a bit like 'Oh God, she's really frigid and tight this girl.' And then a little bit later I think I did kiss him again and I realized it was really nice and I sort of got quite into it. And we did do proper kissing, and I did like it. This was at the same party after I'd gotten over my initial shock and horror, I then sort of tried it again and thought ooh, yeah, yeah, it's rather nice. So I did that for a bit. But then we all went for a date, this sort of group date ice-skating kind of, the following weekend, and I obviously wasn?t looking quite so hot as I had looked at a party 'cause I was sort of wrapped up to go ice skating, and uh, he decided that he liked Tanya, who was the girl who had thrown the party. And he sort of didn't really pay me much attention and he went off with Tanya, and we all went back to another friend's house and they were all shouting horrible things outside about me. And I was really upset. I think because I'd needed to be home by a certain time. There was some reason why they all wanted to go on and do something else and I couldn't and all the boys sort of got a bit horrid. And um I was really upset and I went home and I was really sad 'cause I liked Daniel Pollack. You know, he was handsome, and um, and he had a baseball jacket which I thought was really cool in those days. Like an American style baseball jacket with leather sleeves. I liked those, so you know, obviously I liked him. And I cried to my mum and she said 'Oh, don't worry dear, there's plenty more fish in the sea', and I just thought, I'm never ever going to come to you with my heartbreak again, ever. You know, if you think that's going to help? 'There are plenty more fish in the sea.' I didn't want any other fish - I liked him. So my mother has this sort of very kind of emotional, you know... she doesn't do emotional. She doesn't really see the point of it. And so kind of my emotional stuff, I've never really taken that to my mum.

So yeah, so after that, my sexual promiscuity was just kind of me just going, right, I'm just going to do what I want now; obviously my mum can't deal with anything, so I?m going to find out about everything by myself. So I started sort of you know, abusing drugs and alcohol and... this was - I met my first boyfriend when I was 15, my Proper First Boyfriend, who was a punk rocker called Sven Dogsucker. And he was really bad and horrible and he was ugly in the fact that he had a sort of mohican - shaved the side of his head and sort of three nose rings, two in one side and one in the other, and I think he probably wore makeup and he was really revolting and I just thought yeah, (laughs), you?ll do. If I really want to go against the grain, this is my perfect opportunity. So we went on a date. I got off with him at a gig - a 999 gig. And um, and he was a friend of my friend Sarah's, he'd been a lodger of hers' - her dad had some flat that he'd lodged in, and Sarah was forbidden to see him. I think she'd got off with him once and her mum had found out and she was actually banned from ever seeing him. So I thought, OK, well, seeing as your banned from seeing him, I'll go out with him then. And um, so uh, yeah. I got off with him at this gig and then I didn't know how to find him, and then I went to Southall and found his friend and then yeah, I went through this whole kind of detective thing. I had to go down this really really really really long road called Lady Margaret's Road, and ask - ringing all the doorbells and asking if anyone knew a punk rocker called Rhubarb. And I did find Rhubarb, and Rhubarb was in love with me, unfortunately, because I had to use him to then find Sven which probably wasn't very nice for poor dear Rhubarb. He lived in the shed in his mum?s garden. He wasn't allowed in the house (laughs).

And so I went out on a date with Sven and we went to the funfair and I sort of said to him, basically: I want to lose my virginity. I said 'I'm a virgin, I want to get rid of it, I want you to do it'. And he said 'Not before you?re 16 and you?ve got to go on the pill.' Which was quite weird. It's not very punk rock. No. He was 19 though, so that was quite a big age gap at that time. And so he'd obviously realized that he didn't want to be fathering any children, and um, possibly didn't want to get nicked either. Maybe he just said I had to go on the pill? I think he did say something about me being 16. But um, anyway, I didn't go on the pill. Not until... in fact, we split up 9 months later and it was during those first two weeks when you start taking the pill but you're not safe yet, we split up then, it was really annoying. I did have sex with him during that time, yeah, yeah, I did. We used condoms. We were great fans of condoms.

Well, I don't think I'd been going out with him very long, maybe a couple of weeks, and um, his mum didn't approve of me coming around to the house. They lived in a tiny little terraced house so it was very difficult to be discreet. And so we packed up some candles and some blankets and we went to this building site where they were building some new houses. And there were all these sort of houses that had been built but they didn't have any doors or windows. They were just sort of shells. And we had to climb over the wall and the barbed wire fence. And there were signs up saying that there were dogs patrolling it so that was a bit worrying but we couldn't see any sign of dogs. So we climbed in and we went up into this bedroom upstairs and we put out the blankets and made a bed and lit the candles and proceeded to do the do. Yeah, he knew that I was a virgin, and he'd said to me that he'd only slept with - it might have been one or it might have been three - but a very small number. I can't remember if it was just one. But yeah, that he hadn't had very many sexual encounters himself so...

I thought it was rubbish. I thought, you know, it was over really, really quickly. He came kind of almost immediately. I remember sort of feeling this thing between my legs and kind of thinking, gosh, that's a strange new sensation that I've never felt before. But it wasn't kind of exciting or erotic. And uh, and then before I knew it, it was over. And then he was all upset because he'd been so rubbish and I was the one sort of going 'It's ok dear, you know'- I just sort of said to him - 'you know if you've only had sex a few times, that's quite normal and we'll probably get better at it.' And he just sort of, he was really upset and said 'It's not true I haven't only had sex two or three times, I've had it loads, I've had like sex with nine girls, or something, and I'm just rubbish at it.' So it was a sort of confession at the end of this weird virginity losing experience. So I had to deal with his confession that he'd actually lied about how many girls he'd had sex with, and that he'd done such a bad job of it all.

But then I think after that sex probably did get ok. Yeah, I continued to sleep with him. We had quite a lot of fun. I remember one time the condom broke and that was rather alarming. The top of it came off, and I found it later that day in my pants, (laughs), and gave it to him as a present. We were watching telly with his parents and I went 'I've got something for you?!'

I think sex did start to become enjoyable quite quickly, and I think I did think, this just is going to take some practice. Because I think I?d read enough sort of girly magazines to know that the first time isn't really you know, you don't have too much expectation of it. So yeah, I think I knew from reading those kinds of Jackie magazines, and that, that the sex would get better with practice. I don't think it was ever that great with him though, to be honest. I mean, you know, sex when you're 15 is a bit different to sex when you're 40 (laughs). I think emotional maturity and security and self-assuredness makes it different.

I think I was really really needy. I was always being dumped because I always wanted - I wanted each and every boy that I went out with. I did it with the intention of them falling in love with me and never leaving me. And so because I was so needy, that of course puts boys off quite badly. I mean, you know, there were a couple of boys that fell in love with me and I didn't want to be with them, but on the whole I was always being dumped and I was very often suffering with a kind of heart-break of rejection as a consequence of that. I didn't know how to be with boys at all. So yeah, it wasn?t really very good, I mean even to the point where my marriage - my relationship with Mike - it was very much based on the fact that we were just good mates and he didn't want to be in a full-time relationship with me, although we'd sleep together sometimes and I was completely in love with him, and he even, for the first two years of our relationship dumped me regularly. So I was kind of always in this state of sort of weeping, kind of not understanding why he was doing this. And, um, until, you know, I got pregnant with Minnie and we got together properly. So yeah, I've um, managed to sustain the pattern of being rejected by my, what would be the Alpha Male I suppose. It's funny that you carry on repeating patterns even before you know what the blueprint is - because I didn't know. But I was still managing to repeat it over and over and over and over again a million times. And that's shifted now.

I've really enjoyed it with my own girls because I so wanted it to be a different experience for them. There are two things? the first thing that I learned was that it's safe to answer the question that they ask, and if they ask the question then they're ready to hear the answer and that it's safe to answer that honestly. But stick to the question. Don't rush ahead, you know, they're not ready to hear what they haven't asked yet. I think that what?s happened is that I've taught Minnie and that Minnie has passed it on to Flora and I think that works well for a lot of mums. Because it's like your younger one is always your baby, so I can't actually talk about it to Flora but I know that it's ok because I know that she's got a good big sister that she can go to. And it's not that I want to hand the responsibility over to Minnie, but I think it's ok for Min to be big sisterly and advice-person to Flora, that's a good role for her.

So that was the first thing, was just to answer the question as it came up with them. And the second thing that I just felt really strongly about was that, I knew, you know, that it was... parties were starting. Minnie was getting to that stage where her mates were going to be doing it, and that for me was a pressurous time because, you know, once my best friend lost her virginity, I just was like, right, I've got to get rid of mine, I've gotta get shot of mine, and um, basically I just said to Min that sex is absolute fine, you're allowed to have sex, it's ok and it's fun, but the only thing is that it's got to be because you want to do it and for no other reason - not because your mates are doing it, not because the boy is putting any pressure on you to do it, as long as it's something that you wholeheartedly want to do, go ahead and do it - it's fine. And this is how to keep yourself safe. Yeah, she has quite a healthy attitude actually. And she's very very funny, and she talks about it as well in ways that I never would have talked in front of my mum. She came in the other day when I was in the bath and, um, she came in and sat on the loo while I was in the bath and got a tampax out of the cupboard and started shoving it up herself and I was kind of in the bath going 'Min, what are you doing?' and she just turned around to me and went 'I'm shoving a dry wad of fucking cotton up my cunt!' And I thought yes, we have come on a long way, haven't we!

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