Sex Education In The 1950's.

Me and Alan Deacon are walking to school one day in 1958. We are eleven years old and have just started at the 'big' school. Blimey it is big too! Two thousand pupils. All boys. I don't like it. The junior school I was at last, only had a hundred or so kids.

Alan and me walk up the long hill to the school backwards. We walk backwards because we like to look at the girls who go past on their bikes. On a good day, with a strong wind in the right direction, we get to see lots of stocking tops. Sometimes one or the other of us will say that we saw a bit more than that. But it is mostly wishful thinking.

In the 50's kids never had sex education at school. Most of what us boys knew, or thought we knew about sex was garnered from playground conversations with boys who didn't know anything either. Or if we were lucky we might somehow get hold of what we called dirty magazines. These were heavily censored. Pornography, and having pornography was a serious offence, and carried heavy penalties, so we very rarely got to see anything really horrible. What we would see were the so called art photos of nude women. You could see tits and bottoms, but the bit we really wanted to see, what we called the hairy bit, or the fanny,  was always hidden or erased so that it was just a smudge. This was really annoying and only served to make us even more curious about what it looked like.

Of course there were always some boys who liked to make out that they knew all about sex. I'm naming no names here. But I always tried my best to answer Alan's questions. He was very naive about the subject.

"Ere Bain?"

"What?"

"You know when you do it to a girl?"

"Yeah course I do."

"Ow d'you get it in?"

"Easy. You just push it in."

"Yeah but 'ow d'you get it in before the spunk comes out?"

"What!"

"Before the spunk comes out? Ow'd you get it in? I mean you'd 'ave to be really quick wouldn't you?"

"Deacon! You 'ave to put it in first, and then spunk."

"Yeah but 'ow can you rub your nob when it's inside?"

"You just have to wobble your bum up and down, and then it 'appens."

"'Ow long does it take?"

"If you are good at it it only takes a few seconds, but if you ain't done it much it takes a lot longer I think. Anyway you won't be able to get spunk til you're twelve"

"I know but I will be twelve in three months, so I need to practice a bit. Manley can spunk and 'es not twelve."

"Manley's a bleedin' liar. Boys can't spunk til they are twelve."

"What about the girl? What does she do if it takes ages?"

"I dunno really. I s'pose if they get bored they read a book or something."

"Ere Bain?"

"What?"

"'Ave you ever seen a girl's regina?"

"Yeah, loads of times."

"Where d'you see 'em?"

"At Sunday school."

"'Ow many reginas have you seen?"

"About four, and they ain't called reginas."

"My bruvver told me that's what their proper name is, reginas."

"No they are called fannies. Reginas is something to do with the Queen I think."

"So the Queen is the only one who is allowed to call her fanny a regina?"

"I think so. And her servants and the Duke of Edinburgh."

Deacon puts on a posh voice and pretends to be the Duke of Edinburgh, "I say Your Majesty. May I 'ave a butchers at your regina?" We both start laughing fit to burst, and keep on walking backwards hoping for a glimpse of the elusive 'airy bit.

"Ere Bain?"

"What?"

"What Sunday School d'you go to?"








butchers: butchers hook. Cockney rhyming slang. It means, look.