D is for discovery: the day my sister and I discovered sex.
I can remember the day very clearly; the day my sister and I discovered sex. I guess we must have been about 9 and 11. This was the 1970s. These were innocent times, remember. Parents didn’t talk about sex. We lived in a Georgian style town house with three floors. My mum and dad slept on the top floor.
We were in the house on our own and decided to have a snoop round our parent’s bedroom. I don’t know what we thought we’d find but we were always up to mischief when they were out: drinking their alcohol and cutting up each other’s knickers. (That’s another story).
Their bedroom was untidy. Perfume bottles, clothes draped over a chair waiting to be hung or dumped in the laundry bin. An unmade bed, crumpled sheets. A sweet smell of odour and foul after shave hung in the air, waiting to escape. The windows were closed. The curtains half drawn. The room needed ventilation. Steam still clung to the mirror in the adjoining bathroom. And then we saw them….they were littered across the floor, hidden behind the bed, on the side my father slept. No attempt had been made to hide them away. Magazines. Magazines which were to become, for us an iconic symbol of adulthood; their discovery a defining moment. The ‘Fiesta’ magazine. I remember the name to this day.
There were adverts for strange contraptions splashed across glossy pages. And naked men and women; plenty of them – butch black men, slender blonde women. Puny men with scrawny torsos and men with athletic features. Some with piercings – in very intimate places; others with tattoos on legs, arms and buttocks; anywhere a tattooist would agree to practice his artwork.
And curiously bodily hair seemed to be shaved and we couldn’t work out why. Bodies contorted and twisted, writhing like snakes in a pit. This was a den of sin. And worst of all tongues – flicking and reaching and devouring. And bodily fluids like rivulets cascading across slender necks and breasts. And mouths open – awaiting jets of fluid.
It was a horrible site and I for weeks and months I held the vision of those pictures in my head and wondered what it would be like to do those things. It looked truly disgusting. There were so many questions turning in our innocent heads. Who shot these photos and for what purpose? Who were these people? Were they celebrities?
That day was a turning point in our lives. We began to talk about the naughty things we’d seen and what it might be like to do those things.
Those Fiesta magazines became a gateway to our own fantasies replacing the tooth fairy, the seven dwarfs and the magical reindeer at Christmas flying high above snow clad roofs. In our world we kissed behind bicycle sheds and snogged at the back of school buses.
That visit to the bedroom propelled us to a new dimension. The Fiesta ‘feast of fantasy’ we called it.