When I was an adolescent, we all talked about sex but nobody did it. You would walk ten miles in those days for a kiss goodnight and to get your hand in somebody’s sweater was unbelievable. During the early Sixties, at 14/15 years old, there came a time when everybody had a girlfriend and it was really quite serious. She was the one you went to parties and youth clubs with and you sat outside her house for ages, kissing like mad and waiting for her mum to shout out the window, but nothing else happened.
I was 16 in ‘62, and that was a very important year. That was when you started to go to different parties and ended up snogging lots of different girls, although you didn’t know who they were, so that was very different from what we had come from two years before. And then suddenly it wasn’t abut snogging girls any more, it was about sex.
Your own sexuality suddenly became very important to you and moral issues became real problems for people. It was also a time when changing partners was something we were trying to get our heads round. One week a girl was going out with you, the next she was going out with someone else and sleeping with them instead.
Up to that time, in most working-class families, girls got engaged when they were 17, married when they were 18 and pregnant by the time they were 20. That was normal. If you didn’t have children straight away, there was something wrong with you. When people talk today about teenage sex and young girls having children, we’re only talking about a few years ago where the difference was that illegitimacy wasn’t a thing that went on; the premise of all of it was that if she was pregnant, you would marry her.
The early Sixties was a time when people didn’t understand what the real rules were any more, because we’d given up the old rules and no one had told us what the new ones were, so everyone was making them up all the time. It was really hard to get your head round the changes that were happening so quickly.