The Virginity Project

The age of innocence?

The Virginity Project has been a busy bee lately doing actual work. Don’t my employers understand that I have more important things to do than so-called real work? Like document your stories? Clearly not. The good thing is that plenty of you have been on the case and as a result, I have a rather nice back catalogue of stories.

Since the nights are drawing in and winter is whispering around the corner, what better time to settle in for a spot of ‘period drama’ than now? Sorry Dennis, I don’t mean to jest about your age, it’s just that it’s a rare occasion indeed to hear from the older generation - the whole seventy-four years of you! It’s also a great opportunity to reflect on just how much life has changed in a relatively short period of time.

Our parents really did live in an age of innocence. They remained childlike for longer because they didn’t know what sex was. It wasn’t alluded to in advertising, nobody had televisions and the Internet wasn’t even invented. Childhood lasted a lot longer than the perfunctory ten minutes we are granted today. If you are interested, Rafael Behr writes very well on this subject in the Observer Sex Special.

Meanwhile, pull up the blankets, light the fire and settle in to listen to a story that has more twists and turns than a twisty-turny thing. Bring a tissue. I don’t mind telling you that I shed a tear or two whilst editing this story….

Dennis. Born 1934, lost virginity aged 24.

‘I was born in 1934, the first born to working class parents who themselves had not experienced penetrative sex until after they married at twenty-nine and twenty-eight years of age.  My father had been a soldier, posted overseas for eight years during their engagement but I have no problem in accepting their celibacy as fact. 

I was brought up to the same tradition, my father often telling me that if a man had any respect for a woman, then he would naturally honour her womanhood.  I remember when I heard German prisoners - working on a nearby farm - use the F-word in regard to what they thought of the Russians. I asked my Dad what they meant and his reaction was to box my ears so hard that I was knocked across the room and I was told never, ever to use ‘that’ word again.  And so it still is, now that I am seventy-four. 

Certainly, I went through the schoolboy ‘dirty stories’ phase - but it was what I heard, rather than me actively joining in.  I remember joshing around with schoolmates and comparing ‘hard-ons’ but at 16, I still had very little idea of what this was about.  Accidentally discovering masturbation came as a shock but it was something which I was to make much of in adult life.

I had girl friends but never got fresh with any of them.  One girl friend lasted through 6th form until I was well into National Service.  I used to visit her house on weekend leave and we were left alone in the best room to chat... but nothing more.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt quite so stunned when I heard that she was getting married to someone very much older because she was pregnant by him.     

I also remember all the barrack room banter about what the other men had got up to at the weekend. ‘Did you get it away?’  ‘Were you on the nest?’  ‘It looked just like a peach when you take out the stone’.

I was twenty-one when I started university and student nurses were the main outlet for amorous feelings.  I ‘went out’ with one but we just found ourselves holding each other, hugging, kissing and getting very breathless together but nothing more.  

Then my brother died suddenly - found dead at work in a toilet cubicle from a massive epileptic fit - which shook me rigid.  The summer following his death, I was determined to have a holiday like no other and chose a Club Med straw hut holiday in Sicily.  I had never been further than Paris before and this was an eye-opener for me, to feel incredibly free ... the unlimited wine, superb cuisine, the sea, sand, sun, with people from all over Europe, and sleeping in the most basic accommodation: straw huts.  A lot was ‘going on’ for sure ... but oh so discretely and not in your face at all.  

We were just having the time of out lives... at least, I was.  It was here that I met the girl I was to marry, some three years later, although our ‘relationship’ (HOW I HATE THAT WORD!!) didn't get under way until we met again, quite by chance, the following summer. 

She was Scandinavian, a high-powered international secretary, from a farming background.  At the time, she was working in Brussels.  We had New Year together in Copenhagen.  She came to England for Easter, we holidayed Club Med again and the next summer we got married - a huge affair, at the farm, which went on for most of a week!!  She had rosemary sewn into her wedding veil, a sign of purity, as she - like me - was still a virgin.  She had an upbringing as rigid as my own and, although working abroad ever since graduation, she had deliberately kept herself chaste.  

I don't think we consummated our marriage on the wedding night; after dancing until 4 am, we were taken to a hotel for the rest of the night ... being called for soon after 8 am to return to the farm for breakfast to speed the parting guests.  The hotel room had two single beds, fixed together, as is the custom in Scandinavia.  We were too tired for more than closeness and bodily contact and the floor of the room was covered with rice the next morning from every pocket and crease in our clothes.

There followed two more days of partying and late nights, then three nights with my relatives in Copenhagen, before they returned home.  We achieved full intercourse - just about - only on our first night in Copenhagen, but the real pleasure did not happen until we were on honeymoon in Greece.  And so it continued for the rest of our time together – twenty-three years - until my wife could no longer do so, because of a colostomy arising from surgery for ovarian cancer.  Sex for us was always good and it was very rare for both of us not to experience an orgasm. 

When she died, she was the only woman I had ‘known’, in the Biblical sense ....and there was no way I could even think of taking another woman.  I was distraught for months afterwards.  I felt that our marriage had been perfect in every way, in spite of one of our twins having very severe learning disabilities - from oxygen starvation at a difficult birth - and then the cancer.  Her prognosis had been very bad but she persevered through four years and four months of hideous chemotherapies, two major surgical operations and radiotherapy.  I was with her at every treatment and I nursed her, at home, in her own bed, through the last three weeks of her life.  She died in my arms. 

For most of the following year, I drifted.  I gave up the job I loved. The stress levels were enormous and no longer made sense, so I opted out and worked in administration in a charity hospital, a job with little pay but zero stress!  Throughout my wife's illness, I had received a lot of support from a gay man.  When things were really bad, I would take my lunch sandwiches to his flat, from which he ran a small business supplying clothing to gay shops.  I was aware of his sexuality and didn't think being with him and his friends would have any effect on me. 

I went to his clubs and so gravitated towards the company of men, finding it impossible to relate to women.  Then, one such evening, in a gay bar, a man came straight up to me and kissed me.  I reeled back - why had I let him even near me?  ‘Why did you do that?’, I asked.  ‘Because you look so sad,’ he said ... and that was it.  I broke down completely and hugged him. 

After that, I got deeper and deeper into the hard-core leather scene and S & M, with my own full leather of the best and most expensive quality.  While once I had just my own darling wife, I now found myself in bed with ten ... fifteen ... maybe twenty men over the next nine years.  I even had a man living with me for some four years.  I was always a ‘top’, hating the submissive role; I couldn't understand ANY man submitting of his own free will to another - I loathed being penetrated myself, it was too painful and made me feel dirty to allow this to happen.  But whatever I had been doing Fri/Sat evenings, I was always in church Sunday evening. Through everything, I kept my faith.  Invariably, I ended each service a broken man and in floods of tears.

Then I joined a church group for an Alpha course and, during an evening learning about ‘The Grace of God’, I suddenly realised it was ME for whom the Grace was intended... and I ‘came out’ to the group.  From then onwards, I turned away from the gay scene.  Through a college friend I joined a ‘pilgrimage’ to The Holy Land and there met a delightful widowed lady.  We were South (me) and North, so our meetings were perhaps once a month and, after a year, I had proposed and we decided to marry. 

We were soon sharing a bed during weekends together and it was she who led me into sex again – and for a while, it was good; it was so easy to bring her to a very wild and noisy orgasm.  But I was already sixty-nine when we married and had had a TURP some years before.  So, not long into our marriage, I experienced erectile dysfunction and resorted to Viagra on prescription... the headaches this induces are nearly unbearable!!  I have done a little better with other, similar medication but, gradually, we have come to do without penetrative sex - just closeness and lots of hugs.

When we are on holiday, I am much more open to sex and have even managed to perform without the pills.  I think my problem is psychological as much as physical, as I despise myself for giving in to full sex before we were married.  I am so ashamed of myself for this premature behaviour, although it was encouraged by my wife-to-be and it was already clear that we would marry in due course. 

I can honestly say that I have not been anything more than sociable with men in the past eight years and I do love my second wife.  I try not to compare or contrast ... but this is time round just so different and I long for something of that other marriage, even if only a shared appreciation of fine things for our home, and a neatness which living with two dogs and a cat will never allow.  It is sad to say that, so often now, I am just about ‘hanging on’.  I have had so many hard knocks in the past 5 years that I swear simply would not happen where I lived before.   I guess that I just don't ‘do’ North!!’        

 

Gone but not forgotten

Almost exactly two years ago, I set off in my trusty car to interview my ninety one year old aunt in Cornwall. Interviewing people about the loss of virginity is one thing, asking your elderly aunt to tell you about the first time she had penetrative sex is another. This didn’t phase me. I was on a mission. I wanted this story.

When I had my road to Damascus moment on a beach in California a few years ago, it was the historical angle of this project that first got me going. We live in a unique country. Could I reflect that by knitting together the stories of the people that live in it?

I could hardly wait to find out. Months went by and I got a few stories under my belt but I couldn’t push past the age of sixty five. The truth was that I didn’t know that many people who were really old. Now, back in the day it was a different story.

I spent some of my twenties working with Alzheimer’s patients. This is not an exclusively ‘elderly’ disease, but in my case, these were all octogenarians. I rushed my daily duties to get to the floor and sit with the old folk. They had stories like you wouldn’t believe, admittedly ones they would repeat on a regular basis but I didn’t care. They were stories worth telling once, twice, or even three times at a sitting.

That was then, this was now. Contacts were long gone and grandparents had all departed. Except for Aunty Betty. No matter that we were not related by blood – she married my grandmother’s brother in 1940. She was, by a long shot, one of the most popular members of my family. Loved and respected in equal measures by my grandmother and her four daughters – one of whom is my mother.

A couple of phone calls was all it took and several weeks later, on a sunny morning, me and my mother leapt, Starsky and Hutch style into my Renault five to drive south. That’s not quite true. In a strange reversal of roles, I started the car and asked my mother the following question. ‘Where’s your coat?’

‘Oh’, she giggled with a daft look on her face, ‘I forgot it!’ Well you better un-forget it because it’s not gonna be warm where we’re going.

It wasn’t, but it was wild and it was beautiful and it felt great to escape the city despite nagging doubts at what we were about to do. But Aunty Betty had agreed to this and it wasn’t a surprise. She was universally known as a good sport, a game bird, the person who would always say what everyone else was thinking. She didn’t pull her punches. She was also as sharp as a pin.

‘I’ve got one foot on a banana skin and the other in the grave’. That had been her answer that morning when her hairdresser enquired after her health. She seemed pleased with that response as she swayed precariously, like a giant with stiff legs, across a sea of carpet, taking hold of trinket-laden tables and sideboards as she went.

She sunk into a grateful chair and we sat drinking cups of tea and eating cakes. What else to do with a surrogate granny? How I miss those days. I don’t look back much, but if I could go anywhere, it would be back to my grandmother’s house and her undivided attention over a game of Halma. No siblings, no parents, just me, my granny and a board game. Tea on a tray followed and the comfort of a tucked up bed. What’s not to love?

We can’t rekindle the past but we can make the most of the present. As I pushed the button on the tape player and Aunty Betty began to speak, I realised that this was more than a story. This was the documentation of the past that made all our presents possible. My grandmother had had seven brothers. All of them now dead. Aunty Betty was the last person who would ever be able to tell us about these people – and the act that produced a cousin for my mother.

‘On the first night I might tell you, I thought this is much ado about nothing. But then I got to like it.’

She only ever had one child but she probably had quite a lot of sex. She may have come from the dark ages but that never stopped this lady from living her life to the max. Uncle Teddie had been in the air force. Long after we got past the sex talk and the tape had stopped rolling, my great aunt dropped the real clanger.

‘What were you and Uncle Teddie doing in Germany after the war?’ My mother asked her.

‘Oh, we were spying dear’.

Of course you were. Silly us. There followed facts that I won’t publish here. Years might have passed but I know that the publication of such details would give my mother the complete and utter willies. Let’s just say that the ‘activity’ involved a camera, a lot of ‘picnics’ and a proud young couple taking pictures of their first born outside a selection of prominent German buildings.

My mother might be spooked but my aunt wouldn’t have given two hoots. Mainly because within six weeks of this interview taking place, she passed away. I believe that she knew she was going to die. If I was conscious of this chance to document detail, she was more so. That’s partly why she agreed to take part but it was something else too. I think it gave her a last chance to review a fabulously happy marriage.

‘The whole point about marriage is that you grow into a deep friendship. You grow older together and you become deeper friends. Teddie and I were very deep. We were very good friends.’

He was the bomber pilot, brave but sensitive. A man who suffered with stomach problems for the whole of his life, because despite the pride he took in his wartime role, he never got over the thought of the lives he crushed during night time raids over German soil. Women, children, people just like you and I. He was the dashing uncle that my aunts all loved and she, the charismatic young woman that he chose for his wife. Friendship, she opined, was the key to their success.

I had no idea of how many roads, physical and otherwise, I would travel with this project. I have seen life – mainly other people’s, at its best and its worst, and all through the telling of stories. This is the real deal. This is what makes me me and you you.

But I am just a piece of the jigsaw, a patch in the quilt of this life. And so are you. Go out there and ask your people to tell you stories. Do it before its too late. Because no matter how many sophisticated forms of communication we devise, when the old die, the past goes with them. Document it today.