'Did your mother tell you about the birds and the bees?'

It was all so different when I was a young teenager. My mother never gave me any information of any kind. It was all too embarrassing in those days to discuss such things.

She obtained a booklet called ‘The birds and the bees’ which made little sense. Also of no use was the booklet my friend’s mother had sent for from ‘Woman’s Own’ which gave helpful information about the monthly clearing of ‘ashes’ from a woman’s body.

As we had a Yorkshire range at home where the ashes were cleared out daily, that was also unfathomable.

There were generations of children who could not talk to their mothers about sex or their bodies. As for fathers, anything to do with children generally was women’s work!Going to an all-girls convent grammar school also proved unenlightening.

Anything loosely touching on sex education came in the guise of biology lessons. We sat through a British Sex Education video where the presenter informed us in a clipped English accent that ‘Going to the farmyard, hens lay eggs, so do mother birds, fishes, and reptiles while humans and cows develop their babies inside their bodies’

We came out of the lesson as clueless as when we had gone in! We learnt quite a bit about plants and their antics with stamens, and the reproductive system of rabbits, but nothing about our own bodies! We probably still believed that babies were found in gooseberry bushes!

One of our unmarried lay teachers gave us some dire warnings about our dealings with the opposite sex. If going to a party, she said, make sure that you take a telephone directory with you in case you want to sit on a boy’s knee.

It will prevent him from getting excited. That was rather impractical if only because there were few phones around, with the only telephone directories in phone boxes!!

The same teacher told one of her classes that it was unwise to have much of a shine on shoes as boys may be able to see the reflection of our knickers in them! This alleged state of excitement by the opposite sex wasn’t something we knew anything about, and we certainly couldn’t ask our mothers!

We actually had little or no contact with the opposite sex and no male teachers either. In later years the school I had attended became co-educational, too late for me!We were told however that as good Catholic girls, sex anyway was only for inside a marriage and then only for the use of procreating, not enjoyment! There was also no permitted birth control, only the rhythm methods. It hardly seemed worth the effort!!One of my classmates started going out with a young man who was a medical student. It was unusual for anyone to acquire a boyfriend as a young teenager, but one of the advantages of it was that she brought one of his medical textbooks to school. This enlightened us about the whole matter of sex and pregnancy, and male physiology! It was better than anything from ‘Woman’s Own’