Just Williams

Simon on learning about the birds and the bees

I WAS ALWAYS interested in procreation. The business of how mice or cows or even siblings came about is a childhood mystery summed up by the mangled question my wife was asked by her sister, aged seven: ‘You didn’t be born out of an egg, was you, Lucy?’

When we were living in a rented flat in the stately home of an old earl in the early ’50s, I was caught playing doctors and nurses with his daughter under a yew tree. My astigmatism hadn’t yet been diagnosed so I didn’t really get the full picture.

My friend Briggsy had a theory about reproduction that involved belly buttons and a password handed out in the vestry after the marriage vows, which seemed plausible enough. Later in life, an elderly director told me that sex would be ‘so much better if it could be done with a nice clean part of the body – like the elbow’.

Before I went off to Harrow, my father took me to a county game at Lords, to talk about ‘things’ – squirm, squirm (he didn’t even know how to mend a puncture). Eventually rain stopped play with still no hint of the elephant on the boundary. In the taxi on the way home, Dad tapped my knee auspiciously. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Be very careful of older boys offering you toffees.’

I like the story of the two Wodehousian lads puzzling over the facts of life, and one of them ponders, ‘Imagine doing that to a chap’s sister.’ Throughout my school years my head was alive with all kinds of inappropriate speculation. Health & Efficiency magazine and bras on the washing line made me dizzy with curiosity. Still do. And apart from at the rump end of a box of Quality Street, ne’er a toffee has come my way.

My brother gave me some good tips on sex – for the best results French kissing had to be done with an anticlockwise movement of the tongue. He made me rehearse in front of the bathroom mirror. My sister taught me how to undo a bra with my eyes closed.

I was all set. I just needed someone to practise on. A hefty girl from the pony club was the obvious choice – she lived within cycling distance and she had stabling. It was a perfect match, me with the cider and she with the chocolate biscuits. Alas, when the time came it was icy cold in her barn and I got a bit of straw caught in the prophylactic – the pain was excruciating and I pedalled home uphill and in the dark, virgo intacto. If only I could have done it with my elbow.

Simon Williams was captain of house boxing at Harrow – a team of three. He now plays Justin Elliott in The Archers. simon.williams@telegraph.co.uk