LITTLEJOHN Memoirs of a lost Britain

THE incomparable Richard Littlejohn’s childhood memoirs evoke a vanished Britain. Born in 1954, by the time he started to notice girls the Swinging Sixties had not really got going — and he was more interested in playing conkers. This is our third brilliant exclusive extract . . .

THERE was no easy-access online porn when i was growing up, just a few naturist publications. National Geographic Magazine did contain some nude images, but these were mainly of topless african tribeswomen performing a ritual dance.

There was nothing erotic about these photos, aside from the thrill of looking at bare breasts.

One day, while playing in an abandoned air raid shelter, we stumbled on a stash of wellthumbed editions of Health & Efficiency magazine. discarded copies used to turn up all over the place, especially in the fields and hedgerows. you could go out conkering on a Sunday afternoon ramble and come back with more copies of Health & Efficiency than conkers.

The H&E ‘models’ were all ordinary folk

We’d have been safer swimming in an acid bath

The lifeguards would slope off to snog the girls

pictured doing everyday stuff, except without their clothes on. Most of the women were freshfaced girl-next-door types and for some reason always seemed to be throwing medicine balls and beach balls.

Below the waist, they were as bald as the day they were born. They were like the mannequins in dorothy Perkins’ window. No naughty bits. Bottoms made the cut, front bottoms didn’t.

in fact, there was no indication that there was anything ‘down there’ at all, although we all knew that ladies had some kind of front bottom arrangement. So why wasn’t this ever visible on the women in Health & Efficiency?

We pondered this, until one of the older boys announced he had worked it out. They obviously used papier mache to fill the void. We were familiar with papier mache, since we used it to make models at school. The landscape variety, that is, not the Health & Efficiency variety.

Nor was there anything even remotely sexual about the images in the magazine. The participants were pictured playing croquet, hiking across the moors, riding bikes. Curiously, though, not leapfrog.

i never have been able to work out why anyone would want to ride a bike naked, let alone hike across the moors. Stinging nettles must pose a serious hazard. The women were photographed barefoot, but the men always seemed to be wearing socks and shoes.

it has often been said that there is no more ridiculous sight than an Englishman abroad wearing shorts with socks and sandals. Believe me, there is: it’s an Englishman without any shorts wearing socks and shoes — and nothing else — while playing croquet.

H&E, which was first published in 1900, continues to this day, still serving its core audience of naturists. These days, the women are still barefoot but the men appear to have graduated to designer Birkenstock footwear and expensive trainers. They still look utterly ridiculous.

The attraction of H&E to curious young boys has long since passed, overtaken first by ‘adult’ magazines such as Playboy and Hustler, which cashed in on the decision in the Seventies to lift the ban on publishing photos featuring genitalia and pubic hair, and more recently by the internet.

Today’s adolescents can access explicit, hardcore porn at the click of a mouse, or via an app on their mobile phone. Nudity is so ubiquitous, it’s astonishing that any woman can make a living as a stripper any more.

We grew up in more innocent times. Modern youngsters will never know the forbidden frisson of excitement which greeted a boy’s first glimpse of naked female flesh in Health & Efficiency, even without the naughty bits. Friday night was swimming club at the Thirties open air Lido in Peterborough, built in classical art deco style, with immaculate gardens in front. The Lido opened its gates at Easter and closed at the end of September, whatever the weather.

Some years, Easter fell at the end of March and the temperature could still be in the 30s F, but that was no impediment. We’d be herded into the changing rooms and forced to walk through the icy blast of a cold shower and a 6in-deep foot-bath even before we got to the pool.

risk-aversion isn’t entirely a modern obsession. in the Sixties, they were worried that we might pick up all manner of infections if swimmers weren’t properly de- loused and disinfected before diving in. Just in case the school doctor had missed something contagious.

One year there was a plague of verrucas, to which i was not immune. i was convinced that i’d contracted verrucas from the foot-bath designed to stop us transmitting verrucas. it was like a stagnant swamp. Heaven knows what diseases lurked within.

That summer, verrucas were my constant companion. This particular strain was especially resistant, both to prevention and cure. The Lido management pumped so much chlorine into the pool that it could have stripped paint.

it would have been safer swimming in an acid bath. a couple of dips and your brand new navy blue bathing trunks were virgin white.

By the end of april we all had bleached blonde hair and looked like poster children for an aryan masterrace. That’s if you overlooked the bright red eyes. as a result of the management’s attempt to eradicate verrucas with industrial quantities of chlorine, i managed to contract conjunctivitis. While my streaming eyes could be treated with drops and cream, the verrucas stubbornly refused to disappear.

it wasn’t just me, either. Every other kid at the pool seemed to be wearing socks with their swimming trunks. Mum tried cutting them out and burning them off, applying an assortment of lotions and malt vinegar, all to no avail.

That was until we went to the seaside, sunny Hunstanton on the North Norfolk coast, for a brief holiday. after a couple of days paddling and swimming in the salt waters of the Wash, the verrucas had vanished completely.

if there was a verruca epidemic today, no doubt the local council would close the Lido, drain the pool and send in an ‘environmental rescue’ team in doomwatch-style haz-chem space-suits to carry out a clean-up, which would inevitably last until the end of September. Back then, we just got on with it.

Much of the school summer holidays was spent at the Lido. it had two pools: a full Olympic-sized main pool with high-diving boards and a learner pool for mums and toddlers. There was also a generous grassed area for picnics and sunbathing.

While Mum would take my sister Viv paddling or teach her to swim at the shallow end, i’d amuse myself doing cannon-balls from whichever diving board i felt brave enough to jump off.

There were allegedly rules forbidding running, jumping and ‘horseplay’ but these were enforced mostly in the breach. The lifeguards were primarily interested in impressing the older girls, who never seemed to get wet and spent most of their time, when they weren’t giggling, adjusting their swimming costumes and playing with their hair.

a second-tier balcony ran around the perimeter of the pool. This was where the older boys (and the lifeguards) would slope off for a cigarette, or a quick snog and a grope with the girls. We younger boys would be granted a sly drag in exchange for not blowing the whistle on their light petting.

in my early teens, i’d take out a season ticket to the Lido every year. it was one of the meeting places during the summer holidays, prized as much for posing and picking up the opposite sex as swimming: somewhere to show off new fashions and listen to transistor radios, which were strictly against the rules but openly tolerated.

Most of my sex education came from the Lido: especially the graffiti carved into the cubicle doors, some of which was far more explicit than anything we were ever taught in biology classes.

The Lido also had its own resident nonce, who would stand in the shallow end on club nights and encourage children to swim between his legs. He was well known for it. Parents would warn their kids not to go anywhere near him.

The clue was in the name: he was called Frank The Bummer. Frank never pushed it too far, to the best of my knowledge. if he’d ever acted on his urges, he’d have been lynched from the top diving board.

years later, after i mentioned Frankie B in my daily Mail column, in relation to a story about paedophiles being given Viagra on the NHS, i heard from his former probation officer. Turned out Frank did have a bit of form, after all. Nothing serious, but enough to warrant the authorities keeping an eye on him.

Given the ‘paedo’ mania of recent years, Frank would today have been burned out of his home by an angry mob before he got anywhere near the Lido, just to be on the safe side. after one bout of News of the World-inspired anti-‘peed-io-file’ hysteria in the Noughties, a lynch-mob on the South Coast attacked an innocent paediatrician.

Swimming club catering ran to a couple of vending machines, which dispensed chicken soup, Bovril and Vimto in paper cups for a couple of pence. it didn’t matter which button