Eliza,

All I can say is that you and your friends led a very much more sheltered life than did the people I associated with (and from what Richard, The Leveller and others have said, more sheltererd than theirs).

True, there wasn't the sexualisation in the media, or computers, but no TVs? I was from a distinctly working class background and we got our first TV in about 1960. I'd done with Enid Blyton by the time I was about 8, and I can't conceive of *any* of my contemporaries reading her into their teens, or even into double figures. We'd mostly done with the Beano or Dandy by the time we went to secondary school, but some people read The Eagle beyond primary school.

Our teachers were *mostly* very correct, but there was a coterie of young, more "bohemian" ones, who called us by our nicknames and tried to be "mates" with us. There were affairs between male teachers and 6th form girls, and, from what people like Joan Bakewell and other women journalists of a similar age have been writing in the media recently, this was far from uncommon, and tacitly accepted.

We were getting served in pubs (or the taller ones of us were, anyway) by 14 or 15, no problem. Landlords were more concerned back then with turnover than underage drinking. I remember on a school trip to Ambleside, a group of 13 year old girls from another school staying in the same youth hostel asking us to buy them some cider from a pub "off" sales (we were 14) and us all then sitting by the lakeside getting so bladdered that one of the girls wet herself.

Not sure if you were at a single sex school, but both my first "proper" girlfriend and I were at (different) mixed Grammars and the undercurrent of hormones and sex was there in both schools from early teens. There was snogging behind the bike sheds from a very early age and quite a lot of fumbling about.

At scout/guide jamoborees, despite heavy policing from the leaders and separate tent areas for scouts and guides, most tents spent at least part of the night "mixed" (we practiced our "woodcraft" in getting from male to female camping areas unobserved). I'd done with scouts at 15 so that was definitely early teens, and the girls were just as keen to mix the tents up as the boys were.

I'm not disbelieving your account, but can't help thinking you must have inhabited an enclave of 1940s attitudes while most of the rest of us were hurtling into the 60s at full speed!