The Pornographer Diaries

1. Papier mâché porn

‘Ow!’ I yelped.

‘What’s up?’ Barry asked from the track.

‘I got a thorn stuck in me,’ I told him, pulling my hand out of the brambles and sucking at the little black dot that had buried itself into my palm. The thorn showed enough of itself so that I could get my teeth on the end of it and yank it out, which brought a couple of tears to my eyes and made my lip wobble a bit. Luckily, I had my back to Barry so the rest of the school never got to hear about it. I wiped the blood onto my jeans and began crawling through the bush again.

‘Have you got it yet?’ he whined again.

‘You ask me that one more time and I’ll smack you in the fucking mouth!’ I hissed back at him, meaning, ‘You ask me that one more time and I’ll chuck your bike in the river while you’re in the shops and pretend it was Neil Barratt who came along and did it.’

I caught hold of a few more muddy and tattered pages that had been torn from the rest of the mag and gazed upon them in awe. The colours were dark from the damp and the dirt and some of them showed only fragments of pictures – but there was enough. Curvy, voluptuous ladies stared back at me wearing nothing but vacant expressions and an unidentifiable sludge you find under bushes in Berkshire – er, thorny bushes that is, not ladies’ bushes.

This was my first ever glimpse of a nudey mag and I liked what I saw. Sure I was no stranger to the Great Universal catalogue underwear and shower curtain sections, and if you took mine and every other lad in my geography class’s text books and hurled them across the playground, they’d all fall open on one particular page, but this was different.

This was a nudey mag.

A real, no joking naked ladies nudey mag. And it was amazing. Big round boobs and big hairy fannies that were so real I didn’t need to use my imagination any more. Whole glossy pages of pink, bare flesh with just a hint of bird shit and mildew that was suddenly more fascinating and exhilarating than hunting Christmas presents or finding my big sister’s diary.

See, just lately I’d been finding women’s bodies fascinating – not girls, not the little girls in my class, I still didn’t care about them, I was talking about women – my friends’ mums or even some of my mum’s friend and I had a recurring fantasy about my form tutor Miss Jenkins keeping me behind after school to sit on my head, but I was still in the process of putting all the pieces together. Nudey mags seemed to hold some interesting clues.

I’d all heard about these magazines before of course. Gary Allison had told us he’d seen one his dad’s stashed away in the shed and it was stacked full of pictures of ladies that had to take all their clothes off and stand in front of the camera while people took pictures of them. Barry had asked if they were covering themselves up with their hands or standing sideways or something and Gary had reassured us all that they were, ‘standing facing the camera and you can see everything.’ At this point someone might as well have told me that the universe went on forever for all the ability I had to comprehend this.

‘Everything!’ David Tinnings exclaimed and normally we would’ve told him to fuck off and go and play with his flute but most of us were suddenly far too busy rearranging our own flutes at this point.

‘Bring it in,’ Barry urged him.

‘No I can’t, it’s my dad’s, he’d kill me,’ Gary replied.

‘Yeah, Jimmy Hill. Your pants are on fire,’ Neil Barratt responded, then added, ‘He’s lying,’ for those of us who didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘I’m not,’ he insisted.

‘Then bring it in,’ the whole of the first year waded in. Suddenly you could see it in his eyes, Gary was wishing he’d never said anything about the mag because now he was backed into a corner and there was no way out without losing all face – and when you’re only eleven years old this simply isn’t an option.

The next day Gary swiped his old man’s mag and brought it to school. An enormous cluster around the tennis courts resembling Mecca at rush hour alerted Mr Escott-Neu that something was amiss. Gary tried to stuff the offending contraband back into his bag before our House Master clocked it but this was impossible in the feeding frenzy he’d created.

Gary was dragged off to the Headmaster and bloody lucky not to be caned. Then a letter was sent home to his dad and his luck ran out. Still, serves him right. Imagine nicking your old man’s mag? He must’ve been mad.

Unfortunately, I arrived just too late to catch even a glimpse of the sacred article and tortured myself about it for weeks afterwards until Barry told me he’d heard there was one in the bushes in the New Field and did I want to come along and see if we could find it? Ten seconds later we were legging it up the road and across the Old Field and crossing the stream and... well, I guess this is where you came in.

‘Come on God, pass ’em back,’ Barry was urging me.

‘Hang on a sec,’ I told him and savoured one last look at her. I didn’t know how old she was – when you’re eleven you can’t judge age – but she looked about 45 (see what I mean) and really quite scary. Her face was scowling and she had a wide gap between her teeth and heavy eye make-up and her hair was this enormous curly bush (up and down). She was leaning back on her hands and glaring at the camera with a look I took at the time to be contempt, although remembering back I’d say it was probably meant to be lust. Well if you’d never seen lust before, I suppose it would be easy to confuse one for the other. Maybe this was why we all assumed they were being made to take their clothes off. Certainly none of them looked happy about it. Also, I guess we just couldn’t imagine a lady taking her clothes off and letting herself be photographed voluntarily. I mean why would they? No, there had to be a room somewhere, somewhere where they kept ladies and made them take their clothes off and the ladies had no choice. All they could do was what they were told to do and scowl at the camera. Remember that song?

‘There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,

There’s a hole in the wall where the men see it all.’

I just assumed there must be a place like this in England too, probably in London, where girls slouched in chairs in the nude and generally looked fucked off about not being allowed to go home. And this was the proof. I’m ashamed to admit it but far from feeling sorry for these ladies and wishing they could be reunited with their families and friends, I just wanted to be able to visit this room and watch the girls being made to take their clothes off. Well, a room like this was probably a good thing wasn’t it? A great thing even. This was just what I thought back then, you understand. Although…?

She was an amazing-looking lady though and despite the thousands upon thousands of women I’ve seen since – in mags, videos and occasionally in person – I can still remember her as clear as if it were yesterday. She has become my epitome of sex; naked, scowling, big bush and covered in mud and filth. That’s my conditioning, it’s what my brain has told me I’m into. Like the duck that hatches next to a teddy bear and thinks that’s his old lady, that scowling naked lady has forever shaped my perception of sex. Bit of a shame really, not too many women are willing to cover themselves in filth and crawl around underneath brambles with me. I sometimes wonder where that lady is and what she’s doing now. I hope they’ve let her out of that room. It can’t be much of a life now can it.

I finally laid my fingertips on the stinking soggy mass that represented the bulk of the mag and dragged it towards myself, leaving several dozen beetles homeless and confused. The cover was almost black with filth, although I managed to peel a few pages apart to reveal bright pink flesh tones and backed out of the bush, mission accomplished.

‘Gis have a look, show us, show us,’ Barry squealed, hopping from one leg to the other.

‘Hold on, I bloody got it, be careful or you’ll rip it.’

We laid it carefully on the ground and I wiped some of the gunk from my hands and onto my jeans then set about trying to carefully separate the pages. I’m not quite sure what was on the first dozen because they’d become one big organic wad of filth (in every sense of the word) but on page 14 there were pictures of a blonde lady sitting on a windowsill staring out through a net curtain. She reminded me of that woman in the Flake advert, only with this one you could see her knockers.

Barry exhaled heavily but neither of us spoke as we studied the pictures. Overleaf, she’d lost her knickers (and her head too as we only managed to turn half the page) and we stared her wiry ginger bush as it caught the sunlight that poured in through the big window.

‘Fucking hell, I’ve got a real stiffy,’ Barry decided to share with me, indicating towards his cords. You know what, I know this is going to sound strange but I’d never realised everyone else got them when they looked at, or thought about, naked ladies too. It just hadn’t occurred to me that this might be a universal problem. I’d always thought it was just me and that there was something wrong with me. Now that I knew the truth I felt mighty relieved. That had been one doctor’s visit I hadn’t been looking forward to.

‘Here, Dr Henderson, what d’you suppose this is?’ I would’ve said standing there with a big hard-on. What can I say, I wasn’t the brightest of lads.

‘We should keep this at the camp,’ Barry said. ‘It can be like our camp treasure.’

‘Yeah, though don’t tell anyone else otherwise they’ll nick it,’ I said, then promptly nicked it after Barry went home for his tea.

The mag dried out nicely in my old man’s shed during the summer but went missing at the end of August along with that evening’s dinnertime conversation and I never saw it again. Nevertheless, I’d kept the picture of the woman with the big hair separate up in my room underneath my wardrobe (it must’ve sounded like we had the removal men in upstairs every time I was ‘doing my homework’) although she too disappeared one gut-wrenchingly horrifying afternoon when I came home and found my bedroom had been rearranged. Again, nothing was said although I was subtly warned against concealing anything in my bedroom again by my old lady, who liked to comment every now and then that she must get around to giving my room a good ‘sort-through’, just to keep me on my toes. After that, I kept all my bits of mags in my younger brother’s room (under his wardrobe).

Yep, that was a landmark year for me, that was. I spent most of that summer putting two and two together before finally coming up with five – fingers that is. See, after a whole summer staring at that picture and my own bewildering stiffy, nature finally took its course and at the tender, impetuous and innocent age of just gone twelve I strummed my first one home.

And I haven’t looked back since.