Nan allows her young cousins – of whom I am one - to touch her under her skirt. Enquiring hands tentatively explore the soft skin of her thighs, expecting at any moment to brushed away which happens often. A rejected hand must then resume its slow, blind climb under the drape of her summer dress, each time reaching a little closer to the triangle of white cotton that contains and conceals her bushy, never-seen, girl's secret part. Neither of we boys has ever seen female genitals. We desire what we do not know or understand and are puzzled that girls have natural access to what, to us, is an exquisite mystery. This the 1950s. We have seen blurry and cheap black and white photographs and paintings of naked women. But these make the vee at the base of their belly featureless and anonymous and we do know about pubic hair and that there is another sort of mouth there between their legs. I have read about labia in a book but I do not know what labia is or are. We pretend, Nan and us, that this gentle fumbling is happening in some place other than her own lower body. We talk in low, lazy voices all the time but of other things. She is stretched out on the grass on her back, an intent and breathlessly excited boy on either side of her. As we play, Nan relaxes her body without ceasing to be vigilant ; her legs are very slightly apart so that advancing fingers can discover the fleshiness of her thighs. I would not have believed anything could be so soft and smooth and warm to touch as the flesh of an inner thight. Of course, I have already seen these thighs that I am now blindly savouring since I have seen Nan in her bathing costume but seeing is a different kind of knowledge to touching. Touching has made my small cock hard like a rod of piping in my pants but I dare not risk taking my hand from under her skirt to make myself comfortable in case she refuses to let me put it back. Sometimes my hand on its upward journey meets my brother's and both hands withdraw instinctively from the contact. Nan is talking drowsily as we caress her with such infinite care – as if to lull her into the illusion that we are not violating her privacy at all. But of course, she is perfectly aware. My fingers are now close to the top of her leg. In fact if I extend a finger tip I could touch her panties but I resist the temptation in order to prolong the pleasure of feeling her skin. I know without being told that she will not let me touch her inside her panties. In the end, it is my brother who touches them and breaks the spell. Nan sits up brusquely, pushing our hands away and smoothing her skirt. She laughs at our disappointed confusion. « Go and masturbate, » she says. Now I'm embarrassed that she knows about my masturbation which is supposed to be a secret from girls or at least never be mentioned by them. I go and do it anyway using the hand that played with her to play with myself and transfer some of the magic of those caresses to my own body.

PS: Today's precociously sexualised teens will doubtless be amused by the tameness of the experience above which happened as I tell it; but that was the way it was for us at their age in the 1950s where I grew up. I still like to think about it when I masturbate today. I never did get any further with Nan and I sometimes wonder if she remembers.