He and She by Kenneth C Barnes and Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan - a couple of the books I was reading in May 1976 when I was 14 1/2.
Fifty years ago, in the spring and summer of 1976, I was fourteen and at boarding school. I sometimes wonder now what other people read when they were my age — not the books they were supposed to read, Silas Marner and the Tolpuddle Martyrs come to mind, but the books that genuinely opened doors in the mind. I was also reading a lot of science fiction.
For those younger than me, perhaps think back to whatever period in your own life corresponds to that age: fourteen or fifteen, when reading begins to feel less like instruction and more like private discovery. Sometimes private enough to keep well hidden from Mum!!
What books did you finish because you had to?
Which ones did you read under the desk, under the duvet, or with your heart beating slightly faster?
What genuinely shaped your imagination?
Looking back through my old diaries (1975 to 1992), I realised that two books from May 1976 sit side by side in my memory for entirely different reasons.
The first was He and She, a Penguin handbook first published in 1958. I encountered it at Sedbergh School, though I can no longer remember whether it was officially recommended, left around in a House library, or simply stumbled upon accidentally.
It was earnest, instructive and faintly disapproving of anything before marriage, and only once the couple were the closest of friends. Parts of it felt old-fashioned even then. It treated teenage relationships almost like a moral management problem requiring sensible footwear and emotional restraint. Reading it at fourteen, I remember feeling irritated by its tone. It seemed to speak to young people rather than to them. Courtesy of World of Books, I picked up a copy for £3. It was 3/6 back in the day. Someone had got as far as page 27, where I found a 1958 bookmark!
And yet, perhaps that irritation itself was important. The book unintentionally revealed the anxieties of the adult world: fear of sexuality, fear of emotional chaos, fear of modernity itself.
Then, not long afterwards, came Emmanuelle.
This was another universe entirely.
Suddenly, sex was no longer presented as biology, morality or cautionary advice. It became mystery, glamour, psychology, fantasy and transgression. For a fourteen-year-old boy educated largely through awkward biology lessons and playground speculation, the effect was astonishing. I barely understood half of what I was reading, but perhaps that was the point.
Neither book came with diagrams that meant anything useful.
One book tried to close doors.
The other opened far too many at once.
What I remember most strongly about Emmanuel now was not eroticism, some of it last on a young teenager, so much as the sudden awareness of ignorance. There existed whole worlds of adult feeling, desire, sophistication and uncertainty that an all-male, antiquarian, quasi-religious Quaker boarding school education barely acknowledged. Reading became not simply entertainment, but a reconnaissance into adulthood.
I suspect many of us had equivalent books.
Not necessarily erotic books. Sometimes science fiction performed the same function. Or historical novels. Or poetry. Or political writing. Certain books arrived at precisely the moment when the mind was ready to expand beyond the official syllabus.
So I'm curious:
What were you reading at fourteen or fifteen?
Which books did you abandon?
Which did you secretly persist with?
Which books made you feel older, cleverer, confused, rebellious, frightened or suddenly more awake?
And did school ever manage to put the right book into your hands at exactly the right moment?
