Men in suspenders, the Stones… all we thought about in the Seventies was sex

All the current debate about the sleazy Seventies has got me thinking about what it felt like to be a young girl then.

In 1970, I was 14 but looked older. I had started my period when I was 10 and felt sexually mature — although I was far from it, not having progressed much further than snogging and, that hideous expression from the archives, “heavy petting”. I had not yet, another of those set-in-aspic phrases, “gone all the way”. I was at an all-girls boarding school and most of my friends, like me, saw our virginity as something to lose as soon as we decently (or even indecently) could. None of us was moony-eyed and romantic; we didn’t need to be in love, it was far more important to be in lust.

I’m not sure how much of the talk was bravado and how much was a genuine ache to throw aside our awkward, clumsy teenage selves and emerge — through the alchemy of the sex act — miraculously transformed, as we believed it would be, into the beautiful people we admired. Certainly, we younger girls were struck by the expression on one of the coolest sixth former’s face as she sprawled on the sofa in the common room, before the bell rang for dinner, in a sort of erotically spent position (or so we imagined) while playing Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s orgasmic anthem, “Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus”, over and over again. She had spent the long summer holidays on beaches in the south of France and whatever experience she’d savoured — to paraphrase the most famous When Harry Met Sally moment — we wanted a taste of it, too.

What I remember most from that adolescent era was the terrible, drawn-out endlessness of time. For such long stretches, we were so terribly bored and with that lassitude came a longing to be where the action was, to be part of that scene elsewhere, to be anywhere and be anything other than where and what we were, lying on the great green sprawl of the playing fields, behind our boarding houses, furtively smoking our first cigarettes (horrible Woodbines) and plotting about how — come the holidays — we would break free and have great sexual adventures and become Grown Up.

We had put away our childish pleasure of dancing to Top of the Pops — our Thursday evening highlight — on the stage behind the blue velvet curtain, mimicking the moves of Pan’s People (we all had our favourites — Babs Powell, Flick Colby et al). The DJs who presented the show meant nothing to us. Really, they were just a shouty, gabby irritant to link one act to the next. If we thought about Jimmy Savile at all, which we didn’t, it was how embarrassing and dreadful he was in his stupid sunglasses and horrid DayGlo nylon tracksuits and weird, wig-like platinum hair. The idea of a man like him — or hairy Dave Lee Travis (DLT) — being remotely any kind of sexual being didn’t cross our minds. But that is not to say that we — the minors, the underage schoolgirls — didn’t imagine what it would be like to kiss and press ourselves against (and considerably more) the real stars of that world, such as Mick Jagger, who was such a priapic prince then in his insolence and swagger, so confident of his sexual allure that he dared to be feminine (wearing make-up and long, gossamer shirts that were like dresses). He, we felt with some confidence, as we strutted around in our loons and Biba T-shirts, to Brown Sugar, would be indubitably GIB (Good in Bed).

It wasn’t just Mick who was playing with his female identity; something he explored explicitly in the film Performance, as he and James Fox morphed into one another, as they got their rocks off in bi-sexual orgies. There was David Bowie in tights and full-glam make-up, Marc Bolan with his ladies tap-dance shoes and the new transgressive Rocky Horror Show starring Tim Curry in fishnets and stilettoes. The effect of all this gender-bendering meant that you couldn’t not think about sex.

It was a sexy time. Even the shops were sexy. As a London girl, I spent as much time as I could in Biba, Barbara Hulanicki’s fabulously decadent emporium where you would loll for hours with your friends and strangers on a huge bed of velvet cushions in boudoir lighting. Down the road, in Kensington Market, men twice your age would offer you joints and offer you work shifts on their stalls depending, you know, on how friendly you might be.

I remember being in France and a beautiful bum serenading me with a song about “les filles de seize ans” — along the lines of how full of potential we were without having any awareness of our promise. I had this forcible sensation that what I should be feeling was an immense sense of the power of youth, although I couldn’t grab hold of it; at the same time I had the peculiar premonition that one day I would look back on a time when strange men would sing to me just because I was, for that brief moment, perfect in my young girlness.

The point of this Savile horror show, along with all the other radio DJs and producers who are being questioned, is not that we don’t understand the allure of peachy youth but that, in this instance, the Oscar Wilde line that “I can resist everything but temptation” just won’t wash.

Wanting to shed my virginity meant that I got myself into all sorts of scrapes. One night, I was in bed with some older guy at a party (it was two in the morning; I was tired and, as I recall, there weren’t a lot of spare beds in the house). He had taken speed and was tiresomely nagging me to have sex. When I declined, I got the usual spiel we girls were used to if we wouldn’t put out: “You’re frigid, you must be a lesbian.” (This from the sort of men who would pay quite a lot of money to see lesbian action.) On this occasion, the man told me about his girlfriend who was so keen to please him that she would dress up as a schoolgirl. “Really! But I am a schoolgirl,” I said before turning over.

There were many examples, such as this one, where men did not take advantage of me. I met older men on planes who befriended me, and would take me out for dinner with their friends — and they never laid a hand on me. I had nights with various guys I met at gigs but they never insisted on going any further than I felt comfortable with. So I ended up losing my virginity to my first boyfriend, who couldn’t have been more considerate and caring.

I wouldn’t have had anything to do with the likes of Savile and that really is the point. Yes, the Seventies was a sex-drenched time, yes, young girls can be sexually precocious, but this doesn’t let the old bastards off the hook because they really should know better. Making a habit of screwing around with underage girls does say something about you. And, of course, Savile never homed in on confident girls from stable backgrounds — it was always the most vulnerable and voiceless.

But I have to say, for all my gang’s desire to bed a real sex-god like Jagger, as he was then, I’m glad for all our sakes it never happened. Although I could never go along with my glamorous mother’s admonition that my generation and I were “giving it all away” when we should have been, as she and her friends were, “goddesses on a pedestal”, I think we would have been cheapened and bruised by the experience, as baby groupies to be used and cast aside. If I had daughters, rather than the sons I do have, I absolutely wouldn’t want that for them — and I wouldn’t have wanted it for me. My night with Jagger would not have been a story for the retelling.

Evening Standard