My Sexual Journey Pt 01

It is every woman's romantic dream, at least in England, to live in a country cottage with roses round the door and an old fashioned country garden with its informal mixture of flowers, herbs, and vegetables densely packed into a small space. In a country where most people now live in towns or cities, many in drearily uniform suburban estates, I have often wondered if the English passion for gardening is partly an attempt to recreate that idyll. However, I am one of those few people fortunate enough to be really living what others can only dream about.

My cottage is one of a pair that were originally part of the farm that had been in our family for generations, and which were originally built for the farm workers. At the rear of the cottage was a large paddock of about two acres, which was only overlooked by the garden of the adjoining cottage, and beyond that was an area of old deciduous woodland which, unlike many of the darkly forbidding Forestry Commission plantations that march across our northern landscape, was light and airy with many sun dappled glades.

Like my father's farm, the cottage lay in the western lee of the Pennine Hills. In spring and summer the hillsides were green with the young grass and bracken, which turned to burnished gold in the light of the late autumn sun, the open fields dotted with the white specks of the sheep which were allowed to roam free until the first winter snow. The cottage was separated from the road by an ancient stone wall of local grey limestone covered in colourful patches of lichen and with ferns growing from between the stones in the shady places where the sun only shone at the height of summer. The small front garden in summer glowed with the multicolours of the profusion of old fashioned plants like hollyhocks and lupins. A stone path led form the gate to a front door of dark oak which was indeed surrounded by an arch of white and pink rambling roses which filled the air with their sweet scent from late spring to early autumn. I am indeed blessed to be living in such an Eden.

The mass migration of agricultural labourers to the industrial cities in the nineteenth century, and the increasing mechanisation of farming, resulted in a major decline in the rural population and many cottages fell into disrepair. With unusual foresight my grandfather realised that the cottages on his estate were an important capital asset and in the years following the Second World War when new housing was desperately needed, he gradually sold them off, using the profits to purchase the most modern agricultural machinery. Most cottages were purchased by members of the growing professional middle class whose incomes were rising and who could afford to buy a car which would allow them to live in the country and work in the town.

My great aunt had married the son of the owner of a small cotton spinning mill in the Lancashire mill town of Oldham. Despite his comparative youth my great uncle took over control of the company on his father's death in 1928 at the age of fifty nine. The decline in demand for British cotton goods during the First World War meant that hundreds of cotton mills began to close during the 1920s, a situation that was later made worse by the economic downturn of the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

My great uncle's father was a proud man and refused all offers from larger companies to purchase the mill. My great uncle could see the writing on the wall however, and a year after his father's death he accepted an offer to purchase the company from the Lancashire Cotton Corporation, which had been set up by the Bank of England to rescue the cotton industry, and he was retained as managing director. Sadly, he was one of twenty seven people killed during the V1 attack on Oldham on the morning of Christmas Eve 1944 when he was in his way to work on foot owing to the restrictions on the sale of petrol to the general public.

My great aunt and uncle had no children and on his death she was left with a large house for which she had no need, and a comfortable income from his investments in steel manufacture which had suffered a hit during the depression years but had recovered during the war. For a while she lived on in the house, all alone except for the domestic servants, but when her brother started selling the farm cottages after the war, she sold the house and after paying off the servants with a handsome settlement, used part of the proceeds to buy her favourite cottage on the farm where she had been born.

My great aunt was able to live comfortably off her investment income and during my childhood my younger siblings and I often visited her and listened to her stories of the old times. She was an excellent cook and despite having enjoyed they services of a professional cook through her married life, she had never lost any of her skills. I remember with particular fondness her home grown apple pies with a pastry crust that was just perfect, served with hot custard and cream from the farm. I grew to love the cottage as she did and when she died in 1981 at the grand old age of eighty three, whilst I was in my final year at university, she left me the cottage in her will along with a substantial legacy. Following a year at teacher training college I was fortunate to be offered a teaching post in the English department at a new high school in Haslingden, which was only about twenty five minutes away by car on a good day.

Before I moved in to the cottage I decided to use some of my legacy to modernise it, which meant complete electrical rewiring and new plumbing. I also had central heating installed — although I retained the lovely open fire in the main living room — and a brand new kitchen as there was no way I could have cooked on the antiquated cooker which my great aunt had grown accustomed to. With the addition of double glazing - quite a new idea at the time - it was going to be a cosy nest for me, my cats, and a future husband when I acquired one. There was a small outhouse at the back of the property which I had considerably extended to make a garage, and a stable for my horse - definitely the most important of my improvements - before I went to university I had ridden out for at least a couple of hours every day of the year.

ooOoo

My upbringing was unremarkable and ours was a happy home filled with laughter, except for one significant exception. At some time in their thirties when I was still an infant my parents had become converted to naturism. Unless they were expecting visitors my parents both went around the house wearing nothing other than a pair of wooden clogs or Wellington boots, and my father would often go and do the milking totally naked - I don't suppose the cows were at all perturbed.

Once we were out of nappies all of us children ran around in the nude without any sense of shame, and as there were both boys and girls we developed a healthy knowledge of the difference between the sexes. With the onset of puberty my mother wisely sat us down and explained the facts of life in a sensible matter of fact way, including the pleasure to be had from loving sex with a committed partner.

Our holidays were always taken at a naturist resort where the healthy delights of naked living were taken for granted. Those who can remember the naturist magazines of the time will possibly be surprised to learn that the absence of erect male penises and the demure depiction of female pudenda in the photographs were a gesture in the direction of respectability. This was a time when publication of explicit photographs of naked men was forbidden and female genitalia were airbrushed out in top shelf girly magazines - so different from today when explicit images of people having sex are commonplace on the Internet.

In retrospect the impression of monogamous sexual relationships among naturists given by the magazines published by the movement was a fiction, and the reality was that naturists enjoyed a sexual freedom that was unusual in those more repressed days. The appreciation and respect for the human body that naturists enjoyed was generally accompanied by an equal delight in a sexuality that might have shocked the general public, and drawn censure from the moral guardians of the nation had it become common knowledge. Masturbation was regarded as healthy, but only in private, either alone or with two or three close friends. Of course, guilt free extra marital relationships were also pursued within the privacy of the lodges, but explicit public sexual activity was forbidden by general agreement. Naturists did have a moral code but it was based on mutual respect and caring and equality between the sexes in a loving environment. Cases of sexual abuse were very rare.

We usually took our holidays with another family who were close friends of our parents. Even in my late teens I never even thought about the nature of the relationship between my parents and Uncle John and Aunty Rosie - not our real uncle and aunt, but that was how we addressed close friends of our parents in those days. However, on the last summer holiday I took with my parents before going up to university, one of my girlfriends told me that she had noticed one evening that the curtains of my parent's lodge were only partly closed - we children slept in separate lodges - and drawn by curiosity she had peeked through the window. What she told me was somewhat shocking at first, but as it didn't seem to have affected my parent's loving relationship in any way, I soon accepted that what they did in private was entirely their business. She said that she had seen my mother sitting on Uncle John's lap vigorously riding his cock while my father and Aunty Rosie were watching in obvious pleasure and satisfaction.

I don't wish to give the impression that there was no sexual activity amongst us older teenagers - after all we were at an age when our hormones were at their most active, but we had all been taught from our early years that sexual intercourse was a pleasure to be enjoyed with a loving and committed partner and that an orgasm was a wonderful gift to be treasured. In those days we developed physically a couple of years later than teenagers today — although physical maturity doesn't appear to be matched by an equivalent emotional maturity. However, from about the age of eighteen we began to experiment sexually in mixed groups of four or five, and I remember many secretive torchlit sessions of hugely enjoyable mutual masturbation in the woods.

It was then that I discovered that I had an exhibitionist streak, and the memory still lingers of the pleasure I got from spreading my labia and playing with my clitoris whilst watching one or two young men stroking their erect cocks until they ejaculated all over their tummies. The feeling of power, and the look on their faces as they approached their climaxes, was extremely arousing and made my own orgasms exquisitely sweet. It is a pleasure that, thanks to my understanding husband, I still enjoy today.

We naively believed that our parents were unaware of our nighttime sessions, but in reality they had confidence that they had imbued in us a deep moral sense - albeit different from the accepted norms - and trusted us not to exceed clearly defined boundaries of behaviour.

Surprisingly none of these group sessions included oral sex, but by the time I was nineteen I was enjoying the delights of giving and receiving oral pleasure with my special boyfriend in the privacy of my bedroom - merely a holiday romance as I didn't have a long term serious relationship until I went to university. It might seem surprising, but I was technically still a virgin when I went to university, not out of prudishness but because I hadn't yet met a man with whom I wished to share the almost sacred pleasure of penetrative sexual intercourse.

Lesbianism and bisexuality were hardly talked about in those more innocent days, but I did enjoy evenings with two or three other girls of my age when we masturbated each other, and once or twice pleasured each other orally. This was when I discovered that oral sex is different with a woman than with a man, probably because we understand better what will give our partner the greatest pleasure from our own experience. Sex with another woman is also less urgent than with a man, and in leisurely sessions of lovemaking women are more likely to enjoy the delights of repeated orgasms. In my experience only the most sensitive of male partners have had the self control and patience to give me multiple orgasms before seeking their own release. Sadly too, whilst women remain multi-orgasmic into middle age, and even longer if some of my elderly female friends are to be believed, the ability of a man to have more than one or two orgasms in a night declines sharply with age.

ooOoo

When I was at university and teacher training college there was little opportunity to practise my preference for the naturist lifestyle. I had a couple of heterosexual relationships when I believed myself to be in love. However, neither of my boyfriends had any experience of the joys of naturism - for them the only appropriate time to be nude was when they were having a shower or bath and when we were making love. As a consequence my first experience of penetrative sex was a rather perfunctory affair with no foreplay, and totally lacked the sensual pleasure and delight I had enjoyed with my naturist friends, both male and female. I realised that it was up to me to explain this to my then boyfriend, and to teach him ways in which to pleasure a woman. Unfortunately he never fully accepted my point of view and I often failed to have an orgasm during love making, leaving me frustrated and unsatisfied. The relationship only lasted for a couple of months after that. My second relationship was with a much more sensitive man whom I met early in the first term of my second year, but we drifted apart when he got a job in London after graduating and I went to teacher training college.

For a time I adjusted to a more normal lifestyle, although there is nothing abnormal about naturism - it is a uniquely beautiful way of life where all the barriers between the physical and spiritual are stripped away. It is has begun to grow in popularity in the last few years, but it is different in character from the highly organised and curiously moral activity of my childhood and teens, and much more blatantly sexual in a rather shallow way. The true naturist aspires to the highest delights that flesh may know in a return to the freedom and innocence of Eden before guilt tainted the divine beauty of the carnal with the dark brushstrokes of shame and selfishness.

On my first day at teacher training college I was surprised and delighted to discover that Sarah, one of my closest friends from my school holidays, was also a student, although we had lost contact when we had gone to different universities. We were required to "live in" during our training year, but somehow we persuaded the college bursar to allocate us one of the few double rooms. We quickly resumed the friendship and intimacy of our school days and almost immediately became lovers.

In my youth I had believed that I was basically heterosexual whilst still enjoying sexual intimacy with girls. For the next few years however, I abandoned myself to the lesbian side of my nature. As well as each other, Sarah and I enjoyed intimate friendships with a small number of other women of similar inclination and we began to take things rather further than masturbation and oral sex, experimenting with vibrators and strap-on dildos to give each other extremely powerful and beautiful orgasms. The liberating effect of fully accepting my bisexuality has been wonderful, and happily it is something my husband of nearly twenty five years is also comfortable with. Throughout our marriage he has allowed me to take a female lover when I met someone with whom I shared a mutual attraction.

Once I had finished my education I moved into the cottage, where in the privacy of my own home I was able to enjoy the freedom of nakedness, only wearing clothes when I went out to do the shopping or to work, and even then I rarely wore underclothes. My great aunt's legacy meant that I was comfortably off and was able to afford things beyond the reach of a junior teacher's salary. While I was at university my parents had bought a trailer caravan and started going to the continent for their holidays where there were many naturist caravan sites — these were still uncommon in the United Kingdom.

I decided to follow their example and I bought a new Volkswagen campervan with a free-standing awning, and in my holidays I took the opportunity to travel abroad for the first time in order to broaden my horizons. Rather than travel alone I invited Sarah to accompany me — it is so much more fun to have someone with whom to share new experiences. After a day spent exploring the countryside or sunbathing on a secluded beach we would enjoy an al fresco meal and then retire to the privacy of the awning for a night of slow and sensual sex before falling asleep in each other's arms.

It was during our summer holiday in the South of France that Sarah's and my sexual horizons expanded even further. We were stretched on the sand one afternoon in the shelter of a small cove enjoying the sunshine and the sensual feeling of the warm sea breezes on our naked skin when two beautiful young men, who looked as if they might be brothers, rounded the rocks separating us from the main beach. I was initially attracted by their long black hair and olive complexion which was in striking contrast to the pale skin of the boys we had known in England, but to be completely truthful it wasn't only their good looks which I admired. Nature had endowed both of them with a large and pendulous ball sac and a long penis which swung gently from side to side as they walked. I had seen many penises but nothing quite as beautiful as the pair I was now blatantly admiring. Neither of them had any body hair. From the look on her face, Sarah's thoughts were clearly identical to mine.

They stopped in front of us a few feet from where we were lying and looked us up and down in the same candid way that we were appraising them. As I have said, naturists worship the beauty of the human body, and involuntarily Sarah and I both parted our legs to allow them in their turn the same opportunity to fully appreciate our female charms. In charmingly broken English the taller, and presumably older, of the pair politely asked if they could sit beside us, which we accepted with an alacrity which many respectable people might have considered rather forward.

Over the course of the next few hours in a mixture of French and English we discovered all about each other. Paul and Francois were indeed brothers, a year apart in age, and like us they were in their early twenties. They explained that they lived nearby and worked on the family farm, and that they had been coming to the beach in their leisure time since early childhood. When I asked if they were naturists they looked puzzled at first, so I explained that Sarah and I had grown in families that were members of the British Naturist Movement. Paul, who was more fluent in English than Francois and often spoke for both of them, said that they were not members of any recognised society, but that nudism was considered totally natural in their family.

I have rarely felt a sexual charge as powerful as that afternoon, and perhaps for the first time in my life I felt a desire for sex for its own sake and not as the consequence of a loving relationship. However hard I tried I was betrayed by my physical responses and I could not disguise that desire form Paul and Francois — or Sarah come to that. My nipples were standing out like organ stops, and my labia — which were unusually prominent in any case — were engorged and open like the petals of butterfly, and it was clearly apparent that I wanted to fuck either or both of them. Sarah was generally shy and reserved but when I looked across at her it was clear to me that she felt the same overwhelming carnal urge as me. I have no explanation for the overpowering feeling of pure lust I felt that afternoon — maybe it was something in the air — but I was totally intoxicated by undeniable passion and the overpowering need to feel one or both of those cocks throbbing and surging inside me.