The Things We Didn’t Talk About
Content Note: This article contains first-person accounts of childhood sexual assault and inappropriate encounters with adults.
We didn't have a word for it back then, not one safe to say aloud. When something didn't sit right, it was either ignored, turned into a joke, or quietly filed away. That silence shaped us.
In the 1960s and early '70s, especially in working-class communities like ours, you just got on with it. You didn't dwell. You didn't talk. But I'm talking now.
Fishing, the First Time
I was fishing down at the docks when a man approached, talked to me for a while, and tried to cop a feel.
I went straight home and told my mother. To her credit, she reported it to the police. I was taken to the station and interviewed by two detectives. They asked me to describe what happened, then showed me photos of known offenders. And then they fingerprinted me.
Even at that age I knew it wasn't standard procedure. I can only assume they wanted to check me against burglary cases. After all, I was scruffy, unsupervised, wandering miles from home, and lived in Blaenymaes. An obvious candidate, right?
The Panda Car
A month or two later I was back at the docks, this time not alone. I saw the same man walk by. There was a phone box nearby, so I dialled 999.
Maybe the operator misunderstood, thinking I'd just been assaulted, because the Panda Car arrived in what felt like seconds. Two officers jumped out, asked for a description and where the man had gone. One stayed with me, the other sped off.
They came back with the man in the back seat. Another car took me home, fishing rod and all. I was interviewed again, gave another statement. Then that was it. Nothing more was said. Shortly afterwards our family made its escape to the countryside.
On the Journey to Harrogate
The second time something happened to me I was fifteen, travelling alone to Harrogate to join the army. At Sheffield station, a man "touched me inappropriately," as they say today — copped a feel, we called it. I didn't report it, partly because I thought it would affect my enrolment into the army, or they would think I was a "poof."
The "Give Me a Wank" Mob
When I was growing up in Wern Fawr Road and Blaenymaes there were any number of occasions when we were approached by older boys or men, sometimes strangers, sometimes men or older boys we knew, who would ask us to masturbate them. In all the cases it happened to me, telling them to piss off or walking or running away ended the incident.
One occasion I vividly remember happened when I was about nine or ten. I was down at the dock with a hand line, fishing like I often did. A man approached me, asked if I'd caught anything. I showed him. He got a little closer, smiled, and made his offer. "Give me a wank and I'll give you these fish."
I told him to fuck off and legged it.
This kind of request completely dried up when we moved to Trapp and the countryside. A different kind of people perhaps, or maybe I was just too old and no longer desirable.
Billy the Sergeant
Then there was Billy, the Army Cadet sergeant. He must've been in his mid-twenties.
The weekly meetings were fine. Marching, maps, learning knots. But one weekend we went camping. Just a dozen or so boys, aged between 11 and 14, and Billy.
He left the tent at night and came back drunk. Then, lying in his sleeping bag between two boys, he got them to masturbate him, calling out some woman's name as they did.
The next morning, it was like nothing had happened. No one reported it. No one even talked about it. We just got on with it. That was the way it worked. I never went camping with the ACF again though.
Brian and the Cinema
Then there was Brian. He lived nearby, and we thought he was just a bit odd. He used margarine to slick his hair instead of Brylcreem. That sort of odd.
He liked being surrounded by kids. He'd take us to the cinema to watch children's films. Nothing suspicious in that, right?
Except during the films, he'd start masturbating. Never touched us. Never asked us to touch him. But we knew it was weird.
We laughed about it quietly among ourselves. But we didn't stop going. For kids like us, a trip to the cinema was a luxury. That says more about our lives than it does about Brian's sickness.
I also sold him a stolen electric drill once. Two shillings and six pence. A fortune to a kid like me.
Violet and the Flasher
This one's almost funny, in a way.
My sister Violet was about seven or eight, walking through the park with a group of girls the same age. A man jumped out from the bushes, the stereotype in the dirty raincoat, and flashed them.
They didn't run away screaming. They pointed at "it" and burst out laughing. Proper belly laughs.
The man didn't know what to do. He ran, and the girls chased him, still laughing.
She never needed therapy. If she had, it wouldn't have been available anyway. Different times.
So Did It Damage Me?
Honestly? I don't think it did.
Not in the way people sometimes imagine. The experiences were frightening and shocking at the time, yes. But they didn't haunt me. They didn't break me. They made me a bit more wary, a bit less trusting of strangers. But that's not exactly a bad thing, is it?
Maybe I was lucky. These weren't ongoing events, they didn't involve trusted adults or family members. And they weren't acts of violence.
They were wrong, absolutely. But they didn't define me.
Why Write This?
Because I can.
Because we didn't talk about this stuff back then, not to protect the perpetrators, but to protect our own freedom. Telling our parents would have meant the end of unsupervised roaming, the end of fishing at the docks, the end of walking miles to my Nan's house or disappearing into the woods for hours. That freedom was the only advantage we had as poor kids. We weren't about to give it up.
And honestly? We knew nothing would come of it anyway. The man at the docks got picked up, interviewed, and that was it. Billy the sergeant went back to leading cadets. Brian kept going to the cinema. The system wasn't built to protect kids like us—it was built to process complaints and move on.
So we stayed quiet, stayed mobile, and learned to handle it ourselves.
Now, decades later, I'm writing this because maybe someone will read it and see a shadow of their own childhood in it and feel a little less alone. We couldn't talk about it then.
But we're talking now.