That Carrier-Bag of Porn in The Woods

They were the best of magazines, they were the worst of magazines.

Ah, the innocence of childhood. It’s the summer holidays, seven long weeks of playing down the river, flying kites in the park, riding our bikes over Dartford heath, playing Frisbee, finding a stash of porn mags in a carrier-bag in the woods. And there you have it. In a good year you could expect it to happen twice. Always once, but thrice, never. And thankfully no. Twice was already enough information to process, already too many emotions, fears, and desires to keep your prepubescent brain and body busy for the rest of the year.

Now we are forced to take a detour here, because I am talking circa 1982, a different time, a different place, where boys were boys, with willies and fathers who brought them up to be strong, aggressive, dominant, strong men. And girls were girls without willies, whose mothers taught them about baking and making jam and one day getting married to a man who would work hard so they could raise a family. I know, for an arrangement that was the cornerstone, no, the foundation to our entire civilization, to be wiped from the whiteboard of history in a matter of decades for reasons no one’s really worked out is frankly shocking. I’ve tried to think about it, but all I keep coming back to is self-obsession and destruction. The ludicrous idea that there’s groups of politically aligned people whose lives are so riddled with failure and self-hate, all they can do is blame the world for it and therefore seek to destroy it. But that would be so selfish and crazy, so arrogant and hateful, it couldn’t be that.

Anyway, the point is, our detour is along gender lines, since because when this tale is set, boys and girls were considered different (mad, I know) and there was a general tendency for them to do different things. So, the twice yearly stumbling into the carrier bag of porn mags in the woods was more of a boy’s thing, since the girls weren’t in the woods firing catapults at anything that moved – including each other – or making rafts, camps, traps, rope-swings, or any of those other things that would have them grow up ‘toxic’ and obsolete.

So, while those designated as male when born will read this and identify with much of the goings on, those designated as female when born will, on the whole, be learning a small part of the sexual awakening of what were once called boys.

I would here like to offer some praise (like some sacrifice of time and labor) to the cancel gods for my part in the evil patriarchy, so they might spare me for this potential sacrilege. If only that damned doctor hadn’t designated me as male at birth just because I had a willy, how different things might have been. But to be honest I’ve had so many whores yanking the thing almost clean off my body over the years it’s pretty much just a wee-wee wand now so my gender is quite non-binary, save the occasional morning glory, but then the Mrs deals with like a trooper, bless her.

So, it’s been spotted, the carrier bag, sticking out from under a bush down in the wooded area of Dartford lakes. But even though it’s been over six months since any of us have seen one, we can make out the shape of a stack of magazines, and even circa ’82 the stomach fluttering, porn-particular, neon colours are almost glowing through the plastic of the bag. The starter pistol has been fired, and a blur of boys risk both nettle and vine to get there as fast as possible.

It is not however, a competition. No one’s trying to get there first, there’s plenty to go round. We’d have already, unconsciously done the maths. With your average 1980s porn mag having a spine of around five millimeters and the bag being around two hundred millimeters, that’s about forty magazines. It’s not about getting their first, it’s just about getting there – as fast as possible.

There’s five of us. Darren, Mark, Dave, Michael, and me. And finding the carrier bag of porn in the woods would not only be the best thing to happen that day, or that week, it would probably be the feature of the summer holidays. It would fill our brains with so much kinetic energy and give our tiny synapses so much to get hold of we’d be in a daze for weeks, trying to process the heavy weight of some sexy mysterious truths that had been dumped on our futures, trying to understand the magnetic power of certain images. It’s quite the thing for a ten-year-old boy to languish in the power of some quasi-iconoclastic phantasy coupled with the most delicious, overwhelming feelings of seduction and desire, while the rest of your family are watching Coronation Street with their dinner on their laps.

And yet, it’s time for the cold shower of reality to squirt some icy truth upon this tale of innocence and huge tit lesbians. For while they were the best of magazines, they were the worst of magazines. A combination of the British weather, the scant packaging, all manner of insects (it wasn’t unusual to find yourself flicking a tiny slug from Debbie’s thigh or some kind of millipede from the generous cut of Michelle’s public mound, the style of the day being ‘The Landing Strip’, a kind of downstairs mohawk, a rectangle of pubic hair that – amongst other things – left a ten year old boy wondering how you got the job of shaving those onto girls like Michelle, or photographing it, or anything to do with the production of these damp, decomposing, but nonetheless magazines of dreams. And then Darren started to tear out a page a Mark screamed “What are you doing?” which was the first thing anyone had said in hours. I’ll never forget Darren’s expression. A shy, nervous kid anyway, I remember thinking at the time that while the rest of us were getting excited largely because we realized one day, we’d actually be able to touch the soft, round breasts of girls like Angel, we’d actually be able to do a sex with girls like Danni, Darren was probably having quite a traumatic experience looking at images that represented something else he’d fail at, something else he would not do well at. For that had been his experience of life so far, and there was nothing to suggest that would ever change.

It was so obvious that even if he managed to peel it apart after a thirty-minute walk home there would be very little left of Linda and her ample bosom and perfect skin. Quite the opposite. It was as if he was willing to suffer the embarrassment, making it one of those strange boyhood moments when it was beyond ridicule and just, well, sad. We all watched in some ugly, awkward silence as Darren neatly folded this damp picture into a handy pocket sized square, stains of flesh coloured ink on his fingers suggesting once he got home, through pocket-pressure he’d have some psychedelic double symmetrical print with eight legs, four heads, arms everywhere, like some weird Hindu porn, but with a white inkless cross along the folds, going from top to bottom, and side to side for added – unpleasant, and increasingly unsexy - effect.

As the sun started to go down and it was time to go home and have dinner, we stacked all the magazines into a neat pile and put them back in the carrier-bag. It was a kind of unspoken rule, pushing it back under the bush with just a little bit of carrier-bag showing for the next group of boys to learn too much about themselves and others in too little time, with too long a boner. We adjusted our finally and thankful relaxing cocks and stood up, a sense of relief that at least Darren’s sexual unconscious was nicely tucked away where it belonged and started making our way out of the woods back to the muddy track that would take us to the road.

“I’m taking the long way round” Said Darren, in no way managing to disguise the fact the exact moment the rest of us were out of sight he was going to sprint back and get the whole bag, or at least a couple of mags, and take them home to stare at forever, not eating nor drinking until one day he just flopped forward dead onto Linda’s partially snail eaten face.

But to say he was going the long way round was just a confession really. We were absolutely certain of this because no young boy would ever go the long way round to get anywhere, let alone home. They’d run through rivers and climb up trees for no particular reason. They’d run into the freezing cold and murky waters of Margate on our once yearly trip to that miserable failure of a place just to run out again twice as fast the moment the wave broke and whipped icy Hell up around our freshly dropped testicles. But when it came to the end of the day and the sun going down, it’s the quickest way to the safety of home, to the first bit of food you’ve had since that slice of bread and butter you had for breakfast. It’s as much as the crow flies as possible, the shortest line between two points, even if that meant climbing over some garages, or a quick bit of garden hopping to cut out that last right angle on the corner of your block.

Michael, Mark, Dave and myself were now communicating on a silent plane, a trick we were forced to learn at school to maintain group lies or other deceptions required to keep us out of trouble when we were clearly guilty but didn’t have time to prepare our stories in advance. Our pupils dilated, and our breathing became slow and deep to make the wizardry work. The voice was none of ours, perhaps a combination of all of ours, either way, just like in the headmaster’s office, we didn’t have time for fanciful chat or speculation, this was the pure infrasonic communication of a group of boys hatching a plan with time working against them.

“He’s going back for the mags” the communal voice said in our telekinetic minds. “This has the potential to be the funniest thing so far this summer, if not the entire year” it continued. “We need to hide, we need to camouflage ourselves and quick, where we can see him, but he can’t see us.”

Now, all of this happened in about a second. This is why teachers hate young boys, especially groups of young boys. Teachers are always trying to separate groups of boys, and ironically, it’s probably the pitiful, shrunken and impotent remains of their own, similar communication systems they had as kids, that work just enough for them to identify it. But age, work, reality and all those other hideous things have taken there’s from them or they’ve died off naturally - but prematurely - as other systems like compliance and obedience have moved into the dominant position in their psychological make-up. So, it’s not just hatred that drives them. It’s jealousy, bitterness, and the dark cloud of ageing combined with an ever-growing sense of failure that’s only magnified in the presence of young boys; their energy, their laughter, their hopes and dreams. And of course, their non-verbal communication skills that have allowed them to outwit the teachers with ease countless times and got them out of another otherwise certain and deserved punishment.

Our communal minds speak again: “We have about five minutes. He’ll not want to risk getting caught. He’ll be lingering up by the chip shop, pretending he’s waiting for something somewhat more acceptable than a carrier-bag of damp porn mags. We must fashion a ghillie suit of sorts, a four man one that we lay beneath, North Northeast of the target area, which he won’t check as the South Southeast of the muddy track is a far more likely direction of his dirty discovery”

In seconds we were lying flat on the damp grass about five meters from the bag. We’d all chipped-in to locate and provide some cover, and apart from eight excited eyes, poking free of our skulls as they pumped in anticipation for such a wonderful event. It had it all, we had a lie, a truth, a story, and possibly a trauma. The four fundamentals of being ten years old all in one, damp scene of misplaced desire.

There was no chance of Darren not coming back. I’d noticed something about his expression during our five-hour anatomy lesson and how he kept going back to the same two magazines, a look of jealousy in his eyes when someone else was looking at one of the girls he’d obviously claimed as his own special lady. His girlfriend, the one he’d claimed as his own, his two-dimensional print of love. No, knowing what an immense shocker this would be, he was just biding his time, probably enjoying the delayed gratification and the occasional throb of blood into his penis that he’d tucked under his belt in the twelve o’clock position, a trick every young boy knows and takes well into adulthood to hide that unwanted boner.

Then over the horizon and it was on. Darren’s head bobbing up and down as he walked that slightly odd walk he walked, not made any less strange by the no doubt increasing size of his willy as he approached the object of his dreams. Pandora’s box had been opened. Loads of women’s boxes had been opened, usually by that odd two finger splitter technique I’ve only ever seen used to open vaginas in magazines, or the occasional penis, which I noticed Mark paying particular attention to, almost as if he was looking at very different parts of the magazines to the rest of us. A definite gay. Being so close we all had our suspicions anyway and didn’t care. And he’d be fine for about three years until it became impossible to conceal and then three years of Hell until he escaped the state comp that will have nearly drained all the lifeforce out of him, by several other kids punching him and saying ‘Gay’, several times a day.

As Darren approached, he must have been thinking about how he was going to dry them out, the microwave maybe, leaving the house smelling of an autumn when someone died. Or just through use, the three hours of turning the pages every night with the central heating up on full. Whatever he was thinking, life was about to do what life does, and give him something very different to what he wanted and expected. A lesson in itself.

The excitement at mission headquarters was getting pretty intense too. The four of us are buzzing with excitement, we can hardly stay still and keep our mouths shut as Darren, scanning the area, checking for people, looking behind, looking for us for sure, but anyone could be problematic, anyone finding a ten-year-old boy grabbing a stash of porn would be a terrible thing for a boy currently overwhelmed with desire, fear, potential trauma, and all of that whipped up in furious whirlpool of a claim for the forbidden. For Darren there’s so much at stake, too much at stake, and it’s got the rest of us on the verge of exploding.

Darren stands a few meters away from us, still doing his best to casually survey to the area but now looking like a meerkat in fear of his life. There’s nothing casual about it, his stress is equal to our excitement, and by now he’s been there for bloody ages. But we don’t budge. Knowing only when Darren has left with his filthy catch can we expose ourselves, exposing him and wow, that’s the beauty of such a thing. If he hadn’t lied, if he’d said, I’m going to take some home, there would be no dramas. But the frankly bizarre “I’m going the long way round”, the penis motivated deception he dished out to his best friends, gave us full license for ridicule, and we will take full advantage of it.

Darren picks his moment, he crouches down and reaches for the bag, he’s moving at a furious pace, like the nervous sexual excitement you’d expect in such a situation. He grabs the bag, makes sure it’s wrapped up tight, stuffs it up his sweatshirt and walks towards the muddy path. “Now!” shouts Michael and we all burst from under our hide and run at Darren screaming. He doesn’t even turn around. He just sprints into the distance like his life depends on it, but there’s a slight trip, not enough to make him fall over, but now there’s a trail of porn in his wake, one falling out every few meters. And once he’s crossed the muddy path, he’s on the main road, and the cars at the traffic lights are all watching as his sweatshirt bounces all over the place, porn flying everywhere and four boys running behind, barely able to stay upright for laughter. I fall onto the grass verge on the side of the road, looking up into the red sky, with a smile on my face and the sounds of Darren defending himself to the others competing with car horns.

Tears roll down his bright red face and as he tries to explain his actions. But we’re friends, we’re not here to hurt him, we’re here to have a laugh. “We won’t tell anyone” says Mark, surveying the trail of porn that’s about twenty meters long. There’s breasts and vagina everywhere. One car door opens and grabs a magazine, driving off just as the traffic light changes with his random damp porn, which I see fly back out the car window about ten meters further down the road. “I just really liked Linda, I thought she was beautiful. I’ve never seen a woman that beautiful, but I couldn’t remember what magazine she was in so I had to take them all to make sure I got her”. The tears have calmed to the occasional snivel. “Let’s find Linda, and we’ll all go home”

We scrape up the magazines, put them in the bag and go back into the woods, it takes about thirty minutes to find Linda, it didn’t need to, we were somewhat distracted by Louise, Sharon, Felicity, etc, but we found her. Darren tucked the appropriate magazine down his trousers and pulled his stretched sweatshirt over the top and we all set off home, the quickest way, like we always did.

As a kid finding a carrier bag of porn mags in the woods was a real result. We weren’t swamped in the stuff like we are these days, the internet dominates our lives and some of the most horrific sexual abuse of women dominates the internet. Down the woods in the 1980s it was considered a really magical time to stumble upon and spend every second of natural light looking at what were basically photographs of pretty women in bikinis, and I doubt that did much to the sexual development of young boys beyond finding pretty women in bikinis rightfully attractive.

Undoubtedly the porn being consumed by the gigabyte by young boys today is affecting them negatively, and it won’t be long until we start to find out the extent of the damage it’s having on our society. But for now, I just want to finish up with a few thoughts on the whole phenomena. I can scrawl this little yarn knowing, with some confidence most of the older humans with willies will have experienced the finding, the celebrating, the perusing, repackaging and putting back of a carrier-bag of porn mags in the woods. It’s a remarkable thing. On heaths, in actual forests, in small patches of greenery in urban areas, to ten-mile walks into actual wild areas like Dartmoor this would happen a couple of times a year to groups of kids up and down the country.

What is it that makes (to use the old language) adult males, bag up their overused porn and remove it from its natural environment of houses, newsagents, and people, and make the effort and take the risk, to stash it among the flora and unfortunately grimy fauna of the natural world. There’s got to be plenty of other ways of disposing it. Maybe they actually wanted to pass it on? They didn’t want it wasted since they knew how much they once enjoyed it. Maybe it’s guilt, and once a certain level of guilt has been reached they’re just driven to get them as far away as possible, and to destroy them would take longer and risk drawing attention to them, so it’s carrier bag, bushes, shove, run.

Perhaps there’s an element of ritual, some Freudian separation performance that can be traced back to some Greek myth and turn out not to be surprising at all. Or perhaps, and while it might at first seem like a long shot, I’m sticking with the interpretation of events I made when I was about twelve, a summer two years later in another woods. The magazines seemed somewhat familiar, if in a slightly worse condition. I’d sussed it. There was only ever one bag of porn mags in a carrier bag in the woods. It only ever happened once. Some weirdo human, the type Darren turned into as an adult, who probably still has his kaleidoscopic picture of Linda stashed under his matrimonial bed, was told by his wife to get those ‘filthy magazines’ out of the house, and it was her who bagged them up so the neighbours wouldn’t see. “What am I meant to do with them?” he asked. “I don’t know, go and throw them somewhere down the woods” And that was the start of the bag of porn mags that slowly made their way around the country between 1980 and 1983. Being taken home here and there before being stashed in another woods, and slowly making their way from London to Manchester, to Edinburgh, to Leeds, via all the little towns in between, moving all around the country to give young boys, an afternoon or two a year another reason to look forward to growing up, and give a reason to all those shameful desires and guilty fantasies, all the weirdness and fear of puberty. It was a way of showing you what you had to look forward to once it was all over. And wow, were they right.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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