Banks remembered his conversation with Michelle in the pub about Donald Bradford and his collection of porn, and wondered if he really had acted as a distributor. While Banks couldn’t imagine Graham slipping a magazine of French fellatio between the pages of The People and putting it through number 42’s letter box, he could imagine Bradford keeping his stock under the counter, or hidden in the back. And maybe Graham had stumbled upon it.

He could remember quite clearly the first time he had ever seen a pornographic magazine. Not just the ones with naked women in them, like Playboy, Swank and Mayfair, but true porn, magazines that showed people doing things.

It was in their den inside the tree, and, interestingly enough, the magazines were Graham’s. At least, he brought them. Had Banks never wondered at the time where Graham got them from? He didn’t know. And if Graham had mentioned it, Banks didn’t remember.

It was a warm day, and there were only three of them there, but he wasn’t sure whether the third was Dave, Paul or Steve. The branches and leaves came right down to the ground, hard, shiny green leaves with thorns on them, Banks remembered now, and he could feel himself slipping through the concealed entrance, where the foliage wasn’t too dense, the thorns pricking his skin. Once you got inside, the space seemed bigger than it could possibly be, just the way the inside of Dr. Who’s TARDIS was bigger than the outside. They had plenty of space to sit around and smoke, and enough light got through for them to look at dirty magazines. The smell of the place came back, too, so real he could smell it as he stood waiting to cross the road. Pine needles. Or something similar. And there was a soft beige carpet of them on the ground.

That day, Graham had the two magazines stuffed down the front of his shirt and he brought them out with a flourish. He probably said, “Feast your eyes on this, lads,” but Banks couldn’t remember the actual words, and he didn’t have time to settle down and try to reconstruct the memory in full. It wasn’t important anyway.

What was important was that for the next hour or so the three teenagers looked in awe on some of the most amazing, exciting, unbelievable images they had ever seen in their lives, people doing things they had never even dreamed could or should be done.

By today’s standards, Banks realized, it was pretty mild, but for a fourteen-year-old provincial kid in the summer of 1965 to see color photos of a woman sucking a man’s penis or a man sticking his penis up a woman’s arse was shocking in the extreme. There were no animals, Banks remembered, and certainly no children. Mostly he remembered images of impossibly large-breasted women, some of them with semen spurting all over their breasts and faces, and well-endowed men usually on top of them or being ridden by them. Graham wouldn’t lend the magazines out, Banks remembered, so the only time they had to look at them was then and there, inside the tree. The titles and text, or what he remembered of them, were in a foreign language. He knew it wasn’t German or French because he took those languages at school.