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Ronald Leedham: Difficult subject

Ronald Leedham was born in 1929 in India. His family moved back to England in 1931after Ronald contracted Polio. Ronald spent some years in Hospital as a young child after contracting Diptheria. When he was six he returned home to Catford for a short while to live with his father, eventually ending up living in ‘homes for crippled children’ run by the Shaftesbury Society, until he was sixteen.

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Ronald Leedham

Here Ron talks about sex education at school.

Transcript

Difficult subject to talk about with our age groups. You know, they used to say that, you’ll have to be very careful, there’s more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed, I remember was one of the expressions used and whatever you do, don’t get involved with a mucky woman. And that’s all we wanted was, to get involved with a mucky woman. We didn’t know what it meant all us kids used to look at each other and go hee, hee, hee. We didn’t know what he was talking about but they assumed that we did and I can’t make out why cos we barely knew what a female looked like. We never saw a young female, which was one of the problems with us. We were segregated, we didn’t know these things, but they were talking about them.

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