My very own 1970s sex pest

To understand the Jimmy Savile affair, you had to be there. By ‘there’ I mean the late 1970s.

At the time my school on the Welsh borders had its own very minor provincial sex-pest. I think every school did. Ours was known as ‘the 50p man’. Periodically he would approach a straggler on a cross–country run, or someone taking a walk (i.e. smoke) by the river, and expose himself, announcing, ‘If you touch this, I’ll give you this 50p.’

Even allowing for inflation, 50p was an offer you could easily refuse. So the schoolboy victim would scarper off, usually (perhaps not always) to relate the incident to general hilarity. Every now and then someone might have reported such an event to an adult, but I certainly don’t remember police involvement or any kind of vigilantism. His behaviour was viewed as regrettable but not heinous — as smoking was then and divorce wasn’t (our moral compasses seem to shift).