This is too funny

In The Remains of The Day :
Lord Darlington asks his butler , Mr Stevens to explain the facts of life to his grandson , who is about to get married .
I had to wonder if it was really necessary-where boys not told about sex either ?
Stevens finds the grandson , Reginald Cardinal in the garden .
They were having a hilarious conversation about the glories of nature when the butler is called away .
I wondered if Stevens would ever get to the point and frankly - I doubted it .
I think that it's much the way that I was told about the facts of life only the pretty illustrated booklet concentrated on hygiene .

I found Lady Chatterley’s Lover most confusing, the only bit I remember is him weaving flowers into her pubic hair!

I found a book my mum had bought in preparation for me asking questions, called ‘Peter and Pamela Grow Up’. This seemed to be mainly about fruit flies.

Nobody at home ever got round to telling us how the sperm gets to the egg. I think that was covered by the student teacher who got lumbered with teaching the Sexual Reproduction module, who told us human sexual intercourse was ‘the same as hens’.

Esmay In The Remains of The Day :
Lord Darlington asks his butler , Mr Stevens to explain the facts of life to his grandson , who is about to get married .

I had to wonder if it was really necessary-where boys not told about sex either ?

Just part of the drama of the book and movie, IMO.

I assume everyone learns about sex from their parent(s). My father told our brother, just as mum had already told my sisters and me.

Our brother is significantly younger, less sheltered, he knew.

Just watched it and Cardinal is Lord Darlington's God son not his grandson .

My point was the God son was an adult man about to marry and Lord Darlington presumed that he needed to be told about sex when surely he knew from the boys at school ?!

My parents didn't tell me about sex .
The booklet didn't mention sex only elaborated on the importance of being hygienic .
My mother borrowed it from our missionary neighbours !
I found out in biology lessons and I felt physically sick with shock .

Later on , my school friends talked about sex very freely and that's when I had a better comprehension about something that was entirely normal and natural .

My parents actually admitted that they didn't know anything about reproduction when a young couple who were friends with tried to explain that they had had an ectopic pregnancy.

My dad also once said that they never set great store by sex, although I don't know if that was mutual. I can't imagine they ever spoke about if between themselves.

honeyrose, my student landlady in the late 60s, in Yorkshire, had a 2nd husband - she must have been 70 and I never heard what happened to the first. But a friend of hers from up the road, a widow, told me she’d never get married again, because, ‘I never did take to the upstairs work.’ 😂

Talking of ignorance (not that it was unusual at the time) my mother was married at 22, but at maybe 25, during WW2, a colleague told her what homosexuals were - and what they did.

She absolutely refused to believe it (as she told me decades later) and waited until my father was home on shore leave from naval duties, to ask him. Was astonished to learn that it was true.

Similarly, just before her own sister’s wedding, my mother (who was already married) had her own mother take her aside and whisper, ‘Does she know - does she know? Tell her!!’

Of course she knew. It was odd, really, because as far as I could ever tell, that grandmother was not a prude. But people just didn’t talk about such things.

I do think this is a spoof I was married in 1965 and in a relation ship with my ‘to be husband’ a year before I certainly didn’t hear any of that stuff
I didn’t know much about sex except the simple facts until then but knew enough and was never told any of that guff about face cream and hair rollers etc

When I started my periods in the fifties my Nan told me I must not go swimming or wash my hair !!!

its a fake.

Lots of us have said this document is a modern fake, but, hey, why spoil other people's fun if they want to think it is real!

Surely the point of the quote from the Remains of the Day is to show how remote 'Lord Darlington' was from ordinary life.

His grandson as well as knowing about sex from a very young age, may well have had a homosexual relationship forced or mutual, when at school and regularly visited prostitutes or had a mistress before marrying.

That's what I was suggesting , MOnica .
Lord Darlington was a naive man in every sense - unrealistic about his Godson's sexual maturity and idealistic in his concepts about the Nazi party .

I don't think it's fake .

I wish that I'd kept the booklet that was given to me by my mother .
And I should have kept the booklet given to me by my mother in law about not having relations whilst pregnant .

I cannot remember reading or coming across anything like this when I was out and courting in the 1960s, full decade.

Neither my mother or MiL, who came from very different backgrounds said anything or offered advice and while I am well aware there were then, as now, some people who were amazingly naive, despite being surrounded by the world of the 1960s being publicly 'sex, drugs and rock in roll'. They weren't, generally, capable of writing anything like this, other than as a spoof.

MOnica - then you were fortunate .

I don't think that the OP has generated a spoof and frankly , my recollections are true .

I was hooked on Robert Graves's two-volume version of Greek Myths and was a bit puzzled about Zeus's sexual exploits in strange forms: a bull when he raped Europa; a swan when he impregnated Leda and a shower of gold with Danae. It boggled my teenage imagination but then, as I reflected, he was a god. It didn't leave me much the wiser about human sexual behaviour. I also hesitate to mention my puzzlement about the Virgin Birth.

annodomini
😂
When my cousin became pregnant and "had to get married" I remember my aunt wrote to mum, --to apologise for bringing shame on the family‐- She insisted her DD had not had intercourse.
This will have been 1963 when we had virgin births.

My sex education was given by a spinster.
This was at a catholic school.
Was told that we couldn't get pregnant until we were married.
Class dismissed.

Esmay

I don't think it's fake .

I wish that I'd kept the booklet that was given to me by my mother .
And I should have kept the booklet given to me by my mother in law about not having relations whilst pregnant .

I have long been a fan of American singer Jack Jones. One of his early ‘hits’ was called Wives and Lovers, which had lines like, ‘Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger, you needn’t try any more’ and ‘ Day after day, there are girls at the office, and men will always be men’
And nobody seemed to mind!

Daddima - listening to women much younger than me I'm not that sure that things have really improved for women !
Yesterday , I saw my exhausted friend having to return her husband's new jeans to a shop .
She'd been at work all day.
He'd been at home !

Daddima

Esmay

I don't think it's fake .

I wish that I'd kept the booklet that was given to me by my mother .
And I should have kept the booklet given to me by my mother in law about not having relations whilst pregnant .

I have long been a fan of American singer Jack Jones. One of his early ‘hits’ was called Wives and Lovers, which had lines like, ‘Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger, you needn’t try any more’ and ‘ Day after day, there are girls at the office, and men will always be men’
And nobody seemed to mind!

Yes, I remember that song, As it was a song I didn't see it as having any relevance to real life, which worked on entirely different basis. Anymore when I sang Humpty Dumpty to my toddler I felt that had any relevance to real life.