Another 'Fantasy Girlfriend' from way back: Gillian Duxbury

I did a long post in this series a couple of years back on a girl called Joanne Latham, a young glamour model of the late '70s with whom I and most of the rest of the male population of the UK (or the pubescent segment of it, anyway) had inevitably been deeply smitten. However, there was another of her profession who had attained a deeper, or at any rate an earlier place in my heart - a striking Lancastrian lass called Gillian Duxbury. She must have started appearing in the papers a good 4 or 5 years earlier than Joanne (i.e., when I was not yet 10!), and her career had, I think, run its course by the time my hormones started mandating an obsessive, round-the-clock interest in women. That is why the younger girl took a dominant place in my recollections of my evolving sexual awareness. But, in retrospect, I think my infatuation with Gilly was a rather fonder, purer (unsullied by thoughts of sex!) kind of admiration: I simply idolised her prettiness.

Of course, it was an acute embarrassment to me that most of the pictures of her I encountered were topless. She was for some years in the mid-1970s one of the best-known of The Sun's notorious Page 3 Girls, and the most prolific, appearing in the paper far more regularly than just about any of the others. But for some reason, she always seemed to finish as runner-up in the paper's 'Girl of the Year' poll - an early example of those unfathomable small injustices of life that rankle with me so disproportionately. 

I've never been much of a breast man (I wonder now if this over-exposure in my early years somehow drummed it out of me?), and I really did try not to look at her breasts - even though they were, as the saying goes, jumping out of the page at you. Well, I suppose I may have been trying to concoct a defence for myself, in case my parents caught me sneaking a peek. There were no strict rules, as far as I recall, as to whether I was allowed to look at that paper, or as to what I was allowed to look at in it; but my own innate sense of propriety counselled that I probably oughtn't to be looking at that page. And so I cultivated the pretense that I wasn't really looking at the pin-up picture... or was looking at it only with a Platonic disinterest. I think perhaps this continual subterfuge may have led me to fixate on other nearby features of the anatomy - arms, neck, collarbone. I became convinced that Ms Duxbury had uniquely lovely shoulders.

She had exquisite legs as well (I discovered, when I occasionally chanced upon a full-length picture of her in a magazine advertisement or a clothing catalogue) - a rather tall young lady, I believe (another long-standing, perhaps genetically programmed frailty of mine). But, most of all, there was a quality about her eyes, a liveliness or friendliness that seemed to suggest she was always smiling, even if she wasn't (I suspect she probably always was in these pictures; but I paid much less attention to her mouth than to her eyes). I hope my childish assessment is borne out by this recent photograph of her I just discovered. That kind of beauty - the zest, the radiance, the entrancing eye-glimmer - tends to concentrate rather than dissipate with age. And does she not look utterly stunning now?