The awkward moment my dad caught us with his porn.

As was outlined by the incident in the forest, Phillip Moleford had a keen nose for pornographic material. Which is why when he casually told us that the scribbled word on one of the meat boxes in the attic read Mayfair, which in turn meant 'PORN HERE', we were all ears.

Problem was that the meat box with scribbled Mayfair, was the last in a pile of meat boxes, stacked higher than we could properly reach. Further more, we weren't supposed to go delving into, or indeed moving any of the neatly arranged boxes. There was sure to be carefully arranged order, and to my dad moving even a ski glove from this order was as detrimental as moving a chromosome in someone's genes.

But the attic trap door was closed.

My dad was in the garden.

My mum was probably cleaning the kitchen.

We were clear for take off.

What then ensued, can only be likened to the kind of military excellence normally only possessed by Gurkhas. We were working in a team, moving lightly and with utmost efficiency. The boxes were heavy mind. My father had obviously thought this through, and would be buggered if those magazines were going to see the light of day. There were three meat boxes in all, lined up next to each other on the bottom of the stack. On top of each of these were another twelve boxes, packed with things like 80's kitchen blenders, old computer keyboards, baby clothes and my dad's line of hand warmers that never took off. The last few boxes were cleverly carrying legitimate car magazines, which happened to be just heavy enough to split the box when moved.

After the strenuous trouble and subsequent box splitting caused by lifting the car magazine boxes, I began cursing Phillip's inability to read my dad's handwriting, only then, quite magically, a Scandinavian woman with heaving beasts flounced herself in front of my pre-pubescent crouch.

I wouldn't say it was some great epiphany or awakening of my dormant todger, but I had just found more filth than I'd ever seen in my life and plonked myself down to enjoy the end of the rainbow. In no time at all there were copies Mayfair strewn all over the place. We were gorging our newly opened minds with images of blonds, brunettes, gingers, blackies and even some shaven ones.

There were adverts for Marlboro and articles on Barbados, and I was discovering that rather than being a rude obsenity, this was in fact a magazine for a gentleman. It even had humour by means of little illustrated jokes. It was like The Beano, only everyone was naked and writhing about. One illustration that stuck in mind was the one with a 'man and wife' who were having sex on their bed, while the husband perused a copy of Mayfair behind her back. The caption read: "Oh great, now I can even turn the pages".

Before I could work out what had been holding the husband back all this time, the ladder gave a creaking squeal and so too did Phillip Molefield. My dad was coming up the ladder and we were about to be killed.

Phillip new my dad could get very angry and compared to his Christian folks, my father was like a wild barbarian with a German accent and a Bracker on the wall. To understand the excruciating look of fear that appeared on Phillips face when he heard the second creak, you have to know what a Brackar is.

Bracker is Austrian for carpet beater. I imagine that the verb, To Brack, goes back hundreds of years in Austrian legend when clusters of haus-fraus would spend a morning bracking their rugs with their Brackers. "Ooh that's a nice Bracker Helga, does it brack well?", they'd go. Oswald's mother had used it to beat the crap out of rugs when they were dusty, and Oswald's crap hole when he was naughty. Like many family traditions passed on from generation to generation, The Braker hung on the wall where we ate dinner. It was rarely used, but if you did get it, you'd have a red waffle imprinted on your arse for the rest of the day.

So Phillip was understandably petrified. His lazy eye probably bulged in fear. We shat ourselves too, because we knew the devastation that was about to enter our lives. We knew that being caught by your dad looking at porn was going to be uncomfortable. We knew that being caught by your dad looking at his porn was going to be really, really uncomfortable. And of course we knew that being caught by your dad looking at his porn with your friend who's parents your dad was friends with, was going to be an extremely, extremely shitty way to die.

On an average day, it took maybe eight seconds for my dad to climb the ladder that lead to the trap door. It had taken us at least ten minutes to unload the boxes to recover his artistic gentleman's mags. In panic, all I could think was to stick the Scandinavian woman with heaving beasts under the insulating carpet. My brother's reaction was to freeze like a monkey with a massive head, caught in the headlights of monkey hunters. Phillip, Mayfair still shaking in his hands, faked a left, then a right, then just froze on the spot to whimper.

The smell of the 1970s filth must have drifted down the ladder, because that trap door swung open like a barn door when a bullock is raging for cows. It wasn't my father who lept into the room with araknind athletisism. It was a maniac with crazy horse eyes, wearing my father's clothes. What made things worse was that the clothes my father had on were marroon speedos; a favourite of the time on hot days.

All tiny erections swiftly shrunk into our bellies and Phillip made a run for it. Dropping his magazine on the way past my dad and his maroon speedos, he shimmied down the ladder. I'd have loved to see him scoot past my mum in the kitchen to find his trainers. What did he say? How could he possibly have left without making her think there was a fire in the loft. Knowing Phillip Moleford, I can confidently assume he thanked my mum very much for having him and ran to the forest before my dad did have him.

After a fierce tyrade which may or may not have included the verb To Brack, myself and my brother were ordered to return all pornographic literature to the meat boxes while my father went downstairs, probably to fetch the Bracker. We worked like beavers in a porn packing prison and rebuilt the meat box wall in less than three minutes. Astonishingly, during this time more copies of Mayfair were shoved under the carpet; a decision surely only spurred by the newly sporned hormones still floating around our tiny scrotums.

We left the attic with the same speed we packaged the porn with, and ran down to the kitchen. As guessed, our mother was cleaning the kitchen as we ran through it, out the back garnden and to the certain sanctuary of the forest where Phillip Moleford and all his wonderful suggestions were hiding.