Where Did It All Go Right? (42 page)

Of course it was my hard luck – because she’d got in first. She packed me in on the playing fields at school, having sent out a misread early warning signal two days prior when she revealed that she didn’t like my beloved 999. I vowed on Tuesday, 13 May never to be chucked again.

This proved surprisingly easy for the next 16 months. I didn’t get another girlfriend until September 1981.

* * *

Some girls will, some girls won’t, some girls need a lot of loving and some girls don’t, as Racey so memorably sang, and I so memorably half-found out over the next 16 months. To be fair to myself (well somebody has to), I did discover The Holiday Romance during my first drought, thanks to the improved sociability of staying in a hotel rather than a farmhouse. For my dalliance with Paula of High Wycombe we have H. Adams of Wellingborough to thank. This was my dad’s insurance firm, who rewarded his ten years’ loyal service in 1980 with a directorship, hence the upturn in our family’s financial circumstances and the seismic cultural shift that summer from North Wales to the Channel Islands. (We couldn’t afford to fly there and hire a car, but give us time.
²
)

The fumbling courtship rituals at the Merton Hotel were made all the more artificial – and convenient – by the sheer scarcity of kids staying there at any one time. A sprawling holiday camp of a place, it was still a magnet for the elderly in 1980, with bingo on Tuesdays and ballroom dancing every night except for Thursdays when there was a disco with a DJ who had mistaken his job title for dress code. All residents between the ages of 10 and 18 would form a breakaway republic in the ballroom in order to get away from their parents and exploit the generous bar policy of serving anyone who could see over it. Every year throughout my mid-to-late teens, each Merton week would be immortalised in snapshot: a motley line-up of Debbies and Daves from places as far afield as Portsmouth, Liverpool, Redhill and Manchester, sticking their thumbs up around a table of empties, the flash reflecting in the head-height glass panels of the balcony above. In a good week, there might be anything up to a dozen of us, checking each other out over illicit halves of cider with an eye on the main chance (i.e. a slow dance on Thursday – with parents watching from the balcony – and perhaps a French kiss in the TV room).

This siege mentality was like being in a group of survivors after a plane crash – somebody was
bound
to get off with somebody else
eventually
, especially with the scent of the barman’s apron so high in our young nostrils. (Where else but in an old persons’ hotel ballroom could an ecosystem of hormonally altered teens enjoy this kind of autonomy, especially the younger among us? It was like going to the same youth club every night, with exactly the same 11 people, except they served Pernod and instead of getting a lift home, you got a
lift
home.)

Hence: Paula, who, like Liza was a year younger but seemed a year older. It being my first Holiday Romance (actually I never got much better at them), I took our one snog in the TV room – the kind where the younger kids watch – very seriously indeed and we agreed to write. It wasn’t boyfriend–girlfriend but seeing as how I couldn’t get anyone to go out with me in Northampton, I remained steadfastly loyal by default to Paula across those 70-odd miles for the duration of our fruity correspondence. And she did come down for my 16th birthday party, which was something of an honour for her.

But it all ended in tears after her second and, as it turned out, final visit in July (we sat and watched Prince Charles marry Lady Di on the telly, which was probably an omen). When Paula got back to High Wycombe, she wrote that letter with the all-too-fruity suggestions concerning what we would do when she turned 16 on 14 March 1982. I panicked, and chucked her by return of post, thus at least sticking to the anti-chucking legislation laid down on Tuesday, 13 May 1980.

I had moved on apace with Paula, but I wasn’t ready for any really rude stuff. Luckily for me, none would be forthcoming.

* * *

Know this: I’m not going to talk about anything as intimate as losing my virginity – partly to protect the memory and the other party involved, and also because if you wanted to read about sex you’d have picked up a novel by Edwina Currie. Suffice to say, I lost my virginity statistically very late, when I was 18 in fact – long after most of my peers – but true to form, it left me with neither emotional scars nor a sense of deep self-loathing as it occurred after a measured, patient run-up within what was my first actual,
serious
, long-term relationship,
³
and not up against a wall or with the local loose woman à la those
Porky
’s films.

My trajectory of development up to this pivotal point was a sort of very low curve that suddenly jerks upwards, as it were. Even when I started to get girlfriends more regularly these weren’t exactly steamy affairs. I don’t know why but I was very timid about female anatomy. I could reproduce the textbook diagram of a woman’s reproductive organs but not from life. I wouldn’t say I had a full-scale hang-up, I just didn’t fancy going there. Not just yet.

I went out with a couple of girls who were more, shall we say, gung-ho than I and all it did was bring the chucking date forward. Jo P, my one proper
local
girlfriend of 1981 and not to be confused with Jo G the singer in our band, lasted just under two weeks. She gave me my first love bite at Neil Stuart’s party, which was a warning shot that I was out of my depth from day one.

It dawns on me that I may be flattering these formative liaisons by calling them ‘relationships’ – they are more like dress rehearsals, basic training. As teenagers, we flit restlessly from one partner to the next like bees between stamens, and that’s as it should be – there’ll be plenty of time for commitment, self-assembly furniture and arguing later. I say that for as long as you still think of it as ‘going out with’, you’re not in a relationship, you’re just kissing the same person on a regular basis and scratching initials into playground apparatus.

I went out with Rebecca (neither Warren nor the vicar’s daughter, a third one) for a full month. She was the first girlfriend I’d had with an imagined weight problem and I dealt with it very
intuitively
by not noticing or caring. A slight girl as I remember her, she wrote this in my diary on the day we started going out, ‘Hi! I am not fat. I am obese.’ This was so far from the truth it simply did not compute, and I didn’t take it seriously at all. I was too busy listening to ‘Nowhere Girl’ by B-Movie, experimenting with auburn hair dye and planning Absolute Heroes’ next live gig. Rebecca would have been my Falklands War girlfriend if I’d taken much notice of what was going on in the South Atlantic but I’m ashamed to say I was distracted again. I actually packed her in before the Royal Navy Task Force even recaptured South Georgia. Rejoice, rejoice. I’m sure she did.

I developed a system in 1982: I marked the beginning and the end of each relationship in my diary with coloured triangles. Thus, Rebecca was a lime-coloured triangle (28 days); Wendy
⁴
was an orange triangle (25 days); Sarah – who I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember, but she’s there in the book – a yellow triangle (10 days); Caroline, a pale blue one (her mum was one of our teachers at school – I think it’s called playing with fire – a misleading 46 days as I was away in Jersey for 14 of those); Lynn, red (a misleading 63 days since she was 1982’s Holiday Romance, and we only saw each other once afterwards – I took the coach all the way to Manchester so I must’ve been keen); Carol, brown (the dampest squib of them all, six days); and Fiona, pink (24 days). A pattern was emerging, one made up of multicoloured and in some cases overlapping triangles. My life had become a Venn diagram.

I don’t want this chapter to become a meaningless roll-call of girls’ names (Rebecca followed by Rebecca followed by Rebecca), nor am I aiming to come across like some auburn-haired Casanova ‘82. It is after all like a big game of musical chairs at that age. The truth is, I couldn’t find anybody I wanted to stay with for longer than 28 days. I got bored with them; they presumably got bored with me too, it’s just that I always got in first with the P45 phone
call
. I did occasionally pack a girl in face to face, but Fiona, for instance, I deliberately called while
Grease
was on telly so she’d be keen to get off the phone and back to John Travolta.

* * *

What did this string of brief, surprisingly chaste relationships teach me? Well, that I could get girlfriends (I did fancy myself a bit, but then I was in a band). That I was easily bored. That ultimately I preferred my male friends to any girl (the real quality time I spent in 1982 was with Pete and Craig and Matty and Vaughan, and a five-day biology field trip to Exmouth was more notable as a quasi-homoerotic male-bonding session than as a girl-hunt). Lust was something I saved up for pop stars and film actresses. I saw little crossover between the objects of sexual desire I cut out of magazines and the girls at school.

I’m needlessly ashamed to say I started compiling ‘Horn Charts’ in my diary, and here we see unattainable women like Bo Derek, Catherine Deneuve, Ann-Margret, Suzanne Dando, Lesley Ash, Keren Woodward, Denise the dark haired one out of Tight Fit, and Axa, the pneumatic she-warrior in a
Sun
cartoon strip, fighting it out for the top spot. (I would have paid most of my pocket money to actually see them do that.) Girls at school didn’t as a rule get a look-in. They were all too attainable. Like all boys in a band with a girl singer, I always fancied Jo G from behind my tom toms, but she was officially not for asking out, and we all kept a professional distance. Hence the allure, I guess. She may as well have been Keren Woodward.

So what was happening? What were girlfriends for? What was the point of awarding them the first coloured triangle, when I was already envisaging their second one?

I think I went out with girls in 1982 because:

During the previous lean years, I had filled all the no-girlfriend time with much more important and rewarding stuff: drawing
caricatures
with Paul Garner; learning the drums and forming the band with Pete and Craig; growing a floppy New Romantic fringe; watching as many films as I humanly could; and collecting Sainsbury’s trolleys from as far afield as the Mayor Hold car park in my clip-on brown tie. Even in 1982, the Year of the Triangle, I kept up the band, the films, the drawing, and the hair. I wrote
Not the Sixth Form Revue
, which we performed for three nights at school; I passed my driving test first go (and dented the bumper of Mum’s Metro the
day after
); I made endless humorous and elaborate tapes for my friends’ birthdays featuring Pythonesque sketches, sound effects and spoof songs; and of course, I found time to turn my diary into a work of art, a surrogate water cooler around which the whole gang would gather.
BLOODY PRIVATE!

If I’m honest, girlfriends were way down my list of priorities, even when I had one. There were bursts of uncontrolled over-reaction when a new triangle appeared (the diary is full of heady and harmless nonsense like ‘I am going out with wonderful Rebecca … God, Paula’s beautiful … Where will I be tomorrow? I’ll tell you: Manchester with the girl of my dreams … etc.’), but at the end of the day I think I would have traded any of them in for Vaughan or Pete or Craig.

I was at least building up an impressive repertoire of ex-girlfriends, which made me feel terribly experienced and worldly. Another landmark in late ’82: I mistakenly called Liza an ‘old flame’ in front of her in the Bold Dragoon pub and she slapped me round the face. I thought old flame simply meant ex-girlfriend, but she took it as an implication that she was on the back burner and at least it got me my first slap, which I must have earned by then (for ending it with Caroline by showing her photos of Lynn if nothing else). But because we all moved in the same social circles – Absolute Heroes gigs, Willowtree
⁵
discos, the sixth-form
common
room, Alan’s flat and the Bold – it was impossible to avoid exes. We just had to get on with each other, there was no room for lingering resentment.

However, despite the teen anguish, we weren’t in love, any of us. We were just messing about. I ended up with crap O-level results and some seriously worrying school reports in the sixth form
⁶
not because of girls, but because of the band, the films, the drawing, and the hair.

Oh, and
being gay
, but that deserves its own chapter.

1
.
Actually I have an alibi for history. Our teacher Mrs Horrocks thought she could crack the exam code, and using past papers, had worked out exactly which essay subjects would come up. She advised us which bits to concentrate on in our revision and, by the same token, which bits to ignore. On the day, it turned out she was completely wrong, and loads of us did badly. ‘U’ by the way is ‘ungraded’, which was the equivalent of the exam board coming round and slapping you in the face at the Bold Dragoon. They say Mrs Horrocks was in floods of guilty tears when the results came in, which is why I’ve changed her name.

2
.
Significantly, it was Nan Mabel and Pap Reg – ever the jet-setting, colour-telly-pioneering sophisticates – who went out and road-tested Jersey and the Merton for us. And they flew. And they hired a car. Definitely working for the CIA.

3
.
Another Jo, but not just another Jo. A 15-year-old girl from the NSG (Northampton School for Girls), we were together for 296 days, from December 1982 to October 1983 (thus I am skipping ahead a bit by mentioning it). It was the first relationship that behaved like one: it evolved, bedded in, developed catch-phrases and I didn’t get bored. Who am I now to say that just because we were under 18 we didn’t love each other? If we thought we did, we did. It was certainly the most mature coupling of my life so far – a very good, steadying influence on my luteinising hormones – and even though there was a lot of other stuff ongoing in my life (the usual: band, films, drawing, hair), we did spend a lot of time together for those ten months, and even had the odd row, usually borne out of Jo feeling she was throwing away her 16th year in a long-term relationship. She was two years younger and yet somehow still seemed a year older.