Where Did It All Go Right? (41 page)

I am not going out with anyone.

I have forgotten Paula’s phone number.

I pick faults with myself.

Thursday, 20 November

Dad’s birthday. I got him a
Mayfair
. Good present. Mmmmmmmmm. I have just tasted something as nice as the tastes of malt bread, yogurt, ginger beer, Drifters, dry roasted peanuts all mixed together ie. one of Dad’s sherry liqueurs.
Mmmm
. I scored in hockey and a ball hit me on the head. Hockey is ace.

Saturday, 22 November

So! It was Kristin who transplanted a square inch of JR with a square inch of lead. Kristin, JR’s sister-in-law, is now JR’s sister-in-Strangeways. Thanx,
Chronicle
, for letting the secret out at 6pm. Mates. Haha, if you thort it was Sue Ellen.

Monday, 24 November

Why does everyone keep dying on me this year? Alf Hitch, Stevie, Mae West, Hattie Jacques, lead singer of Ruts, L.S. of Joy Division, George Raft, Peter Sellers, Yootha Joyce etc. Saw
Film 80
. Barry Normal hates
The Island
and
Awakening
.

Wednesday, 25 December

Ace stuff: new drum sticks, Python album,
Not 9.00 News
LP,
Holy Grail
book,
Guinness Film Book, Golden Turkey Awards
book, inks + brush, talc, scarf, felt tips,
Elephant Man
,
²⁰
French Connection
,
²¹
Graffiti 2
, rubber, record box, biros, glue, razors, diary, sweat shirt, Merry Christmas.

1
.
Craig McKenna, soon-to-be bassist with The Brightest View and Absolute Heroes, was new to school and Northampton, having moved here from Watford (though his family were Scottish). He had almost translucent Gallic skin which reddened frequently, and blond hair eventually swept into an impressive wedge. His parents were the first people to own a new-fangled video recorder – certainly in my orbit, possibly the whole country. They seemed to be well-off – they lived in new cul-de-sac Kestrel Close (where my upwardly mobile parents moved in 1983). They had a dishwasher too! And their garden was full of dogshit, deposited by their three yappy terriers. Craig had an effortless cool about him, despite the redness, and was the first among us to get a legitimate girlfriend: Sarah Wadsworth.

2
.
My first glimpse of pubic hair in a film.

3
.
I wish I could see that video today – now that I have a ‘glamour’ career hem-hem.

4
.
The NCFE Film Club contributed greatly to my expanding mania for cinema. Not only did it show key X-rated American films to a then 15-year-old enthusiast (
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Warriors
), but subtitled ones too: French, Japanese, Hungarian, Cuban, German. My film-going companions were always Paul Garner and aforementioned Nene College cohorts Neil Stuart and David Freak.

5
.
Paul Garner was perhaps my most important friend in the fourth and fifth year, art buddy and film buddy (he was as obsessed with Charlton Heston as I was with Gene Hackman). Though he existed outside of the cooler orbit of Craig and Pete and the band, our friendship attained a higher plane through all the hours we spent together. We went on telly together, appeared in the paper together, drew published cartoons together. Paul actually went on to forge a career in commercial art, storyboarding and the like, and I bump into him a lot. A fine chap, with creativity coursing through his veins and a mordant sense of humour (he became convinced he was a werewolf during his diploma year at Nene).

6
.
Mate of Craig’s. Had a lot of disco records.

7
.
Andy Howkins, later nicknamed Howx, then Honx, because it was a funny word, and he was a funny boy. Stocky, Undertones fan (he actually went to London to see them play) self-effacing to the last and he had a table tennis table in his garage.

8
.
Matthew/Matt/Matty Allen, with whom I struck up a deep and unexpected kinship in art and history. The first of our lot to get hairs on his chin, obsessive about Monty Python’s ‘Embarrassment’ sketch and the drawings of Mad artist Don Martin (in particular the phonetic sound effect ‘Geeen!’), rode a scooter, played an acoustic guitar and dug Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Great guy. Became a postman.

9
.
See Chapter 14
.

10
.
I told you how barren Northampton was in those days. We had to go 50 miles to find an ice rink.

11
.
The same Jon who showed us a video of
Deep Throat
when we were in sixth form (and his parents were out). It certainly put
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
in the shade.

12
.
It is, of course, a 999 lyric.

13
.
Not strictly his bowels, more like his stomach, since that’s where half-digested food comes from.

14
.
We were knocked out by the hotel experience as you can see. It was a bold, sophisticated new era for us after a lifetime of self-catering in Llithfaen. Looking back on the Merton, it was far from posh – more an oversized, ‘affordable’ establishment for old folks and families whose dining hall was like the world’s biggest canteen, but the idea of waiter service and occasional soups with French names made us feel as if we were at the Hotel Du Cap in Cannes, and we lapped up every minute of it.

15
.
My first Holiday Romance: a quick snog after hours in the TV room on her last night, which led to furious letter-writing and, in 1981, two visits to Northampton, where Paula and I pretended to be boyfriend and girlfriend. It was ultimately pretty chaste – we were only 15 – indeed, it was the saucy promises she made in her letters about what we would do after her 16th birthday that scared me off. No more letters. No more visits.

16
.
The Farm was a converted barn up Booth Lane that housed the youth club.

17
.
The day – for me, not Jon Savage – that punk died. Long live The Human League.

18
.
The prison officer we laughed at was on the documentary series Strangeways. I don’t know what was so funny.

19
.
Pressure
was a gritty, low-budget 1974 British film about the black community in South London, with particular emphasis on Rastafarianism and sound systems. The Film Club showed it. More education for me (‘There really should have been subtitles,’ I wrote in my diary).

20
.
Making-of book.

21
.
The original novel by Robin Moore.

fourteen

I’m Not in Love

HERE THEN ARE
my O-level results:

Not great are they? Hardly an exhibition match. Pete, for instance, got A grades in all three sciences, and Richard Ford got
four
As – mind you, Fordie was the kind of square who wore his school rugby top
out of school
. Three years earlier I had walked away from middle school the anointed one, top of the form, Mr Hundred Per Cent. Now I was merely scraping through my exams (and in the case of history, failing miserably
¹
). These results by the way have nothing to
do
with getting a few questions wrong in front of the hard kids – by the time I sat my O-levels in the fifth year, I had put that pimp-rolling pantomime well behind me. Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz weren’t in any of my option groups anyway, and since they would all be leaving school at the first opportunity to join the nearest scrapheap I couldn’t have cared less what they thought any more. No, these below-par grades squarely reflect the performance of a distracted boy. It seems my academic brilliance was history and here’s why.

O-levels come at precisely the wrong time (or they did for me anyway). You’re 16. You’re waking up to the world. If you’re a boy, testosterone production is now in overdrive, not to mention luteinising hormone (hey, I got a B in biology). Secondary sex characteristics rear their ugly head and, unless you are at the NSB, girls hove into view in a big way, sometimes obscuring everything else, including the sky, and certainly taking the urgency out of homework, revision and the Industrial Revolution.

I first noticed the opposite sex in 1977, aged 13, which is pretty much by the book. You might say that my first sexual act was buying Rebecca Warren some fudge from Wales. (The crushing disappointment of her response was certainly a useful lesson in this regard.)

I will now call Hayley my first girlfriend without inverted commas, the culmination in 1978 of an intensive campaign of ‘chatting up’ and ‘asking out’ at school. She was my first French kiss, as we used to say demurely in those days: the kind where you bang teeth and try to convince yourself this is hot stuff. But like all apprentice relationships, it didn’t exactly run deep. I don’t even remember it officially ending, although I did experience for the first time that nagging tied-down feeling during the French trip, where very little French kissing actually took place. Well, we had been ‘going out’ for a week – I expect the magic had gone.

After the Hayley watershed (the main consequence of which was a lasting friendship with her supercool older brother Vaughan), I enjoyed an entirely unrepresentative rally of girlfriends that summer – although not one of these nursery-slope liaisons went beyond hanging around awkwardly and perhaps the engraving of initials on the see-saw. I was asked out by a girl called
Louise
at school. She scared the life out of me because she had ‘a reputation’ (possibly fictional) but I said yes. It lasted a week, and I’m not sure I even kissed her. (I didn’t. I didn’t kiss her.) She packed
me
in, which was only fair, as she’d started it. Without stopping to check the time I immediately dallied with a girl called Rebecca (not Warren, another one – was she really a vicar’s daughter?), who I kissed at a youth club disco that finished at 9.15 p.m. Then I went on holiday to Wales, forgot all about her (no fudge), and ‘chucked’ her on my return with this tremendous act of backpedalling in my diary on 11 August: ‘I chucked Rebecca. Well I chucked her ages ago but I told her tonight.’ (Women love a bastard.) I chucked her down the field, which is where most of these torrid events took place. Where else were we supposed to go?

Then I hit what would have been my first girlfriend drought – so soon! – which neatly and not unconnectedly coincided with going to the new school, where my self-confidence took its first beating.

A grand total of no girlfriends in 1979; one in 1980; and one in 1981 (or one-and-a-half if you include 1980’s Holiday Romance, Paula from High Wycombe, who came to Northampton twice). Mind you,
not
having a girlfriend is more of an exam killer than having one at that age. The fancying, the stalking, the longing, the fretting, the sighing, the asking out, the rebuff, these are what take up all the headspace and breaktime.

The key females in my life throughout 1979 were Kris Monroe, Sabrina Duncan and Kelly Garrett, better known as Charlie’s Angels. I watched a documentary on TV about Marilyn Monroe in August that year, and her famous early nude shots against the red background imprinted themselves on my mind, unhelpfully in the circumstances. The out-of-the-blue smooch with Cindy Offord at the end of the year would be my only unimagined contact with the opposite gender, and we all know how far that got me.

I’ll think about it …

When, on 3 April 1980 I seemed to impress Liza at the Girl Guides and Fanciers FC disco (she was a year younger, but like all girls, seemed a year older) I couldn’t quite believe my good fortune, and our subsequent ‘going out’ lasted a creditable stretch, through the rest of April and into May. Six weeks all told,
during
which I walked her home a lot, and invented a code for our chaste, no-hands brand of snogging in my diary (‘romantic interlude’) – the first time I had ever hidden anything from its pages! I also wrote her name many, many times in all sorts of different pens, albeit spelt incorrectly for the first 11 days (it is written Liza but pronounced Lisa).

What did I learn from this great leap forward? Loyalty, I suppose. The pitfalls of trying to integrate a girlfriend into your regular circle of mates (Liza and I spent much of our quality time with Craig, Pete, Honx, Matty, Andy Bonner and Dave, listening to things like
The Specials
LP and ‘A Forest’ by The Cure). But the most important lesson of Liza was the one relationships save up till last, the lesson of rejection. I’d had a pretty easy ride for my first 15 years in this regard. Anita Barker’s mocking of my stabilisers was a knock-back, but it all happened so fast I didn’t have far to fall, and Tina Woods choosing Mark Walsh over me in the days before Hayley was a blow. But this was kids’ stuff. When your other half instigates the termination of a relationship after six whole weeks it stings. I didn’t love her, even when at the height of my junior fixation I wrote ‘ANDY 4 LIZA’ with my Dymo label-maker, but I thought she was awfully pretty with her freckles and when she chucked me on Tuesday, 13 May I was temporarily devastated.

You can tell by the way I pretend not to be devastated in my diary:

Yeh well I’m not going out wiv Liza any more anyway. But it’s nothing to shit yourself about. If she fancies some bigheaded wanker from Lings it’s her hard luck.