5 Black Jacks/Fruit Salad mix
4 Texan
3 Merry Maids chocolate caramels
2 Lyons midget gems
1 Curlywurly
After walking out of the grammar school that day, after my altercation with Nutjob the physics teacher, I just carried on walking, I walked all the way home.
For the first mile or so, I was still shaking with adrenaline, I felt no anger or fear, I was satisfied that my actions were justified. I kept going over in my mind what had happened and how crazy it was that one’s circumstances could change so quickly. Soon it was like it had happened to someone else, and as my journey continued, my mind began to clear and it wasn’t long before I found myself thinking about other things.
I had undertaken this three-and-a-bit-mile journey on foot several times before but usually in the summer when I had chosen to spend my bus fare on a bag of fizz bombs or a can of Lilt instead. I had a feeling this might be the last time I might have to consider such a dilemma instead of paying for the bus purchase.
When I arrived home, much earlier than expected, another Curlywurly had bitten the dust. (Who came up with the Curlywurly, by the way? Not only the concept of the funky lattice-shaped bar but the name Curlywurly—it has to be the coolest name in the world of confectionary.)
‘How come you’re home so early, love, has something happened?’ Mum asked, naturally surprised to see me.
I managed to explain as honestly as I could what had taken place at school that day and that I knew I’d done wrong but that I didn’t think a grown man should be allowed to hit a child in such a way. She listened intently, without saying a word. After she’d heard what I had to say, she congratulated me on my decisive action and said she would enquire about a new school the very next day. Her exact words were: ‘You’re not going back there, over my dead body.’
Mum is a very no-nonsense person and once a chapter is closed that’s it—it’s time to move on. Though she has never admitted it, I believe she went back to the grammar school soon after to give the headmaster a piece of her mind and to set the record straight.
Her enquiries as to a new school resulted in my being much nearer to home, albeit at a comprehensive school. Not that I had a problem with comprehensives, but they were generally considered inferior to the much grander grammar schools. Comprehensive schools were where you went if you couldn’t get in anywhere else.
This school was a bit special though. It was a brand new school, where my year, the fourth year, were the eldest—there was no fifth form or sixth form yet. The school was so new that in fact half of it was still being built—hence its reduced capacity and the additional need for Portakabins as classrooms.
This new school was also an altogether much more civilised affair. The classrooms were much brighter, the teachers called you by your first name and their teaching methods were far less draconian, with not a cane nor a slipper in sight—and there were girls!
*Most of them courtesy of Dad on Saturday afternoons.
Top 10 Girls—Actually Women—I Thought about Before I Had My First Girlfriend
10 Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels
9 Debbie Harry
8 Sally James
7 Both girls from Man About the House
6 Jill from the chemists
5 Mrs Johnson (teacher)
4 Mrs Tranter (neighbour)
3 Miss Leavesley (French teacher)
2 Kim Wilde
1 Karen with the big boobies
Padgate County High School was the school attended by the incredible Tina Yardley. Tina was to be my first love, deep and genuine and proper and innocent. I still love her now, I always will.
I met her when I was partnered with her as part of the school production of Oliver!. She was the girl I would have to link arms with for the opening few lines of the song, ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand’, one of those annoying cockney songs that not even cockneys like.
Tina was an experienced performer and a general all-round star pupil. She was so confident and smiley—the kind of smile only genuinely good people are allowed to have. She was also vibrant, full of life and, even though she was in the year below me, she was easily as tall as any of the girls in my year—and she smelt amazing.
What is it about girls and their smells? You can’t be with someone you don’t like the smell of. I don’t mean if they stink of B.O. (although in the right circumstances I even find this a turn-on), or unfortunately if they have bad breath. What I’m talking about is their own smell, the smell that is them. I have loved everything about some girls I’ve met, the way they move, what they talk about, their hair, their eyes and then, wham bam, one whiff of their natural scent and it’s ‘No Way José’—this is never going to work. Sometimes you don’t get down to their real smell until the morning after the night before, that is the worst-case scenario.
I have a friend, now blissfully happily married, who, in a similar vein, says she used to be able to tell when she was falling out of love with someone because she would begin to start to hate the way they used to eat—so much so it would begin to make her want to throw up.
I think this emotion comes from the same source—inexplicable but un-ignorable.
Suffice to say I immediately fell in love with Tina’s smell, soon after which I fell in love with Tina herself.
I had seen Tina many times before, not only at school but because she also lived directly opposite my best mate in one of those big houses in the nicer parts of town with a drive and a nice garden at the front and the back. My best mate lived in a similar although slightly smaller house right over the road. He also lived two doors down from Tina’s boyfriend!
Not that I knew about this until a couple of days before the opening night of our production when I was riding home on my bike from my best mate’s house. I pulled out of his drive and, having pedalled no more than a few yards, I was punched full in the face by a very hard fist which seemed to appear out of nowhere.
The force of the blow, a superb direct hit, knocked me clean off my bike, smashed my glasses and bloodied my nose—a pretty comprehensive result all in all. I didn’t have a blinkin’ clue what was going on, nor did I know the identity of my assailant, let alone any likely motive behind such an unprovoked attack.
There is nothing like the ‘bang’ of a punch to shock a kid into bewilderment. Our heads weren’t designed to be punched. I suppose that’s why it hurts so much and this punch hurt as much as any I’d ever felt before—even the one from Loony Tunes back at the grammar school.
It turned out that this latest fist belonged to Tina’s boyfriend. He was eighteen, three years older than me and four years older than Tina.
‘That’s what you get for messing around with another bloke’s girl, you specky four-eyed ginger twat,’ he said, as I scrabbled around on the floor looking for what might be left of my glasses.
‘Not very nice,’ I thought, but who was I to argue? If he was nearly able to decapitate me with one punch, what might he have done if I’d riled him into dishing out a few more?
May I also point out here that I had not ‘messed around with another bloke’s girlfriend’—I had merely linked Tina’s arm several times in rehearsal as the script instructed me to. As far as I was aware she had no idea that I even liked her.
Several minutes later I was back at my mate’s house where his mum, who I fancied