Fitting In. Colin Thompson

in the ballroom had been used up and we collapsed in the grass outside and watched the River Thames sail serenely by.

      This wasn’t opera. The words could have been any words. It wasn’t what they said, but how they said it. And every note pressed buttons that made it impossible to sit still. It was like all the walls of my home had fallen down around me and the other houses had vanished and the trees and the shops and the cars and everything that had always been in the way had gone too, and now I could see, for the first time in my life, that if there was a horizon in the world, it was so far away that it might as well have not be there.

      It poured colour over the grey world of post-war England, garish lurid fairground sparkle glitter paint that no amount of repression and criticism could wash away. It changed the world, and when Chuck Berry sang ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, it was better than sex. At least, it was until I actually had sex.

      At eleven o’clock we’d all stagger back over the bridge from the island into the real world and someone would say, ‘Let’s go down to Brighton.’

      So we did.

      We hitchhiked at midnight or scrounged a lift or drove our motorbikes the sixty-five or so miles down to the cold stony beach and all huddled together telling ourselves what a great time we were having, because we were rebel beatniks refusing to follow the rules, at least until we went back to school or work at nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning.

      By the time we arrived in Brighton everything was closed and had gone to bed so we all tried to sleep, but it was usually too cold and when the grey daylight arrived, everything was still closed and in bed so we hitchhiked back to London or got cheap rides on the milk-train or kicked and swore at our motorbikes which were also closed and asleep.

      And the wonderful ridiculous thing was that lots of us did it all over again the next weekend.

      Jazz gave way to rock and roll and rhythm and blues and then in March 1962, only five minutes’ walk from where I lived, The Ealing Club arrived – the thin end of the wedge that would change the world forever. Standards were falling. There would be tears before bed time and even Baby Jesus would not be able to save us.

      Between two shops by the railway, a set of stone steps led down into the darkness to a footpath that followed the railway for a few hundred yards before turning left into a lane of narrow workshops and coming out again at the shops around the corner, and at the bottom of the steps was The Ealing Club, which was started by a Scotsman in tartan trousers called Alexis Korner.

      It was another world, something far too alien to have come from another country, but something that must have travelled across galaxies. For a start there was noise, not accidental noise, but magnificent noise that carried a hypnotic beat. Someone had picked up a piece of New Orleans, magnified it and dropped it in Ealing, where it shouted so loud it drowned out any protests.

      The first time I heard it, I was hooked. The music leapt into my veins and burst into my head with frantic excitement. Rhythm and blues synchronised with the beat of my heart, a door opened that would never close and I flew to another world.

      The man on the stage with the guitar had skin-tight tartan trousers and pointed shoes and wild hair, and magic came out of his mouth. Alexis Korner sang the blues, and over the next eternity there were more guitars and there was more noise. And not just any noise, but noise that was the beginning of greatness.

      Then everything changed.

      On January 13th 1963, I saw a play on TV, which the BBC have managed to destroy every single copy of. It was called The Madhouse on Castle Street and Bob Dylan spent the time sitting on the stairs playing the guitar and singing.

      And very soon after that his first album came out, and bits of me that had been asleep woke up and stayed awake forever.

      And it did matter what those words were.

      They came from another world too and even when they didn’t make sense they said everything.

      I didn’t want to dance around the room.

      I didn’t even want to stand up.

      I didn’t know why, but I knew that things would never be the same again. And a massive, wonderful sadness woke up inside me and everything seemed to get bigger and bigger.

      I saw him play at the Festival Hall, young, nervous, alone and tiny in the middle of a massive stage, and again at the Albert Hall with a group and much later at Earls Court after which he lost his magic and got polluted with religion.

      But those early songs have never lost the magic.

      1958 – SEX EDUCATION – PART 3

      The thing about breasts, especially large ones, is that there is a time in your life when they are everything you could want.

      I was fifteen and Jillian was a big girl caressed by puppy fat, with a kind face and lovely eyes and black stockings held up by pennies twisted into the tops and enormous breasts that one dark night I was allowed to feel through a thick coat, a double-knit sweater, a school blouse and a cast-iron bra. As the weather grew warmer, Jillian left her coat at home and the wonderful breasts felt less like a pile of laundry and more like my imagination. One very dark night, dark enough to hide my shyness, as we lay by the river I put my hand inside Jillian’s sweater and then inside her blouse and then inside her bra and lay perfectly still, waiting for a slap in the face that never came.

      At last I was allowed to do it in daylight and Jillian showed me how to undo her bra, though no matter how much I practised I always needed two hands because her bras were powerfully engineered and had four lots of hooks. I was in paradise, lying in the grass by the river, eyes closed, holding her breasts and stroking the nipples that grew hard between my fingers like nuggets of gold, never daring to try for more. She reached up under her skirt and gave me one of the pennies that held her stockings up.

      ‘Tomorrow,’ she whispered, ‘you can have the other three.’

      Wow, tomorrow I will have four-pence, the price of admission to paradise.

      And then I went away for the summer to stay with my cousins in Cornwall and found another pair of breasts to adore, older breasts that were smaller, but much more used to being handled and eager to see the light of day, but I was still too scared to go any further. And when I got home Jillian had got fed up waiting and given her virginity to someone else.