Seventy-seven

By Michael Fitzalan

1977 was a momentous year. We called it seventy-seven; the DJ on Capital called it Seveny-Seven. If you did not listen to Capital Radio, you were not worth knowing. To listen to ‘Radio One’ was heresy, even if it was the weekend top forty, both radio stations aired their singles chart on the same day at the same time. ‘Radio One’ did not have adverts but we still listened to London’s radio station because we could pick it up even west of Reading and, for us, London was the centre of the universe.
Seventy-seven was a cause of great celebration, it was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and you can still see plaques and go on a Jubilee walk to commemorate her twenty fifth year on the throne. Nineteen fifty-two saw the first commercial passenger jet airliner entering service and the completion of the first atomic bomb, nineteen seventy-seven was a street party to celebrate the achievements of Elizabeth’s reign, full stop.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291818192

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Seventy-seven

77

By

Michael Fitzalan

Copyright © 2009 by Finnian Fitzpatrick

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews.

A Foretaste - Memories from friends

1. Hiya; good to hear from you! Have just read a few paragraphs of 77 looks; looks like fun. I will think back - was that the hot summer? Must have been, I guess, distinctly remember buying a cheesecloth shirt to go to a party, I think at Mandy's. There you go never grew properly out of the hippy stage! Must come from having an older sister... I was much younger than my boys are now. What a thought. Must go and read some more...love to all the Family. I'll write back soon… Baci.

2. Read it at work - one of the advantages of a low-pressure job! Great fun and well done, I can't wait for more. If only one could find a girl who liked ‘Gentleman's Relish’ rather than relishing a gentleman! One of my fave '77 punk bands was Eater, incidentally… M

3. Enormous Valentine, Donatella, Inge, Virgo Fidelis Streatham, The Cats Whiskers’ Club, Queen’s Ice Skating Rink, David Galaxy Affair, Pot-holing in Yorkshire, on Duke of Edinburgh, CCF, Top of The Pops, Legs & Co, the dance group. Drinks: Thunderbird, Snakebites, Depth Chargers, dope den in the ‘wooden horse’ in the assault course, frequented by myself, J H and his brother and other foreign nationals, Reading Rock festival; headlining: Police, Motorhead, Whitesnake… Johnny Deaf and the Hearing Aids, blue hair and back-stage spliffs in Lemmy’s caravan… Await the next installment with baited breath… E

4. The seventies for me were David Bowie, Loon pants and Mr. Freedom t-shirts - at 13 hanging out in my sister’s clothes shop in Dublin called 'It's a Beautiful Day' with Thin Lizzie and everyone thinking I was 18 - how cool did I think I was? H.

That was them!

We did have such a rich culture back then, a diet of: musicals such as God-spell and Jesus Christ Superstar, plus films like Star wars. Music gave us a plethora of choice: teeny bop rock with the Bay City Rollers; Country and Western we all knew the words of Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand by Your Man’ and of ‘Jolene’, the Osmonds, Rod Stewart and then along came Siouxsie & the Banshees. We all looked liked disco boys in our smart shirts, trousers, and we all wanted skateboards, which were new.

Out went roller-skates and old-fashioned bicycles in came ‘Choppers’ and roller-blades. Clothes varied from mini to midi to hot-pants, flip flops and platform shoes or boots, to romantic dresses, shirts with wide collars and the 1976 denim explosion.

Then in 1977 people arrived at parties with food dye in their hair, clothes with slits held together with safety pins or which had added zips all over, spiky hair with gel hardening the follicles and suddenly bottle blonde hair for boys, it was most disturbing. Memories, Gladys Knight reckoned they were the corners of our minds.

First respondent - 1976 was the hot summer; I sweated as I took my first examination in a badly ventilated sports hall, the glass seeming to magnify the heat. The summer of seventy-seven was hot too, because punk was a year old. To the first person to reply to me, I can say 1976 and 1977 were hot.

The music was hot, as were the girls on the corner of king’s Road, ‘Pucci’s Pizzas’ positively pulsated with prime, pretty nubile nymphets or so I was told by someone who wanted to impress with his knowledge of London and his ability to serially alliterate. I never got to see inside the place myself that year.

I was always too late to get a seat next to the cool chicks. Timing was everything, as ever. It would have been un-cool to turn up at a pizza restaurant on your own before the ‘in- crowd’ arrived and it was too much of a squeeze to get a space once they arrived. I passed quickly, glimpsing the beautiful people at play.

Cheesecloth shirts were all the rage, in those days, seriously. We did not need Egyptian cotton or silk. Cheesecloth was light and kept you call, an ironing nightmare but it kept you cool.

The seventies saw the introduction of the crumpled look for travellers. I bought one; mine was bought in Paxos through sheer boredom, the realisation that I only had one decent shirt and by the standards of those days, cheesecloth was considered decent. We had been marooned in harbour, and it had rained for several days.

At the first sign of good weather, I had spent a quarter of my money on a clean and dry shirt. All our clothes on board had absorbed the moisture from the storms. The shirt was smart but it had outsize buttons and the navy and white stripes were about three centimetres, (that’s an inch and a quarter for my generation) and a collar that thought it was a scarf but it was ironed and clean.

Shopping had given me something to do as we waited to set sail but I had decided I would have to look smart for another reason; there was a gorgeous blonde called Siobhan from South Africa on one of the other boats in the flotilla. It was for holiday wear only.

A cheesecloth shirt is one of those items that only an extremely gorgeous Italian girl could get away with wearing either on a beach or when attending parties in London.

I had never worn my cheesecloth shirt after that holiday except at home when I knew no one would be calling around. It was cool in summer but not cool outside the confines of my mother’s house and garden.

The thick blue and white stripes did not go not go with the black trousers and white t-shirts that everyone under thirty seemed to be wearing. Punk was monochrome and even I knew that you have to choose either blue or black as base colour.

In the eighties, I wore a white shirt, black 501’s and black and silver silk boxer shorts.

In the nineties I went navy, blue 501 jeans, red tab, button fly, a blue and white striped or navy shirt, light blue on occasion and blue briefs for support after spending the eighties letting it all hang out.

It was a uniform of sorts, the variants of which are present in any town these days.

In the seventies, there was no uniform until punk came along.

Pre-seventy-seven you dressed in a cord suit to look Parisian intellectual, you wore a peasant dress and t-shirt to look sexy and available, clothes reflected your mood. Feeling funky, get psychedelic; feeling blue, dress in denim; want to dress like you’ve come back from safari, put on the safari suit; feeling ironically military, grab a Chelsea Pensioner’s blue topcoat, Sergeant Pepper’s red coat or a MASH green combat jacket. You could dress as if you were going foxhunting as you shopped in the King’s Road.

When punk arrived, everyone had to wear the same: black jeans, mohair jumper and band promoting t-shirt. Even going out for special occasions needed a uniform; the party dress was the bin liner with safety pins; nothing else was quite punk. Tights were generally black; saw a red pair once and nearly passed out with the outrageous independence of that statement.

Second respondent - Eater was one of the alternative bands of the seventies, a less than typical name, obviously an abbreviation of eat her. This was followed in the nineties by Ebenezer Goode, Ezer Goode, ‘E’s’ are good. The pop world is littered with such gems, 10 cc refers to a very weak engine, and Boney M might refer to an anorexic girl called Matilda or Emma. ‘The Avengers’ character was called Emma Peel because she had man appeal or ‘M’ appeal.

I only got the joke about Queen when I realised the lead singer was gay and that was after Freddie Mercury had died. Seventy-seven had unsubtle bands like ‘Ian Drury and The Blockheads’ and ‘The Sex Pistols’. What is a blockhead and what is a sex pistol? The former is ambiguous the latter is immediately obvious.

Teachers used to call us blockheads if we did not know the answers to questions and we knew ships had bulkheads. Pistol was a character from Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’, which we were studying for our English literature examination since September 1976. He had lines like: Pistols cock us up and flashing fire will follow. Even Elizabethans enjoyed lewd jokes.

He called all women ‘Doll-tear-sheet’, which might have been a good name for a highly made up punk band, which tore up its music score. I have yet to meet a woman who tears up the sheets and besides in Elizabethan times it was a term for prostitutes; don’t ask me why.

What did these strange punk names mean and should I have known the answer? More to the point should the band have been told about their awful moniker, should someone have sympathised about their terrible tag or was that the point? Anarchy, perhaps, required self-deprecation.

Names like ‘The Stranglers’ and ‘The Police’, or ‘Super-tramp’, are solid and strong. Most of Punk Bands’ names were deliberately badly chosen. Was that an attempt to reflect the nature of their music? There was so much ironic rebellion, against mass-produced record labels, that it was difficult to see where the seriousness started and the absurdity ended.

Third respondent - An enormous Valentine- This boy seemed to have a better time in 1977 than I had in the seventies, eighties and nineties combined. Virgo Fidelis, faithful virgin, what sort of name was that for a nightclub, or maybe it was a girls’ school that he played kiss chase with when he was younger? He was not specific and who was that enormous valentine card from, an enormous fan of his?

I can think who it might be; she was a stunner and later she married a pop star. (Virgo Fidelis is, in fact, a school, which he attended because his parents lived in Crystal Palace).

He saw ‘Motorhead’ and the ‘Police’ and ‘Whitesnake’ at Reading Pop Festival. No one told me about the event, nor invited me, or thought I was cool enough to go, or maybe I was busy that weekend.

I do remember Top of the Pops and the dancers Legs and Co, scantily clad replacements for ‘Pam’s People’ or ‘Pan’s People’. During term time the common room television would be surrounded by eager faces waiting for those lovely, leggy girls to bounce and strut around the screen. Each one of us, like hunters, focused on our favourite girl as we peered at the distant screen.

I liked the music on ‘Top of The Pops’.

Perhaps I deserved my fate, if I actually enjoyed listening to pop instead of punk. I did go skating at Queen’s and Streatham ice rinks but I ended up with a wet bottom and bruises all over.

When you are skating well it is exhilarating but when you skate with people who drag you over, the charm and excitement soon wears off. The music was always good but we should have worn more-suitable clothing if we wanted to enjoy ourselves properly. There was always the possibility of pulling over someone that you fancied, engineering that they landed on top of you.

This ruse had its drawbacks in that you could injure yourself twice, once as you hit the ice and the second time as they thrust an outstretched hand into your nose as they fell. Actually arranging for girls to go out with you was a major undertaking which they treated as some blasé event that happened every day. For us it was a major operation, we had to organise ourselves and get tickets and seem competent.

We had to wear our best clothes and then not be upset if they got ruined, for instance an indelible grass stain on a blazer, which we had put on the ground for them to sit on, would be laughed off as a trivial nuisance.

The fact that you could never wear that jacket again with her because the stain would not come out was neither here, nor there. Then your second best jacket came in the firing line until that too was ruined. After a wet winter or fine summer, we were lucky to have any outer clothing left at all.

Couple that with spillages of red wine, on light blue Levis, and you can see how the punk fashion caught on. Leather jackets are much more reliant than wool and black trousers hide a multitude of stains. My sisters went through the same rigmarole, taking hours to choose the right outfit, bathing, applying the right make up to the right areas, choosing something not too demure or not too sexy. They had the same angst over what to wear, trousers or skirts, the smartest or the favourite, the most comfortable or the most figure hugging. Would a billowy blouse be best or would a tight t-shirt look better?

Punk made it easy: tights - black, bin bag – black, rips, made with scissors, patched with safety pins. It was always best to have friend to help to avoid sleeping for a hundred years. The make up was simplicity itself: eyeliner - black, lipstick - red or black, nails - red or black.

There was little choice of what to wear on the feet, few dared to wear brown, black and red were the favoured-colours and the heavier the footwear, the better although ‘Doc Martens’ seemed to be the favourite. At least our feet no longer smelt from Green Flash tennis shoes or basketball high-tops; odour - prevention was not high on the priorities of manufacturers in those days. That was easy!

Getting ready was half the fun; the rest of the fun was getting to the party. Money had to obtained; it did not grow on trees, although it occasionally came in an envelope from an aunt or uncle. Bus routes, tube maps and the A-Z of London had to be poured over. The London phone directory was also handy for numbers in case you got lost: A-D, E-K, L-M, N-Z, or whatever it was. These would be hung inside the phone box and you could look up a name and there would be not only the number but also the address.

With you’re A-Z and a friendly phone booth that had not been recently vandalised; you could track down anyone, as long as you knew their vague whereabouts and their postcode. Unfortunately, many of our friends were x-directory and therefore not in the phone book. In such cases, precise details and local landmarks were needed to ensure embarrassing encounters were avoided.

We think life is complicated now; it was even more so then. If you wanted to get hold of someone and they were out, you had to keep ringing until you got an answer; there were no answering machines or call return buttons. Then you had to leave a message with another member of the household, if they were not there and pray that it would not be lost under the post or homework or any other paper work or that the person you had left the message with was reliable. Finally, you had to sit next to the phone willing it to ring. In fact whole days, even weeks, could be spent by the phone. That was why we read a lot, waiting for that return call.

In fact, you were not waiting for the call, you were reading, you just happened to be next to the phone whilst reading. Generally, you had to get on with your life so you could leave messages for each other for days or weeks on end. If you were out you had to find a phone box and then, having walked the length of the street, you might find that it did not actually work or someone had urinated in it the night before.

We had to draw money out from the bank, not from a cash point or ATM. This involved writing a cheque and queuing up between the hours of nine thirty in the morning and three thirty in the afternoon. Everyone paying in and drawing out money waited patiently for hours to be served, now if there are more than three people in a cash point queue you can hear impatient tutting from the back.

We live in an instant twenty-four hour culture. There was nothing that was instant back then, except the coffee, and the dried potato or soups. There was nothing twenty-four hours about the punk period. The pubs shut at eleven unless you knew a dodgy landlord in the East End or south London and gigs ended promptly so that the punks could get home on the tube before it closed at midnight.

Some of the punk bands went to a lot of trouble to use word-play. There are no subtle names for bands these days like ‘Eater’. It took me a while to work out that it meant ‘eat her’ as it took me years to decode the comedy phrase, ‘Happiness is very important’.

In the post flower power seventies, groups reigned, sharing and grooving was the key and even Sid Vicious was only the front man for The Sex Pistols. Punk was bands not individuals, individuals had to be ironic about their success, unless they were Belgian, singing ‘Ca plein pour moi’, called ‘Plastique’ Bertrand, in which case they were ironic and very amusing. Our grasp on music up until then had been British individuals after the Beetles and Stones: Mike Oldfield, the single-minded composer of

‘Tubular Bells’ Eric Clapton was an artiste. Elton John was a rock musician. Cat Stevens and David Essex were guitar men.

Across the pond, Don MacLean a musical poet and Neil Young was a satirist and disco and Mowtown had turned from one or two artists to bands like Sister sledge and Rose Royce.

It would be tempting to say that music is about individual personality these days more than groups like ‘Matt Vinyl and the Poly Euro-Thanes’ because it fits with the idea that we have not recovered from the’ ME’ generation of the eighties. Music has always had its individuals: Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Presley and so did punk. You won’t meet ‘Poly Thene’ or ‘Poli-Esther Blend’ at a party but you might have been fortunate enough to Malcolm Maclaren or Vivienne Westwood.

Punk had a lot of spunk and that’s why we liked it. It shocked with swearing and disgusting slogans on t-shirts. It turned respectability on its head and we all wanted some of its anarchistic ingredients in our lives.

Nowadays your biggest conundrum is whether you should tell the person wearing the FCUK t-shirt that the words French Connection United Kingdom becomes an acronym, which is an anagram of a disgusting word for fornication.

FRIG would have been better, more subtle like ‘Eater’ and ‘E’s are good’. Frig clothing by French Connection; sailors look great in the rigging with our frigging clothing. Everyone would be wearing GRIF t-shirts now.

Respondent number 4 - I cannot comment on her hanging out in Dublin with thin Lizzie, it would not be fair. Nor will I comment about her loon pants because I do not know what they were. I assume they were some groovy, ultra-flared American, import that swept Dublin like no other craze before it and I suspect that, but for the arrival of Punk, those loon pants might well have received the same welcome in London. All I can, or will say is that envy at her speechlessly cool existence leaves me dumbfounded.

Her love of Bowie, I can comprehend because my middle sister, Fiona, was totally obsessed by David Bowie. From his "Laughing Gnome to his Zowie" phase, my sister adorned her walls at home with pictures of him.

He looked pretty scrawny to me at the time but he could belt out fantastic songs. I went to see him, in concert, in 1983 during his very successful ‘Serious Moonlight Tour’ on the strength of his early work and I was not disappointed. Bowie was constantly reinventing himself, developing and improving.

In my sister’s bedroom there were other men. Bowie was not alone, his faces in various guises, through all his images were scattered across the bedroom walls. He was my sister’s favourite but she was not that faithful. There were also pictures of David Essex, Looking back to see if you were looking back to see… and Cat Stevens. They were manly men, the sort of pop star we could aspire to be, apart from the fact that they had smouldering dark eyes and Byronic good looks along with thick, dark, curly hair, they were also supremely talented. They could actually play guitar brilliantly and sing beautifully.

We could not compete with their gifts and their Adonis appearance. We could not compete with their success, a powerful aphrodisiac. Plus, they were tall dark and handsome, we were just tall. I loved Cat Steven’s music; my sister thought he was a hunk. David Essex was cool. However, Thin Lizzie was the coolest of the cool; Phil was ‘The Man’. Carlos Santana came second. We all wanted to meet the ‘Black Magic Woman’ and we were painfully aware of the fact that ‘she was not there’.

There was no ‘she’, here there or anywhere, unfortunately. We thought we were as cool as Phil and ‘The boys are back in town…’ became our theme. We played the tape or LP before we left school or when we arrived at someone’s house. It was our anthem when we returned to London. Even at school, having a London address bought you kudos. The girls who boarded at our school thought we were cool. They were between the ages of eight and twelve at the time and there were only four of them; daughters of various staff members, but we liked the way they looked at us.

Being under fifteen, their judgment was not terribly refined, anyone older than them and a boy was cool in their eyes. At fifteen, anyone who stared at you and looked dreamy was a good thing.

It massaged our fragile, infantile egos. For those of us who made a massive effort to be effortlessly cool, it was gratifying to have some acknowledgement. It was sad that such attention had to come from little girls but gratifying, nonetheless. We were not that un-cool or that ugly, we did not possess film star or pop star good looks but we were pleasantly good looking, good-natured and good fun. We were polite, attentive and amusing; the convent girls loved our company.

It was the London girls who would deliver, we were convinced; and they found us dull. Dull was good if they had no alternative, punk provided them with that escape and they took it. They grasped punk and sometimes punks with both hands. The punks took away everything good, everything had to be crude, rude, bad and ugly, disgusting and depraved. If we could get to the depraved by being everything else bad before hand, we were prepared to do it.

Unfortunately, the punks were better at being bad and ugly and we had a reputation of being good which was bad. Even if we could have got to the depraved stage by being good it would save us a lot of swearing, nose picking, spitting, glue sniffing and talking anarchistic claptrap. Punk was the means to our ends and we wanted to get our ends away as soon as possible. We needed to jump on the bandwagon.

We tried to become chameleons, public school punks were almost as ridiculous as the tucked up middle class suburban punks. Only in America were the punks really poor, but their punk music was not anything like British punk and middle class kids, playing rough-cut music in garages, hijacked it. Punk in the UK meant simple guitar rifts, drums and base and blasphemous or offensive lyrics, which would send adults apoplectic with rage and indignation. It was the perfect teenage music scene; it was rebellious and noisy, tuneless and upsetting. How could we not love it? Derek and Clive (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) swore and cursed to amuse, punks put their vocabulary to music but their lyrics were not as funny. They swore to offend the older generation and it generally worked. Only sophisticated singers like Ian Drury told an amusing story.

The others shouted and screamed; made a noise that no parent could approve of, and generally tried to shock.

Chapter 1 – A Seven Taste

1977 was a momentous year. We called it seventy-seven; the DJ on Capital called it Seveny-Seven. If you did not listen to Capital Radio, you were not worth knowing. To listen to ‘Radio One’ was heresy, even if it was the weekend top forty, both radio stations aired their singles chart on the same day at the same time. ‘Radio One’ did not have adverts but we still listened to London’s radio station because we could pick it up even west of Reading and, for us, London was the centre of the universe.

We tried to listen to Radio Caroline and other pirate stations broadcasting from the North Sea but most of them sunk in storms or the reception was so poor that even the coolest people would not put up with the annoying static hiss just to listen to a trendy station. We would not go that far. Some years contain defining moments in history; the Christmas on the Western Front, Kristal-Nacht, VE-Day, Kennedy’s assassination, the first man on the moon, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the abolition of apartheid, famine in Ethiopia, Live Aid, the atomisation of the twin towers and the devastation of the Asian tsunami or the China earthquake.

Seventy-seven was a cause of great celebration, it was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and you can still see plaques and go on a Jubilee walk to commemorate her twenty fifth year on the throne. Nineteen fifty-two saw the first commercial passenger jet airliner entering service and the completion of the first atomic bomb, nineteen seventy-seven was a street party to celebrate the achievements of Elizabeth’s reign, full stop.

I cannot think of any other milestone except of course my first novel being written but that was not nationally publicised. Supposedly, these celebrations also masked the disintegration of the British economy, discontent with which was meant to be the basis of the punk revolution. Allegedly, punks were disaffected, unemployed modern teddy boys; society had turned its back on them and they had reacted by preaching anarchy. The punks that I met were all in jobs and played in bands at night.

The people at the venues or at parties all seemed to be studying or working, perhaps I only met privileged punks. To these middle class, ‘I want to be in a band’ punks, anarchy was another word for rebellion, not the destruction of modern society, as we knew it.

However anarchists and their reputation conjured up terrible pictures for the establishment. Why rebel when you can become and anarchist and sound that bit more threatening? Personally, seventy-seven defined me.

Born in 1962, I finally considered myself an adult. Sadly the adults and the many other people did not agree. I took my first public examinations and wrote my first novel at fifteen. Only 1980 bettered 1977 and that was because I was promoted to Head Boy, which made me very popular with the girls and I co-starred, co-wrote and directed the winning play in the Inter-House competition.

Also, 1977 was brilliant because of the three ‘O’ level passes and the production of my book. I thought these were the pinnacles of my school life. The echo of that one-year still resonates audibly in my attitude and approach to life; work hard, play hard, get nowhere fast. It can be summed-up in a conversation in summer seventy-seven.

Where’s the party, Mike?

It’s all around you, Mark!

Enough details of dates, you want the grubby details, I am sure. Not too grubby, I am afraid I was only fifteen at the time and pre-Thatcherite Britain encouraged only drunken snogging and groping with clothes firmly tucked in; bare flesh was out of bounds. Our appetites, sexual or otherwise, had not developed to the egomania of the eighties. We were fed on Cadbury ‘Smash’, a reconstituted potato mix, and frozen fish fingers and frozen peas. Freeze dried or frigid food kept our passions at bay or cryogenically suspended. Our sexual experiences were mostly reconstituted stories of other people’s exploits, or stories of frigid girlfriends with locked together knees, and thighs frozen together like our beans and peas.

It was rare for the raconteur to find the defrost button. Even our most experienced hunters were unable to supply us with the necessary key to success. You could have girls interested in you and you could snog girls endlessly but you could not ‘have’ girls.

One prime source of information could have been my middle brother. He was two years older than me and his resemblance to Bob Geldof meant that he had no shortage of girlfriends. However, we never discussed details of his relationship, he was the embodiment of discretion, he would never kiss and tell and I dared not challenge that noble sentiment, so I remained ignorant.

He had supplied me with a magazine called ‘Custom Car’ which had topless girls inside and that was the extent of my sexual education from him. Otherwise, we had ink drawings of a cutaway section of female genitalia and reproductive organs, hardly a Michelin Guide to women and their bodies. We were hopelessly lost and the girls were equally confused or unwilling to help us find the key to their desires.

If I had been a teenager in the eighties, nouvelle cuisine and kiss and tell would have been the norm and oral sex would have been obligatory for all. It was when I was in my twenties. As far as I knew, in seventy-seven, female genitals had yet to be invented, much to my chagrin and the annoyance of my friends as well. They were dying to discover what they were for and how they functioned. Curiosity killed the cat but that particular pussy was keeping itself covered.

Young women were looking for respect and friendship. They were not searching for the multiple orgasms; they were trying to avoid spotty, ropey, groping organisms - teenage boys - trying to divest them of their clothes, their dignity and their virginity.

Frankly, no one could blame them; boys only wanted one thing. They did not want a wife, children or a companion, a soul mate or a shoulder to cry on, they wanted sex. Boys saw women as sexual playthings; the talking and charm offensives were a means to and end. Once that end had been achieved; charm and consideration, and even conversation, often disappeared.

I did not smoke or take drug.

I drank copious quantities of anything alcoholic that was going: tequila on night exercise in the CCF, port with cobnuts with my mother at home, Madeira in Richmond Park with a seventy-year old who was trying to seduce my twenty-two-year-old sister and anything else I was offered. At fifteen, in those days, being grown up had to include having a drink of some sort.

We were on night exercise at fourteen and a friend had smuggled miniatures of Jose Cuervo tequila for his squad in order to keep out the cold. We sat in a barn and sucked the last drops from the receptacles. We were cold but our