it’s against the law, don’t you? You can get done for that at your age, and so can the boy. If the police catch you you’ll be in trouble.’
The prospect of PC Plod peeking through the curtains to spy on me every time I dropped my knickers was worrying, but seemed to be a little unlikely. More worrying was my family’s joint insistence that in future they would need to safeguard my welfare more closely. ‘We need to keep tabs on you a little more,’ my birth-mother insisted. ‘You should hold on to your virginity until you meet someone special, the man you’ll marry.’ I was the only one among those in the room who knew that her concern was a little late in arriving: quite a while too late.
The end result of the ‘fibs’ debacle was that I was grounded for weeks by the combined forces of my grandmother and my birth-mother working in harmony to ensure my moral welfare. I was not allowed to go out anywhere other than to school and back, and my relationship with Trevor was stopped in its tracks. Demonstrating the true spirit of schoolgirl friendship, Jennifer took the opportunity to start going out with him herself. As soon as she mentioned that she had ‘seen’ Trevor the evening before I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that they must have had sex. I didn’t really mind because I was imprisoned in my nan’s house anyway. It did feel a little unfair when she revealed that my former boyfriend had been grading my performance: ‘He says you’ve got a ten out of ten body, but a six out of ten face,’ she announced with some glee.
So after the briefest of outings, my burgeoning sexual history had pretty much ground to a halt. A one-afternoon stand with two older men who took my virginity had been followed by a few inexpert couplings with a lad more my own age. None of the above had been much to write home about and none of it had been enjoyable enough to encourage me to seek sex elsewhere. I suppose that my reluctance to repeat the experience was some sign of how well my grandparents had succeeded in instilling at least some sense of morality throughout my childhood. I could not have articulated it at the time but I knew that something was not quite right about mere random sexual encounters. I did feel that I wanted a boyfriend but knew in my heart that I should be having sex with a proper partner, rather than with strangers to whom I had barely even spoken. No such standards had ever been spelled out directly at home but the message had beenrepeatedly conveyed by implication. It was a drip-drip, almost subliminal feed of my grandparents’ morality: ‘You do not have sex until you are married; look what happened to your mother at such a young age; be careful, be a good girl, behave.’ My grandparents had never had that sex education talk with me, but clearly something of their message had stuck in my mind.
Perhaps more importantly, I was also spending a lot less time at that stage with my sex-mad friend Jennifer. Without her around to chat up a seemingly endless string of would-be partners, I was happy to concentrate on my schoolwork and to try and solve my perennial problem of never having any money. The age-limit for working in a ‘Saturday’ job was supposed to be 15, but for a long time I had looked older than my age. It was easy enough to get a job as a waitress in a local café, the first of a string of dull jobs which served one purpose for me better than any other: they made me determined to get a good education, good qualifications in order that I would never again get stuck in that type of boring, dead-end job.
I was around 13 years old when I started my first waitressing job. The wages were about £10 each Saturday but that could rise by another pound or two if the customers contributed to my tips jar. The money felt like a fortune to somebody who had never been given more than £1 a week pocket money throughout their childhood. I can remember with crystal clarity how I spent my first week’s