I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby

Tickets for Iron Maiden go on sale next Friday.

When I was nearly fifteen I started going out with my friend’s brother’s friend. He was eighteen, and I thought he was the absolute pinnacle of what a teenage girl could hope for in a boyfriend. He was unsuitable - from his long hair to his ripped jeans, from his motorbike (I use that term loosely – it was a CG125 in middle-aged grey and burgundy) to his job on a pig farm. His parents were well-off and owned a sprawling farmhouse in rural Oxfordshire, and he was happily rebelling against going into the family roofing business. I presume his parents were happy to indulge him for a few years, secure in the knowledge that the threat of no inheritance would steer him back onto the right track at some point. When he wasn’t parping sedately around on the CG, he would use his rusted-to-within-an-inch-of-its-MOT Vauxhall Chevette (which had its wings stuffed with newspaper and weatherproofed with parcel tape) to visit me in rural Essex. He introduced me to dope, cheap cider, motorbikes and rock music. As you can probably imagine, my mother hated him. This was a huge part of the appeal.

When I was fifteen and a half, our relationship was abruptly curtailed.

We’d spent the summer hanging around with a huge group of friends. We all camped out most weekends in a field on the outskirts of the village, riding knackered old mopeds around and smoking huge joints. On the weekends that my friend’s parents were away, all sixteen or so of us would stay there instead. We’d eat the place bare, have sprawling, rowdy parties and engage in panicky clean-ups the day they were due back. One memorable weekend, someone managed to spill a five litre tub of emulsion down the stairs (they were the ones with gaps in between [I don’t know what the proper word is] ), covering stair-carpet, hall carpet and a very surprised dog in white-with-a-hint-of-peach. That took some clearing up, but we got away with it*. I loved that summer – things at home were very bad indeed that year, and any chance of escape was seized upon.

When it all fell apart, it did so in style. I’d been to stay at Boyfriend’s parents’ house for the weekend. Well, that was where I was supposed to have been staying. In reality, one of his friend’s parents had gone away and we were staying there. In a fit of teenage pique (which if I’m honest was actually a total crisis brought on by the circumstances at home) I decided I wasn’t going back. I rang my mother to tell her, and she flatly stated that if I wasn’t home by the Tuesday morning I would come home to find all my things on the doorstep. I didn’t care. Really. However, my mother subsequently panicked and went through my room to find a contact number for Boyfriend’s parents. She found it, along with some, ahem, revealing correspondence and all hell broke loose. We were tracked down by his sister and hauled before Boyfriend’s parents. Six o’clock the following morning saw us hurtling back to Essex in the Chevette to face the wrath of my mother. It was not pretty. I was consequently grounded until my sixteenth birthday which was a whole six months away. During these six months, a different group of friends (and, in retrospect, a more suitable one) were going to see Iron Maiden in concert and I’d been really, really looking forward to going with them. I didn’t though. Oh no. My mother spent three weeks threatening me with being put into care, being sent to live with my father (he declined, unsurprisingly) or just being kicked out. Anything would have been preferable to the house arrest I was placed under when, having been allowed out for a couple of hours on a subsequent Saturday I met up with Boyfriend, was grassed up by a neighbour and ended up being kidnapped by my own parents from outside the corner shop. Seriously. The car screeched up, I was bundled into the back and taken home, whereupon my parents announced that they were going out for the evening. So they locked all the doors, locked all the windows, removed all the phones and did exactly that. I contemplated setting the house on fire to make them feel guilty** but decided that was a bit too drastic, even for me. I (grudgingly) rode out the remaining months of my grounding, and paid them back when I was sixteen and allowed out again by promptly choosing an even more unsuitable boyfriend. They upped the stakes considerably by simply moving to the next county and not inviting me to go with them, and so began the really eventful years.

I’ve still never seen Iron Maiden. Whenever anyone mentions them playing live it reminds me of the story I’ve just told you. And you know the worst part? The very worst part? It was eighteen years ago. Eighteen. Years. Ago. I work with people who weren’t born when this happened. So, I am very much looking forward to being one of the old gits at Earls Court in December. And I can’t think of a better way to see them than in the company of the Other Half. Bollocks to being fifteen. Being fifteen was fucking rubbish. Nearly thirty three is way, way better.



* We got away with a lot. I dread Small Person becoming a teenage girl, and will never, ever leave her alone in the house for more than half an hour at a time until she is twenty four thirty seven and has learned the value of other people’s property.

** What?? I was fifteen! Don’t tell me you never thought about setting the house on fire.