I discovered girls at about 13 years of age and the six form girls were all very attractive. My first crush was on a girl from Scarisbrick, she was the Scarisbrick police sergeant’s daughter and she went to school on the same bus as me. Jean was her name and I followed her around like a love struck puppy. She was 15 and in the fifth year. The older girls would disappear and dinner time down to the bottom of the school field where the grass sloped away. You could not be seen when you got down to the bottom of the bank. It was a great place to hide away from the teachers and most of the smokers would go down there. Some of the kids brought little transistor radios into school with them and switched them on to listen to the new pirate radio station Radio Caroline. They broadcast from a ship out in the Irish sea off the Isle of Man and we really enjoyed the pop music. You did not get records all day on the light programme. Any way I would sit at the top of the bank listening to the radio and would shout out a warning if any of the teachers came near. Most of the time they stayed away as they did not want to get involved with the work that was involved if they had to take a load of kids up to the headmaster for smoking. Jean started working for my Mum helping with the parties at the weekends in the pub. It just gave me a chance to see even more of her. My Mum told me off once for staring at Jean and not getting on with the job I was supposed to be doing. I once sent request in to Radio Caroline and asked for them to play Whiter shade of pale by Procul Harum on my Mum and Dad’s for wedding anniversary. I listened all day on the 6th of September as this is my birthday as well. Nothing was played on the day, sometime in October Mum’s cleaner came through and said she had heard the disc jockey wishing them happy anniversary.
I eventually found girls of my own age and started going out to local dances at Church hall in Ormskirk when I was 15. One of my mates at school had his own band and we went to watch them perform. Girls used to flock to the dances and I had a few fumbles in the passage behind the stage. One evening I had planned to go to a dance without asking Dad. I had worked the morning behind the bar and opened the pub at 5 o’clock. When it got to seven and the staff came in I went upstairs to change. I put on my new trousers, a clean shirt and best jacket. I even had a shave, not that I needed to shave. I went out to catch the bus at twenty past seven, as I waited Dad came out of the pub and shouted me back. I said “but I am going to the dance and I have a date.” He said, “you are not going out you are working tonight,” and that was it. I had to book with him if I wanted to go out in future.
When we went out all the lads liked to try and get a drink from the local pubs, I just couldn’t do this as all the landlords knew me. Drinking did not interest me as I could have as much as I wanted at home. I saw my mates making absolute fools of themselves because they had no experience of what drink could do. Half the time they ended up at the local off licence where the staff would serve anybody no matter how old you were. This was all in the days before supermarkets were open 24 hours a day and shops did not have alcohol licenses.
One of the girls in my class was having a party for her 15th birthday and most of the year was invited. I had turned fifteen the September before and this was February. It was my first real teen age party and I got dressed up specially for it. It was starting about eight o’clock and was in Ormskirk. Someone said there would be drink and all sorts so I took a party seven can of beer. All my mates were there from school and the girl’s parents had gone away for the night. We had records played by a lad who had a twin deck and earphones just like a real disco. The furniture had been cleared out of the front room and the carpet had been rolled up to leave the floor boards bare, it made a great dance floor. It was all northern soul and motown music as this was what the lad who owned the decks was into. Someone offered me a smoke of a rolly and I nearly said no as I had a packet of ten Park Drive. One of the lads nudged me and said “ go on take a drag and pass it on”. I did just that, the room suddenly got all swimmy and the music got much louder. I started to smile and felt so warm inside, it was my one and only taste of “wacky baccy” as they called it. It really took effect quite quickly and I felt like I was in slow motion floating round the room. I ended up on a couch with three others, one of them was a girl called Pauline from my class. I never knew she fancied me before, but her tongue was down my throat before long. We stayed together for a few weeks but I think it was the weed really that affected us both.
At school when I was in the fifth year I was a prefect along with all my form and the form above and below our. We had the responsibility of making sure that the lower years behaved themselves in school. This was like making the poachers into game keepers, we did a good job up to a certain point. If we caught younger kids misbehaving they would get told not to do it but none every got sent to the teachers. I rebelled against school uniform by not wearing a black blazer like all the rest of the school. I wore a tweed jacket. it made me stand out and look like an individual. At first when I started wearing this jacket the teachers told me not to but I persisted and by the end of the first term of my fifth year, three months after I started wearing it, no-one asked me to change it.
I started dating a young lady from the year below me at this time, her name was Christine and her dad was a police sergeant in Ormskirk. We went to the local travelling fairground with a crowd of mates on a Friday night in May. It was parked on the Church fields in Ormskirk. The Fair was owned by Silcocks and they turned up on a Tuesday, took two days to set it all up, then were open Thursday, Friday and Saturday before moving on to the next town.
As you approached the fair there were the big wagons with the generators in throbbing away with a stench of diesel in the air. Then you could hear the music, latest pop music, bright lights of many different colours all made up from painted electric bulbs. The was the candy floss machine where the lady stood with a stick in the big spinning bowl and the candy floss would appear like a big pink spiders web. She would turn the stick and it would wrap itself into a great big cloud on the end of your stick. The texture as you bit into it was crisp and yet soft, crunchy as you chewed but then would get chewy in your mouth and stick to your teeth, It was ever so sweet and the girls loved it.
You could get Coca cola in real bottles and the lads never had a straw like the girls, you put your straw in the girls bottle so they had two, then swigged it straight from the bottle. There was a big wheel, dodgems, darts stalls, hook a duck and the one we liked to get the girls on was the waltzer. You sat in a curved gondola with three or four others and it went round and round and up and down as the pop music blared from tinny sounding speakers. The lads from the fair walked round the back and spun the gondolas just to get the girls to scream. That was the best bit because the girls would cling tight to you as they started to get dizzy. The fair ground lads all wore white tee shirts or vests to show of their muscles and tattoos, They had big leather belts with large brass buckles with all sorts of designs on them. There hair was slicked back into a quiffe with loads of Brycreem.
I tried to win a prize on the air rifle stall but I never could, even though I knew I was a good shot with my own air gun, the fair air rifles never seemed to shoot straight. I wasted shilling after shilling trying to win but I was not the only one. One lad even turned up with his own .177 airgun pellets to give him self extra goes, it was OK until the stall holder caught him and chased him off. Christine, myself and our mates ended up walking up into Ormskirk and getting chips to eat. We went into the local park and sat eating the chips laughing and joking with the music and the throbbing engines in the distance until late into the evening.
I walked Christine home about a mile away down the country lane and then caught the last bus home to Scarisbrick.
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