The shoe debacle was so serious I was wondering what I would do if we didn't make up. Christine and I had become exclusive; too exclusive for our own good because when either of us was off sick we no longer had other mates to hang around with.

My lack of a sense of direction was legendary and a source of amazement and amusement to Christine. Thanks to the shoe incident I had to find my own way to double maths that afternoon. I wandered about uselessly and even sat for five minutes in the wrong room waiting for the others to turn up. I eventually found the class I should have been in and shuffling to my desk ten minutes late I could see Christine looking at me. I returned my haughtiest disapproving stare but she was just collapsing into stifled giggles knowing full well I was late because I'd got lost. This broke the ice and solidarity between us reigned. It was as close as we ever got to a real bust up.

Needless to say when I got home that night I looked through the Catalogue my Mum had ordered the shoes from. There it was in black and white. Brown Leatherette! Christine had been right and I just felt downright inferior.


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We were thirteen and increasingly rebellious. I was definitely the rebel leader with Christine falling in line too eagerly with my points of view. It was a delinquent era but it seemed we were the only ones in our year who were openly tapping into this spirit. The other girls were rebelling in a more predictable way. Once a group of girls from our year were in the library talking about sex. They were admitting to each other 'how far they had gone'. One girl said she'd had 'the finger' at which Christine and I moved away in disgust. There were the make up rebels too, some girls kept wearing pan-stick foundation, rouge, peach nail varnish and fancy ear studs even if it meant a detention. We even heard about a girl going off to hospital because she'd got herself pregnant but we didn't probe to see if it was true, we hated gossip.

Our defining moment for rebellion came when we saw Julie Driscoll in a play on telly. She had very short hair and was hitching rides in lorries. We both cut our own hair short after this and started bunking off school. We'd hitch hike a few miles up the road to some gravel pits and spend the days sunning and swimming.. Our method was pretty fool proof and as we had been 'good girls' up until then we got away with it for virtually a whole summer term. We'd arrive at school on the school bus. Go to our house form for morning registration, then leave and come back in time for the school bus home.

I say pretty fool proof, the weakness in our plan that we were still in our uniforms. Coming back from the gravel pits two days away from the summer break we were spotted by two teachers with a van full of our class mates out on a geography field trip.

I Digress

Before long Christine and I were doing everything together. We volunteered to be school librarians to stay indoors lunch times stamping books. We had smart green gold edged LIBRARIAN badges. I was happy enough with this bit of status and even happier not to get my hair messed up in a cold wind. There were two other Plymouth Brethren Librarians from our year. Ruth and Rebbecca had overall freckles, long coarse gingery single plaits down to their waists, and a very Old Testament way about them. They smelt of scorched lambswool. As law abiding Brethren they regarded us as sinners. They never said as much but we weren't that stupid. Ruth and Rebecca weren't in it for the books either. They'd volunteered so as to get away from the Heathens. After one Christmas holiday I remember us asking them what presents they'd got. "None," they said, "The Brethren don't believe in that sort of Christmas." Any attempt at real conversation between us pretty much stopped after this. We weren't giving up Christmas for anyone. Mine was pretty lean compared to Christine's but way up there in the lap of luxury compared to the celebrations of the dirgey Brethren girls

I was in the library with my horrible new brown shoes one day and moaned that the leather was rubbing me. Christine, ever the snob, said "they're not leather, they're plastic." I insisted they were leather, took one off to show her the lining but she insisted they were not. When she mocked me with the word 'leatherette' I was furious, and after a rising scale of 'no they are not, yes they are, no they're not' got so mad I tapped her on the head with the offending footwear and limped stompily off one shoe off and the other one on like Diddle Dumpling.

The Day My Best Friend Found A Man

We'd done everything together. I was thirteen when she literally courted me to be her friend. I was sitting on a bench at school, a few metres away from the swimming pool with my friend Wendy who wanted to be an actress. Her aunty had been on the stage and she was the inspiration for this ambition. Wendy was already very interested in boys even though we were only twelve. She used to talk endlessly about her older brother and fancied his friends. Her brother loved John Mayall who I'd never heard of up till then. I used to try to keep up by boasting about my brother in law who was the only man in my family life..apart from my Uncle Lionel and he didn't count. I went along with the fancying boys business but really the interest wasn't there.

My brother in law loved Johnny Cash, drove a big lorry and he'd travelled the world with the Merchant Navy. He said the best sunsets he'd ever seen were in South Africa. He could also draw battle scenes like the great Italian painters and play guitar and piano. Not only that but the first Christmas he went out with my eldest sister he bought me and my two other sisters a massive box of Black Magic chocolates each. My mum got a 200 pack of Rothmans cigarettes and a compliment on her nice legs.

Wendy and I were sitting there on our bench, as usual, pretending to be old women..we said things in a strange elderly accent like, "I know, isn't it terrible, it shouldn't be allowed." Christine came along and stood in front of us. She was slim, with braces to control her sticky-out teeth, and had short dark straight hair. She literally hung around us but it was me she was after, not Wendy. I hadn't even noticed her before but I guess she'd been around all along. There was a point where I felt quite guilty about Wendy because gradually I was hanging around with Christine more. Christine was persistent. She'd marked me out to be her friend and wasn't taking no for an answer.

Christine was very class conscious. We used to go into the same loo cubicle together at school..I was standing against the door while she was having a pee and she said: "I can't stand people who go to Bingo, it's common." As my mum went to Bingo once a week with her best friend Mrs Barratt (who'd introduced her to the the excitement of the Jackpot) I went red. Very red. Extreme blushing was the bane of my life. My cheeks would go crimson like a painted doll and it meant that all my discomfort was displayed on my face for the world to see. Anyway, regarding the Bingo, from that time on I used to beg my mother never to say she was going to Bingo in front of my friends. I was always nervous it would slip out or that one of my sisters would mention it.