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.