For anyone following my stories, here's more of Classmates....

‘In a way,’ I hiccupped, smearing my finger along the class photo and coming to rest on Simon Floyd’s face, ‘I’m sort of hoping he’ll be there next week.’

It was midnight; my vodka-and-spaghetti-night with the girls had reached a reflective, confessional pitch. 

Nadine peered over the yearbook and made a face.

‘That scraggy, Mr Beany-looking boy?  Whatever for?’

 ‘I want to apologise to him.’

‘What, you mean say “Sorry you’re ugly”?’

‘Don’t be mean, Nadine!  I was mean to him.  That’s why I want to sshay sshorry.  He liked me for years, but I never forgave him for not being Karl.’

‘That sounds fair enough.  People have remained unforgiven for lesser crimes.’

‘You never know, Zo,’ Heather breathed dreamily, ‘he might well be a handsome doctor now – like a young George Clooney – or some dashing and important scientist!  You might fall in love with him on Friday night and forget all about Karl.’

 ‘Oh Heath, you dumb romantic!’ scoffed Nadine.  ‘He’s most likely even more gangly and acne-ridden than he was there.  I bet you he does something terribly earnest and mind-numbing with circuit boards.’

‘Actually,’ I interjected, ‘he’s a maths teacher, or so he says on Friends Reunited.  Which is kind of ironic, seeing as how it all started in a maths lesson.’

‘What all started?’

One of those good traditional masterpieces of schoolboy engineering, a paper aeroplane, swooped on to my desk, waking me from an algebra-induced stupor. 

It was March 1990.  We were a year on from choosing our GCSE options; a further year away from actually sitting the critical GCSEs.  Mathematics was not a subject we were permitted to drop – alas!  I saw no point to it – a fact which was, I’m afraid, reflected in my effort and marks.  Unlike Simon, I had no plans for it ever playing a role in the career which – in between more pressing pursuits like gawping at boys and swapping straps for our Pop Swatches – I was now supposed to be contemplating.

‘Careers talks’ had become a fixture of our curriculum.  Each week, visiting soldiers, solicitors, nurses or whoever would, with cult-leader-ish earnestness, attempt to enlist rabbles of uninterested fourth-formers into the Army/law/nursing/whatever.

I for one was too ridiculously young to take any of it seriously.  Karl harboured aspirations to be a vet, but I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was an old fossil of twenty-one, harbouring a typical ‘take each day as it comes’ teenage outlook. 

The professions I did half-heartedly ponder incorporated either or both of my passions: food and writing.

‘I think I’d quite like to run my own restaurant,’ I announced to Mom, precisely one week after announcing to her that I would quite like to be a journalist.

‘You’ll need maths for that then,’ she annoyingly pointed out, ‘for doing your accounts and balancing your books.’

‘All right then, I’ll become a waitress.  Won’t need to add up for that, will I?’

‘That’s not much of an ambition, though, love.’

‘An air hostess then!  That way I’ll get to go abroad at last.  Now what’s on telly tonight?’

That’s how flippant I was about the topic.  The truth was that adulthood, responsibility and the concept of drawing an income from sources other than daddy’s pocket seemed so distant as to be unreal. 

Oh, my glorious youth!  I, in common with most adolescents, took you wholly for granted.  The years spooled before me like a never-ending carpet; they didn’t rush and tumble into one other the way they do now.  Why did I squander so many of them, tearful, sleepless and heartbroken about the pettiest ‘traumas’ and stigmas – such as being the object of nerdy boys’ fancy?

Nerdy boys who made paper planes in this case.  Like several real planes, this one bore a female name.  To my surprise, it was my own: crayoned in sprawly capitals across a wing.  Curious, I subtly unfolded the aircraft behind my textbook.  A spidery lilac script covered a lined page that had clearly started life in an exercise book.

My dearest Zoe,
You make my heart fly.
xxx

I sniggered with delight at both the corny play on words and the sentiment it conveyed, and turned the creased page over to scour for clues as to its sender’s identity.  Crudely sketched hearts with arrows piercing them (at least I think they were hearts – they looked more like pigs’ trotters) filled the margin, but there was no signature. 

No name. 

No clues.

‘No talking please – we’re going to have a little test of what we’ve learned today.’

Bugger!  I hadn’t even shown the airborne billet-doux to my friends yet.  I stuffed it into my bag, where it burned a hole for the next ten monotonous minutes as Mr beardy fogey Parker spat out questions on algebra.  A voice at the front of my brain was screaming ‘Get on with it, fart-breath – I want to reread my letter!  Who gives a toss what twenty-seven multiplied by f equals?  I’ve had my first love letter.  I am wanted!’

How magical, by the way, courtships were when conducted by means of anonymous epistles from those shadowy creatures known as Secret Admirers!  They signed themselves with hearts and kisses or, if they were feeling bold, an initial.  One would pretend to be embarrassed or even spooked by his enigmatic overtures, yet secretly adore the attention and mystery of it all.  I realised I was starting to get on a bit when my love letters ceased to be anonymous; when even my Valentine cards would arrive signed.

Anyway, I was desperate to pivot round and try to catch the glinty eye of my punning paramour, but didn’t dare while Parker droned.  He pounced like a panther on pupils who displayed the vaguest inattention, punishing them with his most convoluted arithmetic.  As long as I gazed unblinkingly at him in a manner that suggested equations gave me orgasms, I would be safe.

I did permit myself a surreptitious peep at my watch.  Nine-and-a-half minutes past ten.  Thirty seconds to the bell.  Come on, yer bastard thing, ring!

The second it did, my head whistled round.  The back row’s male inhabitants were on their feet, tossing pens into bags and loping off to next lesson – save for Karl who, intriguingly, was scribbling something.  A note.  In purple crayon.  Which, with an extremely resolute air, he folded and thrust at Bradley Round before hoisting up his own bag and striding for the door.

And then two minor miracles occurred.  For not only did Bradley extract his finger from his nose long enough to receive the square of paper, he then lobbed it at my desk.  ‘Thass for you.’

I almost tore the note in half in my haste to unfold it.  No puns or eulogies this time.  Just a Karlishly forward, straight-to-the-point invitation.

Yo Zo,
Meet me by the tennis courts at break.
xxxx

It was autographed with a huge looping question mark and the same trotter-heart motif as its predecessor.

‘Karl wants to meet me by the tennis courts,’ I yelped at Janine.

‘You’m joking!’

‘Yeah – I mean no – look – this note – he wrote – and gave to Bradley – and Brad gave it me – oh – and he sent me this as well.’  I slapped the crumpled plane into her pudgy hands.  ‘It’s happened at last.  Oh, I was born for this moment!’ 

I really did say that, I’m afraid!  I had that much of a crush on him.

I wasn’t the type to get carried away or anything, but all through English I daydreamed about our wedding (which would bear no resemblance to the toe-curling Charles and Di re-enactment at primary school), and the love-nest in which our adult selves would set up home.  I would write novels and cook wonderful soufflés; Karl would tend sick kittens and birds – bringing the odd creature home as a pet.

We were doing Jane Austen this term, and her spirited, winsome young heroines were my new role models, flouncing around Hertfordshire, driving waistcoat-wearing gents into lusty frenzies with their waspish remarks and swishy ringlets.  These novels provided new backdrops for my Karl-based fantasies.

I had, you might gather, shed my tomboyish persona.  Its gradual disappearance coincided with the progress of puberty.

It’s one thing pretending to be Dennis the Menace when you’re eight, feisty and mere hatred of My Little Pony is enough to classify you as ‘boyish’ – but the façade slips rather when you’re fifteen and members of the male sex are sending your hormones haywire.  Stubbornly as I resisted turning into a girl, deep down I wanted to phwooarrgh over pin-ups and dabble with make-up like any other.

I borrowed Janine’s lipstick now, for my tennis court assignation.  It was puce, globby, cheap and looked as drag-queenishly ridiculous on me as on her.  But I knew bog all about colour co-ordination.  I just thought all make-up transformed all women into instant goddesses. 

‘You’ll knock his socks off with that on,’ Janine misguidedly encouraged as I cluelessly smeared it on in the loos and blew a kiss at the still cracked, hairspray-smeared mirror, ‘good luck, mate!’

I must have looked ludicrous sashaying over to the tennis courts full of ‘I’m having a rendezvous with Karl Corbett, so there!’ importance, pouting the new lips in my idea of a vampish manner in case Karl should be watching me from some concealed site.

He wasn’t there yet – oh well, perhaps he had his own bit of pre-rendezvous grooming to address?  A slap of Old Spice, a splodge of hair gel…he really didn’t have to bother, I liked him enough without cosmetic aids, but if he thought I was worth the effort – well, that was nice!

Simon Floyd, the class weed, was there though – oh damn!  Hunched against the fencing, all long-limbed and diffident, with his satchel and his sensible cropped hair.  The kind of boy every parent dreamed their daughter would bring home but knew she never would if she wished to maintain street cred.  I hoped he wasn’t going to hang around like one of those voyeurs who get off on ogling courting couples.  Ugh – the thought!

To my astonishment, on seeing me, Simon stepped forward with a shyly expectant expression on his zitty, putty-coloured face.

‘You got my letters then?’

Whoa!  ‘Your letters?’

This was a sick joke surely?  Or one of my surreal dreams.  Karl was a ventriloquist, throwing his words into Simon’s mouth.

‘Well, Karl wrote and passed them to you, but they were my sentiments.  I just, er, told him what to put.’

‘You. Told. Him. What. To. Put?’  I wanted to beat the ground and howl with disappointment. 

‘Yes.  I’ve been wanting to, er, ask you out for some time, but never had the bottle.  So Karl offered to do it for me.  He’s always ribbing me about you when I sit with him in maths.  Ha ha.’  Oh God, even his laugh sounded earnest and nerdy!  ‘So today he offered to write a little note for me and, er, pass it to you.  My handwriting’s rubbish, you see.  Ha ha.  The paper aeroplane was my idea.  You make my heart fly – geddit?’

‘Yes.’

There was a torturously awkward pause.  I had no idea how one walked away from a conversation like this.  If it occurred to Simon that I had not exactly greeted his advances with knicker-busting enthusiasm, he didn’t show it.  His little mouth flexed into a hopeful semi-grin.

‘So how about it then?’

‘How about what?’

‘You and me – you know – er, like, seeing each other?’

He looked so sincere and square, it made me feel furious.  I had hoped by now to be locked in a lip-throbbing snog with Karl.  Instead I was standing in a field, caked in a lipstick too garish for Lily Savage, feeling like a game show contestant who has just gambled the prize holiday to Antigua and won a canteen of cutlery instead.  None of this was poor Simon’s fault, of course, but that didn’t stop me wanting to thwack him one just for being alive.

‘Oh, piss off, bog-face!’ I wailed.  It was quite possibly the most offensive thing I had ever said to anyone.  That’s what love and disappointment did to me.

Then I turned and ran – straight into Karl.

‘That wasn’t very nice, mate,’ he said, in that half joking, half rebuking way that I found so madly hunky, ‘it was the kind of thing Hayley was always saying.’

‘Shouldn’t have been earwigging, should you?’  I retorted sullenly.

‘I couldn’t exactly help it.  You were screaming your lungs off.  Floydy fancies you rotten, you know – talks about you all the time in maths.’

‘Well I like someone else, don’t I?’ I sulked.

I was going to tell him – I was!  I was emotional enough to confess anything, and didn’t care what a plank I made of myself in the process.

He grinned.  ‘It’s pretty obvious who that is!’

‘It is?’

So he knew!

‘I’ll say.  You’re mad on him.’

‘Mmmh.’

‘Yeah, Lee Sharpe!’

‘Oh, him.’  One of only two footballers whose names I have ever known – the other being David Beckham, whose tattooed physique adorns the calendar in my present-day kitchen.  Lee played for Manchester United and England, but actually came from Halesowen, in the Black Country.  All the Capewell girls seemed to fancy him – just as all my workmates today coo and dribble over OK’s endless Becks spreads. 

‘That’s right,’ I murmured, too deflated to tell Karl the truth now.  I stomped away before he could see my tears.

‘Ooh, that’s hilarious, that is!’  Nadine was choking on vodka-flavoured howls.  ‘You poor thing, expecting to fall into Karl’s arms and have a bit of tonsil tennis behind the tennis court – and then finding out scroggy Simon was your admirer!  I bet you were gutted.’

‘Completely!  Poor Simon must have been too, though strangely enough my rude rebuff didn’t put him off.  For the next year, Zoe Taylor came complete with her very own loyal little pet spaniel.  He followed me bloody everywhere – he only stopped short of the girls loos.  When we were in lessons, he used to stare at me as if in a trance.’

‘And you never put him out of his misery?’

‘I was vile to him really.  I’ve never regretted not going out with him, but I do regret being so childish.  I wanted to punish him, you see.  I’d heard, through friends, that the reason he liked me was because of my personality.  Personality, I ask you!  Frankly, I was insulted.  I used to dream about chaps being dazzled by my spellbinding beauty.  Not much chance of that, though, looking the way I did.  It’s funny how as teenagers we have this overblown sense of our own beauty and self-importance – even when we look like complete dogs.’

‘Don’t put yourself down, dear.  Be grateful he didn’t see you as just a sex object.’

‘Heather, that was exactly what I wanted to be seen as!  Oh, me and my mates could go all Germaine Greer when it suited us, getting uppity about lads being only after One Thing, but deep down none of us wanted to attract the kind of nice, mother-pleasing lad who was into personalities.  We wanted to be desired!  So I insulted him back.  I thought I was this Jane Austen heroine, slighting him and putting him down all the while.’

‘Yes, “Piss off, bog-face” is very Jane Austen!’ hooted Nadine.

‘I know, I know!  I was horrible.  It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what it was like to be bullied, after being top of Tina Skidmarks’s hit list for so long.  I think it was a classic case of the big hen pecking the little hen, who then pecked the littler hen, and so on.  I’d been picked on, and now I was venting my frustration and unhappiness on someone who I perceived as weaker.  I make no excuses for it.’

‘It’s human nature,’ said Nadine sympathetically, ‘I guess we’ve all done it at some point – to a certain extent.’

‘And what was happening to Karl while all this was going on?’ asked Heather.

‘Oh, he was breaking my heart dating all these second year sirens!  He was the class stud – everyone liked him.  We were still good mates, though.  I decided to accept we were never going to be more, and had to kind of switch my feelings off and pretend I was happy with that.’

‘Poor you.’

‘Luckily, our GCSEs were coming up, so I threw myself heart and soul into my revision.  It was a good distraction actually.  If I’m going to die a virgin, I thought, I might as well die a virgin with good grades.’

‘Couldn’t you have gone out with Si to make Karl jealous?’

‘I doubt it would have had any effect.  Not at that time.  Besides, Si had these horrible clammy little hands that I just couldn’t bring myself to be touched by.  Ugh!  He actually asked me out again at the fifth form disco.  The teachers organised this little shebang for us once we’d done our exams.  I’d got so sick of him haunting me by then that I screamed “Leave me alone!  I wouldn’t date you if you were last chap on earth!”  Now it was his turn to run home sobbing from a disco.’

‘Ooh, Zoe, you bitch!’

‘I know, I know.  My granny gave me a good old bollocking for that one.’

‘Your granny?’

‘I am so, so sorry,’ I panted, bundling into the Cancer Research shop forty minutes late one humid July Wednesday, ‘my usual bus didn’t turn up and I had to wait ages for the next one.  Still, I’m here now.  I’ll stick the kettle on, shall I?’

Granny nodded tersely, an unusually chilly expression distorting her dear features, but I just attributed that to my lateness.  She prided herself on punctuality.

Marjorie Danks was Dudley’s busiest seventy-two-year-old.  One of my mom’s favourite moans was ‘Even your granny’s got more energy than you’ – and actually it was true.  My hulking weight made me sluggish, whereas she was as wiry as a ferret and never sat down. 

She was a long-standing Cancer Research volunteer – the charity was close to her heart since Granddad’s death. 

‘Our Zo’ll be at a loose end once them GCSEs are done and dusted,’ she had helpfully pointed out to Mom, thus buggering my prospects of a nice indolent holiday between breaking up for study leave in May and starting sixth form in September.  ‘Her can come and help me in the shop for a few hours a week.’

Of course Mom thought it was a superb idea.  Mom is one of those workaholics for whom every millisecond of the day has to be accounted, who feels guilty if she ever stands still and seems to believe anybody who doesn’t share these traits has something wrong with them. 

I’m a bit like this now myself (I take very much after my Danks side), but at sixteen was still in the grips of Studentitis.  It’s quite amazing I matured into a lady capable of full-time employment.  I only did that charity shop job two days a week but, deprived of my summer noon lie-in, I moaned as though it was slavery. 

The school holidays weren’t for work, in my opinion.  I was used to the kind of vacation where I lounged in bed, headphones jammed in my ears listening to Beacon Radio, then got up in time to watch Going for Gold in my pyjamas and make myself sandwiches with ludicrously greedy fillings.

But this year, in my token ‘sensible’ clothes – a cutesy blouse and pleated skirt which I think were cast-offs from the lady in the Shake ‘n’ Vac commercial – I worked the till, made tea and aesthetically arranged rails of clothes that were euphemistically labelled ‘nearly new.’ 

Actually, for a venture I approached with as much enthusiasm as double PE, it was surprisingly fun.  Granny was the greatest workmate ever, I glowed with false modesty when she showed off about me to the regulars – ‘This is my granddaughter.  She’s just done her exams.  Gunna be a brain surgeon, ain’t yer, girl?’ – and interacting with the customers gave me unexpected confidence.

It was my first ever foray into the world of work – albeit an unpaid foray.  Several of my classmates already had Saturday or holiday jobs – predominantly in restaurants, which made for a few excruciating Taylor family meals.

The times I’ve cringed behind menus when our allotted waitress turned out to be someone from school!  I hated ordering my steaks and prawn cocktails from them – I felt uncomfortable with the master/servant roles it implied.  And then Dad would launch into his ‘Let’s be nice to Zoe’s little friend’ routine: over-complimenting the food, making naff jokes and doling out patronisingly large tips.

But today it was Granny’s turn to look mortified.

‘I’ve been hearing one or two unpleasant things about you, madam,’ she said tartly as I emerged from the stockroom and slapped two mugs on the counter.

‘What?’  I dredged my brain to think who the hell I might have been unpleasant to amongst her tight-permed social circle.  ‘From who exactly?’

‘Not that you should ever quote yer sources, but it was my friend Beryl down the day centre.  I couldn’t believe it was my Zo her was talking about.  I said her must have got the wrong wench, but no, it was yow all right.’

‘Which one’s Beryl when she’s at home?’  The name actually sounded dimly familiar.

‘You know, Beryl Floyd.’  Floyd!  Ah.  ‘All upset ’cos her grandson came home blarting his eyes out after some school disco or other.  Poor Simon had taken quite a shine to you, and by all accounts you made a few nasty remarks to the lad.’

That Simon was capable of feelings and tears was, in a funny kind of way, a revelation.  I had treated him like an android for the past year, never imagining my snubs and digs might actually be penetrating that expressionless shell.  I wasn’t a naturally vicious, Tina type – I was punishing Simon for not being dynamic; for not being hunky; for not being Karl.  He was easy to punish because he seemed so impervious to it all.

In my soap-opera logic, I was in fact the aggrieved party.  I was genuinely offended by his adulation – how dare someone like that ask me out!

It was curious, this uniquely teenage mix of insecurity and arrogance.  I knew I was no oil painting, but was still mortified when I failed to lure the hunks.  I (outwardly at least) despised ‘shallow’ boys who chased pretty bits of skirt – yet I rejected a sincere pursuer like Simon because he was puny and pockmarked.  It made no sense.

I felt very foolish and cruel now – but teen pride dictated that I must react with scorn and a sneer.

‘What a dork, telling his granny about me!’

She shook her head darkly and swigged her tea.  ‘His grandparents is all he’s got these days.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s lived with them since his mom and dad got killed in that car crash.’

‘Car crash?’ I gulped.  This got worse.

‘Didn’t you know about that?  Terrible, it was.  He was only a littl’un when it happened.  That boy hasn’t half been through the wars.  I think what you said to him was the straw that broke the camel’s whatsit.’

I gulped.  Oh Simon, what have I done to you?

‘I’m sorry, Granny.’

Her lovely face softened.

‘Oh, I know you ain’t an unkind lass, our Zo.  It’s a good job you said them things after his exams rather than before, though – or else he might have flunked them.  He studied hard, Beryl said.  He’s going to King Edwards College in September, you know, that one in Stourbridge where all the egghead kids go.  Probably end up being a professor or summat.’

‘I don’t fancy him, though.  What was I supposed to do, just say yes and string him along?  That would have been just as cruel.’

‘True, but you could have said no in a nicer way.  You know, I turned many a young man’s head when I was your age.’  I giggled despite myself.  ‘It’s true – don’t you scoff!  But your dear old Granddad Syd was the only one I wanted, so I had to turn a few chaps down when they came a courtin’.  But I always did it nicely, so as no feelings got ’urt along the way.  But I dunno where some of you wenches get your arrogance from.  You all seem to think you’m summat off that Baywatch programme.’

‘I don’t,’ I sighed, flopping on to a stool behind the counter, ‘I hate my looks.’

‘But you’re an attractive wench, me flower, no doubt about that.  This Simon certainly thinks so, and others will too, in time.  In fact, can I say summat?’

‘Go on.’

‘Don’t take umbrage, but I think you could be a real stunner if you lost a bit of your lard.  That Karl lad you’ve got the hots for might start to sit up and take notice then.’

So Granny knew I liked him!  But then Granny knew everything.  I didn’t bother with any attempts at coy denial.

‘It shouldn’t be about weight,’ I pouted priggishly even though I couldn’t help liking the sound of her words, ‘people should like me the way I am.’

‘And they do.  But the way you’m going, you’ll be twenty stone by your eighteenth birthday.  Do you really want that?  When you get to my age, wouldn’t you rather look through your old photos and remember what a little glamourpuss you was?’

I shrugged, in a noncommittal, ‘yes, but I don’t want to give you the satisfaction of being right’ sort of way

‘Weight’s not the only issue anyway.  Think what you’re doing to your poor little heart and arteries with all them chips and burgers you live on.  What’s wrong, don’t you want to be healthy?  Don’t you ever wonder why you’m tired all the while?  Your mother says she can never get you out of bed.  It must be like humping a great sack of coal around, carrying all that extra suet in yer belly.’

I nodded, not insulted by Granny’s typically frank counsel, just absorbing it all, but really wanting to revisit her earlier theme.

‘You truly think I could be a stunner, Granny?’

In reply, she took my hand and towed me over to the coffin-sized changing room.  Whipping back the curtain (good job nobody was in there), she deposited me before the full-length mirror.

‘Look – you’ve got a bostin’ face, a smashing bust, lovely pair of pins – ’

‘Greasy hair, acne – ’

‘Your skin’d be like a babby’s bum if you stopped stuffin’ yer gullet with chocolate.’

‘You’re the one who was always giving me sweets when I was a kid,’ I sulked petulantly.

‘Maybe, but I don’t force feed you them rubbishy school dinners every day, do I?  Come on, our Zo, stop looking for people to blame.  If you keep on gorging, you’ll pop or keel over with ’art disease before you’m thirty.  That won’t impress young Karl now, will it?’

I giggled.  ‘It won’t.’

She winked naughtily into the mirror and whispered, ‘Whereas if you start eating up your fruit and doing a spot of exercise, you’ll be giving that Pamela Anderson wench a run for her money in no time!’

A sudden vision of me bounding along a Californian beach in a high-legged red cossie, with a toned torso, Barbie-smooth legs and boobs as pert as peaches finally swayed me.  I didn’t catch the bus home that evening.  I walked – and spent my fare on an apple.

Years later, Mom and I were giggling and cringing over photographs of my Fat incarnation. 

‘It was me,’ she confessed, ‘who asked Granny to have that little ‘word’ with you about eating sensibly and stuff.  I knew you’d take what she said on board.  She was the only person you’d take advice from.  You used to call me a nagging old bag if I tried to give you any.  I couldn’t believe the change in you afterwards.’ 

It was so true.  I treasure that image of Granny, bless her, making me look at myself – really look at myself – in that narrow charity shop mirror surrounded by mildewy jumpers and knockdown MC Hammer LPs.

I renounced chocolate cornflake cake from that day on, amazing myself by developing a taste for the vegetables I used to push away untouched; the fruit I previously left to rot in my ruck-sack.  This sensible new outlook extended to my  own cooking also; butter, cream and oil now featured less prominently in my recipes.

My diet received an unexpected boost when term resumed in September.

I collected my GCSE results at the end of August, and was delighted with the four As, two Bs and three Cs which guaranteed me a place in sixth form to study home economics, English literature and general studies.  I didn’t stay delighted for too long.

My reasons for hating school had been many and varied, but the work aspect had hitherto been the least of my troubles.  After five years of not being a straight-A egghead but still acquiring grades high enough to classify me (certainly by Skiddies’ standards) as a ‘swot,’ I suddenly felt like a dunce. 

A-levels were purgatory.  I struggled with the deeply analytical method of studying a heap of baloney which, by the teachers’ own admission, had no relevance in the real world.  I am afraid I was never able to derive any form of pleasure from dissecting every last comma in Julius Caesar or Sense and Sensibility.  On the contrary, this completely spoiled my enjoyment of books.  When I read novels for pleasure now, outside school, I found myself unwittingly analysing plots, characters and dialogue.  It was maddening.

That first term was especially fraught.  I shed oceans of frustrated tears and lost count of the number of times I vowed I would leave school immediately because I could not cope with my demanding new workload.  All too frequent were the times when I never imagined I would complete the two-year course.   To be honest, it is little short of a miracle that I ever did. 

One minute, I had absolute confidence in myself, believing I would pass my exams with the proverbial flying colours and become editor of The Times; next minute, I was going to fail, and spend the rest of my days cluttering up the dole queue.  Bulky volumes of Shakespeare or William Blake were hurled furiously across my bedroom carpet on a nightly basis, pounding the floorboards and shattering the nerves of my parents in the living room below. 

Where eating had so often been an anti-boredom tonic, I now found boredom no longer an option.  My chock-a-block timetable had no windows in which I might fantasise about or pick at food.  Remarkably, there were now times when I forgot to eat altogether and only when Mom called me for dinner did it dawn that I was peckish.  My daily itinerary was literally: get up, go to school, go home, do homework, flop into bed cream-crackered.  What a life, eh?  In that first, fraught term alone, I lost two stone without even trying.

There were other compensations to being a stressed out sixth-former.

Firstly, although Shakespeare overload was on the timetable, PE was now decidedly off it.  So no more rounders, no more humiliating team-picking, and no more Slattery shower abuse. 

Secondly, in the sixth we could wear civvies.  I contemplated burning my school uniform, but figured that would be a waste of decent matches, so instead I cut it to shreds with Mom’s pinking shears.  I really did!  I took fiendish delight in hacking a serrated hem for my skirt, vest sleeves for my shirt, lacerations in my tie.  The result was an improvement.  I still have a photo of me in that shredded get-up somewhere.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the Skiddies left school for good.  Tina had left me alone since being suspended, though she still bullied other vulnerable kids, but there would never be any love lost betwixt us.  It was a joyous day when I – metaphorically at least – lofted two fingers to her retreating back for the final time.  I never saw her again and have no idea what became of her.

Janine and Claudette left at sixteen too, and I did miss them.  Janine found apt employment almost immediately, behind the counter at Druckers in the Merry Hill Centre.  She was a fount of free cakes initially, then as my diet progressed, free quiche and salads.  Claudette, meanwhile, went to Dudley College to do performing arts.

Andrea stopped on, as did Karl.  His subjects were biology, chemistry and physics – which couldn’t have been much further along the arts/sciences spectrum from my areas of interest.  Our schedules didn’t often dovetail now, though we still talked.

‘I’m going to Bristol Uni, Zo,’ he said decidedly, skimming through a prospectus  when we did meet, by chance, one lunchtime, ‘it’s got the best vet school in the country.  It takes five years to qualify, you know.  But one day I’ll set up me own practice, like that James Herriot chap.’

‘Good luck Karl – I’m sure you’ll do it.’

I had no doubts he would.  He was more driven than a D-reg Land Rover, was our Karl.