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       Top 10 Girls—Actually Women—I Thought about Before I Had My First Girlfriend

       10 Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels

       9 Debbie Harry

       8 Sally James

       7 Both girls from Man About the House

       6 Jill from the chemists

       5 Mrs Johnson (teacher)

       4 Mrs Tranter (neighbour)

       3 Miss Leavesley (French teacher)

       2 Kim Wilde

       1 Karen with the big boobies

      Padgate County High School was the school attended by the incredible Tina Yardley. Tina was to be my first love, deep and genuine and proper and innocent. I still love her now, I always will.

      I met her when I was partnered with her as part of the school production of Oliver!. She was the girl I would have to link arms with for the opening few lines of the song, ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand’, one of those annoying cockney songs that not even cockneys like.

      Tina was an experienced performer and a general all-round star pupil. She was so confident and smiley—the kind of smile only genuinely good people are allowed to have. She was also vibrant, full of life and, even though she was in the year below me, she was easily as tall as any of the girls in my year—and she smelt amazing.

      What is it about girls and their smells? You can’t be with someone you don’t like the smell of. I don’t mean if they stink of B.O. (although in the right circumstances I even find this a turn-on), or unfortunately if they have bad breath. What I’m talking about is their own smell, the smell that is them. I have loved everything about some girls I’ve met, the way they move, what they talk about, their hair, their eyes and then, wham bam, one whiff of their natural scent and it’s ‘No Way José’—this is never going to work. Sometimes you don’t get down to their real smell until the morning after the night before, that is the worst-case scenario.

      I have a friend, now blissfully happily married, who, in a similar vein, says she used to be able to tell when she was falling out of love with someone because she would begin to start to hate the way they used to eat—so much so it would begin to make her want to throw up.

      I think this emotion comes from the same source—inexplicable but un-ignorable.

      Suffice to say I immediately fell in love with Tina’s smell, soon after which I fell in love with Tina herself.

      I had seen Tina many times before, not only at school but because she also lived directly opposite my best mate in one of those big houses in the nicer parts of town with a drive and a nice garden at the front and the back. My best mate lived in a similar although slightly smaller house right over the road. He also lived two doors down from Tina’s boyfriend!

      Not that I knew about this until a couple of days before the opening night of our production when I was riding home on my bike from my best mate’s house. I pulled out of his drive and, having pedalled no more than a few yards, I was punched full in the face by a very hard fist which seemed to appear out of nowhere.

      The force of the blow, a superb direct hit, knocked me clean off my bike, smashed my glasses and bloodied my nose—a pretty comprehensive result all in all. I didn’t have a blinkin’ clue what was going on, nor did I know the identity of my assailant, let alone any likely motive behind such an unprovoked attack.

      There is nothing like the ‘bang’ of a punch to shock a kid into bewilderment. Our heads weren’t designed to be punched. I suppose that’s why it hurts so much and this punch hurt as much as any I’d ever felt before—even the one from Loony Tunes back at the grammar school.

      It turned out that this latest fist belonged to Tina’s boyfriend. He was eighteen, three years older than me and four years older than Tina.

      ‘That’s what you get for messing around with another bloke’s girl, you specky four-eyed ginger twat,’ he said, as I scrabbled around on the floor looking for what might be left of my glasses.

      ‘Not very nice,’ I thought, but who was I to argue? If he was nearly able to decapitate me with one punch, what might he have done if I’d riled him into dishing out a few more?

      May I also point out here that I had not ‘messed around with another bloke’s girlfriend’—I had merely linked Tina’s arm several times in rehearsal as the script instructed me to. As far as I was aware she had no idea that I even liked her.

      Several minutes later I was back at my mate’s house where his mum, who I fancied by the way, was tending my wounds while my mate was trying not to laugh. Not that this bothered me, I would have thought the same if it had happened to him and besides I was privately getting my own back by imagining me and his mum getting married one day and him having to call me Dad.

      His mum was livid and insisted on going over the road to tell Tina and her parents what had happened and ask her what such a wonderful girl like her was doing with an animal like ‘Shit for Brains’.

      My mate’s dad—not my biggest fan; perhaps he knew about me and his wife—ended up ‘having’ to give me a lift home after being convinced that I really couldn’t see anything without my specs.

      He reluctantly went to get his keys and coat, but before he did so he looked at the state of me and audibly laughed.

      ‘Thanks for that,’ I thought. ‘Please die soon.’

      The next day at school I had to wear my old specs again, a far cry from the Reactolite Rapides that had said farewell the night before—these were altogether much more NHS. The weird kid with ginger hair from the grammar school had just got a little weirder.

      We had rehearsals for Oliver! scheduled again later that day and all I could think about was what was going to happen when I saw Tina. I couldn’t concentrate on my first lesson, I felt like such a loser. The only thing I knew for sure was that I must learn to fight—but first I had to endure breaktime.

      I wandered off into a corner of the playground and was in that frame of mind where nothing matters, nothing that has gone before, nothing that exists now and nothing that may exist in the future. I was numb to the core and also really confused. I had done nothing wrong, had been nearly half killed by an idiot and his big knuckles, yet it was me who felt like the schmuck.

      My poor old swollen nose was an inch away from the school wall. I was staring at a brick now, hoping breaktime would never end. If I had to stare at this wall for the rest of eternity I wouldn’t mind as long as I didn’t have to face Tina again.

      It was one of those moments like when you climb into a bath and can put life on hold until you decide to climb out again. I recognised I was both at peace and yet totally fucked at the same time, but as long as I didn’t move from the exact position I was in—ever—I would be fine. For anything else I would need a miracle. Which was, in fact, what was about to happen.

      ‘Er, Chris…hi.’

       It couldn’t be.

      ‘Are you alright?’

       It was—it was

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