From the age of 13, when the hormones kicked in, till I left my parents home at the age of 17 to become a writer (nearly forty years later, I’m still waiting) I must have been the most sex-mad virgin in Christendom. Nights were spent dressed as a West Country approximation of a transvestite Port Said prostitute, blind with eyeliner and dumb with lipgloss, alternately dancing like the lead in a Tijuana pony-show and hiding in the toilets during the slow numbers, crying repeatedly ‘Why won’t all those men just LEAVE ME ALONE!’ Days were spent in an attempt to evade the attentions of the regiment of leering males while voluntarily rolling up my regulation school skirt so high that it resembled a cummerbund.
Though I thought about sex ceaselessly, I clung on to my virginity as though it was an autographed pair of Marc Bolan’s undercrackers. I read Lolita in the park the summer I turned 13, wearing heart-shaped sunnies and hotpants and sucking on popsicles in a rather sordid example of life imitating art. I shivered at the fate of poor Dolly Schiller dying in childbirth in the town of Grey Star, still a teenager and all played out.
I avoided sex like the plague because I knew I would really, really like it; I suspected that it would exert a massive, non-specific power over me, and that it would conspire with those forces already bent on doing so — i.e. my parents — to keep me exactly where I was. To a kid who slept with a London tube map over her bed, joining the massed ranks of ex-teenage rebels turned harassed young mothers seemed a voyage of the damned indeed. Pushing a pram through a purgatory of pregnancy, lactation and finger-painting was to me as horrific an image as any Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell.
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