The music was good, or so we thought. A lot more adventurous than the usual cafe fare. More “Brighter Shade of Pale” and “Light My Fire” than “Puppet on a String” and “The Last Waltz.” And we could smoke down there. Melanie and I smoked Sobranie Black Russians, Pall Mall filter tips, Peter Stuyvesant or those funny pastel-coloed tubes. We wouldn’t be seen dead with Woodies or Park Drive. We felt very grown-up and sophisticated in our coffee bar, smoking our exotic cigarettes, but perhaps to the boy behind the counter we just looked like two fourteen-year-olds trying to act older. He was always nice to us, though, and he even gave us a free biscuit each with our coffee one morning. I’d been smoking for about a year by the time I was fourteen, as had Melanie, though at first it had made me sick, and I had to work at it to get it right. We were secretive about it, of course—our parents would have killed us if they had known. I noticed my mother sniffing once or twice when we sat down for the evening meal, but when she mentioned the smell of smoke, I told her we’d been for a Coke at one of the seafront cafes in the afternoon, and the smoke must have got in our hair or clothes. You could smoke everywhere then.

That first week, Melanie and I fell into a routine: Coffee Cellar, amusements arcades, pier, Golden Mile and beach. Most evenings we spent at Pleasure Beach, though it never got really dark enough for the full impact of bright lights at that time of year. We didn’t usually go to the Coffee Cellar in the evenings. We tried it once, but it was full of a different crowd, people in black polo-neck sweaters with their hair over their collars. Even a couple of berets and beards. No stools left. They were an older crowd, too, and they looked at us as if we were just kids, which I suppose we were.