So in Blackpool that summer, it was going to be the terrible two. The whole town was at our feet, and we were set to grab what we could. Including boys. Melanie was more sophisticated about the opposite sex than I was. She had told me about her last boyfriend, who had tried to tit her up when she was babysitting for Mr. and Mrs. Delaware down the street. She said she moved his hand away gently, but she remembered that it felt nice and sent a shiver right through her. Perhaps next time, she had thought, she would let him touch her there, but he lost patience and moved on to Sally Hargreaves, who had a reputation for doing it with anyone, even though she wasn’t as beautiful as Melanie. People like Sally Hargreaves excepted, it was an age when good girls mostly didn’t. And we were good girls. We knew some girls who did. Sally had to leave school and we all knew why. We also knew you shouldn’t give in to boys, or they’d look down on you and tell their friends what you let them do to you. Then you became a slut. Or worse, you’d get pregnant and have to get married. You had to save yourself, we believed, preferably till marriage, of course, but failing that, at least until you were genuinely in love.

I wasn’t sure whether I was willing to go as far as letting a boy touch my breasts as I had only done a bit of French kissing so far and wasn’t even sure I liked the feel of a tongue in my mouth, but I was keen for new experiences and we certainly intended to team up with some likely lads and get them to take us on rides at the Pleasure Beach. It wasn’t as expensive then, and you didn’t have to pay to get in. A kiss on the Big Dipper, perhaps, or the Ghost Train. Now that might be fun, especially when the spiderwebs brush across your cheek in the dark and a phosphorus skeleton jumps out of nowhere right beside you. Or in the funhouse, where all the paths are constantly changing angles and direction and you see yourself in distorting mirrors.

I remember we did meet two boys from Doncaster in the Coffee Cellar one morning and they wanted to walk on the beach with us after dark. The first night we went to the Pleasure Beach with them and went on a few rides and ate some cotton candy but we wouldn’t walk on the beach with them. We arranged to meet them the next day. After we’d been to the funfair we walked with them across the prom. It was a lovely evening, I remember, and the sun was setting out on the Irish Sea, the waves rolling in, but there was still a broad-enough swath of beach to walk on.