9. Losing My Virginity

An elegy to a Lost Boy

Virgin Island, then. Has it made everyone wistfully revisit their First Time? Their first “lover” if not their first boyfriend/girlfriend? Reason I ask is this: the Daily Telegraph asked me to opine on this traumatizing series (here's the article). Dear, oh dear.

It was sad to hear that one in eight of our twenty-six year olds are virgins, and even sadder to watch the dozen islanders, so desperately loveless that they were prepared to have their first sexual experience on a Croatian island for Channel Four, pour encourager les autres, I suppose.

I could only manage a couple of episodes or so. I couldn’t bear the most intimate pain of a dozen millennials united only their youth, fragility and virginity, presented as a state of shame in a pornified culture where children are soaked in sex from pre-puberty onwards. It was all so different in the 1980s.

We made plans to meet by sending postcards; waiting in for a landline to ring; or racing home to a message on blinking answering machine. We met on tube platforms, at train stations, in Camden Market or Kensington Market, and our entire understanding of procreation came courtesy of our mother’s copy of the Seventies speculum-spectacular Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the National Geographics pile in our grandparents’ loo. Everything to do with sex involved risk, embarrassment, deception and often, disappointment, which brings me, and us, to Essex.

I lost my virginity in a garage in Billericay to a six-foot seven-inch tall Mohican punk. A single red lightbulb dangled above our heads to lend a romantic glow to this historic - if unexpectedly brief, from my readings of Judith Krantz and Judy Blume - event, but that didn’t matter. I was just sixteen, and I was smitten.

His name was Aldo Soldani, and he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen.

.

I saw this vision in a mosh pit at the Revillos concert at the Lyceum in 1980. He towered like a classical statue carved by Praxiteles above the pogoing, gobbing punks.

He had a magnificent quiff and plumed gelled Mohawk. His perfect profile and godlike proportions were in no way marred, in my eyes, by the way he’d painted the sides of his head with white gloss paint.

Our eyes locked across the heaving sea of spiked barnets and golden beer arcing from the plastic glasses being lobbed at the band. For me, that was that.

“You said “I think I’ve seen a God,” Kate Brakspear, my best friend at the time, tells me. “I said go and talk to him but you wouldn’t so I went and grabbed him, and brought him to you.”

Our second time was in my mother’s flat in Notting Hill. Forgive me if this is 100 per cent TMI. Sorry children, sorry husband.

As I lay in my single bed in my tiny attic bedroom – his long, long legs and huge feet dangling off the end – the earth moved and then we dashed off to a Stiff Little Fingers gig at Hammy Pally. Pretty much a perfect day until my supposedly sixties boho Beatnik mother came back from New York a day early, before I’d sanitized the crime scene, went upstairs to look for me, and freaked. Her gimlet eye fell on the enseam’d bed, the bottle of wine and two glasses.

She came to the correct conclusion.

When I came back home later she actually kicked me out (which was pretty rich of her when I look back at some of the men who trooped through the flat between her marriages).

Undeterred, I decided we would head for my father’s garconnière in Maida Vale. My father was in Brussels, being a Euro MP. Or so I thought. Just as things were getting underway with Aldo we heard the heart-sinking sound of key in lock. A heavy tread. A bag dropping. Mail being picked up.