So David went.
It was April 1980. I had just come back from the Warwickshire school cruise, a trip that took in Athens, Istanbul, Egypt, all thanks to the SS Uganda, a troop-ship that was to have her moment of glory carrying our boys to battle in the Falkland Isles.
When we were on it though, the only battles we had were how to avoid the boring lectures and get down to some serious sunbathing on deck. We flew to Venice to meet up with the ship and, after getting settled in, were allowed to explore the city. There was a tiny ruffle of rebellion when a few of us decided to gamble on our teachers' having some sort of discipline-amnesia, being so far from home and classroom, and we tried to get away with not wearing our uniforms while off the ship. We hadn't counted on Mr. Price and his military leanings...
Mr. Price was actually Major Price. Although, technically, he was employed by our school to teach Latin, he devoted most of his energy to running the CCF (Combined Cadet Force), Mr. Mannering-style. Every Friday, the school chapel, where we held our assemblies, would be dotted with khaki and shiny boots. If you were stupid enough to join this kids-army, you would have to attend all classes that day wearing full army kit. I was stupid enough to join, heaven knows why, and stood it for a couple of months until I could take the chaffing and the lack of irony no more and asked for a discharge. Mr. Price didn't give up without a fight, and I had to have it made abundantly clear to me that I was the only pupil to leave the 'force' before the end of the three years in the entire history of the school. I imagine he thought if he let me go, others would soon follow, and then the whole idea of the cadets would disappear into history. Goodness knows what would happen then! How would the school defend itself without its army? Despite the weight of the centuries on my shoulders, I handed back my boot polish and lint without one iota of guilt.
Mr. Price could not be avoided that easily though and so it was that he was put in charge of the cruise trip, or 'mission' as he chose to call it! He ran the expedition with his usual military precision and we were sent back on board to immediately change back into our school suits and ties and remain wearing them for the rest of the cruise. He wasn't entirely made of stone though and, later in the trip, allowed us to visit the pyramids in the stifling heat with our jackets off - "shirt-sleeve order" - leaving us wandering around like bloody extras in some Merchant-Ivory movie.
The cruise was not without its good times, however. I managed to have two serious relationships; two of our party were accused (by Mr. Price) of interfering with a girl on the upper deck; we got so regularly pissed we were constantly threatened with early flights home; and every night we'd bump and grind our virgin-hips to "Smoke on the Water".
The matter of the 'rape' was always on slightly dodgy ground - two third-formers, found by the Major, with their trousers round their ankles and a much older, fully-dressed girl from another - rougher - school standing looking on with an amused smile and too much make-up on her face. The matter was brought back home and dropped pretty quickly. I assume, for Mr. Price, if a boy is found with his trousers down and a female is within earshot, foul-play can be the only conclusion. Having said that, it is probably always a good idea to err on the side of caution in matters such as those...
Back on dry land in Stratford, I took my driving test (passed) and made the decision to leave school early and concentrate on two things: the band and lying in.
In David's place, John found a very nice fireman from Leamington Spa called 'Noel'. He was a good bass player and played the bass lines very well indeed, but something wasn't right. He wasn't David. We rehearsed in Noel's cellar, and the songs sounded fine, but, apart from a weekend in Cambridge when we re-mixed the single, and a reunion gig at the Green Dragon in Stratford the following year, the band would never again see the light of day.
The last rehearsal in September 1980 was a monumental turning point for me in more ways than one. I still remember, as if it were yesterday, 'bang, bang, cracking' and looking over at John, who just stopped playing and sat down, looking as if his dog had just died. He slumped over his guitar and announced that he couldn't do it anymore. Knowing his ignorance of all things carnal, we assumed he meant play in the band. We just sat there. After all, what could you say to that? Fair enough! We could have forced him to play by threatening him with expulsion from the band, but seeing as John wrote the songs, sang them, and played guitar in a way that gave us our distinctive sound, that threat would have sounded particularly unthreatening. Anyway, to be honest, such was John's svengali-type hold over us, the idea of telling him what to do artistically simply didn't figure. So we decided to stop for the evening and have a drink and a smoke. The following hour or so is a bit of a blur. I know I swallowed at least one, if not two, bottles of Strongbow and got through a couple of woodbines of the electric variety. In any event, I found myself in a world of my own making, and a very nice one it was too. While swimming around this maze, my mind slowly began to recognise a song coming from somewhere else in the house that I knew! and not only that I knew but also liked very much indeed. It was an XTC track from their brilliant album Drums and Wires, a CD copy of which I bought a couple of years ago to replace the vinyl one I had lovingly stored in the cupboard like all the rest of us sad thirty-somethings for years - in fact I have just walked over to my rack of CD's and put this copy in to my impossibly modern system in my impossibly modern home. Back then, in the days of effortless optimism, absolute faith in human nature and fairness, tight jeans and roll-ups, I sat down in that cellar where we had rehearsed, stoned out of my brain and listened to this track - Helicopter - and was transported. Literally transported, actually. In my fermented apple-induced trance, I stood and, like that dog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons who follows the smell of steak in spite of himself, walked out towards where the sound was coming from.
It was a very big house and I walked up two or three wide flights of stairs, past room after room, until I reached the door it seemed to be behind.
Noel had a girlfriend called Sharon. Sharon lived in this house with Noel and her sister, Tracey, along with quite a few other people actually. It was a bit of a commune type thing, and to me and my conservative-country-bumpkin, non-sleep-overed, inexperienced self, very daunting. Off my tits on cider, and mellowed with the grass, I felt pretty damn good though, and was determined to get to where this music was coming from, free from any fear whatsoever. So I found the door and walked straight in, sat myself down and listened. Sharon and her sister were in there talking in a semi-darkness lit by one of those table lights with red gauze over it, but hey, I just wanted to listen to the track and not bother anyone. I mumbled something and got comfortable. After a while, I noticed that Sharon had left ages before, and I became gradually aware of being alone with Tracey and therefore responsible for the conversational element of the situation.
We chatted about this and that and, slowly but surely, the fact that I was alone in a bedroom, with a girl, in a house with no parents in it, filtered into my brain.
Having never been anywhere near this sort of stiuation before, I hadn't the foggiest about what to do next, so I decided to keep chatting and let things take their natural course. Four hours later - by now, the time was well into single figures - I was still chatting for England, each hour that passed making it more and more difficult to broach any subject other than the most superficial. It got to the stage where there was nothing at all left to say, and exhaustion was setting in, so I laid my cards on the table and uttered these earth-shakingly romantic words, "Look, I'd kiss you...but, I'm a bit tired."
The next moment is for me frozen in time. I looked down on myself from above and saw the expression of total horror on my face as Tracey leapt on me and pushed me back onto the bed we had been sitting on for most of the night.
The following morning, I marched in to the kitchen and gave the thumbs up to John and Sophie. Sophie indulged this crass behaviour and John just looked a bit crestfallen - maybe the band should be renamed "The Virgin" now... although, maybe not. Years later, I would find out that all was not quite what it seemed at the time.
The postscript to this moment of manhood-gaining has to be my complete inability to come to terms with what had happened. A few nights later, we all met up at the house and John, Sophie, Noel, Sharon, Tracey and the commune all sat in the huge living room watching something on the TV. While sitting there, I became overwhelmed with a sense of self-revealment, an exposure I just couldn't cope with for some reason. I felt embarrassed, paranoid and panicked - all without the help of any substance at all! After enduring this for a while, I stood up, left the room and drove the twelve or so miles back home as fast as I could. Doing this, of course, made the whole situation a lot worse, creating some sort of pressure-cooker effect. I had publicly displayed my unease and would now have to explain myself; that would be the responsible, mature and most effective thing to do to get myself out of this awful predicament.
So I hid.
A week later, I was sitting at home one afternoon reading the Melody Maker and the doorbell ding-donged. I got up and opened it. Tracey was standing there. She'd made the bus journey from Leamington and was standing at the door, vulnerable and confused.
Not knowing what to say, I immediately returned to my chair, picked up my paper and left her to come in by herself and sit down. We sat there in silence for a long, long while, me hiding my face behind the paper. Eventually, I heard her get up and leave for the door. The yale lock turned and the door shut - it wasn't even slammed - simply shut quietly, sadly, behind her.
I never saw Tracey again.