She was a Catholic and the first person I knew with a florescent Virgin Mary statue; maybe there’s something in this Catholicism, I thought, if you need a green glow to help you through the night. We loved the Monkees and Tamla Motown; Band of Gold by Freda Payne was a favourite . We had a vague idea what it alluded to and we vowed to avoid mummies’ boys. She was a year older than me. She loved horses and I didn’t; I became her foot soldier. She taught me the facts of life on the way to school. She got it a bit wrong but we muddled through and I let her take the credit. We listened to the Top Forty on a Sunday evening at her house; Sugar Sugar, Spirit in the Sky, Melting Pot, I’m a Believer. Her Belgian mother was silently disgusted that she wasn’t in church confessing all; she said she made it up anyway. Her mum gave us fags, told us to keep ourselves pure and never pluck our eyebrows. She had three brothers and I had three sisters; a stress line went through both our families and we regularly took to the park, smoked ourselves silly, making up names for our children; musing on identikit boyfriends of the moustache and long hair variety
Headbands, hot pants, long T shirts as dresses, roman sandals, platform heels, calico smocks, denim halter neck waistcoats, loons, oxford bags, chamois leather, afghan coats, jeans.
We were the Monkees; we were the next generation; I stopped being a believer
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