Junior 4 was all about trying to be cool.
My best friends (both now and in the years before Junior 4), John and Darren, were abandoned by me in favour of Robert Hutchinson and Gerard Lynch, who I considered to be the coolest kids in the class. The girls all loved Hutch, he had that air of confidence and looked like a ten year old baby-faced David Soul, only, he was a bit of a short-arse and, if I'm honest, consequently chubby in the way that a baby is before it starts walking. Puppy fat, maybe. Or short-arsed kid chubbiness, stored up energy ready for when he grows tall, which he never did. Robert knew about proper pop music and so did Gerard. And they both understood fashion. No one in our class even thought about fashion before that. Maybe the girls did, but I wouldn't have known that and I doubt it, looking back. But Robert and Gerard both declared themselves to be 'Rude Boys' and each owned a Harrington. Gerard also had a Crombie and was tall enough to carry off the much longer coat. Robert would have looked like something from Michael Bentine's Potty Time in a Crombie. Anyway, I wanted to fit in and persuaded my parents to buy me a Harrington. (Incidentally, my Dad bought me another one for my 50th birthday last month, knowing that I am both nostalgic and a creature of habit). We were the Harrington gang and sometimes Robert suggested we turn our jackets inside out so that the iconic red tartan lining was fully on show on the outside. At this point, my effort to fit in failed somewhat. Robert and Gerard had plain white lining on the inside of their sleeves. I had bright green. That was embarrassing. I looked like a Scottish racing jockey.
Despite the green sleeves, they agreed that I could be in a room with them on the school trip that summer. That was where my temporary abandonment of Darren and John was most treacherously realised, having been in a room with them in Combe Martin the previous two years. This year the holiday location switched to Lympsham in Somerset and there were 6 of us in that room, 6 of us self-styled coolest kids in the class, with our Harringtons and with Robert as our leader. The holiday was brilliant, especially as somehow I had got over my chronic travel sickness and didn't puke once on the coach the whole time, which was fortunate given how much my jacket meant to me. I'd have been mortified if the outside ended up as bright green as the inner sleeves.
The hotel in which we stayed was reputedly haunted. And we believed this, after all, we were all Catholics, so we were open to all sorts of superstitious nonsense. Originally the building had been a farmhouse and our room was built on an annex where the dairy had once been. This became significant once the spooky story gathered some meat and we were told that the ghost was a milk maid. Someone then claimed to have looked through the frosted glass of our bedroom door to see the silhouette of a woman bending over as if milking a cow (I imagine if we were older and more worldly, we would have interpreted this rather more crudely). If that wasn't scary enough, I then imagined - as I twisted the handle of the door leading to our corridor - that someone on the other side of the door was turning it back forcefully and yet, as that door also had glass in it, I could see no one there. I totally pooed myself and ran back to the main building armed with this addition to the story of the haunting.
This holiday proved a rite of passage for me, though. It was when I got into PROPER MUSIC thanks to Robert bringing with him two 45" singles to play at the party. The first was Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier. The second - and more in keeping with the Harringtons - was Madness, The Return of the Los Palmas 7. I was blown away by both and became a fan for life of Madness and an obsessive Adam Ant fan for at least a year afterwards, much to my Dad's discomfort and concern over my sexuality, once the posters of this obvious 'poofter' in make-up went up on my wall.
On the last evening, each room had to perform an act for all the other kids. John and Darren's room mimed along to a Beatles song, while we did the same for Kings of the Wild Frontier, just to highlight the chasm in coolness. However, in a moment of self-conscious awkwardness reminiscent of my green sleeves, I was instructed by Robert to be 'on piano'. There is of course no bloody piano on that song, so I felt like a bit of a prick. We Ants weren't even allowed to put the famous white stripe across our noses, as only Adam had this, the Ants didn't, as Robert pointed out. And Robert was Adam Ant. Gerard was guitarist, Marco Pirroni. And I was just the prick on piano that wasn't in the song. Robert might have looked the coolest, but at least he suffered for his art. As I discovered later, when I tried it myself, applying a thick white line of toothpaste over your cheeks and nose sends a wave of stinging mintiness into your eyes that hurts like buggery.
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