More Joel and T. London 1976-77

Everything was different when we escaped into our own little world. The adults didn’t know what we were up to. They were always busy with their own hectic lives and we preferred it that way. Once, one of them tried to cross the boundary. It was Marnie’s best friend – a tall, loud American woman, who drank too much and wrote a satirical column. She would sunbathe topless at Joel’s cottage in the country and came looking for us like that, asking if we would pass the joint round. T looked horrified and edged away in disgust. You always knew exactly what he was thinking. Joel was more tactful, but it didn’t take long before she went off again, swaying slightly, glass in hand. Drunk as she was, she’d got the message that she was definitely unwelcome. We ran off giggling into the woods in case she came back again.

That first year, what we enjoyed most was seeing how far we could go. Before I’d met them, Joel and T had invented a company called Floggit, Profit and Leggit, and they’d spent their time trying to scam backstage passes so they could get into gigs. They were displayed on the cork noticeboard in Joel’s bedroom in London. Right at the top was the biggest prize of all – a drumstick from a Led Zeppelin gig. Joel was so proud of that drumstick.

We were always trying to think of ways to raise money and then have a good time with it. We enjoyed the planning as much as the doing. We spent so many hours together scheming, laughing, smoking, plotting our elaborate games. Once at Kingsway I went to the offices to apply for a grant from the hardship fund. I was the most innocent looking. I think I even managed to cry when I told the welfare officer my sad story – the huge family row, being shown the door, nowhere to go, needing some money - just to tide me over. It worked – I was so proud of myself. T was waiting around the corner, with Joel, and we danced with delight –it was the best feeling in the world. We spent it all in one go at Maxwell’s on Hampstead High Street. Hamburgers and tequila sunrises. Maxwell’s was sophistication personified for us – the little revolving condiment dishes they gave you – red, green, and yellow relish, and mustard. The idea that we’d won it all through cunning made it taste so much better.

Joel’s older stepbrother had a flat in West Hampstead. Joel had a key and every Friday we would skip school and college, let ourselves in and mix Pimms in a dustbin we’d bought especially. I have no memory now why we did this, or what we did once we were gloriously drunk. I think we just lay around laughing, going through Stephen’s albums, then carefully removed all evidence that we’d been there and staggered back up the West End Lane to Joel’s house. Stephen never knew.

Once we mixed a little bit of grass with all sorts of other things and had a competition to see how much of it we could sell before anyone noticed. We scammed friends and enemies alike – it made no difference to us.

We had boyfriends and girlfriends that first year, but they were all fairly brief things – they didn’t seem to get in the way. Once though, the boys disappeared, and Joel came into the room alone looking shifty. He said T was wondering if I would go out with him. I was kind of shocked – it hadn’t occurred to me to think of either of them like that – they were my friends, not people to have sex with. It felt really awkward saying no, watching Joel leave the room, and then a little while afterwards, they both came back in and we all acted as if nothing had happened. I was so relieved. I loved them both so much more than all the boyfriends put together.

We scammed friends too. One of the girls from Dixon and Wolfe was called Camilla. She was twelve when I first met her and she used to sit on my lap at breaktimes in school. I think maybe she had a kind of crush on me for a while. I didn’t mind – she was nice and I felt sorry for her. Poor Camilla had a hard time. Her mother had great expectations for her. I remember the shame Cam suffered when her mother wrote to the school to say she wasn’t to be allowed out at lunchtime because she had put too much weight on. She made Cam take diet pills instead. She was only thirteen. As she got older she was forced to go out with boys who had titles and bizarre first names. Her mother was a terrific snob and when Camilla tried to wriggle out of the dates it was made clear to her that this wasn’t an option.

By the time I was at Kingsway, Camilla had already been in Tatler – one of those photo shoots they did of “girls to look out for”. I took Joel and T to her flat in Queensgate. Hr mother was an interior designer and the flat was huge and horrible. One the bathrooms was entirely gold - everything in it. The loo itself was encircled with a curtain made of gold chains. It was truly hideous. There were two Philipino servants who slept in a little room beyond the kitchen. We emptied out her piggy bank and the four of us went for a meal, paying the large bill with great piles of change, smiling as the waiters got angrier and angrier. Later we went back to her flat and I talked to Camilla in her room, with its small four-poster bed draped with ribbons and walls covered in pony club rosettes. As we were walking back up towards the tube station, Joel and T showed me what they’d got – a small collection of silver teaspoons with crests on, and some boxes of big fat cigars. We all really liked Camilla – we just liked scamming people too.

There was no reason for any of this – it was just because we could. Perhaps the most pointless thing we did was to a family whose daughter had also been at my old school. Her mother was a Hollywood actress so rich and famous that even we were impressed. Her dad was an English film director. They lived right next to the Albert Hall and they had a whole room in the flat with seats and a giant cinema screen. She had terrific parties when her parents were away and we would revel in the novelty of seeing films at the touch of a button. We got the details of her dad’s taxi cab account and for a good few months we abused it shamelessly. We thought it was so funny to call up taxis in the middle of the night and ask them to buy and deliver cigarettes and alcohol to us. We’d order them to go all over the place until one day we were told the account had been closed. To us it was just a big game.

I don’t know why we chose the dingiest pub in the area for our local either. The North Star, on the Finchley Road was horrible. It was a characterless, dirty place with an upstairs pool table. We spent countless evenings there, staggering back to Joel’s flat after closing time, trying and failing miserably to unlock the front door quietly – it would take so many goes to hit the keyhole with the key. The more we tried the more we’d giggle – until eventually we’d manage it, and stumble in, trying to tiptoe as quickly as possible into Joel’s room. We must have woken up the whole house so many times.