at the time. it would pay me £27.30 a week, of which £15 would have to go into the house.

i would
have less than £8 a week to myself. so i still signed up for the two year yts scheme. i was to train
to be a painter and decorator and then maybe i would go into business by myself. peter and i were
inseparable little shits. we would go to roller discos and get into scrapes together. we would get
drunk and jump into rivers from bridges, we were young dumb and full of....life, this was the age
of innocence, but we were not to be innocent for much longer at sixteen peter introduced me to his
cousin, and she gladly took away my virginity. Shelley was a little bit overweight, but she wasnt
fat. she looked ok and she tasted of cherry lypsyl. i was impressed with her. within a few days we
were an item. she would come to my house and i would go to hers. She lived eight miles away so
a bus journey either way separated us. it took away two weeks for us to arrange a perfect time to
be living room floor. i had some respect and didn t want to use her employers bed, shelley was
more than ready, and i was raring to go. i had waited for this moment for such a long time, of all
the people i knew, all of them were no longer virgins and i wanted to lose my virginity so badly, i
literally couldn t wait. the pressure of the first time, the excitement of knowing it was finally going
to happen, the worry that the woman who owned the house may come in the door at any second,
in less than a minute all the elements seemed to conspire against me, and it was over as soon as it
began. she was disappointed, and i was embarrassed and it took around just thirty seconds to
destroy my confidence and empty my tanks. She was kind and said it didnt matter. i just looked at
myself in the mirror, knowing it was done but not exactly how i had gone over it again and again
in my mind in practice, this was not how i had planned it. thankfully time would give me a second
chance but it was not with shelley. it was just too embarrassing for me. i finished with her, and she
cried a lot, and then i felt like a right shit, but life went on. peter and i went out together and we
did what we did best, we got drunk. then he did another stupid thing, and he introduced me to his
twin sister. catherine was peter s twin; she was a week older than me. She also had a child, but it
didn t matter to me at all. She looked great and she was fun to be around, she also seemed to like
me. i accepted her child as if she were my own, and loved them both. peter way ok, as it meant i
was around his house all of the time, but he would sometimes go out with other mates and leave
us alone. we could only go out with each other one week out of two when her mother was at work
on nights, catherine was worried her mother would not approve, she was right. catherine s mother
had always been nice to me in the past, and often looked at her and thought she was quite pretty
for an older woman too. She was ultra protective of catherine and her child as the child s father
had done something which they would never tell me, he had either hit catherine or had threatened
her as far as i could make out, but i never really knew the truth. i will tell you more about catherine
later. the yty scheme turned out to be a thug s paradise. all the different school hard nuts that
couldntseem to find any real work, and had ended up on one of these schemes, and the worst of
them all seemed to land up in our van. i was used to being hit, and wasnt really worried about
being bullied, but these guys hit a lot harder than the guys at school, they hit a hell of a lot harder.
we had some laughs there, but it was normally at the expense of someone innocent or
disadvantaged, there was a guy called gary who was a heavy metal freak. he had the long hair and
denim jacket that was the heavies uniform at the time. it proudly displayed a large ac/dc picture
across the back. he took particular enjoyment in opening the van window on route to work, and
then he would shout bal-dy! every day at a young girl who had recent cancer treatment and had
lost all her hair. She always flipped him the bird but every day he would cry with laughter at his
simple joke. gary was a little bit of a nutcase to say the least. im sure had the ing of the average
hamster, but he may not have actually been that clever. we worked on site at a place called enham
industries, enham is a place where disabled people are employed and housed, en masse, and here
i met some of the loveliest people i have ever met. gary didnt see the disabled as real people. to
him they were walking jokes to be ridiculed, and ridicule them he did. there was one guy who was
working at enham in the book binding factory. the factory was at the top of the hill and we parked
our van at the bottom. i remember now that his name was tony. tony could not speak, but he made
noises. he always wore a grey suit jacket and had big nhs glasses, the only word he could say was
ba. now to gary this was the funniest thing he had ever heard,