Chloe Sims - The Only Way is Up - My Story. Chloe Sims
bunked off too, but she’d gone and grounded her.
I was so pleased I’d been let off that I hadn’t given a thought to anyone else. Anyway, the next thing, Helen’s mum – who was a primary-school teacher and quite well-to-do – came driving past and pulled up alongside Helen and told her not to be silly and to get in the car. She was saying, ‘Please, Helen, come on, get in the car and we can talk about this.’ It was so funny; she was saying it all posh and politely, totally different to my family. If that had been my dad, he’d have got out of the car and dragged me in!
It looked so funny – her mum saying, ‘Please, Helen, just get in the car,’ and Helen saying, ‘No, I’m running away,’ even though she didn’t have a bag or anything with her – that I couldn’t stop laughing.
People had started staring by this point and Helen’s mum didn’t like to make a scene, so eventually she said that, if Helen got in the car, she would un-ground her, and Helen was over the moon. We’d both got away with it!
I could tell Helen’s mum was none too impressed, but she still liked me because Helen and me were so close.
Although I never really bothered in class and was always being told to try harder, I didn’t go out of my way to get into trouble – things just seemed to happen to me! One day, I had got in late so I had to walk in via the office to tell them why I was late. Anyway, the ladies in the office told me to take off my false eyelashes and I said no. They kept saying it, but I was having none of it – I told them they couldn’t make me, I made such a fuss. I remember saying, ‘You can’t tell me what to do – you’re not even teachers, you just work in the office!’ Then – cocky little cow that I was – I told them that it was an infringement of my human rights!
They were none too impressed, so they went to fetch the headmaster and one of them told him that I’d been really insulting and called her a goat! Now I’m not saying I was in the right, but I definitely hadn’t called her a goat. There was no way I would have used the word ‘goat’. I was only 15 – I’d have said ‘bitch’, not ‘goat’!
Anyway, the headmaster hauled me into his office and shouted at me. He was so angry the spit was coming out of his mouth as he was shouting! I told him, if I had wanted to offend her, I wouldn’t have said ‘goat’, but that just made him more angry because I wouldn’t admit to it.
He told me to write down exactly what I had said, so I did. But, when I took it back to him, he wasn’t happy and tore it up and told me to do it again. I ended up doing it three times, but he still wasn’t happy because I hadn’t admitted to calling the secretary a goat.
I kept trying to say I hadn’t said it, but they wouldn’t believe me. The secretary obviously made it up to get me in trouble. The headmaster was so furious he rang my dad, and Dad and my step-mum Karen came up to the school. They sat them down and told them what had happened. Dad was livid and grounded me for a month. All over my false eyelashes!
From then on, every time I did any little thing wrong, the headmaster would get straight on the phone to my dad and I’d be grounded. It was awful! The older I got, the less I cared about schoolwork, though – I was more bothered about going out and having a laugh with my mates.
All through my last year at school, I was going for more modelling shoots and entering competitions, and I was even more determined that modelling was what I wanted to do. By the time I did my GCSEs, I had literally given up and failed all my exams except art. And I only passed that because I found some old art work of my dad’s and handed that in for my assessment. They were really old-fashioned pictures of bodybuilders and singer Kate Bush! I can’t believe they actually thought it was my work.
Around this time, I started hearing rumours that Danny had been seeing another girl behind my back. We’d been together nearly a year by this point and, when people started telling me that this girl Tracey was going round boasting that she’d stayed over at his house, I was livid. I confronted Danny, but he denied it and I couldn’t find any proof, so I decided that I would have it out with Tracey.
I found out where she was going to be one day and I marched down there and gave her a slap! I wasn’t going to have her going around saying she’d been with my boyfriend.
Over the time that Danny and me had been together, I had started hanging around with some older friends and going to pubs. I was desperate to go to clubs and wanted to go out drinking. Meanwhile, Danny was still quite happy hanging around the streets smoking. I didn’t want that – I wanted to get all dressed up and go out, and I guess I outgrew him.
A few weeks after I slapped Tracey, Danny dumped me for another girl. She was a traveller and I can’t remember her name. I was a bit gutted but it was more that my pride had been dented because he’d dumped me than that I actually cared.
I had been head over heels for him a year earlier when he’d seemed so cool but now I’d realised that, actually, he wasn’t all that. I guess he wasn’t the love of my life after all. When he dumped me, I’d already been flirting with a few guys I’d met on nights out anyway, so I suppose I wasn’t bothered for long.
Shortly after we split, he ended up going out with Tracey – the one who claimed she was seeing him behind my back. They later got married and had kids, and they are still together now. I still don’t know if he did cheat on me with her, though.
The time came to leave school and I needed to find a job. While I was at school, I’d had a Saturday job working in a card shop, where I got paid £15 a day, which is shocking by today’s standards and, even back then, it was a pittance. It all went on toiletries – I used to go straight to Boots and spend the lot on make-up and beauty stuff.
By the time I was 16, I wanted more money for going out – although my dad wouldn’t let me go clubbing – so I left the card shop. I asked Kelly – Auntie Sylv’s daughter – to get me a job in McDonald’s because the pay was better.
Even though the pay was much better – I used to get £60 a fortnight – I hated it, so I quit and just walked out without telling them I was leaving. That was what I did with pretty much every job I’ve ever had – I’ve never been one to stick at something I hate for long, if I can help it.
Next came a stint working in telesales, selling double-glazing, but I was useless at it. Some friends from school worked there as well. We were on a really rubbish basic wage and then we’d get commission if we sold anything, but I never did. We used to go down the list and find the people with the funniest names and then we’d phone and ask to speak to them, and just crack up laughing.
It’s no wonder I didn’t sell anything!
Anyway, after I quit the telesales job, I really didn’t know what to do next. My dad wasn’t happy because I didn’t have a job and he didn’t want to see me wasting my life. He was also worried about the group of friends I had because some of them smoked cannabis and took other drugs. I guess maybe he thought they would be a bad influence, but I had no interest in taking drugs.
Then Dad was offered a job for 2 years over in Majorca. The job was well paid, so as a family we relocated there. My dad organised a job for me before he went, which was working for a company that organised bar crawls.
Things were looking up again. Just a month after leaving school and still only 16, I headed over to Majorca to start a new life in the sun.
I can seriously say that I had the time of my life in the Balearic Islands. It was 1998 and I was young, single and up for partying every night.
The job my dad’s friend got me was selling tickets for the bar crawls in a famous party resort. It was pretty straightforward – I had to go around in the daytime getting groups of holidaymakers to sign up to the bar crawls in the evenings.