Laid in Chelsea: My Life Uncovered. Ollie Locke
of whom was Alfie Allen, the actor and Lily Allen’s little brother. We all had to wash in these horrible showers where you had to constantly push the button in to make the water flow, and it was one of the things I dreaded most.
I was quite a late developer, and I only had a very flimsy curtain to shield myself from the queue of burly, sniggering sixth formers waiting outside.
I was always very careful about being alert at all times when showering because a guy called Donald Yang had a habit of whipping back the curtain and revealing our scrawny hairless bodies to all of our fellow pupils. I didn’t want them to know I wasn’t a hairy beast underneath my clothes. When I finally got my first pube that year, for some reason it was grey. I’ve never quite got to the bottom of why and it worried me for weeks.
I remember a guy called Ronald Westwing-Burt being very hairy from an early age and I was so jealous. Ronald even started getting chest hair, whereas my chest only decided to sprout its first hairs when I was about 23.
My friend Dan Slowen and I used to compare our underarms on a weekly basis, looking for any sign of progress in the hair department. But nothing. I was as smooth and hairless each week as the last week, much to my despair.
Dan could kind of get away with being one of the smaller, less developed boys because he was the first person at school to have a mobile phone. At the time that was incredible because they barely existed, so he was like some kind of mobile phone-wielding god. It wasn’t like some of the enormous brick ones I’d seen my dad lug around either, it was quite small and neat. I was jealous.
After lights out in the dorm, we all used to huddle around his mobile and call up the porn lines that were advertised in the back of Loaded, then listen to them on the loudspeaker. For some reason the women were always Scottish. Dan would try to put on a sexy older voice, but as soon as he admitted he was calling from his school dorm the ladies on the other end of the line would call a halt to things with an expression that we will never forget, ‘I think you’re a wee bit young for this aren’t you, Danny?’ leaving us with no porn material to go back to our bunk beds with.
I guess those porn lines opened the door to a world of sex that I hadn’t really thought about very much before. I kind of knew what sex was, but I didn’t know how it all worked (to be honest, I sometimes still wonder). I was so innocent, and all I really knew was that frigid was a bad word and not one that you wanted to be associated with. If anyone said you were frigid you would dispute it, even though we didn’t properly understand what it meant. Of course I wasn’t frigid, I had felt a boob, I would always say to myself.
Sex became something that I consciously thought about, quite a lot.
OK, I’m going to break down a barrier now. I’m going to mention the unspoken act: wanking. You can only imagine how much secretive masturbation went on in the dorms – even though the likelihood was that no one was doing it properly.
We had no choice but to do it in the dorm or in the toilets, but even in these public places we could always find a way. I’ve heard all of the stories about boys’ private schools where apparently everyone lines up in a row and has a wank, and something to do with a soggy biscuit, but that certainly didn’t happen at any of the schools I was at. When you’re young you’re so insecure about the size of your penis that I can’t imagine anyone would want to get theirs out in front of their peers. Unless, of course, you were particularly blessed in the downstairs area, in which case you would probably choose to walk around naked most of the time. As far as I was concerned it was all very much done under the covers – and under the cover of darkness.
Wanking certainly wasn’t a subject that was discussed at school. I am still very grateful to this day that I was never caught with my hands down my pants. I think that would have set me back several years, and I was far from advanced to start with. It’s entirely possible I’d still be a virgin now had that happened. Can you imagine?
Aged 14 and still high on my first breast-groping experience, I decided that I wanted a proper girlfriend. Not the sort of hand-holding, occasional kissing type I’d had before, but a full-blown, boob-groping, bike-shed kind of one. I really fancied a girl called Evelyn Beanie, but she wasn’t at all interested in me. Outrageous, I know, but I still wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘a catch’, and I was very inexperienced in matters of the heart. I just wanked a lot.
I never used to get any Valentine’s cards and every time that ‘special day’ rolled around it was like a form of torture because everyone used to boast about how many cards they’d received and my granny’s handwriting was always distinguishable. I was the person who would organise for the other boys to send roses and cards to girls via the school. I was the cupid and the one the teachers selected to organise everything. You could send a rose to someone you liked and add it on to your school bill so your parents ended up paying for it at the end of the year, but I always sent them to the really popular girls and never received any myself. Tragic.
I think the bottom line is that I was a loser. I didn’t help myself either, for when the opportunity came to be in charge of the headmaster’s fish tank I jumped at it, granting me the nickname ‘Fishy’. While other people were busy groping the go-getter Tiffany, Fishy here was busy making sure the pH levels of the water in the tank were accurate. I know I’ve said I love all things to do with marine life, but I think this was taking it a bit far, even for me.
The squash courts were the place to go if you wanted to get down and dirty with someone. There were always stories about girls being felt up in the viewing gallery. It was legendary. I think every school has such a spot. There was one girl – who shall remain nameless – who had a real reputation for getting groped by virtually every single guy in school. She made Tiffany the go-getter look like a right prude. Apart from me, I might add; I was probably busy feeding the fish.
Looking back, I thank God that I didn’t end up with my hand down anyone’s pants because I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was doing. It would be years before I had any understanding of the female form.
I remember learning about the, I guess you could say, technical side of sex while sitting in a science lab, playing with the gas taps to distract myself from the horror that was unfolding in front of me. Some poor teacher was made to stand facing a classroom of 14-year-olds and slide a condom over a banana as the entire room looked on in mortified fascination. It was about breeding, not pleasure, it seemed they were saying. I guess they were trying to make it sound as unsexy as possible so we wouldn’t all go home and do it, underage. I should have been so bloody lucky!
I honestly think that when it comes to sex education, rather than just telling people how to avoid getting pregnant or and the ins and outs of things, as it were, they should tell teenagers how to actually do it. There is nothing in place to help you avoid the humiliation of being absolutely shit when you do finally manage to convince a girl to get off with you.
I remember having one absolutely awful lesson where we were shown a silky piece of material and told that we should use it, should we ever wish to perform oral sex on a girl, to prevent STDs. It was like a condom for oral sex and it was the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen. No one said we didn’t have to use it.
In short, sex education taught me nothing about sex. It just left me confused and rather amused that our teacher, Mrs Oddy, had said the words ‘scrotum’ and ‘climax’ all in the same lesson. It was better than maths with Mrs Dilloway, though, I guess.
Thankfully, Rupert and I soon discovered a place where we could learn what we really needed to at that point in our lives. That place was jackinworld.com.
Jackinworld.com was a website that basically taught you how to masturbate in hundreds of different ways. Nobody at school had laptops back then, so Rupert and I used to have to wait until we had access to a computer in his dad’s secretary’s office and swiftly look up as much porn as possible.
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