(Nearly) January

Nine minutes to twelve on New Year’s Eve and I’m leaning against the radiator in my bedroom with my head out of the window. For dramatic effect, I’m taking in exaggeratedly bracing gulps of East Lothian air. I’m watching the stars, mentally preparing myself for a new year and a new start. I’m going to be strong, and I’m going to be better. I am totally focused on turning over a new leaf. It is my last chance to redeem myself.

I am thirteen.

Aside from the stars, clear in a navy-blue sky, all I can see is the snow. Good, clean, crisp and criss-crossed from perpetual sledging. In 1979, snow was still liable to fall right through the winter. And thank God it did. For three dark months of the year it was just about all we had. There was no cinema. The boys had relentlessly turned up for every film and thrown bottles at the screen until it was too tattered to see anything projected onto it. There was no dancing. The youth disco that Chick Rankin had set up to combat glue sniffing was closed, due to excessive fighting between second-generation mods and rockers, and generally more glue sniffing.

You could get a drink at the Miners Arms, provided you had big tits and wore blusher. But for those drinkers without adequate breasts and make-up skills, the only other option was to drink cider and pop aspirin under the Roman Bridge. However, the vicious Scottish frosts could put paid to that behaviour by as early as mid-October.

Sledging was quite welcome for me because it took sex off the agenda. As a child, all sexual activity took place outside. So the arrival of snow meant that, happily, sex could be replaced by winter sports. Snowball fights and hazardous icy gauntlets on the well-polished teachers’ walkway that led from the school car park - all that was just fine by me. It gave me a break from the usual. For come summer or winter, I hated the whole sex thing. For me it was nothing to do with lust, desire, physical drive or romance. Or experimentation (unless I was experimenting with misery). It was all about pressure and fitting in - part bargaining, part fear of losing whoever was interested in me at the time, part living in pointless hope that it might lead to a boy holding my hand, or wanting to take me to the school Christmas disco, where we’d romantically kiss beneath the mistletoe held over our heads.

But all the fingering was in vain. By the age of twelve, I was officially a slag, a cow, and a whore. I couldn’t fucking win. This was my lot and it was all my fault. I gave it all up to them too early, because that’s what they wanted - and in my naïve logic I thought if I did what they wanted they would like me for it. But instead they hated me. They preferred the girls that gave them nothing: the silent, beautiful, boring girls, who wouldn’t let them touch them for another four years. They waited patiently and respectfully, doing all the mistletoe, hand-holding, Valentine stuff with them until they finally gave way. Meanwhile, they passed their time with me.

And while I longed for the things the boys would never give me, I had other longings too - a desire, and the painful, hopeless pursuit of it, that dominated my life. This was the only thing on my mind tonight. No longer would I be obsessed with girls.

Rhona Cameron - 1979