December 30th 1980 - Hoddesdon!!!

December 30th 1980 - Hoddesdon!!!

So unplug the jukebox and do us all a favour / Yeah that music’s lost its taste, so try another flavour

- Antmusic - Adam & The Ants (#7 in the charts)

Much of the time, it seems that God gives you lemons. But very occasionally, He serves up a cornucopia filled with pomegranates, lychees, sweet strawberries, succulent melon, papaya and mango.

I don’t know why He chose to bless me in the summer of 1979, but bless me he undoubtedly did when he saw fit to contrive to place me in an olde worlde tea shop in the centre of the western Irish resort of Galway, some 500 miles from home.

We shouldn’t even have been there. If it hadn’t been for a flea-infested holiday farmhouse on the shore of Lough Corrib and the sight one morning of the owner’s wife taking a long piss in the adjoining hay barn, we wouldn’t have been.

But Mrs O’Flaherty answered her call of nature, Matt, our cousin Phil and I were forbidden from going within ten feet of the lumpen, bug-infested mattresses and Dad spent the first day of our holiday that year finding new rental accommodation in Ireland’s most celebrated seaside town.

Which meant Dad, Matt and I found ourselves in search of afternoon tea in the centre of Galway that July day, rather than spending the hours on a boat in the middle of Lough Corrib asking Dad to untangle our fishing lines. Again.

If the reality of what we’d all imagined would be an idyllic Gaelic retreat were the lemons, God made up for it with an exotic smorgasbord of sweet-tasting fruit days later when he placed us at the bottom of the stairs of the teashop and moved in that mysterious way of His to locate John Abbott, the Alleyne’s headmaster, at the top of them.

It was a long-odds coincidence. mathematically somewhere in the millions to one. But God wasn’t done yet. Because no sooner had Matt and I processed the presence of our out-of-context headmaster than Miss Brown, my unmarried French teacher, appeared right behind him.

To be fair to him, he styled it out pretty well. But he couldn’t completely mask the shock of running into two of his pupils in a corner of Europe that, as a summer holiday destination, would doubtless have fitted nicely into the category of Discreet Illicit Getaway.

The greetings exchanged were brief and fleeting and over within the time it took to pass on the stairs. Miss Brown, red-faced, hurried onward and I wish now that I’d had the presence of mind to wish her an au revoir or a bon menage a deux or something.

But as we progressed up the stairs to the promise of a cream cake and a pot of tea, my mind swam with endless possibilities. This was a story to end all stories. It was hard currency that would be good for my personal stock for at least a term when we returned to classes in September.

We had barely taken our seats when Dad, manfullly fighting his own amusement as he weighed the merits of a strawberry scone against a choux bun , instructed Matt and I to never mention what had just taken place.

Crass as I undoubtedly was at the time, and incapable as I also was of keeping any sort of secret beyond where I stashed my supply of fags, I never told a soul about the encounter. But I knew then that what I had witnessed could prove very useful at some stage in my school career.

Which brings us to my trip to Hoddesdon. According to my Diary, I departed for the far-flung wastelands of East Hertfordshire with my best mate Kev to attend a New Year’s Eve party organised by the Schools Hebridean Society.

Hoddesdon lay fully 14 and a half miles and the other side of the A10 from my house in Knebworth but may as well have been on the moon for all I knew of the place. Even now, it seems like an odd place to hold any sort of function, never mind one that included invitees from every corner of the British Isles.

My three-week expedition to North Uist in the summer of 1980 with Kev, Dave Wilson and, following a decision we'd all later come to regret, my then-girlfriend Debbie, had a profound impact on me, though I didn't appreciate it fully at the time.

Doubtless the myriad ways in which it scarred me - in good ways and bad - will be chronicled in full should I ever get around to transferring my diaries from 1980 to these pages.

But the condensed version is that Kev, Dave, Debbie and I boarded a sleeper at Euston weighed down by rigid-framed rucksacks, 200 Benson and Hedges each and half a bottle of Bells whiskey.

When we returned, largely unwashed and sleep-deprived 21 days later, I had experienced my first brush with a naked female breast, discovered seminal albums by Black Sabbath (Heaven And Hell), The Scorpions (Tokyo Tapes) and The Clash (London Calling), dug a cess pit, slept in a bin liner on top of a mountain (if a 347m hill can be described as such - the weather was pretty atrocious and it spent most of its time capped by the cloudbase), evacuated an injured fellow expedition member to hospital in Lochmaddy across rugged moorland as one of four teenaged stretcher bearers and fallen in and out of love twice.

It was some trip.

It just so happened that the Schools Hebridean Society (SHS) was founded in the 1960s by none other than Mr Abbott,

Having the opportunity to spend three weeks away from my parents was immediately attractive. The destination - a small and sparsely-populated island off the west coast of Scotland - wasn’t exactly Club Med, but it had the distinct advantage of being 630 miles and a sea crossing away from home, and so getting on the trip to North Uist became a cause celebre for me in the spring of 1980.

I lobbied both Mum and Dad and Mr Abbott hard to secure places for me, Kev and Dave. It came as no surprise to find that Mr Abbott, doubtless mindful of the potentially career-ending hand grenade I had been carrying for eight months, proved more than accepting of my sudden and inexplicable interest in Scottish fauna and flora.

I imagine that as a pragmatic man, three places on the SHS trip to North Uist that summer was a reasonable price to pay for my continued silence. Fate can be a kind, as well as cruel, mistress.

The end of year SHS get together was an opportunity to be reunited with your fellow expedition members and also meet those who had been on the other expeditions that had taken place on the islands the previous summer.

My memory of the trip to Hoddesdon is that it was entirely uneventful. I have a vague recollection of dormitory-style rooms and refectory-style dining. I do remember that those fellow travellers who made it to the event weren't anywhere near as interesting as they'd been four months previously, when we'd been thrown together in a lumpy field behind a remote crofter's cottage which served as a dining area. And I'm pretty sure they felt much the same way about me and Kev.

It wasn't that their company wasn't pleasant or that it wasn't nice to see them; it was just that away from the slightly exotic context in which we met (don't laugh - I went to school in Stevenage and everything is exotic when most of your life is spent in Stevenage) they were, well ordinary kids like me.

Besides which, Ruth - the owner of the naked breast - didn't come down from Sheffield for it and part of the appeal of going in the first place was the the opportunity to end my four month naked breast drought.

One upside, though, was that Kieron, the lad we evacuated to Lochmaddy, had come up from Petersfield, having made a full recovery from what at the time was thought to have been quite a serious neck injury.

What I remember, though, from my diary entry of December 30 1980 - HODDESDON!!! - and that of January 1 1981 - BACK FROM HODDESDON!!! - apart from showing quite the most excitement anyone could possibly feel about going to, and then returning from a town in 14 miles away is that in being away from home for the first time without any supervising adult, I had crossed the line between kidulthood and adulthood.

I was nearly 16, full of naked breast-related testosterone - and, as I would later find out on a depressingly frequent basis, I couldn't have been less mature if I tried.

The SHS ran its last expedition, ironically also to North Uist, in 1989 - nine years after Kev, Dave, Debbie and I returned from the island. It was, I have come to appreciate, a remarkable organisation which gave young people a unique opportunity to see some of the UK's most spectacular scenery, ecology and biodiversity. At 15 I didn't fully appreciate that, but - for both good and bad - it played a massive part in shaping who I was to become in the years afterwards.

You can read more about the SHS here and also here. The picture of the now-abandoned schoolhouse at Lochboisdale, where we slept in sleeping bags on hard wooden floors on our first night on the island, was taken from the latter site.