by Ollie Locke
I was obviously very shallow back then because I quite clearly remember telling her that she could never, ever, ever cut her hair because she would no longer be pretty.
I had known her since I was born because her parents used to get drunk with my parents back in the day, but over a very short period of time she evolved from being a girl I’d run away from as fast as my lace-up Kickers would carry me to being someone I wanted to lose my snogging virginity to.
Crushes are such strange things, and more often than not, they can go horribly wrong. If I ever have kids I will tell them not to stare at someone you like, which I was guilty of. I was a fortified starer. When I was a bit older I also had a habit of drawing hearts and putting mine and a girl’s name inside. Trust me, that was cool in the 90s.
Olivia was the first girl I properly snogged, but I can’t remember it in much detail. I remember that we were in the living room at my mum’s house during a weekend break, and I was desperate to kiss Olivia. The only problem was that Ricky was also there. He was one of my best friends at the time, so we took turns going behind the sofa to snog Olivia. Which now sounds very slutty …
I was horrified that Olivia spent more time kissing Ricky than me. He had already kissed Melanie Bell three times so he should have at least let me take the lead on this one. Heartbreak number two. I blame Ricky for tainting my first kissing experience and I’m not sure I’ll ever truly be able to forgive him. I know he lives in America now, so at least he’s on another continent …
I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not that first kiss was a good one, but I’m pretty damn sure it was awful. It’s entirely possible I’ve blocked it all out in the name of self-preservation and not to harm my ever-so-fragile ego. I suspect I used the dreaded ‘washing machine’ technique favoured by so many, or even the infamous poker kiss, or, my favourite, the face licker. These days I pride myself on being a reasonable kisser. I’ve had nearly 15 years of practice, so if I was still crap I should probably retire now!
None of us really knew what we were doing back then, so we just opened our mouths, moved our tongues around a bit and hoped for the best.
I continued to spend a lot of time with Olivia and had become so smitten with her that I even tried to ride a bike without stabilisers past her house to impress her, but sadly I would often fall off my bike and look like a twat.
She really fancied this guy called Ben Ridgeway, who was by far the coolest guy at school and I envied everything he had. His father was one of the heads of Virgin Atlantic and he had beautiful older sisters. But above all, he had a centre parting, which was the epitome of cool in the mid-90s.
If you could train your hair to have a centre parting in 1995 you pretty much had girls on tap. For the best part of a year I worked on training my hair so I could look more like Ben, and convince Olivia that I was every bit as cool as him. Annoyingly, even now, in 2013, if I let my hair fall naturally it will go straight into a centre parting, making me look like a complete bell end, because I was so persistent with training it.
Olivia went through the whole of school as the popular girl, and even though I was a loser, the fact that I knew her out of school raised my coolness stake. Even though I never did get to make her my girlfriend, we became best friends and I always loved her. When we reached our mid-teens we made a pact that we would lose our virginity to each other in a caravan my mum owns in Cornwall – it’s more romantic than it may sound.
We never did have sex. If only it had happened. Maybe then I would have been able to avoid the horror of what happened on that fateful day when I eventually had sex for the first time. I still shudder slightly at the thought of it. Don’t worry, we’ll come on to that a bit later.
Although we don’t see that much of each other now, I still speak to Olivia and she occasionally comes to stay in my flat in London, and she will always sleep in my bed. I don’t love her any more in that way. In fact, we help one another through all our relationship trials and tribulations. I can’t imagine not having her in my life, though we never discuss how much I used to love her. I’m hoping she’s forgotten about it all by now.
It’s funny how some people you meet when you’re young will later shape your future, whereas others you swear to stay friends with forever seem to disappear off the face of the earth once you all grow up. I still bump into people from my schooldays around Chelsea night clubs, and although I have done the drunken polite exchange of numbers and promise of a drink many times, we both know that the moment’s passed and we probably no longer have anything in common. Or, to be honest, we weren’t that good friends back then so why would we be any better friends now?
My tenth year was something of a disaster all round when it came to the opposite sex, as it was also the first time I ever got slapped by a girl. It was a real slap, like the ones they give out in EastEnders, and unfortunately it wasn’t the last.
The girl in question was called Hermione Little, and looking back now she was very overdeveloped for her age. Hermione had boobs by the time she was 10 and it was all the boys could talk about. We all thought she was beautiful back then, and my sister tells me she still is. I was completely intimidated by her – everyone was – but I didn’t let that put me off pathetically trying to flirt with her.
One evening before the bell for bedtime rang she was on the payphone to her mum. I was waiting in the queue behind her, feeling really homesick and desperate to talk to my own mother before bed.
Hermione was taking forever so I tried to hurry her up by banging on the door. She stormed out of the phone box, turned around and slapped me clean across the face. I was in total shock, but at the same time I rather enjoyed it. I had never seen anyone be slapped before, or been on the receiving end of one. It was the stuff of movies, like a glamorous 80s film with me in the role of the handsome phone-hassling hunk.
All other poor attempts at seduction were soon forgotten the moment I first saw Jemima Hoare (I’ve always pitied her name. Her teenage school years must have been a fucking pain in the ass).
Everyone else paled into insignificance. After lots of long looks, fluttering eyelashes and love notes across the classroom (all from me), I finally persuaded her to become my girlfriend. Yes, at the tender age of 10, I had found ‘The One’.
I wanted everyone to know that we were ‘going out’ with each other and that I was in a very serious, grown-up relationship. As a result I insisted that we kissed every time we saw each other so that other people knew we were both off the market and that Hoare was mine.
I don’t think she was particularly interested in me if I’m being honest. I think she mainly liked me because I was quite the rollerblader. But I also wanted her to like me for my dazzling looks and sparkling personality, neither of which I was blessed with at the time. I had half a centre-parting and half a bowl haircut, no family money, and I was weirdly obsessed with goldfish. Quite the catch, I was!
As soon as school finished I used to put my blades on and go outside the design technology block to the big open car park with my friends and we’d spend as long as we possibly could blading. Jemima always used to come and watch me and I am very happy to admit that I showed off massively to impress her.
We only ‘went out’ for about three weeks, but it seemed like forever back then. We broke up following an argument after I mistakenly snapped her favourite pencil. It had a troll on the top and everything so I think she felt she was left with no choice but to dump me. I was devastated, and humiliated. Heartbreak number three.
Most of the other pupils in my year had brothers and sisters who were older, so we were taking our lead from them and snogging anyone we could. I was on the rebound as a snoggingly active 10-year-old. We used to go to the local woods to run around and play kiss chase and anything else that gave us an excuse to kiss each other. I remember our teachers warning us to be careful because local yobs may be lurking in the woods. Yes, that’s how posh my school was. But I was more scared about ‘our’ girls falling for those ‘yob
s’ than being beaten up by them.
There was a lot of integration between the girls and boys at my school. I wasn’t sporty and I wasn’t wealthy like some of my dorm mates. All in all, I didn’t feel like I had a lot going for me. I was also a big crier and used to get upset a lot. My only saving grace was that I wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Paul Flynn when it came to the tears. He literally cried at everything. Even if he was late for a class he’d be sobbing in the hallway. I looked like Vin Diesel in comparison. For that reason, I will always be grateful to him.
Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was in quite a bad place overall. I was worried about my mum, I missed my dad, I was desperate to fit in and, shit, did I have big ears! I didn’t feel like I properly belonged anywhere, and on several occasions I’d hide myself away in the toilets.
Because I wasn’t much of a looker and was very insecure I was an easy target for bullies. It wasn’t until I was about 16 that I discovered that being funny could make me more popular. I had no idea that if you made people laugh they would like you more. It may be part of the reason why I love comedy so much now. A lot of comedians have admitted they were bullied at school and so they used comedy as a way to deal with it or escape from the bullies.
I looked so young and prepubescent that I actually wanted spots so I would seem more grown up. I’ll never forget being in Boots with my sister. I was buying Clearasil to try and seem mature, and just to embarrass me in front of the woman on the cash desk Amelia shouted, ‘You don’t even need it. You don’t even get spots.’ My mum turned around and said, ‘It’s preventative, darling.’ Brilliant. I had the perfect excuse to hand over my money and trot back to boarding school with my badge of hormonal honour.
Although we bickered a lot, my amazing sister kind of saved me at that school. She ran the school tuck shop, so that made me a little bit more popular than I otherwise would have been. I had an allowance of £5 a week, which was a lot of money in those days, and I was allowed to put anything I bought from the tuck shop on the school bill. That was the dream.
If I wanted to impress a girl I would get an entire box of sweets and flash them around. Like bankers buying bottles of vodka in London night clubs, you may look like a bit of a pretentious twat, but it gets the ladies running. They may not have fancied me, but I could lure them over with a bag of Space Invaders. Or, if it was summer, an ice-pop. The ice-pop was considered the king of sweets. You couldn’t get much better.
I’m probably making boarding school sound slightly dreadful, but it wasn’t all that bad. I would definitely send my kids to that very school because I discovered so much about life. When you’re stuck in a dorm with an eclectic mix of kids you find out so much about people. You have the cool kid, the nerdy kid, the brainy kid, the goth kid (Richard Dinan – yes, seriously). You see things from all angles and it’s such a learning curve.
Amelia and I were always arguing as children. We fought like cat and dog and love-hated each other in the way siblings often do. It was probably only a couple of years ago that we properly started getting on as grown ups, and now we’re like friends as well as brother and sister.
After several months of worrying non-stop about my mum, things took a massive upturn when she landed a job by complete fluke. Mum was still working for Max FM when she got scouted by the BBC. At the time, she was talking about chlamydia and sexual diseases on a midnight show listened to by about three university students, yet she managed to get spotted by a man called Chris Van Schaick. It turned out he was the head of the BBC in Hampshire, and later that week he gave her a job as a presenter on BBC Radio Solent, where she stayed for the next 12 years.
After that, everything changed. There was no more delivering videos or late nights spent at the bottom of a Martini bottle. We moved house to a lovely place in the centre of Southampton and we started a new chapter in our life.
My first celebrity crush, which started when I was eight, was Denise van Outen, who very slowly became my dream girl. My friend’s mum worked for Channel 4 and she invited us to go along to the filming of The Big Breakfast. I fell in love with Denise the moment I met her. I remember her giving me a friendly wink, and I totally decided that she was the one. I grinned all the way home and I used to scour my mum’s magazines for pictures of her, which I would tear out and plaster all over my bedroom walls.
By the time I was 11 my obsession had properly kicked in – probably along with my hormones. I used to sign RDA – meaning Respect Denise Always – after my name every single time I wrote it. Perhaps Ollie Locke RDA still adorns the toilet walls and classroom tables at my old school? I remember being genuinely upset when she got engaged to Jay Kay because I was convinced that she would love me if she got to know me. I almost threw a party when the engagement was called off, and it made me fall for her even harder.
Now, the awful thing is, I’ve since got to know her and bump into her every few months at parties around London, where we double-cheek kiss and I try not to say anything stupid. And recently, at an Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit, to my horror I was sat next to Jay Kay. I certainly did not tell him of my childhood hatred towards him for stealing my woman.
If Denise reads this book, she’ll know that I was once her biggest fan. Imagine if I ever told her that I’ve still got the newspaper cutting from when she got engaged to Jay Kay in an old diary somewhere? Mortifying.
Denise kind of bridged the way between me being a little kid and heading, confused and bewildered, into puberty. I knew I wasn’t a boy any more because I was about to start my first year of high school, but I was far from being a man. I wasn’t quite sure where I slotted in.
I think puberty is one of the hardest things we go through. My top tips would be to wear deodorant and wash your face thoroughly every night. Also, don’t pick spots. I did, and I’ve got three small scars as a result.
When I was 12 I moved schools and started going to Embley Park, which is a small boarding school based in Florence Nightingale’s old family house in Romsey, Hampshire. It was the most beautiful school and I’d look out every morning and see deer on the golf course. Yes, the school had a golf course. Ridiculous, I know.
I went out with a succession of girls while I was there. I hadn’t really expanded my relationship skills since Jemima Hoare, so it was very much about holding hands and imagining that you’d be together for eternity, then dumping one another by letter the next day but feeling terribly grown up while doing so.
I was now with a completely different group of people to those I’d been friends with at my last school, so it was a chance to reinvent myself a bit. I was determined I would no longer be ‘Oliver the loser’ with unruly hair (yes, you may be surprised to know that those silky locks once had a mind of their own). I started to buy hair gel so I could literally stick my centre parting to my forehead if it didn’t behave itself, giving it absolutely no choice to move. Who’s cool now, Ridgeway? I also changed my name to Ollie and stopped talking about fish quite as much as I had done previously.
I started to actually enjoy school for the first time ever. I still wasn’t great academically, but I got much more involved in singing and acting. It was a brilliant way to express myself, and taking part in school productions gave me a focus. It’s hard to imagine the link, but it also gave me the opportunity to fondle my first ever pair of boobs.
The boobs in question belonged to a girl called Tiffany, who was known to, ahem, put out. Hence I went for her. I was 14 by this time and we were putting on a show called Space Queen Malajusta and the Video Kidz. It was no Hamlet, but it would do for now. I had a starring role as an ageing superhero and I felt pretty awesome.
One night after the show Tiffany and I crept behind a rail of coats and started snogging. It must have been the super-hero confidence that made me slyly slide my hand under her top and inside her bra and have a grope. She certainly didn’t try to stop me at any point so I was absolutely over the moon. If Twitter had been around back then I would have posted my triump
h in seconds. She had really big boobs and I was thrilled to have finally felt a real one, nipple and all. It was everything I expected and more. Apart from how they actually felt; in my mind I expected them to have the weight and texture of a bag of sand, but in fact they felt more like a water balloon filled with cottage cheese.
I was quite keen to repeat the episode – and hopefully gain some more experience into the bargain – but second time around, she wasn’t interested. Did I grope wrong? Who was to know? Personally, I felt I was firm but gentle. Even the girl who had a bit of a rep as a go-getter didn’t want to come back for seconds! Fuck it, I still got a grope.
I shared a dorm with 12 other boys, one 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.
