me of Rhona Mitra, the actress who once played Lara Croft. I assume she used to serve me my dinner thinking I was a sweet 14-year-old, but I was actually having very improper thoughts about her while surfing the web on jackinworld.com. I once again thought she was the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and she obviously had no idea that I fancied her. I would be devastated if she wasn’t working when I’d inevitably drag my dad to the restaurant on one of my visits.
She was probably one of the first girls I ever seriously tried to flirt with, but instead of sweeping her off her feet I just blushed a lot, said the wrong thing, ordered moules marinières and tried to impress her with my weird fish knowledge. It was very awkward. She now works in a shipping yard near Portsmouth, and every now and then when I go and see my father I bump into her mother. The last time I saw her she told me that Nina had recently got engaged to a very wealthy man. Great, so now I’m at an age where I can date older women I’ve missed the boat, if you’ll pardon the awful pun.
I had access to quite a lot of older women around this time, and I developed crushes on quite a few. Bizarrely, I mainly remember Joanna Lumley being the object of my desire. I was still pursuing my dream of becoming an actor by doing some work as an extra on TV shows and films, so through this I met a lot of glamorous older actresses. For some reason, even though I was somewhat shy around girls of my age, I was confident with older women. I genuinely thought I had a chance. If I had met Joanna Lumley I would have tried to win her over.
Back in the real world, I started hanging out with a girl called Hazel, who I met through my school choir. She was 17 and, despite the age difference, I really fancied her. She and her friends used to let me hang around with them – they were very grown up and would talk about how their boyfriends had annoyed them by not calling or acting like dicks. I learned a lot from their more experienced insight into love, listening to everything they said and storing it for my later years, when I was certain it would all come in very useful.
I didn’t have any jobs growing up like most teenagers do, apart from a three-week stint cleaning arcade machines at Hayling Island funfair. I was at boarding school all week and I didn’t finish until 2pm on a Saturday, then from 3pm until 7pm I was at Stagecoach drama school.
My mum had this obsession with community church so we’d go there every Sunday. I liked the idea of religion, but I think it’s something everyone should make up their own mind about. I thought it was great fun and I loved the fact that they sang and played guitars, and although it’s maybe distasteful to say it, some of the church girls were seriously hot.
At one point I got so into church that I used to go and sing and dance around each week like I was in some kind of gospel choir in Texas. I loved it. I’d top it off with a roast dinner at home with my mum and sister, before returning to school to start the week over again.
My Saturday afternoon drama school was also a good way of meeting girls. I was used to quite posh girls, but the girls at drama school were totally different and more fun. They wore make-up and said ‘fuck’. It was a whole new girl world to me and I loved it. I intrigued them because they thought I was very posh. They always asked me about boarding school and I think they thought I lived in a castle.
There weren’t many boys in my classes because guys of that age didn’t really do drama, so I got a lot of female attention. There was a girl called Sarah I really liked, and I also really fancied the principal’s daughter, Gabby (not that Gabby before you get ahead of yourself). She didn’t often do the classes but I used to text her a lot. Usually messages like, ‘I can’t text any more because I’ve got no credit’. My dazzling way with words shone through at a young age; clearly, showing that you can’t afford credit is not an aphrodisiac. Gabby was a bit gothy and I thought that was very cool because she wore Green Day hoodies. God knows what Green Day was, but it looked great.
As I got older, my relationships with girls turned from fascination and masturbation to an appreciation of the actual friendship you can have with them. We were all hanging around together as a big group, guys and girls together. Every one of us was transitioning into adulthood – pubes were growing, spots were shining, and we’d started to drink and smoke as an outward sign that we were very old. So much so that, at the age of 16, I actually shunned cigarettes for Café Crèmes, which are like small cigars. I hated the taste of cigars but I thought they looked awesome. In my mind, I looked like a Second World War soldier – and a seriously cool one too.
Dating was a fun game back then, and boarding school had never been more enjoyable. My search for my first proper girlfriend had lasted for a year with little – or no – success until I met Joan Lightening when I was around 15 years old. She may sound 75, but I promise she was my age, and hot. She was a tall and very beautiful redhead with a big smile. She was also very funny. After several months of dating, which consisted mainly of hand-holding, trips to the cinema and snogging like a washing machine, I sent her a letter to try to woo her into taking things to the next level. In today’s world of email, text, Facebook, Twitter and BBM, that sounds very old-school and I suppose almost romantic, which it would have been, only I didn’t write the letter myself. I didn’t have a clue what to say so I asked an older and wiser prefect called Simon to pen it for me to increase my chances.
It said, ‘I think it’s about time we made our relationship more intimate.’ To be honest, I had no idea what the word ‘intimate’ meant. I thought it was some grand romantic term, and I basically trusted Simon to write something sonnet-esque that would enable me to get some action. But rather than get me action, it got me in a lot of shit with Miss Blackwell, the head of boarding.
The letter was found by a cleaner, who then passed it on to Miss Blackwell who, to put it mildly, was less than impressed. Of course when she read it, it sounded as if we were planning to have sex on school grounds, and there were few things worse than that. Joan was in the year below me as well, so she was probably only about 14. It was horrific and marked the end of that short relationship.
I don’t think I’ve ever cried as much as when I got summoned to the headmaster’s office to explain myself. I was in so much trouble and convinced I was going to get kicked out of school. In the end my mother had to come and explain that not only was I obviously incapable of being intimate with anyone, but I obviously had no idea what the word meant.
When I was getting towards the end of my days at Embley I had finally started to grow hair down there. It’s amazing to think how a few hairs can carry so much meaning, but they do. Those downy tufts of dark hair populating my nether regions and underarms were a tangible expression of my transition from boy to man. On top of those luscious locks of Ollie Locke pubes, I was getting pretty happy with the size of my ever-growing willy. Now, you may feel that I’m going off on one here, but bear with me. The previous Christmas I had been given a camera phone and it was my pride and joy. So, one day I did what every man does but won’t admit to: I took a picture of my semi-flaccid willy. Without going into too much detail, I made sure it looked as big as possible, and then I left the photo out to be found by the other boys so they would be impressed.
Needless to say they did find it, but the camera phones of 2003 weren’t great, and angles and shapes came out slightly distorted. I hadn’t noticed when I took it, but the photo gave the impression that my manhood, my pride and joy, was cone shaped. From that day on I was nicknamed ‘Coner Boner’, and it has stuck to this very day. Oliver ‘Coner Boner’ Locke. RDA. Thank God Fishy was dropped!
We were always up to stupid things in our dorm, and one thing we loved doing was getting glow sticks and having pretend raves. One fireworks night we discovered that if you cut the tops off the glow sticks and whip the liquid
