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 triumph 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.
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
