It would have been 1984, I expect – though time and memory play tricks. I was going on 15, and in love, with either Helen or Beryl, I forget who. It was the school Christmas disco.
I think I would have worn flared jeans. We all did in Wigan at that time. I’d assumed everyone was wearing flares, but we’d gone on a school trip earlier that year and a bunch of kids from another school down south had pointed and laughed at us with our hems flapping around our Kickers boots.
The school Christmas disco was the high point of the winter calendar. The school hall – normally the domain of the drama teacher Mr Panther (he’d once been on telly, either Play for Today or Coronation Street) and also doubling up as the place where we had our assemblies – was festively bedecked and dangerously darkened. A science teacher who was deemed to be most down with the kids would bring his collection of seven-inch singles and play them through a tinny PA system.
We would stop off at an off-licence on the way to school and each buy a single can of beer. Stones Bitter, usually, because we thought that’s what proper men would drink. The woman behind the counter would wrap each can individually in newspaper and beg: “Please don’t tell anyone who sold it to you.”
We would drink our cans in the cold night and stagger to school, necking whole packets of Extra Strong Mints so the teacher on the door wouldn’t get a sniff of our debauchery. And then we were inside, and into the hall, where months of simmering resentments, bubbling feuds and raging hormones would create a primordial soup of which you could almost take a spoonful.
There would have been a fight. There was always a fight. The science teacher would edgily drop Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, amid Last Christmas and Band Aid and Madonna. He’d try to sneak in his own personal tastes, some Cocteau Twins or Go-Betweens or The Smiths, before a chorus of angry voices demanded he played Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go for the third time.
Emboldened by my single can of Stones Bitter, I would have edged along the blackout drapes that lined the walls, interspersed with festoons of tinsel, towards Helen, or perhaps Beryl. I was nearly 15 and tongue-tied, easily embarrassed. But I read widely and had the soul of a poet. If only I could say the right thing it would have been all right.
But Helen or Beryl would already have the protective, possessive arm of Colin or Darren or Brian draped over their shoulders, boys who were better at football and had the whiff of danger and stolen Woodbines about them, things with which the soul of a poet could not compete.
Then the science teacher would play How Soon Is Now by the Smiths, and the words would crush my soul as though Morrissey himself was grinding it with the heel of his Doc Marten into the dirt like a cigarette butt, and I would stand on my own, and leave on my own, and go home and cry and want to die.
And despite all this, I still look fondly back on the school Christmas discos. And I am somewhat perplexed that my own children don’t seem to have this festive fixture on their social calendars at all. My kids are 15 and 14; the optimum age for this rite of passage. The school disco seems to have gone the way of Woodbines and Stones Bitter, replaced by the glitzy end-of-school prom with its posh frocks and stretch limos.
But the festive school disco was the perfect training ground for the office Christmas party in later life, where equally powerful longstanding resentments and subdued lusts would bubble to the surface. A prom can never prepare you for real life in the same way that a school disco can – with its illicit boozing, muted menace and rank heartbreak. I feel my kids are missing out on all that, and it makes me sad. A shared Spotify playlist and a group chat just can’t compare.
• David Barnett is an author and writes about books and comics for the Guardian
