TUESDAY 3rd JUNE 1980

“A” level English Literature exams today, we are grouped with the sixth formers and other pupils taking the same exam at “O” level. They were a bit loud, but once the fighting and catcalls had died down we were able to get something done.

Once we had finished, he went to the common room for coffee and a chance to watch England losing the test match.

Steve mentions a girl called Debbie who is madly in love with him. Being Steve, he is far from being pleased. He is worried that this might in some fashion get in the way of his infatuation for Beverley! I try hard not to be too scathing, but point out that the relationship with Beverley is going nowhere fast. If Debbie is keen to go out with him then why not do it. I want to say that I don’t believe that Steve and Beverley had a long term future but he is so head over heels in love with the knee socked one that I really don’t have the heart or indeed the inclination to argue with him.

Besides Beverley had a boyfriend! To be fair to her, this was never in doubt and she never made any secret of the fact. The lad is called Rob and from what Steve tells me, their relationship is based on purely on the fact he drives and is able to bankroll trips to some club called Peppermint Park. Steve is keen to remind us all that Rob does not have an artistic bone in his body - he can’t draw and certainly can’t play Higgins to Beverley’s Eliza. Thing is, I’m not sure that Beverley gives a shit!

Editors note. Cook developed this theme in what seems have been an idle moment during a Polytechnic lecture the following year.

I can't honestly lay claim to being a pragmatist, realist or even someone who courted conflict situations, but to my untrained eye Steve was heading for trouble. It was obvious that he was exceptionally fond of Bev, but how much of that was returned was open to debate - lots of debate, with people chanting and live on the spot reports from the various faction!

They would wrestle each other on the chair of the sixth form centre and there was lots of flirting going on, but I never saw anything which could be called affection. never a kiss or hug or tender moment. Iin the months since we left GHS Bev has never been far from his thoughts and it only take a couple of pints for the flood gates to open. RC

Editors note. Our researchers noticed that a typewritten sheet had been pasted into the diary for this entry and that underneath Cook had recorded his original entry and then thought better of it. We are not at all clear as to the meaning other than it seems to relate to the sub-culture that was rapidly developing in the sixth form.


WEDNESDAY 4 JUNE 1980.
Mark is concerned about all the attention that Lee is showing towards Diane. He fears a rival for his affections. The grapevine tells me that he is right. Steve dropped several hints, but they went for the most part unnoticed.

For the rest of the day Mark followed Diane, attempting to start conversations with someone who is it clear does not want to talk. This could be difficult. Beverley is concerned about her “O” level in Religious Studies. She thinks that she will fail the examinations because she had not had the time to revise.

Steve offers to tutor her. It is on the tip of my tongue to offer to help as well and then it occurs to me that perhaps that wouldn’t be a clever thing to do.



FRIDAY 6th JUNE 1980.
Kim spoke to me about Ashok; she has followed her conversation of last week with a letter. She is upset and wants to talk, in doing so she offers a thumbnail into the life of Kim Lathrope.

Aside from being racists, her parents apparently live in fear that their daughter will be assaulted or raped. The prospect of having Ashok as a son in law has from what I can gather triggered all sorts of fears, and they are convinced that allowing their daughter anywhere near an Indian will result in their child being forced into the white slavery business.

What I don’t understand is why Kim is willing to dump Ash because her parents say she must.

I hear that Steve’s younger brother,Andy has been taken to court for truancy, and the Johnson’s have been fined £200. Where did I get this information from, well from Beverley of course, where else? Steve had told her in confidence.

The common room: walked into the room for what I can only describe as a relaxation session. The fact that in the average day none of us do anything to make us tense in no way invalids our desire to mellow out after school. Ash (possibly the only member of the group in real need of relaxing) puts his tape of Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell on and we listen to the metal meditations of Ronnie James Dio and friends.

They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you've got to ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes then steal your dreams
...it's Heaven and Hell, oh well

And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and Hell..

He pulls the curtains closed and we lay across the chairs and listen in silence. Steve manages to fall off his improvised bed during a particularly complicated guitar riff.

Later: Steve wanted a word this morning, it seems that we have volunteered to tell Mark that Diane wants to break up with him. Not sure why we are involved in this, but it looks like Steve kindly offered our services possibly having been asked by Beverley. The ever-accurate grapevine says that Lee and Diane are now getting on very well and she would prefer Mark to be elsewhere. Steve seems to think that if we tell Mark it will go far down far better than any attempt by someone else.

This puzzles me, but Steve eventually concedes that if we don’t tell Mark, Lee will tell him. In the past Mark has demonstrated a tendency to react violently in certain situations. Unfortunately while he may have possessed the soul of a warrior he was saddled with the body of a nine stone wimp and it was fairly clear that Steve was worried that there would be a fight and Mark would come a pretty poor second.

I collect Mark at the usual spot and we wander down to The Greyhound. Steve is there in advance and delivers the bad news in fairly short order. Mark’s reaction is not what we expected. At first he completely refuses to believe what we are saying. After a couple of repetitions he half concedes that there might be some half-truth in what we are saying but declares that he will speak with Diane. His tone suggests that this is simply some small mental aberration on her part, one, which he can solve with a word or two.

Editors note. A segment from the transcript Cook created offers some insight into the mood and more importantly the mores of the time. We have reproduced it below.

MP: I never thought that Beverley's chest was particularly large. She didn’t really have tits, well she did have them, it's just that they weren’t that large. Actually I can’t remember what her chest looked like.

RC: I don’t think she ever looked like Natassja Kinski?

MP: Don’t think I’ve heard that one before?

RC: Steve used to think that Beverley looked like Natassja. That’s the reason that he went to see Tess.

MP: (sudden realisation) Of course!

RC: That’s also why he went to see Cat People. I saw it as well, but only because I liked the theme music by David Bowie – I put up with the nudity and sex. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

MP: I think he expected her to be wearing white socks for the film! Then we found the other Beverley look alike Joanne Whalley.

RC: I don’t remember that.

MP: At some point Beverley stopped wearing her socks in favour of what might have been white tights. I think that Orme actually preferred the girls to wear socks rather than tights, but other than PE I can’t recall anyone else wearing them. Come to think of it, that can’t be right. Apart from wrestling on the chairs, no one took any exercise.

No one aside from Lea Hensman took any physical exercise. She only did it because she wanted to be a PE teacher.

RC: One of advantages of being the sixth form was that you were not expected to do anything.

MP: That’s what I loved about it.

RC: All we had to do was watch the world go by every thirty-five minutes.

MP: Our role was not to do - but simply to be…

RC: Once we covered up the windows no one was even sure if we were there or not.

MP: To go back to your original question some of the girls wore socks, because they were that demure. Others, I think, wore them to catch certain fish. Diane may have been persuaded not to wear them shortly into our relationship, we were playing a lot of footsie under the table and she complained that I was getting polish on her socks and that it wouldn’t come out in the wash. She showed me the socks afterwards and there was indeed polish all over them.

RC: You were the only one to polish their shoes.

MP: I always thought shiny shoes pulled the birds! No that’s crap, I hoped it would pull the birds.

RC: Did it?

MP: No.

[The transcript paused at this point.../]

MP: It was in Steve’s bedroom – and I confessed that I fancied both Diane and Debbie Bradshaw because they reminded me of child prostitutes. Er, you’re not recording this are you?

RC: Of course not.

MP It was in 1980, because I lent Steve my tape of 17 Seconds by The Cure from which Steve took his inspiration for the last ever Dylan Clune play A Forest, which had Korac chasing you through the forest. During the same conversation I said I was sexually attracted to Diane.

RC: How do you think your relationship with Diane might have developed?

MP: I never had the slightest idea.

RC: Speculate?

MP: I think realistically we would have split, but at the time I had no idea.

RC: What would you liked to have happened?

MP: Steve Grantham dying in prison would have been nice. I never had any preconceptions about the future beyond the hope that we would have sex. What were your intentions towards Kim?

RC: Pretty much the same as you, really.

MP: Fairly short term wasn’t it?

RC: Yes… June and July 1980 was a fairly emotional time for us all, but you in particular as I recall were having a lot of problems.

MP: I don’t think I had ever had cause to be so self-destructive before. But I didn’t think I was playing a part, for me it was real. I remember Karen Thomas calling me, to ask if I was going to do anything stupid. I said “Of course I fucking am!” and then she rang me again and told me that she was worried about me and was I going to be all right? I said I would be fine if you didn’t include committing suicide and slammed the phone down on her. I was touched by her concern but thought she had been put up to it by someone else…

Editors notes. The relationship between Mark and Diane was to occupy much of the remaining weeks at Gaynesford. Cook’s diary records events the next day...


SATURDAY 7th JUNE 1980
Mark was spotted by my sister Teresa in the vicinity of Middleton Circle this morning, he seemed to be just hanging around. Teresa was curious that he didn’t move much from his location. He also, according to Teresa at least, seemed to be acting into a very suspicious manner. I would suspect that he is heading for Diane’s house, except that I have no idea where she lives.

The Coach and Horses public house, 7.45pm: Steve had called this meeting to talk to Mark about Diane. I assumed that he wanted to continue the discussion from last night and was amazed when I found out that he had invited Lee along as well. Since Lee is what I suppose you could call, stretching a point - the other man - bringing him along is pretty bloody stupid and I wonder what Steve is up to?

Mark didn’t want to talk and spent most of the evening perched chicken like on a chair. He refused to listen to what Steve was saying and clearly considered any communication with a cheerfully upbeat Lee Burrowes tantamount to an admission of defeat.

Steve gave up after a while and slipped into malaise. At some point he spilled his beer over the white cords of a girl sitting nearby. Embarrassed he slunk out of the pub only to return when the girl and more importantly her King Kong like partner has departed. Further efforts were stymied by the arrival of some former first year sixth formers from our year, Henry Gambey Chris Carrick and Gary Meredith on one of their interminable pub-crawls.

We gave up on The Coach and Horses and heading to The Greyhound. At the end of the evening, drunk and singing merrily Lee tried to jump in the ponds at Carshalton – to my shame, I actually considered not grabbing him and pulling him back.

He wouldn’t have drowned, but the pollution would have burned this legs off…!