My First Valentine

I had considered a brooch but I wasn’t my Grandad and this was 1972. A brooch was hardly Rock’n’Roll. Gazing around the jewelers I was confounded by the amount glittering  remuneration a boy could extend to a girl and decided to count my money yet again. I had counted said money in F.Hinds and again in H. Samuel, now I was in Ratners. The young girl in the queue ahead of me curiously pondered a board of gold crosses.

“No,” she exclaimed. ” I want one with the little man on!”

“You mean Jesus,” said the sales assistant.

“Ohhh!” uttered the frustrated shopper in a tone that is reserved for teenagers and left.

The sales assistant picked up the board but I had been inspired. Choosing what I considered to be a ‘brama’ gold cross without a little man and within my budget I paid and left. ‘Brama’ was a 1972 equivalent to today’s adolescent word, ‘sick.’ At least we made words up!

Flick forward four nights to the school Boxing Club. You see I was convinced, as much as a fourteen year-old can be that, Susan ********* came to the boxing club every Wednesday evening to watch me. I mean she spoke to me and I’d shown her my prized Hells’s Angel photo. That’s me on a Chopper. So it made sense that she fancied me rotten? Didn’t it? The conversation was very short.

“Sue, will you out with me,” asked a little sweaty me (it was a boxing club!) and proffering the aforementioned cross. She took the cross. Heart thumping, hands sweating, I eagerly awaited the sound of angels singing and that first kiss.

“No! she said and walked away. “Thanks for the cross, though.”

Thanks for the cross? That was three months paperboy money!

Valentines Day? Huh!