Alison and I were 15 when we decided to leave our school, fuelled by that heedless, unstoppable force peculiar to teenagers. Any qualms we might have had about a wasted education were hushed by our impatience to bypass boys our own age, find true love and fulfil our glamorous destiny. We would write comic poems about these quests and each other, which showed at least some self-awareness about how gloriously lost we were. My mum – a teacher – knew that there was no rationalising with teenagers. She made the wise decision to keep me close and let things play out.
It was 1989 when Alison joined the girls’ school I attended in central London. She had a demure mystique about her, but once you were allowed behind that, she was deeply amusing and curious. We longed to go clubbing. We pored over pictures in Vogue and the Face magazine of the people who fascinated us – musicians, designers, film-makers, supermodels, beautiful “wild child” Amanda de Cadenet – mingling in places with daft or postmodern-sounding names like Wall Street or Club MFI. The first club night I tried to get into was called Xanadu, in Clerkenwell, but my friend Jane and I stood no chance, with our baby faces and lack of fake IDs. When Alison and I attempted it together, however, we somehow made it past the red ropes. Perhaps her Bianca Jagger looks helped us appear less like the children we were.
