Over the Moon by David Essex

kiss on the lips and invited me in to meet her parents.
    It went OK. Carol’s dad had a moustache and was fairly quiet. Her mum was pretty glamorous and looked like she wore the trousers. They gave me a cuppa and asked me a few questions about myself before agreeing that, yes, Carol could come with me to Bermondsey that night.
    As I left in the late afternoon, Carol told me she was nervous about meeting my parents. ‘They’ll really like you,’ I assured her. ‘I do.’ ‘I really like you too,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears like music.
    That evening, Carol and I, Mum and Dad and my Slingerland drum kit headed off to Bermondsey in the Ford Popular. They seemed to get on fine, and I was delighted to see Carol up and dancing with my mum during the Everons’ set. The band went down pretty well – as we always did in that particular pub as long as we stuck to chart hits and went nowhere near the blues.
    My life now settled into a new, fairly satisfying routine. I was setting up the lathes and presses in Plessey’s from Monday to Friday, rehearsing and playing gigs with the band and seeing a lot of Carol. We got on great, and I felt sure we would stay together for ever and eventually get married.
    In fact, we followed the trajectory of almost every first teenage romance. Initially, we were inseparable, devoted young lovers keen to explore each other in every way. Our romantic fumbling and fondling got more intimate, and often my heart was beating not only with passion but also because her parents were sitting the other side of a council-house door.
    Carol and I also had plenty of days out on the Lambretta that I had bought from a workmate at the factory, which proved to be a complete disaster. It virtually never made a bank holiday run to Brighton or Clacton without breaking down, leaving the two of us stranded in a lay-by. I spent way too many hours glumly pushing that bloody thing down the road in my Mod parka and beret.
    Actually, the parka and beret were the least of it. As my interest in clothes and fashion grew, I took to sporting a mohair suit, tab collar shirts, knitted ties and chisel shoes. There was even a bizarre short-lived craze involving Pac-a-Macs and Hush Puppies, although I am glad to say I drew the line at blue hair, as sported by one of my more sartorially daring mates.
    Apart from my recalcitrant Lambretta, there was nothing too wrong with my life in the summer of 1964 – though it maybe lacked a touch of glamour. Happily, this was to arrive courtesy of Ted, the father of Brian and Sandra from the Everons, who helped to get bookings for the band. We were gobsmacked when he told us that he had possibly secured us a new gig – in Cattolica, Italy!
    The plan was for us to fly out on a package holiday, attend an audition at the club Ted had spoken to, and hopefully impress them enough to get a mini-residency. Mum and Dad didn’t just give me permission to go: they said they’d come with me.
    This was a huge deal. It would be my first time on an aero-plane – in fact the first time abroad for all three of us – so Mum started to make detailed inquiries about what we needed to pack. She asked important questions of the very few people we knew who had been as far as France, or even the Isle of Man: could you buy things like teabags, milk and soap, you know,
abroad
?
    For Carol and me, it would be our first time apart. We had now been going steady for more than a year, and while things were essentially OK between us, the odd niggle and argument had crept in. Maybe I subconsciously felt that we were slipping into a bit of a cosy routine the night that I suggested to her that she should dye her black hair blonde.
    My fortnight’s break from Plessey’s began. The Cooks and the Everons were flying to Cattolica on a Saturday morning, so after work on Friday I called for Carol and we sat outside a pub with a pint of brown and mild (my drink of choice at the time) and a Babycham. She was sorry I was