Teenage Parties From Hell

Last week, 17 year old Rachael Bell slunk back home and apologised to her mum for holding a party at which 200 gatecrashers trashed the family’s four-bedroomed house, allegedly causing £20,000 worth of damage. Rachael herself was apparently so traumatised that she felt it necessary to disappear and lie low for a week. Her mother, whose wedding dress had been ripped from the wardrobe and urinated on, was quoted as saying she felt her house had been “raped”.

Back in the 1970s when I celebrated my 18th in my parents’ garage, it was all so much more innocent. I did my level best to create an unforgettable event by inviting every bad lad of my acquaintance. But Sandy L. (tipple of choice rum and black) was absent on the night in question, serving a short custodial sentence for setting fire to a police cell after being arrested as drunk and disorderly. His brother Gavin, who could be relied on to supply mind-altering substances of your choice, and on whom I had an immense crush, was also otherwise occupied, fortunately for my father’s blood pressure.

The real difference is of course not so much innocence as communications. When Rachael Bell’s gatecrashers arrived, alerted to the event by a hacked and doctored MySpace site inviting them to a “trash the average-sized family home disco party”, they came from all over the country in their own cars. My guests could muster one battered blue Bedford van and a motorbike between them. Everyone else was reliant on their parents driving them ten miles out of Birmingham to the village where we lived. You can bet your life that my mate Di’s mum frisked her for stolen sherry and cigarettes before she left the house, and breathalysed her on the way home.

A year or two ago, the fourteen-year old daughter of a friend of mine told me about the party from hell she’d been invited to. The parents were divorced. Party Girl was living with her mum in a small, cramped flat, while Dad was shacked up in a rather more luxurious pad decorated to the new girlfriend’s taste with white walls, ivory carpet and cream leather sofas. Dad and girlfriend went away for the weekend, foolishly forgetting that Party Girl had her own door key. She told her mum she was staying with a friend for the weekend, and sent a general invitation round the school for a get-together at Dad’s.

At this point, several dozen teenagers knew about the party. Some, my friend’s daughter told me, could work out what was likely to happen and were not happy about it. But the price of informing would have been social isolation. I am also willing to bet that one or two parents knew about it too, but decided it was not their business to tell Party Girl’s mother or father. The party went ahead. Predictably, there were gatecrashers. The cream leather sofa and the ivory carpet took the brunt of their attentions. I am sure Party Girl got the sharp end of her mum’s tongue, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there might have also been secret, smug glee that the new girlfriend and her swanky furniture had got their come-uppance.

At the time I was writing my novel Crow Stone, a thriller partly about the terrible events that occur during her fourteenth summer and determine the course of the heroine’s adult life. The novel is set both in the 1970s and in the present day, with two intertwining, edge-of-your-seat narratives. But as I wrote about Katie growing up in 1976, and heard the story of Party Girl, it occurred to me that what really scars teenage girls is the stuff of everyday jealousies and friendships, rivalries at school, being ostracised for being different or for telling on your friends. What seems like a comedy to an adult audience is often a tragedy for its intense, adolescent actors, and the people around them.

So in the novel, I wrote as farce the episode in which Katie’s best friend Trish — an appalling bossy-boots who trails disaster in her wake, both as a fourteen year old and as an adult — decides they will celebrate Katie’s birthday at the home of another friend, whose parents are away. Katie doesn’t want to go along with the plan, but daren’t tell anyone. What happens that night, traumatic enough at the time, is also the catalyst for the dreadful experience that later unfolds in an underground quarry on the outskirts of Bath.

Rachael Bell will not be marked in the same way as Katie. But she will never forget that Easter Monday night when she bolted the front door then saw gatecrashers come crawling through the windows, like zombies from Night Of the Living Dead, vomiting on the carpet. My heart goes out to her mother too, her memories trashed along with her possessions, and no doubt also aware that every other parent in Britain is smiling wryly and thanking God that there but fortune…

As for my own eighteenth, alas, I will never forget the humiliation. In the garage and garden, all was going splendidly. I looked amazing in my Laura Ashley dress, the stars were out and I was on the point of snogging Dave Miller, on whom I had another immense crush. Meanwhile my parents, who had promised not to interfere, were sequestered in the living room on the other side of the house. My mother happened to glance out of the window. “Ooh, look,” she remarked, “there’s someone sitting in the swimming pool.” It was Dave’s friend Brian, using the splendid acoustics of an empty pool to serenade his girlfriend with his guitar.

Unfortunately my father misheard. “Someone being SICK in the swimming pool?” he roared and marched round the house to throw everybody out. The party ended abruptly before midnight, and I was the social failure of the season. I have never felt entirely happy holding a party since.