Sally Newcastle was the prettiest girl in Middlesbrough. In fact you can throw in Stockton and Thornaby, too. She was tall and slender with long, blonde hair like a Scandinavian’s. Her face would have made a troll weep: her enormous, impossibly-blue eyes seemed to be permanently fixed upon some sweet tableau of love and loss that was being enacted in the air a few feet behind you. And her sister was a model.

With absolutely no hope of success, I invited her to the pictures to see Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. She met me straight from my Saturday job as a shelf-stacker at Hinton’s The Grocer’s, we watched the film, I tried to kiss her, she let me, I took her home.

That was the last time I asked her out. When I told Miff and the rest on Monday morning, they sneered and reminded me that she didn’t have breasts. This was technically true, and although I knew it shouldn’t matter, it did. I was fifteen and breasts were crucial. They were what distinguished Girls from little girls. 

Sally’s flat chest condemned her to the same camp as my friends’ younger sisters. And it denied her the nubile status of, say, Gloria (the vicar’s au pair, erotic images of whom tormented me day and night).

So I surrendered to peer-group opinion and never invited her to the pictures again.

On the other hand, I did ask Julia Black to a ‘party’ round at Miff’s. Julia was the daughter of the secretary of Middlesbrough Football Club and although she was only fourteen, she had a smudge of dark hair on her top lip and the legend of her breasts had already spread beyond the boundaries of Linthorpe, possibly even as far as Acklam.  

She, too, accepted my invitation. (I must have been doing something right, back then. If only I could remember what it was).

I say ‘party’ because it was really just an excuse.  Miff’s parents were going out so we had the house to ourselves. Within minutes of their leaving, Miff was behind one sofa with his girlfriend Christine and I was behind the other with Julia Black.

I was incredibly nervous. I was quickly smothered in hot French kisses punctuated by fast, hard breathing and bursting blouse buttons. And suddenly, there before me was the final hurdle – the robust and entirely unornamented brassiere that restrained the strapping twins of legend.

I fumbled ineffectually around behind her back until with a sigh she obliged me with a casual flick of her fingers, and the mountainous breasts spilled generously out into my cupped and trembling hands.

My ecstasy was short-lived. Car headlights swept the sitting room like enemy searchlights and we froze at the sound of tyres on gravel. Miff’s mother had forgotten her handbag. Frantically I tried to manhandle the breasts back into the bra, but like the secrets of Pandora’s box, they proved far harder to recapture than to liberate.

For one thing, the fasteners resembled the bolts on a Bronx apartment door. There seemed to be dozens of them, and the elastic of the straps was as strong as catapults. You needed two hands to drag them together and then another two to get the hooks through the eyes. “Hurry!” hissed Julia Black. “Are you stupid or what? Haven’t you ever seen a bra before?” I hadn’t, and her scathing tone did nothing to improve my dexterity. For a moment, I was teetering on the brink of panic – then as I heard the key in the door, I plunged headlong into the abyss.

Julia Black brushed aside my shaking hands and managed to close two of the four fasteners while I concentrated on the front.

Looking back, I feel for her parents: at the rate her bust was exploding, they must have had to buy four new bras a year. Consequently, the one she wore was always a shade too snug for the job. As soon as I’d managed to force one breast home, the other would pop out of its cup. I had to use both hands, an elbow and finally a knee.

When Miff’s parents walked in, we were sitting bolt upright at opposite ends of the sofa in the dark. The top button of Julia Black’s blouse was in the second button hole and while her left breast was more or less where it should have been, the right one was pushed up under her chin. Our hair was in disarray and we were panting like sledge dogs.

“Hello, Mr and Mrs Smith!  Back so soon?”