Back in 1964 with my Jolly Native Banjo I was becoming aware of exciting new possibilities. The Beat Boom was on. The TV Times carried adverts for electric guitars and drum kits that you could buy on hire purchase. The drum kits came in red or gold sparkle finish and the guitars were Flame Red or Sunburst. They looked just like the ones The Shadows were holding on the front of my sister’s Cliff Richard EP, The Young Ones. They didn’t look quite real. They were bright red and you couldn’t tell what they were made of. They looked almost edible. I wanted one.
   An older boy at the bus stop wore a Beatle jacket with tight trousers and Cuban-heeled boots. He was quite possibly post-pubescently plump and spotty, and he probably looked ridiculous, but to me he was magnificent.
   Sometimes the bus was a single-decker Southdown coach, one of the really old ones, and the trick was to get the double front seat next to the driver. That way you got an uninterrupted view of the road ahead, and you could see him working the controls – the big gear stick that wobbled and juddered about when the coach was stationary, and the enormous handbrake that had a silver lever at the top end and grew out of the floor with a set of cogs for roots. And the indicator – a round black thing with a big red plastic knob on top that lit up and flashed red when the driver turned it in whichever direction the bus was going to go next.
   It was enough to make you want to become a bus driver.
   Sometimes my friend Bobby Chalmers came with me, and sometimes Ronald Beard as well. Ronald had a twitch that he did with both eyes at once. His dad ran the off-licence. When Ronald and/or Bobby came along it was easy – we just commandeered the front of the bus, or rather me and Bobby took the front seat – we stuck Ronald in the seat behind because he was easily pushed around. The Beatle Jacket meanwhile had gone to the back of the bus where he could smoke cigarettes with another older boy who sometimes carried a Real Electric Guitar in a see-through plastic bag.
    Except when it was a double-decker. Then the Beatles Jacket and the Real Electric Guitar took the front seats on the top deck, and me and Bobby sat at the back where we had a good view of the electric guitar. The back of the top deck had the added attraction of Shop Assistants – young girls in Dolly Rocker macs with peroxide hair, mini-skirts and beehives. They smoked cigarettes and made a fuss of us. I found all this highly attractive though I hadn’t quite figured out why.
    I had a crush on Dusty Springfield too.
    I don’t know about Bobby – he was a magnet for middle-aged homosexuals although we didn’t know this at the time. There was a man with large glasses and a fawn raincoat who got on the bus a couple of stops further on, or sometimes he was already on the bus, languishing seductively across one of the back seats. He had an odd name like Tolly or Tosher, something like that. He always wanted Bobby to sit next to him, or sometimes he thought it would be fun if the three of us sat in the long back seat together, but that was usually full of shop assistants.
    If Bobby wasn’t there he’d invite me to sit next to him by patting the seat, raising his eyebrows and smiling slightly with his lips. But I didn’t want to, so I never did.
    He started giving us Dinky Cars, new ones in their boxes. Bobby always got a better one than me. I think that happened twice. It was discussed between my mum and Bobby’s mum. And then Tolly or Tosher or whatever his name was disappeared. One of the shop assistants had apparently made a complaint.
Another time, during the Easter holidays, we saw a racing cycle outside the newsagents. You didn’t see many of those in a place like Peacehaven. While we were inspecting the Derailleur gears, trying to figure out how many it had, the man who owned it came out of the shop. He was wearing a funny pair of stretchy shorts, a shiny orange top and odd-looking rubbery gloves with the fingers cut off. He was very friendly – he told us that the bicycle had ten gears and that he was on a cycling tour.
    He asked us if there was somewhere where we could sit and talk, so we took him to a place called The Dip which was a hollow in some waste ground between the South Coast Road and the cliff top.
    When we got there he wanted us to play some games together. Not so much me as Bobby, I seemed to be a bit of a spare part really. I should explain that Bobby was plump and juicy looking. I was a bit skinny, and though I’m sure I was the better looking of the two, Bobby was much more succulent than I was.
    The man offered to show Bobby how to wrestle. He did this by lying on his back, grappling the wriggling, giggling Bobby to him, and growling like a bear. He didn’t want to show me how to do wrestling, just Bobby, which was all right by me because I didn’t think I’d like wrestling. It seemed strange, there was something not quite right about it. I insisted it was time we left – we were expected home for lunch. The man said he’d meet us back there in the afternoon – or just Bobby if I couldn’t come. I don’t know if Bobby talked, but neither of us was allowed out that afternoon.