You are not logged in. Signup to contribute or login! Not recieved your activation email? Click here to send it again.

Keeping the lads out of girls only space

1984


“Women only space was absolutely unheard of, the lads would do everything to get in to the at the youth club, they set fire to the doors, they used to break in, my self defence came in very handy, I was very good at kicking behind me and stopping very close to their prick, so I would back-kick but not actually get them in the groin, but as close as I could, it’s hard to believe, we had to physically defend ourselves and the girls, all the time. It was just standard, there were kids running along the roof, they were chucking stuff in the windows, they would wait for you when you left, Chris’s mini, they used to push round the back, disconnect the battery, let the tyres down, we thought it was normal in that it was a very radical new idea. One time this young man came, he’d not only dressed up in drag but he’d shaved his legs! I thought that just went beyond anything so I played along and let him in and pretended that I thought he was a girl, took him into the office, and we had a chat and just laughed about it. The Vice-Principal of Adult Education had come along that night, saw this young man in drag and decided there was a real problem with him psychologically, and he would have to submit a report on him – he just wanted to get into the girls' night! The lads used to run along the pitched roof, and this lad used to run along the very top of it, so he was called ‘Squirrel’ and this Vice-Principal guy wrote a letter to ‘Mr and Mrs Squirrel’! Eventually we got to know these lads, and they said, ‘Will you run a boys' night for us?’ Eventually a couple of the young black guys used to ask us to walk them to the bus stop, because they were frightened of being picked up by the , I’d not experienced that kind of thing round before”.

Contributed by: Trisha McCabe, 51

Click here to read the full interview with this contributor