Every tragic thing that happened on your teenage ‘night out’ in Leigh-on-Sea

Can I have a tenner, mum?


Leigh is a little district of Southend-on-Sea and is a beautiful place. It’s a tourists dream: independent shops, little arty cafes and a beach.

Unfortunately, growing up here seems to have a bad effect on you. Especially when you and your mates first get old enough to venture out by yourselves – for a young teenager, theres absolutely jack all to do.

Idyllic

If all 13-14 year olds enjoyed nice views and cute cafes, I probably wouldn’t have had such a tragic few years.

Leaving the house

“Can I have a tenner, we’re gonna get a takeaway at Harry’s house.”

That was such a good line when I was 14, it would completely sort me out for the night. My mum would think I was safe staying at Harry’s house and I’d get a tenner to get a bottle of Chekov. It’s little things like this that I remember.

The rush when my mum asked me what takeaway we were thinking of having and instead of just saying a simple “Chinese”, I’d say “Dominoes because Luih is coming and he doesn’t eat Chinese food.”

These elaborate little lies were all added complexity to give me some reassurance that my poor naive mother would never find out my whereabouts. It wasn’t me being a bad child, it was me being a good one – I just wanted to protect my mother from what I thought was the “real world”.

She was old, she wouldn’t understand.

Guys we made it

Getting alcohol from the broadway

I actually hang my head in shame when I picture the lot of us taking on the monumental task of securing a good few bottles of vodka for the night ahead. I hate thinking back to this bit because it’s just so wrong. I don’t know why we thought it was acceptable, when you’re 14 you think the world owes you everything, we believed it was our right to have alcohol.

Swag

Okay, so I wouldn’t say we “pimped out” the only two friends we had who were girls – but they definitely took one for the team when we told them it was the only way. No creepy men were going to  buy alcohol for some teenage boys were they? Fuck, it’s just so wrong.

So us group of boys would be in the park (which was opposite a corner shop), we would stand on the climbing frame to see over the wall and this would give us a perfect view of our two friends standing outside the shop. We had this game we would play where we would point out in the direction of potential targets they should ask walking towards their vicinity. We would point out people who looked like they;

  1. Didn’t have kids
  2. Looked lonely
  3. Had no morals

It gave our two friends some weird sense of reassurance: “Oh, our friends have pointed them out, they can’t be a psycho kidnapper”.

So wrong.

Library Gardens

It was always going to be Library Gardens, but somehow we always managed to get in a full fledged argument on where we was going to be holding this atrocious all nighter.

It was probably because everyone was put in a bad mood for having to wait so long to get alcohol, strangely – even the creepiest people weren’t flocking to buy two young girls vodka at a shop overlooking a playground.

There was always this power struggle in our group – the two girls would say things like, “we are the ones who actually got the vodka, we get to say where we go”.

It must have been such a sight, this group of 13-14-year-olds holding black bags outside the park in the evening – arguing about where to go and drink their Chekov.

Trying to understand why the fuck you’re here 

Like I said, we were always going to do it at the Library Gardens – why would we go anywhere else?

The thing about Library Gardens is that it gets locked at 9pm in the Summer, this means that you have to hide until closing – or just climb over the gate when it’s been locked.

We always chose the first as it added to the excitement, you’d go off in your little groups and find your hiding spot with your bottle of vodka – hoping no one gets caught and getting as pissed as possible while your little group is all huddled in a bush or something.

It would dawn on you and your little group that it was probably time to go out into the park, that it would be locked and the warden would have been long gone. It was the moment of – why the fuck am I here?

The park is pitch black, you and your group have no clue where the rest of the people are and someone would always say: “Imagine if it’s not just us in here”.

‘Oh don’t go home! We’re having fun’ 

When you’ve finally found everyone through the darkness and you’re all sitting down together – this the point which should be the most entertaining. The part that all this work has been leading up to.

In reality this was the absolute worst part of the whole night.

No one thinks to bring a coat, everyones to busy lying to their parents about sleepovers and takeaways.

Everyone is just sort of waiting for someone to say it – everyone is thinking the same thing, but no one wants to admit it.

“…I think I’m gonna go.”

Regretting everything

The weaklings have left and only the strong have survived.

So much face covering

It’s got past the point of wanting to get drunk, it’s too cold to pull your hands out your pockets.

Everyone’s phone is dead – so we have to resort to electronic bus timetables to give us a sense of what time it was in the morning. No one could leave too early, then your mum would be suspicious of where you’d been.

‘Someone was really sick from the takeaway, we all had to leave early’ 

I arrived home at around 6am. I couldn’t stand being in the cold anymore.

I thought all in all it was a completely successful night – we stayed out all night in a park until 6am and I drank vodka!

Tragic.