I’m looking for some of my dad’s papers in a cupboard in the lounge and I come across a stack of boxes containing colour slides. My dad always used to prefer transparencies to prints and had a projector to inflict holidays and other events on friends and relatives.

The boxes have labels lettered in my dad’s neat capitals. The one that catches my eye says “NORFOLK 1976”. I open the box, select a few transparencies at random and hold them up to the light one by one. The first is the cottage we rented for our summer holiday – the last one I spent with my parents – the second is a parched landscape, the wide sky punctuated by a church spire. The third one I select is me, in a check shirt, standing in front of a traction engine, looking suntanned and sullen.

Mid-August I was dragged away by my parents to spend a week in Norfolk. My only consolation being that Penny was away with her family at the same time so we would have been apart anyway.

We often took family holidays in Norfolk in the ’70s, staying in a rented cottage. The wide skies and open landscape were almost as familiar as home. I had packed my L-plates although I knew that I had little chance of Dad letting me drive on strange roads. I stayed quiet in the car on the long drive down, lost in my own thoughts and, after only a few hours, already missing Penny.

Since the accident, and in particular the dream, things had changed. At the outset my overriding aim had been sex. I liked Penny and I reasoned if you were going to have sex it was better to do it with someone you liked. Now I was beginning to feel something more; something deeper than those first stirrings of desire at the youth club. The sex part was still there and I still wanted it to continue, only now I had other motives too. I was starting to believe that I might really be in love.

I couldn’t escape all the excursions to visit agricultural museums or steam railways but a lot of the time during that holiday, whilst my parents were out looking at old churches, or visiting my dad’s stamping grounds from when he was in the RAF, I chose to stay close to our holiday cottage. As an only child I was often happy to enjoy my own company.

The weather was still glorious and sometimes I would choose to wander in my knee-length sawn-off denims, barefoot and bare-chested, around the little seaside town. I got plenty of admiring glances, even the odd tentative approach, from girls. I could have had casual sex on several occasions just for the asking. But whereas a year before I would have been eager to leap gleefully into bed each time, that summer I had Penny and given my new-found feelings, was determined to be loyal to her.

I had bought a shorthand pad and would often sit in the sun under the sea-wall, enjoying the warmth, the breeze and writing. Sometimes poems; sometimes long rambling descriptive passages; sometimes inventing lives for the people who passed by.

I also wrote about Penny, though I would never bring myself to show her any of it.

On the Wednesday of another blazing week, I sat with my notepad, describing the blue sky, the waves and the little white splashes made by diving sea birds; feeling the sand between my toes and the warm concrete against my back. I had paused, tapping my Biro against the end of my nose, searching for an appropriate word, when a shadow fell across me. I looked up, shielding my eyes from the glare with a raised hand.

The owner of the shadow was a girl, my own age or perhaps a little younger. She wore jeans, rolled up to reveal a few inches of bare leg, and a peach and white, string-tied, bikini top. Her fair hair she had tied back in a ponytail, with loose wisps around the front, framing her face like a halo against the sun.

‘What’re you writing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ I closed the pad and threaded the pen through the spiral binding.

‘Must be something.’ She sat uninvited on the sand beside me, testing the heat of the concrete wall with a hand before trusting her shoulders to it. I had a clearer view of her face now; a pert button nose punctuated by a line of freckles and cool blue eyes like the bottom of a swimming pool.

‘I like to write myself sometimes.’ She brushed an imaginary speck of sand from her stomach. Her skin was brown and soft downy hairs stood out, fine  and white, like sheep on a far distant hillside.

‘I write a lot,’ I said half hoping she would go away and let me get on with it.

‘About what?’

‘Just stuff.’

‘Can I see?’ She held out a hand.

‘No,’ I snapped then felt I should offer some explanation for my refusal. ‘I hardly ever show it to anyone.’

‘Why not?’

‘I suppose because I don’t think it’s any good.’

‘Oh.’ She considered this for a moment and seemed to accept it as valid. ‘It’s hot, isn’t it?’ She undid the button of her jeans and folded the front of the waistband down. The extra flesh revealed was as brown as that above. I felt a bead of sweat leave my armpit and trickle down over my ribs. I placed my pad in my lap to hide a nascent erection.

‘Ellie,’ she said, quite out of the blue.

‘What?’

‘I’m Ellie, from London.’

‘John,’ I replied, ‘from Yorkshire.’ We shook hands; which felt rather absurd there, half naked, on a beach.

‘Yorkshire, that’s up north isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘Yes. You don’t fall off the edge when you get past Watford, you know.’

‘I know! An’ I ain’t never ’ad a jellied eel in my life.’ She exaggerated her accent. We both laughed and her pool-blue eyes twinkled. ‘So, you here with your folks?’ She continued her interrogation.

‘Yes.’

‘Me, too. Boring isn’t it?’

I was seldom bored, but I felt I had to offer her some consolation. ‘It’s not too bad,’ I answered, ‘at least the sun’s shining.’

‘True.’ She looked down at her tanned body as though seeing it for the first time. ‘You got a girlfriend in Yorkshire?’

‘Yes, her name’s Penny,’ I said, anticipating her next question. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ and adding one of my own.

‘Nah, I’m not ready for that sort of commitment.’

I didn’t know quite how to reply to that so I stayed silent.

After a few moments she said, ‘Fancy a shag?’

The cartoon devil popped up with an enthusiastic, ‘Yes, my son!’

‘I told you I’ve got a girlfriend,’ I said, startled. I put a hand down to rest on my note pad. A second bead of sweat, faster this time, chased down over my ribs.

‘She’s not here though, is she?’

‘No, but―’

‘But what? It’s only a shag. It doesn’t mean anything.’

I played the contraception card. ‘I haven’t got anything to use.’ Cartoon devil sighed in exasperation.

She trumped it. ‘Don’t worry, I have.’ She fished a foil Durex packet from her jeans pocket and waved it under my nose. ‘I know you want to.’ Her eyes fell to my notepad which now stood a little higher off my lap. ‘Come on, the flat’s just across the street.’ She took my hand and dragged me to my feet. ‘Follow me.’

Meekly I trailed behind her, still holding my notepad in front of me. Part of me didn’t believe that this was happening; it was sure to turn into some sort of practical joke. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? She led me off the beach, across a small car park where the tarmac felt lava hot under my bare feet, and into a side street. Here she stopped at a door, produced a key from her pocket and slotted it into the lock.

The doorway led into a narrow lobby with green-carpeted stairs leading up to a first floor flat. I closed the door behind me; she was already halfway up the stairs, reaching behind her to untie the strings of her top as she went. I followed, at the landing she turned left into a small bedroom.

By the time I entered she had pulled down her jeans and stood facing me wearing only a pair of small pink knickers, her pale breasts like marshmallows on a coffee cake.

Despite the cartoon devil urging me on, I felt I had to mount one last challenge. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Is this sure enough?’ She took off her pants, threw them at me, then stood with her weight on one leg, hands on hips, head tilted to one side. Her lips parted in a slow smile and the twinkle flashed, once again, through her eyes.

I resigned myself to my fate. It wasn’t too hard. I threw my pad on the floor and removed shorts and underpants in one smooth action.

She handed me the Durex. ‘Nice white bits,’ she said with approval.

I wasn’t sure if she was joking, but it didn’t seem to matter. My hands shook a little as I opened the packet, then condom in place; I waited for her to make the first move. She pushed me back on to the bed and straddled me. No kissing. No foreplay. I lay back and thought how I was helping to break down the north, south divide. Giuseppe Farina, Alfa Romeo, 1950; Juan Manuel Fangio  …

Afterwards she slipped her knickers on and handed me a box of tissues. From a bedside cabinet she produced a battered packet of Player’s No.6 and a box of matches, she offered me a cigarette.

‘I don’t, thanks,’ I said. She lit one herself, took a long drag and blew out the smoke watching it drift in a small cloud up to the ceiling. I told her the joke about the market researcher who asks a woman if she smokes after sex; the woman says she’s never looked.

Ellie laughed out of politeness then said, ‘You’d better go.’ Maybe she hadn’t liked the joke. ‘I don’t know when my folks will be back.’

I retrieved my pants, shorts and pad. At the top of the stairs she held her cigarette out to one side and kissed me on the cheek, our first kiss, her breasts brushing against my chest as she did so. ‘Thanks, John, I needed that,’ she said, like I’d just made her a hot drink. ‘You can see yourself out.’

I descended, feeling a bit shell shocked, to the street. From shadow on the beach to full carnal knowledge in under one hour. Then with almost no time to get my breath back I was out of the door. To be used in this way was a new experience for me. It was sex and it was good but somehow seemed wrong. Surely sex should be special? It seemed I’d done nothing more for Ellie than scratch an itch.

The cartoon devil cackled in my ear and told me not to be so wet, that I had to take chances to get my end away when I could, especially if they were handed to me on a plate. ‘If you hadn’t done it she’d have found some other prick to oblige,’ he said, laughing at his own joke.

I walked back to the cottage playing over what had just happened in my mind. Every time I passed a girl on the way the devil taunted me by whispering, ‘Bet she’s up for it,’ in my ear. My parents were still out when I got there, so I went straight upstairs and had a shower. This reminded me of Penny and in an instant guilt hit me with the force of a Henry Cooper left hook. I felt suitably wretched. Since the accident I believed I really cared about Penny; and yet I’d allowed my hormones to get the better of me with so little resistance.

When my mum and dad returned from their sightseeing I was sitting on the sofa reading a paperback.

‘Have you had a nice day, dear?’ Mum asked.

‘Yes, it was okay,’ I replied. Careful to keep any hint of emotion from my voice.

We went out for a meal at a pub that evening and I spotted Ellie and her family at one of the other tables. She didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. Maybe she didn’t recognise me with my clothes on.

I returned to my spot by the sea wall several times during the remainder of the week. Partly because the cartoon devil kept telling me there could be the chance of a rematch, mostly because I wanted to talk, to understand what had happened; but I never saw Ellie again. In a way I was relieved.

On the drive home my guilt gnawed away inside me. I looked out of the car window at the parched brown landscape and saw Ellie’s brown skin.

I felt ashamed that I had succumbed with so little resistance, but I also remembered her words: ‘It’s only a shag. It doesn’t mean anything’. I was sure it did mean something. And that the something was me being a weak-willed idiot who walked around carrying his brain in his underpants. And yet it had all been so casual, almost unreal. A part of me wanted to believe it had been nothing more than an erotic dream.

The Monday after getting back I went round to Penny’s house and we went for a walk on the beach. We splashed along at the edge of the sea, our tennis shoes hung around our necks. She said she’d missed me loads and I felt guilty as all hell. I couldn’t tell her what had happened; I knew it would break her heart and I’d never see her again. So I followed my usual pattern of self-defence and made a joke.

‘Had sex with any good looking Spanish waiters?’

‘Only the one.’ I knew she was playing along with the gag.

‘Manuel?’ I asked.

‘José,’ she replied.

I did the gag about the Spanish fireman who calls his sons ‘Hose A’ and ‘Hose B’.

She laughed dutifully. ‘What about you? Rolling in the hay with Norfolk farm wenches, I’ll be bound.’

‘No!’ I tried hard to sound hurt by the implication. Then my face cracked into a grin, ‘But she did let me handle her tractor.’ I kicked at the surf, splashing Penny with water. She tried to retaliate but I was too quick and she chased me up the beach.

When we reached the dunes I let her catch me, and we kissed. By chance, we had selected a quiet spot and I had taken advantage of the holiday to replenish my contraceptive supply, in shops where no one knew me. Allowing our pent up desires to take control we had hurried, gritty, intercourse among the coarse grasses, our ears straining for the sound of any approach.

A memory of a school P.E. lesson returned to me.

Running cross country we were following the prescribed fourth-year route, out along the tops and return on the beach. It had been a warm September day and we ran with the front hem of our football shirts pulled back over our heads, to keep cool. Craig and I were loping along with another lad when we saw Bunny up ahead of us moving at a crawl and peering over the edge of the low cliff.

‘Warren, you wanker, what you doing?’ Craig called.

Bunny turned, held his finger to his lips for us to keep quiet and pointed urgently down below. We slowed and looked over the edge to where he was indicating. Below us a couple were having sex in the dunes, the man’s backside moving up and down in a steady rhythm. We continued on our way, now a group of four. Returning along the beach we saw the protagonists emerging, looking flushed, from their hiding place. We sniggered as we ran by.

Ever since that day, sex in the dunes had been an ambition I wanted to fulfil. Now, as I ticked it off my things-to-do-before-I-die list – it came sandwiched between leaping into a taxi and yelling, ‘Follow that car!’ and writing a bestselling novel – I found it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I was so alert to the chance of discovery that I found it hard to concentrate, and the sun was beginning to burn my arse. To cap it all, I had sand in my underpants which began to irritate me so much on the way back that I had to sneak behind another dune and slip them off. I emerged swinging them round my index finger before stuffing them in my jeans pocket.

‘Hello, Nicholas,’ said Penny. It took me a few seconds to get the joke then we had a half-mile mutual giggling fit.

We only had three short weeks before the start of the autumn term and we wanted to make up for lost time. I knew that once we were in the upper sixth, Penny’s work ethic meant that study would take precedence over our love life. Even though one of her subjects was biology.

‘You free tomorrow?’ she asked as we parted.

‘Afternoon, I’ve got my driving test in the morning.’

‘Good luck.’ We kissed, and I went home to read The Highway Code.