A steel-tipped pub dart thwacks into a carefully posed photograph of a group of teenage schoolgirls taped to the inside of a wardrobe door. It missed. The intention had been to hit one of the girls. Instead it struck the school building behind them. Did they laugh with quiet relief?
Later, closer inspection with a magnifying glass suggests that a younger girl sitting in the Junior Common Room window, took that first dart full in the face. The window must have shattered into shards of glass. Possibly.
More on her later.
Meanwhile, a second dart shoots with intent across the room and strikes one of the girls in the knee.
“Got one!”
Ruth. Front row. Far left.
I said something melodramatic along the lines of:
“The darts have spoken.”
My name is Kizzy Foster. It should have been me in the front row, far left, next to Ruth. Just as well I wasn’t in the picture to face ‘selection by dart’. That would have wound Robbie up something rotten and defeated the game’s purpose.
Regardless of my absence, I still think of it as ‘my’ Form Photo — Mrs Rowbotham’s class, Lower Fifth B, Eastfield High.
The school photographer took three pictures: one with me, one without, and a third for luck.
I wasn’t in trouble. The school had instructions that I was not to appear in photographs in case my biological father recognised me. He’d been jailed for eight years when I was eleven. That was five years ago. I’d been warned he may be let out early. My mother was in psychiatric care. My older siblings dispersed.
Then the Fosters stepped in and adopted me. A ropey start to life received a lift. They were posh. I was not. But I had to try. Part of me wanted to fit in. Exclusion from the Form Photo suggested how unlikely that would ever be.
When the Eastfield High, Lower Fifth B Form photograph was taken, I was mischief personified. It was Robbie’s sixteenth, (Tuesday, 13th September, 1977) but he was ninety miles away – locked up, kind of. That’s how he saw boarding school – a punishment.
It’s Robbie with the darts – depending on your perspective he was my brother, my twin, or my husband. Though known as ‘the twins’, — and this matters — we weren’t’, nor siblings and certainly not married.
For the first eleven years of our lives, we were not even sister and brother, though we developed a deep psychological bond, kindred spirits.
Robbie will tell you that we married when we were seven. His idea, naturally. We met in Beadnell on the Northumberland coast. All dunes and rock pools. We shared the same hiding place: an upturned wooden fisherman’s boat. I was hiding from my Da; he was hiding from everyone.
Typical Robbie, we’d only known each other for a few days. I don’t recall him asking me if I’d marry him. He dressed me up, put sticks and flowers in my hair in some ritual of his, then walked me all the way to the Long Nanny, and we got married on the wooden footbridge, ritualised by swallowing cod-liver oil capsules each and exchanging Flicker rings: Batman for him, Cinderella for me.
That was 1968.
The saga of the darts and the Form Photo took place ten years later — Easter 1978.
I’m looking back fifty years. Adolescence fascinates me and has been my life’s work. It’s 2028 and I’m a Child and Adolescent Psychologist. I would have retired by now but for Covid. Teens suffered being shut away for months on end.
Adolescence depends on friction — arguments, flirtations, embarrassments, mistakes made in public. Lockdown removed the friction. The knock-on effect has been developmental disruption.
It wasn’t so different for Robbie, from the age of seven, directly after that summer holiday when I met him first. He was sent to a boarding prep school for boys, just a few weeks short of his eighth birthday.
By the time I’m placing darts in his fingers and pointing at a photograph of my classmates (all girls remember, it was a private girls’ school), he’s already had nine years of it and that Easter, he was returning from eleven weeks on the trot of what he called “posh prison”: St Aidan’s, Calderwick. Rugger buggers. All male. Not natural.
A teenage boy ready for action, but with nowhere to explore it is like a caged animal. He wanted a mate. Not the kind
The Form Photo dartboard — and the rush to acquire a proper girlfriend during the four weeks of the Easter holidays — was the result.
And I helped him. We’re both sixteen years old.
I was later asked to leave Eastfield High when the whole thing came out at the start of the summer term.
But for now, it is Tuesday evening, 28 March 1978.
Robbie’s in my bedroom. It’s after 10, we’re listening to the John Peel Show on Radio 1. Gay and Terry Woods are playing.
We’re home alone—Mum’s staging over with a boyfriend. Dad upped sticks and moved to London years ago.
I didn’t fancy Robbie’s chances with Ruth. But putting things into the hands of Fate like this with the darts appealed to him, and that was what mattered. If he has to speak to Ruth first, ask for a dance, buy her a drink, then so be it.
Let the darts decide.
What Robbie understood very well was that I needed to redirect his romantic attention away from me and towards someone more suitable. Robbie had asked me about my friends, so my classmates at Eastfield High came to mind immediately. Girls my age. The right age.
And conveniently, here they were, lined up in skirts in this Form Photo, captured on celluloid, glued to backing paper and placed in a cardboard frame. And Selloraped to my wardrobe.
Seventeen girls in Lower Fifth B. Sixteen of them are in the photograph. One of them tells the story.
Inspiration for a boy who had been “sex starved” (his phrase, not mine) since early January.
“Third time lucky?” I said, blowing on the last dart for luck before handing it to him.
Robbie claimed to be rubbish at darts. He aimed anyway. The third dart struck gold.
Or rather — an eye.
Cecelia Noble. Rear row. Third from the left.
Willowy. Funny. Ballet. A dog called Bramble. An older brother in the Army. She had auditioned for the Royal Ballet. Holding a tennis racket was exercise; actually hitting a ball with it was another matter.
“Cece,” I told him. No one called her Cecelia except her mother.
Robbie thought the dart might have inflicted some Voodoo damage.
I briefly worried about the same thing myself.
But one vandalised photograph seemed a modest price to pay if it persuaded Robbie to redirect his enthusiasm away from me and towards the rest of the female population of Newcastle.
Robbie believed the darts were deciding his romantic future.
In reality, they were deciding the course of the next fifty years.
Adolescence is like that. Small decisions echo longer than anyone expects.
By the end of Easter, the photograph looked less like a school portrait and more like an Action Man firing range.
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