I was 14, it was summer and I'd been invited to a school-friend's party. My boyfriend was a slight, dark boy called Mark, who I'd met at the church youth club. The youth club consisted of some bored teenagers hanging around in the gloom on a Friday evening, doing almost nothing and hoping to attract the opposite sex simply by being there.

Talking to them was out of the question. Somehow I must have talked to Mark, and one of our early dates was going to the cinema and my mum making us chips wrapped in newspaper - for a slightly eccentric chip-shop effect! - when we got back.

On the evening of the party I was wearing an off-the shoulder pink top with a ruffle and a circular, '50s-style skirt, hand-made by Mum. Of course I spent ages bathing and making myself smell beautiful, and applying lots of make-up I didn't need. Mark and I were very shy together, but we held hands on the way to the party, and once there, hung around just as we did at the youth club, not knowing what to say, not knowing what you did at a party. I probably drank Cinzano and lemonade, cloying precursor of the alcopop.

The evening wore on, it got dark, and slow, smoochy music was played. Boys got off with girls. I waited for Mark to make a move - I knew what should happen, but he was either too shy or too lacking in knowledge. I sat on his lap in an armchair and we watched the couples circling the living room, groping each other.

I'd read a lot about kissing in magazines and was feeling very impatient - it was just the right moment, and he was doing nothing. So I kissed him. I gently pushed my tongue into his mouth, but now we were both in unknown territory - I'd been hoping he'd know what to do once I got him started. What was the tongue supposed to get up to once it was in the other person's mouth? Breathing seemed quite difficult, and what if you needed to swallow? After a few awkward moments, the kiss ended, but the main thing was that we'd done it!

It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and although our unsuccessful technique cast a shadow over proceedings, that first kiss was a very significant moment. In fact, gaining pleasure from kissing had never crossed my mind: it was just something you did to prove you were grown up, like smoking and drinking.

As Mark and I kissed so awkwardly, upstairs a girl from my school was leaving her childhood way behind. My embrace with Mark ended as feet thundered down the stairs from the bedroom where an assembled crowd had witnessed this girl and her boyfriend go all the way. 'She's got blood on the carpet! My mum will kill me!' yelled the party-giver. Mark seemed baffled and asked whether she'd cut herself. I didn't enlighten him, and still wonder if he really couldn't guess what had happened. He was apparently completely innocent of sexual matters, which now, in retrospect, adds to the sweetness of that first kiss.