Teenage party made me weep

Last weekend I made good my promise to my daughter to let her have her 15th birthday party at home. I had a notion that at least if I held it at my house, I would be able to exercise some control.

Like most parents, I’d heard the horror stories. Drink, drugs, under-age sex. still, I thought — how bad can it be? I cast my mind back to my own teenage parties. a lot of talk, very little action. Maybe a few bottles of contraband beer, perhaps the occasional cigarette.

Mostly it was just people with bad skin sitting around listening to music and pretending to be cool, with the odd lucky few enjoying a snog in the corner.

and so, with the help of my daughter’s ‘squad’ (a group of delightful girls from school) we set about transforming our basement kitchen and garden into a disco. the girls enthusiastically scrubbed the floor and we hung fairy lights in the pop-up gazebo outside.

We laid out big bowls of crisps and sweets, and bottles of Fanta. We removed all our own alcohol supplies from the kitchen and stashed them in the sitting room, which was where I intended to spend the evening with a friend, another mother, on guard.

In an attempt to discourage undesirables, I had insisted on a guest list. apart from friends from IF GENERAL Sir Nick Carter, head of the Army, is so worried about the threat from Russian troops, why on earth did he authorise that ridiculous touchy-feely recruitment campaign? I can’t imagine Putin’s thugs have much truck with ‘feelings’. Or is his cunning plan for everyone simply to hold hands and cuddle the enemy to death? her own all-girls state school, my daughter had invited various others from her old school. the boys, such as they were, mostly came from a very prestigious private London day school.

I also hired ‘bouncers’ — three a-level students I knew I could trust — to man the front door and help me keep an eye on goings-on. short of installing full body scanners, I thought I’d had done everything to ensure a vaguely civilised evening. I was in for a very nasty surprise.

Everything was going just fine while it was just my daughter and her girlfriends. a bit over-excitable, I’ll grant you. But they all looked lovely in their uniform of trainers, cargo trousers and crop tops, with their hair covered in glitter and eyelashes coated in 17 different layers of mascara.

I was banished to the living room while they bopped around the kitchen. at one point I caught one of them going down to the kitchendisco in a coat, and demanded to see what was underneath it. an alco-pop, 3 per cent. It was confiscated, everyone else searched for similar and the party carried on.

and then the boys began to arrive. Groups of three or four, polite as you like. But once they got downstairs, all that changed.

You read a lot about the pressures young girls face in this age of internet porn. But it is not until you see the effects for yourself that you realise how much the social landscape of the modern teenager has changed.

First, the dancing. Forget the awkward jerkiness of my youth: this was properly provocative, a mass of writhing, thrusting extremities.

as the boys began to infiltrate the groups of girls, the kitchen became a fug of pheromones. My bouncers were doing good job of repelling anyone who wasn’t on the list. But some must have slipped through, because the next time I checked the atmosphere had taken a turn for the worse.

I descended into the pit, fighting my way through a mass of naked limbs. By the time I emerged I had confiscated several bottles of vodka, one amaretto (obviously pinched from a parent’s drink cabinet), a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and some Lambrusco.

oh, and one very dodgylooking cigarette.

When I returned to the basement, the amaretto boy swaggered up to me and demanded his drink back. I looked at him speechless, and pushed on past into the gazebo, pausing only briefly to wrestle another bottle off a child.

Here the majority of boys had set up camp, plying the girls with drink and cigarettes. they had a very clear agenda — and the atmosphere was suddenly anything but light-hearted.

It was at this point that my daughter and two of her friends found me. they were visibly upset: this was not what they had envisaged. I asked her if she wanted me to chuck them out. Reluctantly, she said yes.

I turned on the lights, switched off the music and began herding the boys towards the exit.

one or two of them just laughed and carried on. But most of them went quietly, some of them even apologising. they left behind a trail of broken glass, cigarette butts and assorted liquids.

SoME of them I had to physically manhandle up the stairs through a combination of reluctance and drunkenness. thank God they were only 15: if they had been any bigger I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

as they hung around outside the house waiting for ubers and parents to collect them, they struck up a football chant. three men from the estate opposite us came over to complain. a few minutes later, two policemen arrived, investigating a noise complaint. My night (mare) was complete.

as we began the lengthy process of clearing up, I began to reflect.

First, on how vulnerable these girls were to what can only be described as the feral demands of boys who clearly had no respect for them, me or my home.

Boys whose arrogance made them believe they could do whatever they wanted with impunity — and get away with it.

Boys, dare I say it, who had a completely skewed notion of what girls were for.

I wondered what their parents — presumably wealthy professional people to be able to afford the school fees — would have thought had they known what they were up to. after all, this was no uneducated rabble. this was supposedly the creme de la creme of London’s private school elite.

as for the girls, I felt sorry for them. they had made such an effort, spent so long talking about the party and getting ready for it — all to have it trampled upon by a bunch of thugs interested only in one thing.

When I finally fell asleep that night, I had two thoughts in my head: first, thank God I’m not a 15-year-old girl in 2018.

and second, how on earth am I going to protect my daughter from the twisted world in which she is growing up?