From the drunk girl who knocked her own front teeth out to the father searching the garden bushes with a torch for couples having sex… One teenage girl’s hair-raising revelations about post-GCSE party season

As the youngest of four children, and the last teenager still living at home, I know for a fact there is an annual event my mum dreads more than anything else.

It’s the ‘End of GCSEs House Party’, where clueless parents stupidly allow their 15 or 16-year-old Year 11 to invite a ‘few’ friends over to celebrate.

They’re happening up and down the country this very week – but not in my house, alas. Mum has been there, done that and still got the faint vomit stains on the carpet from my older sister’s bash five years ago.

On that occasion she invited 20 mates and about 200 turned up. I remember some of them climbed on to the roof and played a game where they were hitting my dad’s balled up socks from his underwear drawer into the bushes, using one of his golf clubs. Then they threw my sister’s bed out of the window.

That was the last party ever to happen under our roof – which totally sucks for me at the age of 15, but just makes me even more determined to find someone else’s to go to.

It feels like quite a traitorous thing to say, but adults should know about these parties and how easily they get out of hand. I suppose the one positive is that it’s not winter, so the carpets won’t get totally wrecked by mud when the party eventually overflows – as it will – into the back garden flower beds. (If you’ve got a pond, definitely cover it up.)

The problem is, most parents flatly refuse to allow these get togethers because they’re not stupid, and they’ve heard about the carnage that always follows.

But there are still some – the greener ones with first-time teens – who actually believe their child when they promise it’s going to be a ‘small’ gathering. And because these ‘gatherings’ are so few and far between, when we teenagers hear about them happening on messaging app Snapchat, all hell breaks loose.

I go to a state school in Sussex. It’s one of two big ones in our area, and there are also three private schools. It’s quite rural so lots of my friends went to the same primary and prep schools before heading off to different senior schools depending on what their parents could afford.

Because of this, if there’s a whiff of a party happening, word gets round fast.

To give an example, I heard about one taking place last weekend (a bit earlier than normal, but to be fair there was only Physics and Spanish exams left). Everyone in my year was talking about it even though the boy concerned didn’t go to our school and I’ve never actually met him in person.

But what he did was put something on Snapchat telling all his friends to invite whoever they wanted. That was the tier one guest list.

About three days later, I was added to the group by someone I knew who was tier four. What that means is they knew someone who knew someone who knew someone else, who was on the original list.

I had to scroll through Snapchat for almost ten minutes to get to the bottom of the names – about 450. Apparently, his mum had said he could have 15 people over.

What happened next was that first Snapchat group had to close because it reached capacity, and another one was started. The whole thing just massively snowballed.

It’s kind of cool when you think about it. I don’t know how these things were organised before social media.

It must have been impossible.

But this can have downsides too. A party group chat is every teenager’s worst nightmare. There are lots of rules surrounding it, and breaking any of them is basically social suicide.

People will ruthlessly make fun of you if you say something wrong or send to a chat by accident. If you’re not good friends with the person throwing the party, or you’re not popular or well-known, you can’t say anything on the group chat. You’ll just get removed and slated.

In the days leading up to this most recent party, the two sole topics of conversation were what people were going to wear and how they were going to do their alcohol drop.

These conversations about the same party were going on in five schools across a 30 mile radius. Obviously, none of us are stupid enough to think we could arrive with our alcohol because we all know that most parents have already said: ‘No drinking allowed.’

If they’ve got any sense at all they’ll also be checking all our bags and coat pockets.

At one party I went to last year, I managed to hide miniature bottles of vodka in the bun in my hair. I can’t believe I got away with that.

At another party where I was a tier one guest – the girl is a direct friend of mine – the dad is known for being super strict. It’s his second family so he’s been through all this before.

He wasn’t insane enough to leave the house while the party was on – though some parents do – but instead appeared on the door wearing one of those green high-vis jackets, looking like a motorway worker, and he had a massive floodlight torch so he could search the bushes in their garden to drag people out if they were in there having sex.

Also, he’d taken all his light fittings off the walls and put plastic sheeting over the entire downstairs of the house. Then he body-searched everyone, patting them down like they do in airports because he didn’t want any drinking going on.

It didn’t make any difference though because most of us had already ‘dropped’ our bottles of vodka and Apple Sourz a few days earlier behind a stone wall right at the end of their garden. Every teenager I know just wants to get off their heads at these parties and there is almost nothing a parent can do to stop it happening.

I do feel sorry for them when their house is properly trashed. The son of a friend of my mum’s threw an end of GCSEs party in London and a couple of thousand pounds worth of damage was done.

The beautiful stained glass in the front door was smashed, the banister was broken, the leather sofa was irreparably scratched and someone got locked in an upstairs bathroom.

Their only means of escape was to climb out of a sash window, walk along the side return extension roof and drop down – well, fall – through a Velux window into the kitchen, breaking quite a few roof slates and wine glasses on their way. The cat disappeared for days.

It’s crazy how quickly everyone gets drunk.

At the party where I smuggled vodka in my hair, everyone was vomiting after about 45 minutes.

There was only one loo downstairs and a bathroom upstairs and so people were just chucking up in the corners of the room or in the kitchen sink. I watched one guy pull the top off what looked like a really pretty vase in the living room.

Unfortunately, it was their dead labradoodle’s ashes. My mum would have absolutely freaked.

Things can get frightening too. I love going to parties and I do enjoy drinking, but not to the point where I’m losing control. I’ve seen one girl fall down a flight of stairs knocking her two front teeth out. There was so much blood on the walls that we had to put her in the bath upstairs until someone came to collect her.

After all the hype of last weekend’s party, it ended up being a total wash-out because the mum came home after 30 minutes to find hundreds of teenagers in the house when she’d only agreed to 15. But then everyone just legged it to a nearby field for the sub party. I was running behind this boy who was so drunk he stumbled into the road and a car coming round the bend just clipped him, throwing him on to the pavement where he cracked his head open.

His mates tried calling his mum but they were laughing so much they couldn’t really explain to her what had happened and I ended up having to take the phone to speak to her. She was crying and asked me to call an ambulance which I did. He had to spend a few days in hospital.

I’ve also known kids get so drunk, they pass out and can’t be woken, so ambulances have had to be called for that too.

Invariably they sober up a bit when they hit the outside air, but if they’re actually taken to hospital, their parents get a call from social services, which takes a lot of explaining.

Quite often their school gets told too. I know of one school in London where house parties happen all year round and the letters from social services are rumoured to pile up in a big box. Thankfully you don’t go back to school for months after a GCSE party.

Obviously it’s not just the drinking that should make parents’ hair curl.

A lot of my friends are already having sex even though they’re not even 16 yet. I usually kiss several boys at a party although I’ve never gone further. It’s not really a big deal for kids my age. It’s just kind of accepted that this is what happens. No one calls you a slut or anything.

Drugs are another matter. They’re everywhere. But any conversations about bringing them to the party don’t happen on the group Snapchat.

People move to smaller, private chats for that. I’ve seen so many kids my age smoking weed and taking ket (ketamine), it’s ridiculous how easy it is to get hold of.

My mum really worries about me going to parties and wants to forbid it but I’ve told her I’ll be a social outcast if she doesn’t let me be a ‘normal’ teenager.

And even though all of this might sound shocking to most adults, it is normal behaviour among the majority of year 11s, especially after all the pressure of exams. How else are we supposed to let our hair down and celebrate the end of school?

I guess the only difference between us, and previous generations is how fast word gets round when a party is in the planning. I asked my mum what they used to do in the 1980s and she said something about carrier pigeons, whatever that means, then told me to Google it.

I don’t think there’s much parents can realistically do to stop parties like these. I would just say let your teenager go.

Or, if you don’t want them ever to be invited anywhere ever again, encourage them to ask lots of questions on the group chat. That should do it.

Names have been changed to protect identities.