The plan was simple - hit London, become rich and famous, and live happily after - but it didn't survive Heathrow, recalls Róisín Ingle

I remember that summer in London. Most of it anyway. I was 17. I had done the Leaving Cert and The Rest Of My Life stretched deliciously ahead. My age was significant because that was the summer when I first read Scandal, the gripping account of the Profumo affair which nearly brought down the British government in the 1960s. Mandy Rice-Davies was also 17 when she first started slinking around London with Christine Keeler. It seemed like an omen. Well it would, wouldn't it?

I spent the summer with my best friend at the time, who, in the name of posterity, I shall call Christine. We didn't ruin any political careers, but Scandal was kind of our handbook during those weeks when there were no rules and the world - well, that bit of it between Tottenham Court Road and Covent Garden - was our oyster.

This is my version of the story. Christine might tell it another way. But we haven't been in touch for an age and I don't have her number. She will have to forgive me for any omissions or the way I remember that summer. She's forgiven me for more than that over the years, as I have her.

We had a plan. It went something like this:

1. Busk the streets of London with guitar and tambourine until noticed by wealthy pop Svengali determined to turn us into stars.

2. Become rich and famous and live happily ever after. The plan was so simple and we were so fabulous, we were convinced it might just work.

We were at the baggage carousel at Heathrow Airport when we hit our first barrier to fame and fortune. For some reason our only contact in London was an Indian fruit importer with a warehouse full of mangoes. I was in charge of the address book that contained Mr Fruity's number, but as we collected our luggage from the carousel I realised I had left the precious book on the plane.

Comedian Frank Carson of "it's the way I tell 'em" fame was also collecting his luggage. For some reason he wasn't interested in letting two girls, no matter how fabulous, shack up with him until they found somewhere else.

The airline couldn't find our address book. We had nowhere to go. So, as you do, we met a good-looking Swedish boy who was headed to a party in Brighton, and we took a train there with him.

The next morning found us lying sans-Swede in the baking heat beside the Brighton Pavilion, sucking ice pops and wondering about our next move. A dark-skinned man was lying nearby and we got talking. He took pity on us and said we could stay with him in east London until we got ourselves sorted. We spent the day minding his kids on Brighton Pier and drove back to the city that night.

His mother wasn't too pleased to have us stay in her high-rise flat, so the next morning he brought us to his pad in East 17. The place was strangely unfurnished, as though he was minding it for somebody who was yet to move in.

We were only there a week or so, but it felt like forever. We slept fitfully, as far away from him as possible, but every morning his sleeping bag would have moved dangerously nearer to Christine. At night he brought friends back to watch porn, and some days he would lock us in the flat. We were terrified that he was going to do something to us, but he warned us not to leave, so we didn't. At no stage did either of us ring our mothers. We just checked with the airline every day to see if they had found our address book, and planned our escape.

When we found Mr Fruity's number again, we got him to meet us in a pub near our captor's flat. We were terrified we would be discovered mid-flight, but thankfully we weren't. As retribution for our captor's nastiness we liberated one of his heavy gold chains from a shelf in his house. We exchanged it for cash down Kensington Market and it kept us in tube fares for a month. (The man we sold it to brought us to a high-class casino that night and we put all the chips he gave us on number 17, just like Mandy Rice-Davies did in Scandal. We won around 70 quid.)

Mr Fruity was as good as his word. He let us stay in his house in Southall. Unfortunately, his dead mother was also sharing the house and was laid out in the front room. We said polite goodbyes and went to see if they were giving out homes for free at the dole office.

Events had a curious flow that summer. In the dole office Christine was wearing a white leather jacket with the name of one of her heroines, the cartoon character, Modesty Blaise, written in pink on the back. A man, who told us he was from Mauritius, said: "I have a film of Modesty back at my house - would you like to see it?" Before the opening credits had rolled we were fast asleep on his plush sofa.

We woke to find our new host making us beans on toast.

We stayed there for the rest of the summer. The man I'll call Ahmed had just been abandoned by his wife and children. He was in this house on his own and it became our base while we tried to follow our dream. Our days melted into weeks.

We would busk in the tube station until we made enough for chicken sandwiches in McDonalds or hot chocolate in Soho cafés. We bunked into the Hippodrome club, drank champagne with strange old men and sexy young boys. We sang in a club on Tottenham Court Road and got noticed by the owner of another, bigger club, who gave us 50 quid one night but never did anything else for our fledgling careers.

And all this time we had our place in Southall, where if we mentioned we liked spaghetti bolognese, that's what would be on the table the next day. Ahmed bought two-litre bottles of cider for us and kept them cold in the fridge. He didn't have an iron. We complained, so he bought one. It was around the time that Ahmed started talking about buying a car so that he could drive us around that we left. He was devastated, and continued to send us Christmas cards for years.

The plan was to go back to London a few weeks later, but when I got home to Dublin things changed. No matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise, my mother's entreaties that I would repeat my Leaving - I hadn't earned enough points to go to college - began to seem more appealing than living the dream. The thrill of London, the thrill of not knowing where the next anything was coming from, had dulled and turned into an uncomfortable ache in my stomach.

It was the hardest phone call I ever had to take. I told Christine, who was still in England, that despite all my promises I was staying where I was. Our friendship recovered eventually and a couple of years later we even tried to make it again. But no matter how much fun it was or how I tried to convince myself otherwise I knew it was never going to work out that way for me. I had learnt that lesson during one mad, bad, crazy, dangerous, beautiful summer when I was 17.