by Woog
It all started on a school excursion. As usual, everyone raced to the back of the bus, trampling smaller ones who got in their way. I was not that concerned about sitting at the back of the bus, so took my seat about halfway down the aisle. Word travelled down to me that Paul had saved me a seat at the back of the bus.
He wanted me to sit next to him? Who was he fucking kidding? No WAY!
This act of independence proved to be my undoing. The next day, in the playground at recess, one of Paul’s mates told my friend Penny that Paul wanted to break up with me. Penny delivered the bad news to me, and I fled to the girls’ toilets for the rest of eternity.
Eternity lasted until the end-of-recess bell, which rang out precisely seven minutes later. I had a choice to make: I could remain sobbing in the bathroom, a victim of public humiliation, or I could straighten myself out, splash some water on my face and bravely take my place in the class line. Which is what I did.
I joined the Year 5 line while Paul stood nearby in the Year 6 line. I looked across and down at him, and when I caught his eye, I mouthed slowly and deliberately: ‘I hate you.’
And with those three little words, I was over him. Little fucker. I spent the rest of the year trying to spread rumours that Paul Ryan had stinky breath and wet his pants, and anything else I could think of that would shame him.
As the school year went by, I became friends with boys. It was nice. It gave me the confidence to be myself in front of them—and let’s face it, I was more of a tomboy than a girly girl up until that point. There was a little group of us, boys and girls, who hung out a fair bit. And then hormones came and reared their ugly head and eventually everyone had paired up with someone to ‘go with’.
My new boyfriend was a deadset spunk and a nice boy to boot. My mum knew his mum, who was one of the local swimming instructors. He proved to be a very good handball player. And I actually did want to sit next to him at the back of the bus, where we would hold hands. He had no warts. Nice clean hands.
We became the king and queen of handholding. Everywhere we went, we’d be swinging digits. Up the back of the hall in assembly, we would sit side by side. He would put out his hand for me to hold, and so I did.
Then we went to see Ghostbusters at the Richmond Regent and it was here that things heated up a bit. An actual arm went out and snaked around my shoulders. Of course I could not concentrate on the movie. A cute boy had his arm around me! It took all my concentration not to wet my pants there in the seat. During the interval, when he went to get me a treat from the the kiosk, I shared this new development with my friends, who were seated on my other side. I was so happy!
Our relationship flourished. Our friends were constantly splitting up and swapping partners in dramatic fashion, but not us! We were like the Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward of the playground. He would shower me with gifts. Like, one time, he presented me with a plastic bag which contained a car seat for my Cabbage Patch Kid, Ramona Alvarez. He gave me a bracelet with my name engraved on the outside and his name engraved on the inside, which may have just made my heart stop.
And then, of course, came my first-ever kiss! I was such a fan of the experience that I went on to do quite a bit of kissing as a teenager. But that first kiss . . . you never forget it. Even if it happened when you were twelve. Even if it was in front of all your friends, with them egging you on.
We were at a party, which was a slumber party for both boys and girls. I KNOW! But the fun police (my parents) refused to let me attend the actual sleepover part, so I just went along for the movie section of the festivities. We did our traditional handholding, and the now customary arm around the shoulder. We were getting a lot of peer pressure to pucker up and so, after a lot of nagging, we eventually did, giving each other a small peck on the lips.
The crowd EXPLODED!
Looking back on it now, it was quite perverted, but I felt that we were ready to take our relationship to the next level, so along with handholding and arms around the shoulders, we added quick kisses to our repertoire of PDAs.
Then, as tended to happen in those days, the old bush telegraph kicked into gear and word got back to my parents, who promptly enrolled me in a boarding school for my high school years. I presume they were thinking that this might save me from myself. I cannot say for sure that their decision was made on the basis of a few quick, dry pecks on the lips, but I suspect said kisses didn’t help my cause.
As the year drew to an end, Mum took me to the local children’s wear shop, which was extraordinarily fashion forward for the time. There I chose the most perfect outfit for the Year 6 farewell. It was a pale pink dress that was teamed with a short-sleeved floral jacket. On my feet I wore a pair of white leather shoes. I had been taken to Toppings, the local hairdressers, where I was given a blow wave of brilliance. Never before had I ever been able to tempt such flicks from my fringe. My hairdo was a thing of beauty.
Later that night, I danced with my boy. But not in an inappropriate way. We danced to ‘Nutbush City Limits’ and we danced to the amazing song by Ray Parker Jr that had been the soundtrack to our first cinematic experience just a few months before. And as the evening drew to an end, he took me into the canteen to plant one last dry, quick peck on my lips.
And then it was over.
At the end of the summer holidays I left my little town, my little boyfriend and my little sheltered life. But I left with a wised-up heart, having felt both the joys and heartbreak that comes with falling in love—with someone who is not from the equine family.
7
PUBERTY BLUES IN A FLESH-COLOURED BRA
I never really thought too much about boobs as a kid. I mean, sure, I had seen them here and there, especially my mum’s. But I was a skinny, lanky lass with a chest you could use as a spirit level—until I hit Year 5. And then something happened; something so mortifying, so humiliating, that even to this day I have been unable to erase it from my cerebral cortex.
I had been crook. Indeed, I must have been near death, because my mother actually presented me to our family doctor, Dr McIntosh, whose surgery was in a group of shops in the suburb of Hobartville. This is important to note, as there was a superior bakery nearby that sold the best doughnuts with thick pink icing, which was the only upside to a visit to the quack.
I sat on the table in Dr McIntosh’s surgery, with my mum watching on as the doctor told me to remove my top and then applied a cold stethoscope to my back. He asked me to cough. Preoccupied by the prospect of pink doughnuts, I did as I was told, and the doctor listened intently. When I was done coughing and he was done listening, I turned to face him—and then he said something so embarrassing I wanted to die.
‘You’re getting a boob there,’ he remarked casually, pointing to my left nipple with a pen.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mum chimed in. ‘So she is!’
The conversation went on as if I were not in the room. I looked down at the offensive nipple and realised that it did look a little different. But was it normal to discuss it as if one was trading observations about the weather?
If I had known the phrase ‘And let us never speak of this again’, I would have uttered it. Though as it happened it would have been unnecessary, as we didn’t speak of it again—at least, not for a long time.
Eventually my right nipple cottoned on to the surging hormones and made itself known. Then together they began to be backed by actual boob until it was fairly obvious what lay in store for me next.
When it comes to growing up and puberty, it seems to me there are two camps. I was in the first of these: the one that believes ignorance is bliss. I was not at all interested in turning into a woman and walked about with my shoulders hunched forward, trying to hide my growing chest. In the other camp were the girls who were positively delighted with their blooming bodies and wore their bras with pride.
So you can just imagine my delight when, one Saturday morning, Mum told me that we were going shopping to buy my first bra. I insisted that it was not yet required,
but she was equally adamant that it was.
The bra shop was in a local mall frequented by people we knew. It had the butcher, the greengrocer and the bakery, and on a Saturday morning the joint was jumping.
Mum, seemingly oblivious to my cringing, stopped to chat with every friend and acquaintance she encountered, and to each one she stated the purpose of our mission.
‘We’re off to get her first bra!’ she announced proudly, to admiring murmurs and covert glances at my chest.
Once she had ensured the entire town knew that I had boobs on the move, we headed for the Blue Bayou Boutique, where the true nightmare was about to unfold.
‘Christine!’ cried the saleswoman. ‘How can I help you today?’
Mum explained that I needed my first bra, and they both practically shat themselves with excitement at the prospect.
The saleswoman—whom we shall henceforth refer to as Delvene, because she was a Delvene if ever I saw one—had a massive bust. I’m fairly certain that she was made of 100 per cent bosom, because it was impossible to see beyond her ample and heaving chest. At least I would be dealing with an expert, I consoled myself.
‘Come on then,’ Delvene barked at me. ‘Give us a look.’
Did she seriously expect me to disrobe so she could gawk at my buds? I looked for some reassurance from my mother, but she was busy making sure everyone else in the shop knew why we were there.
Up until this point, I’d suffered a few humiliating experiences in my life. Getting stuck up a tree in front of a group of boys was pretty bad. Wetting my pants in the car while it was parked in the hot sun was not up there with my favourite recollections. Neither was performing ‘Memories’ from the musical Cats during the school talent quest. But this—this unfolding scenario—was the deadset winner.
Resigned to my fate, I removed my top and stood rigid as Delvene inspected my chest from all angles.
After several excruciatingly long minutes, she delivered her verdict. ‘I think she’s a 10A, Christine,’ she pronounced.
Delvene bustled off, thankfully remembering to pull the curtain back across the changing room. I continued to stand there, looking at posters of ample-busted ladies draped over yachts and office desks wearing only matching bras and panties. Was this what I was supposed to do? Who were these women? Why were they so happy with their boobs?
Eventually Delvene and my mum reappeared, clutching a selection of elastic bands with scraps of fabric attached to them. These, apparently, were my bras. And so began a new round of torture as Delvene helped me into one wispy garment after another. Once I was ‘fitted’, she and Mum would both look at me critically, until one would convince the other that this was not the right one. The offending bra would be discarded onto the reject pile, and I was wrangled into the next contender.
Eventually they agreed on a simple flesh-coloured bra that did up at the front. Flesh-coloured was preferable to white, I learned, because it didn’t show up the dirt as much. I looked at myself in the mirror, and then up at the glamazon lingerie models in the posters. I could see absolutely no correlation between me and them.
And that was how I acquired my first bra.
I didn’t ever wear it, of course. It just sat in my drawer in all its beige glory. Sometimes I would pull it out and show my friends if they happened to be over for a play. It wasn’t until I hit high school, where if you didn’t wear a bra you were a complete deadshit, that my bra ever saw the light of day.
If I had plenty of time to adjust to my first bra, periods, on the other hand, didn’t give you any time to prepare.
When I was a lot younger, I would look at the tampons on Mum’s dressing table and presume that they were rather large tablets. One day, I asked, ‘Mum, what are these?’ and she sat me down on her bed and gave it to me with both barrels.
When she was done, I literally staggered from the room, mortified, and swore to myself that that was never going to happen to me. How barbaric! How revolting! It all seemed so wrong, and even though Mum had been very thorough with her explanation, it still made no sense to me at all.
When, years later, Flo did actually come to town, Mum handed me a Modess and delivered a touching speech about how I was growing into a woman. To this very day, she still calls anything feminine hygiene-related a ‘Modess’. Clearly the Modess marketing department of the day did a cracker of a job.
I grew up in a fairly liberal household and I like to think I am a part of one now. But that’s not to say I didn’t suffer a few awkward moments when it came to explaining the facts of life to my son.
I was in the kitchen making dinner one day when Harry wandered in and demanded, totally out of the blue, ‘Tell me the truth, Mum: have you ever sexed Dad?’
Well, I just about cut my finger off.
I told him to go to the lounge room and I would come and talk to him in a minute. And then I had a minor panic attack. I mean, the kid was seven and had already begun with the hard questions. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I just brush it off, make up some bullshit story and hope the whole thing would go away?
No, I knew I had to address it, so I poured myself a stiff vodka and tonic and sat down on the couch with Harry to have ‘the talk’.
Big swig of vodka.
‘So, darling, what do you think sexing is?’
‘When you kiss and cuddle in bed,’ he replied.
‘Correct.’ I told him.
There was a silence. I could tell he was waiting for me to say something more.
I took a big swig of vodka. I looked at him. He looked at me. I wanted to die.
I started to explain about falling in love and having funny feelings in your tummy about someone. By this stage I had a pleasant little buzz going on and was talking in circles. I was confusing myself. So I ripped off the band-aid, so to speak.
I actually used my fingers to symbolise a vagina and a penis and did the jabbing motion, like we did as an offensive gesture when I was in high school.
Harry just stared at me blank-faced. So then I used my hands to make a little tadpole swimming towards an egg, explaining that they joined up to make a tiny baby that grew inside the mummy’s tummy until, after a long time, the baby was ready to come out.
‘Where does it come out?’ he enquired.
Big swig of vodka.
‘It comes out through the mummy’s vagina.’
‘How?’ he asked.
‘With much difficulty,’ I told him.
He seemed okay with it. Not once did he look like he wanted to run away. He said, ‘So you and Dad have done this twice then . . .’
So I went on to tell him that when people love each other, sometimes they show their love for each other by doing it . . . you know . . . like, for fun.
It was this part that he found the most offensive. ‘You do that for fun?’
By this stage I was onto my second vodka and I really wanted to say I did it because I was nagged to death by his father and really most of the time I would have preferred to watch Chelsea Lately over a bowl of Maggie Beer’s ice-cream, but the romantic in me told him that it was a very special thing to do. (But you could not do it until you were married and even then you had to wait until you were thirty otherwise you went to jail for life.)
The birds and the bees. Puberty. Sex education. I acquired my knowledge of these subjects through a mixture of resources. I can recall going to the library in primary school with my parents for a very special presentation by some woman from the Department of Education. She gave us each a copy of Where Did I Come From? and we all read it together.
But I also learnt a lot about sex from watching documentaries where buffalos would be going at it hammer and tongs. Also from the local dogs, who could be spotted humping here and there because dogs were free to roam the streets back then, and desexing wasn’t as widespread. I also learnt a lot about sex from Judy Blume, the author of such literary masterpieces as Forever, in which Katherine and Michael (and Michael’s penis Ralph) end up doing it on the bedro
om floor, before she dumps him for an older tennis instructor called Leo.
And that, my friends, is a real life lesson.
SMALL SCHOOL TALES
I asked writer Emily Toxward to share with me a few of her own memories about being a primary school kid in a small school. Here is her story.
I’m not the sharpest razor on the shelf, but what I lack in intelligence I make up for in sheer guts and determination, or in the words of three of my primary school teachers: ‘Emily tries hard’.
From their over-seventies lifestyle villas, Miss Yeoman, Mr Connor and Mrs Curtis would happily tell you that nothing came easy to me as a kid. My gangly and uncoordinated limbs meant I was always last picked when it was soccer time and my inability to lose gracefully meant I once got an F for sportsmanship after throwing a cricket bat at the bowler in anger. This sort of anti-social behaviour is common at primary school, but it sticks out more when you attend a country school with a roll of twelve.
Sure there were years when a new family moved to the district and the number grew to fifteen, but for most of my primary school years there were a dozen kids aged from five to twelve years. The local community fundraised to buy an old Bedford school bus and it drove on windy and dusty roads to pick my sisters and me up from a cobweb-filled bus stop a few kilometres from our sheep and cattle farm. You learnt to hold in your vomit because Mrs Kennedy would stop for no one or nothing.
There were two things I nailed at primary school: trying really hard and crying. Not surprisingly, these things often went hand-in-hand. I vividly recall my first day of school because I had just got a new blue Annie schoolbag and Mum packed the first of my 2132 Vegemite and lettuce sandwiches. (Yes, the lettuce did go soggy and I always threw it out.)
I was an excruciatingly shy and sensitive child with thin white-blonde hair, chicken legs and the incredible ability to literally cry when I dropped a hat. School wasn’t a foreign place to me because my sister was already there and I’d been to a few end-of-year prize-giving events where parents drank wine and then drove home with their kids sprawled out in the boot of the car in their sleeping bags.
