Growing up
I have been asked to write something about my experience of growing up. There are those who will tell you I never did, and I can’t argue with that. After all, can a fully adult man sit at his computer flying a fake aircraft? Consider.
At the age of six or thereabout I happened to see my father handing over his wages to my mother and for the first time I saw real life. He drove London Underground trains not because he liked driving trains but in order to keep us alive.
Any remark or picture remotely connected with sex or the related regions of the body was out of bounds at home. All was unexplained and came only in scrappy hints and unreliable guesses of school chums. Ignorance of how it all worked caused bewilderment and embarrassment. My single most shattering revelation as a young child is now reduced to a comic memory. It comes later.
There were so many little hints. In the quick scanning of my older brother’s magazine, tucked not quite carefully enough under his mattress, I discovered what a woman’s body looked like.
The ultimate signal that adolescence had arrived came to me as a shock. For weeks afterwards I thought I was suffering from some unspeakable disease. In the local Public Library one day I discovered a book that gave me the facts. Quite possibly I ran out of the place crying Yippee.
School ended at fourteen and, like all other 14-year-olds, I was allowed to wear long trousers. Knee-length shorts were thrown away.
I became an apprenticed mechanical engineer. A curiously satisfying incident gave me my first actual feeling of becoming adult. I cycled home at the end of my first week with the engineering company, walked into the kitchen and handed my mother my first earnings.
There. I was now a man. I was doing exactly what my father did. I was helping to feed us all.
A real girlfriend materialised. Girls had already intrigued me while I was at school; organised events like the annual Hertfordshire Schools Singing Championship meant that we occasionally mingled with girls in their crisp summer uniform of pleated skirts and pastel shirts and ties, their shirtfronts in many cases curiously and pleasingly urged outwards in a way that stirred me deeply; it was delightful.
Then I came to know and actually to speak to girls, and excitement grew. But the tightrope-walking experience of having an actual, a real and publicly-recognised girlfriend, was, I suppose, the ultimate declaration of adulthood. It came when I was just into my twenties. I had little idea of how one should behave beyond being nice. Polite, generous and nice. But, yes, I really was a man at last. I knew all there was to know about life. Oh, yes.
I suppose I felt much the same one morning at the age of nine. I had been taken by two girls, one a year older than I, the other a year younger, down to the little fishing-port beach in Cornwall early one holiday morning. They had told me, with immense excitement, that they wanted to show me something. I wondered about this. Lobsters? Buried treasure behind the rocks?
Their parents and my own were probably still asleep. We had their blanket permission to run around the village and beach in the mornings, so this was all aboveboard.
They led me round the beach into a very small cave, our cave; barely a cave, in fact, more a dent in the cliff face. But it was our cave.
They told me to sit down and watch. I watched, dazed, as they peed in unison into the sand. When their little demonstration was over I wanted to shout for delight. The thing that had puzzled me for ages about girls was explained at last. I knew how girls do it! I knew! I knew! I could tell the boys!
I was ready for my breakfast.
They were not. ‘Wait!’ said the older girl, tidying her dress and sitting down beside her sister. ‘Now, show us how boys do it.'
Mercifully, the rest is a blank.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
