The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs

by Dawn O'Porter

  The A.B.S.G.N. would take one look at us, spin us around, and then proclaim our fate in the form of our vest size. She would proclaim it VERY, VERY LOUDLY. ACROSS THE GYM. Because, of course, the sister taking down the sizes was sitting all the way across the room. Why? Why not! It made it more fun for everyone.

  ‘SMALL!’ the A.B.S.G.N. would yell, as a tiny girl curled into a ball and prayed for someone to come and kick her away. ‘SHE’S FLAT! THIS ONE’S PRETTY MUCH DONE.’

  No breasts for her. But not so for the early-blossoming next girl, who was probably already wearing what my grandmother used to call an ‘over the shoulder boulder holder’ and was probably very aware of it. And now, thanks to the A.B.S.G.N., so was everyone else. Including my dad, who had taken me for my fitting – probably expecting, as most sane people would have, that it would be done in a room somewhere, privately. The flowers may be delicate, but the gardeners rarely are.

  Over the four years, we were expected to fill that vest. It wasn’t like they would kick us out of school if we didn’t – it was a silent expectation. The mountains would come to Mohammed (or Mary – Catholic school, after all). But once they were there, the school had very conflicted feelings about them. Cover them! Deal with them, girls, they’ve arrived! They were there, like some invaders from another planet we’ve always been grimly expecting.

  I had to read the Bible cover to cover in school too, which contained passages such as this one, from the wise Solomon and his provocative Canticles – which I felt very well summarized our school’s position as well:

  We have a little sister

  who as yet has no breasts.

  What shall we do with our sister

  When she is asked in marriage?

  If she is a wall,

  We shall build on it a silver parapet;

  If she is a door,

  We shall bar it with a plank of cedarwood …

  I was one of those girls who never thought about the boob question much. I never really cared what size they were. I just shoved them into a bra in the morning and forgot about them. This, I suppose, is a luxury. Some people have massive ones that hurt their backs or keep them from seeing their shoes. Others feels inadequate. Mine were … enough? Basically there? I was much too busy trying to shred my indestructible polyester uniform and trying to understand the mysteries of Catholicism to care much about them. I had, in my opinion, Bigger Problems.

  But I did notice that some people did care a lot, and I never quite grasped why. Why the attraction and shame and terror and pride. So much expectation and fuss over a few pounds (or ounces) of floppy meat and milk bag, as I would have sexily described them. And as an adult woman, I am excited to report I have never figured it out. I’m excited to write for a book about boobs, because it actually made me stop and wonder about the wonder.

  And sure, the boobs are about as literal a symbol of life-giving power as you could hope to find. And the mixed range of emotions – lust, disgust, practical acceptance, comfort, annoyance – that the funbags contain within are certainly impressive. But in me, there is still an angry teenager in polyester who wants the freedom to take her shirt off in public, yet doesn’t want the bother of dealing with the attention of taking her shirt off in public … who wants not to care about boobs. I’ll get them mamogrammed and put them in a holder if I feel like it and feed a baby, but at the end of the day they are mine to ignore in favor of more interesting body parts. Like the hand. Or the head. Or the poor, undervalued spleen.

  Perhaps the Amazing Breast-Size Guessing Nun actually gave me this gift of general apathy toward the entire subject, and for it, I thank her. For I am a field, and not a tower or a wall or a door. So are we all. And our flowers come in many sizes.

  ALEX JONES

  I used to be as flat as a pancake. While all the other girls secretly loved seeing the vague outline of their first bra through their blue school shirts, I was still sporting an M&S thermal vest. It was hell, and every night, without fail, I’d pray that I’d wake up with enough boobs to fill even an AA cup! Things hit an all-time low in Year Nine when I took to wearing a very stretchy elastic around my back so that there was something there that the boys could twang! Needless to say the only twang I felt was searing pain, having endured that tight elastic for seven long hours. In a nutshell, I was a violin-playing, ‘boobless’ geek. While some of the more ‘developed’ girls in Year Nine were complaining of sore boobs after netball practice (although, clearly exaggerating) I was only concerned with whipping my age 11–14 vest on and off quick enough in the changing rooms so that nobody would see my childlike body.

  My boobs were late, as were my periods. I was stuck in perpetual girlhood waiting for life to begin. Then it happened. One beautiful morning at the end of June, circa 1994, a week or two after our GCSEs, I woke up and there they were. Two wonderful, fully grown breasts. I was officially a woman. Along came a well-needed dose of confidence and a posture change. There they were, two new friends who I’d waited so long for. And they grew and grew and grew. It was like the biggest ‘boob explosion’ of all time. I was finally blessed with a lovely pair of 30Es that I’ve treasured and loved dearly ever since. These days, they’re not quite as pert as they once were, but we are working together to resist the pull of gravity. They’re wrapped in a supportive sports bra during exercise, moisturised on a daily basis to try and ward off any stretch marks and ensconced comfortably in pretty underwear on my more organised days. They were a long time coming, but I’ve loved them every day since they arrived. They signalled becoming a woman and together, we have had a pretty exciting journey.

  MARIAN KEYES

  Years later, when I was all grown up, a friend told me that when she was a teenager she used to stuff her bra with tissues and I was both cheered and a bit miserable. At least someone else had been at it – but tissues! What difference would tissues make? Me? I had a pair of socks. In each cup.

  Oh, it was terrible to be a flat-chested teenager!

  Every teenage girl thinks their chest is too small (except for those few who fear theirs is too big) but mine really was non-existent. I looked like Iggy Pop. (See the cover of Nude and Rude.)

  At fourteen I was full of yearning and longing and I was desperate for boys to fancy me. Breasts are very very powerful creatures, perhaps the most powerful things in the universe, and I had none. Also I felt my bum and thighs were way too big (they weren’t) and I needed a proper chest to balance them out. I was all wrong.

  Magazines urged me to do the pencil test – if you can hold a pencil between your breast and your ribcage, then it’s time for a bra. I’d no idea what they meant. My boobs were like bee-stings. All the same, I found a pencil and gave it a go and watched the pencil fall to the floor. I tried again. And again. And eventually concluded there must be something wrong with the pencil.

  If I’d been allowed to have a breast enlargement when I was sixteen, I’d probably have gone entirely overboard and done a Jordan on it. I’d have got them so big that I’d never have stood up straight again. But it was Ireland and it was 1980 and there was no such thing as breast augmentation back then. There weren’t even padded bras.

  So anyway, socks. Socks became my friends. Socks gave me the appearance of a chest. But it meant that I couldn’t let anyone (read, boys) get too close.

  When I landed a proper boyfriend things got awkward. He was keen to ‘proceed’ with matters and I was aware that there was a marked discrepancy between the boobs I had on view to the outside world and the boobs that were really there. I had to sit him down and say, in a serious talk sort of way, ‘I have something to tell you.’ I broke the dreadful news and I was mortified – but he wasn’t a bit surprised. He’d known all along. Apparently socks don’t have much bounce in them and it seemed I’d been a little delusional.

  I knocked off the socks.

  But still my boobs didn’t grow. I came to the end of my teens and there was still no sign of them. And on into my twenties and still they stayed away.
People told me I was a late developer, but I tried to make my peace with the fact that I’d be flat-chested forever.

  Now and again I’d read a shock story about how every woman should get her chest measured because ninety-nine per cent of us don’t wear the right bra size. Well I do, I thought gloomily. I was 32AA. We were all agreed on it. In fact I was afraid to be measured in case I transpired to be actually smaller than 32AA.

  A well-meaning type told me how lucky I was to be flat-chested because when I got older I wouldn’t have them swinging around my waist. I cannot tell you how little comfort this was to me at twenty-one.

  Occasionally I’d read about girls who’d had to have operations to have their knockers reduced for health reasons, back pain and suchlike, and I’d be baffled – the ingratitude! Who cared about agony? I’d have been delighted with that sort of agony! Or those girls who complained that due to the size of their knockers, men only ever spoke to their chests, that they were objectified. Frankly, I’d have been delighted to be objectified!

  But despite my abnormal flatchestedness, I did have boyfriends and eventually I even got married. In my early thirties suddenly I had a few quid and I could have afforded to have a breast enlargement and to my surprise I decided that actually I couldn’t be bothered – I was fine as I was.

  Then guess what happened – it turned out that I really was a late developer. Around the age of thirty-four, I suddenly grew boobs. I’m now a 36B. Okay, so I’m not Jordan, but would I want to be?

  ANNIE MAC

  Boobs, breasts, jugs, norks, mammary glands, whatever you called them, they were not welcome in my life. I spent my childhood years as a bona fide tomboy. I could climb all the trees down the green in my housing estate, I rolled with an all-boy skate crew, ollying my way up kerbs on my brother’s old fibreglass skateboard, I played up front on the school football team, the only girl dribbling around the knobbly knees of a pitch full of pre-pubescent boys. I never dreamt of getting married, I never collected Barbie dolls, I was going to be a marine biologist or a set designer for the theatre when I grew up. Womanhood was an enigma, something I knew was inevitable but still very much a faraway mystery that would be solved YEARS down the line. Not until Tracey O’Connor took me into a toilet cubicle at lunchtime in 6th class and told me she had her period did the reality of impending puberty come crashing down on my happily oblivious existence. It was all hushed tones, talk of tampons and bleeding. Ominous stuff. Then we had the sex education class in school and I looked on, confounded, struggling to equate my body with the biological model of a cervix that was in front of me. I chose to ignore it all … until I came home from school one day to find my mother waiting for me in the kitchen with a book explaining sex. I burst out crying and ran out of the room. That’s how I felt about sex at eleven. Two words. Not Ready.

  The boobs came around the age of fourteen. There was the purchase of sports bras, worn as social armour, as a sign to say, ‘Look! I’m grown up!’ rather than out of any necessity. There was nothing there to support. Eventually, when my breasts started to grow, they grew lopsided. My left breast was noticeably bigger than my right. There were many traumatic hours stood in front of the mirror with my hands above my head, desperately willing my right breast to grow more. Oh what a turbulent and heightened time those early teens are, with everything growing out and up. I thought I was the only person in the world going through all this profound confusion; I was going to have lopsided breasts for the rest of my life!

  My bathroom pleas were granted and my breasts finally balanced out. As the school years edged by and my skirt length edged up, they felt the crude groping hand movements of my various boyfriends. With a sex life came a pale pink box with the word ‘Celeste’ written across the front in delicate lilac letters. The contraceptive pill resulted in inexplicable mood swings. In tandem with the tears and turmoil there was the rapid and rather alarming swell of my breasts. A whole cup size in a matter of weeks! I went on and off the pill throughout my twenties and my breasts ballooned in and out, inflating and deflating in direct correlation to my sexual experiences.

  Mid-twenties, a serious relationship and my first attempt at cohabitation meant routine and regular exercise for the first time in my life. I lost all my puppy fat and became a streamlined version of my previous pot-bellied self. My breasts shrank and have remained a very normal 34C, until now. Now, my body has changed wholly and completely. A blue cross on a white stick five months ago means I have become a vehicle. A tiny wriggly thing, fists clenched, eyes squeezed shut, is squirming in my uterus. I can feel it kicking. My belly is stretched and taut, my breasts swollen into huge fleshy pendulous receptacles, and my mind boggles with the miracle of my physiology. They are going to feed my baby. My own breasts are going to feed my baby. It is yet another chapter for them and me to get through. When I write it all down, they tell my story very well.

  Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others

  SARRA MANNING

  It was meant to be a summer full of boys. The ones who worked at the funfair on the pier, their tans deepening as the weather got hotter and they took off their T-shirts to spin squealing, sunburnt kids on the Waltzers. The packs of guys down for the weekend to our dreary little seaside town, who wanted to steal kisses behind the amusement arcade. The boys from school who’d suddenly got taller and fitter and learned how to look at you as if you were the only girl in the world.

  Which was why me and Jules had got summer jobs at the ice-cream parlour on the pier. Before my dad left we used to spend two weeks in Magaluf so my parents could hurl insults at each other in a Mediterranean setting. But now money was tight and if I had to spend summer at home then I needed to be where the boy action was. And when we turned up the first day in our matching white short shorts, the owner, Big Don, increased our pay to £5.50 an hour and all the sprinkles we could eat.

  Yeah, it was going to be the best summer ever. And then three things fucked it completely and utterly up. Jules got appendicitis and was rushed to hospital. Her parents were so relieved that she didn’t die that they took her off to Fuente Vera to convalesce. And Jules asked Louise to go with her because I’d insisted her stomach pain was trapped wind. Also I look way better in a bikini than her.

  Then it started to rain and never stopped. The skies were permanently dark and the sea was an angry, bubbling grey cauldron. Big Don wasn’t too bothered that his only customers were geriatrics making a small vanilla cone last an hour while they waited for the rain to die down to a light drizzle, but I was devastated at the lack of cute boys coming in for a Cornetto.

  Then the summer went from sucking to officially sucking like no summer had ever sucked before. Because one morning there was Rosie cowering under the parlour’s jaunty awning when I arrived to open up.

  ‘Oh, hi, I’m Rosie,’ she whispered so quietly I could barely hear her over the relentless drip-drip of the rain.

  ‘Cath,’ I said, giving the door a hard shove because it tended to stick. She was looking at me funny because we’d been at junior school together, but Rosie had gone on to the posh girls’ school and she was wearing mum jeans and it seemed easier to pretend that I didn’t know her.

  But she was still the same quiet Rosie who crept round the edges. She looked around the ice-cream parlour nervously, as if she expected the metal scoops to spring to life and start attacking her. I opened the store cupboard and grabbed a handful of yellow cotton.

  ‘Here, put this on,’ I ordered. ‘Loo’s over there.’

  Rosie reached out to catch her regulation ‘I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream’ T-shirt, and I realised that she had changed. I mean, she was still small and round and her messy, mousy hair still obscured her pink cheeks, but Rosie had grown up. Or at least her breasts had. They were huge. And when she emerged from the bathroom in the figure-hugging T-shirt, her tits entered the room half an hour before she did. Large breasts were wasted on a girl like Rosie.

  ‘It’s a little bit tight,’ she bleated forlorn
ly, staring down at her chest in dismay.

  ‘Yeah, sucks to be you.’ She’d bogarted all the breastage so no way was she getting any sympathy from me. Then I launched into her orientation. ‘It’s pretty easy to figure out, apart from when someone wants to build their own sundae,’ I finished. Rosie nodded and waited at the counter eagerly like we were about to be besieged by hungry customers.

  Surprisingly we settled into a comfortable routine over the next few days. I’d serve if a hot guy came in but the pickings were pretty slim and I always got the mint choc chip and the pistachio mixed up. Rosie had way more patience at dealing with people and when it wasn’t raining, she actually volunteered to hand out flyers because she was a loser.

  But mostly I sat reading magazines and Rosie sat reading books. Proper books with tiny letters and fugly paintings on the front of girls who looked all swirly and watery.

  We didn’t talk at all. Until the day the guy who worked on the face-painting booth came in for a sundae. I rushed to serve him because he was under fifty and passably fit apart from the whole geek chic thing with his hipster specs and Jack Purcells and, OMG, a cardigan, but Rosie was already brandishing one of the scoops purposefully.

  I watched in amazement as he took the Build Your Own Sundae promotion to scary places that it was never meant to go. Chocolate ice cream, double chocolate ice cream, chocolate fudge ice cream with chocolate sauce and a Flake was against all laws of God and WeightWatchers.

  ‘I saw you handing out flyers this morning,’ he remarked to Rosie, who blushed more furiously than usual. Boys probably didn’t talk to her that much, except to comment on her mammoth appendages. ‘I could take some for the face-painting booth if you wanted.’