I waited for what had happened to all the others to happen to me. I dreaded its coming, but wondered what it was like. One Saturday in summer I was sure it would come. My mother gave me a belt of pink elastic and a soft white pad; I put on extra pants — just in case. It was strange to see the bump showing through; strange to feel the secret between my legs, that rubbed when I sat down. (I think it must show — it doesn’t; I think I must look different — I don’t.) I went to see twenty cartoons with Carol, and as I ate my Eskimo Pie I brooded upon the thing I could not tell her. When I got home I went to the lavatory: it was still white. I ran out onto the lawn; I turned somersaults and waved my legs and climbed the apricot. I called out that I was not grownup, that I was not a young lady, that I was still me — something like Peter Pan, and could do all these things. (When it does come it is a feeling of sickness; a feeling of being dirtied — I wish I was a boy.)

And hairs so fine they looked like pencilled shadows came beneath my arms. And I was ashamed of my chest and wore a cardigan all the summer.

Grown-ups were no longer fathers and mothers. They were dirty and men and women. I stared at them in trams and saw them naked: ladies had breasts and rubber crotches; gentlemen had hair and parts like Tinker. (My mother and Nan and Reece are just as bad.)

Everything familiar became strange; I masqueraded as a child.

Every Saturday afternoon of my childhood, for as long as I could remember, I had gone to the pictures with Carol.

We queued before a lady cut off at the waist by a glass cage. We filed through a red plush foyer, down drab caramel passages, past winking exits and gents and ladies. We gave up our tickets; entered the Moorish temple — and rococo angels strained at silent trumpets, acanthus leaves and laurel writhed, masks and pipes of Pan danced together, velvet purred, rock-crystal sang. All was as it should be (the collector shreds his tickets at the door, the lovers cuddle in the balcony, the mothers eat their dandies in the lounge, the gangs wait with their spit-bombs in the front — the manager waits for pursuit with his torch). As velvet, then silk, then gauze rippled apart, and we stood in homage to the queen and the horse, I felt the snakeskin of school slip away. There was just the darkness and the hardness of the seat; Carol’s familiar odour and the dim shapes of other children staring at a screen.