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?