Wednesday 19 February 2014

Where babies come from


It was so simple. I thought that all girls automatically had tiny babies inside them from birth and it was only when you got married that they started to grow and then you actually laid them, like a hen laying eggs. The fact that this only happened when you had a husband was due to the same kind of magic that allowed Father Christmas to come down our chimney in spite of the fact that we didn't actually have a fireplace. I remember jumping up and down one day and saying to my mum, “I hope I'm not making my baby feel sick!”. I was only about seven or eight; just for a brief moment there my mum may well have felt a little nauseous herself. The 'getting married' bit was the trick, though - maybe it was something to do with the ring. Anyway, when I got married, probably to the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christopher, who had given me a clockwork helicopter for my sixth birthday, the baby would come out of my bottom and we'd all live happily ever after in one of those houses with the sticky-out windows that I'd seen on the way to Aunty Margaret's.

So it was all a bit of a shock when Elizabeth told me what really happened. Elizabeth was off school for a trip to the dentists that fateful day. It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays at 10 o'clock Mrs Williams took her class of 9-year-olds into the assembly hall whereupon she wheeled out the big television with wooden shutters on its tall stand and we spent the next half hour sitting on the floor cross-legged being educated and entertained, often by some rather excellent programme such as Merry Go Round. However, for some reason that Mrs Williams wouldn't explain, that Wednesday the routine was changed and we didn't get our usual telly session.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth, being a very good, studious, little girl, thought she'd watch it at home anyway before she went to the dentist. Her mum was upstairs cleaning the bathroom and left her daughter to it. If only she'd realised.

When Elizabeth and I sat together on the pudding stone at playtime the next day she was a different girl. She knew. She knew all about how babies were made... she'd seen it on Merry Go Round... and she couldn't wait to tell me. It was shocking. “The man puts his thing right inside the woman!” “But how? Where?” I was aghast. It was hard to imagine Christopher putting his thing... well... you get the idea.

By the time I got to secondary school, just turned 11, I felt I knew the basics, but I was surprised to discover it was complete news to some of my classmates. We had to watch a creaky, unimaginative film about The Facts Of Life, all very cold and anatomical, and one of the Bagwell twins fainted. I don't think she even knew about periods, poor thing.  But later in the year we got the gory childbirth film in our Biology lesson and with all the blood and guts and umbilical cords in that I nearly fainted too. It was even worse than having to look at the dissected pregnant rat (and I can still smell the formaldehyde from that particular traumatic event).

Then there were those conversations on the way home from school. Sarah T revealed what her biggest sister had told her she'd done with her boyfriend... that “she put his... you know... in her mouth!” We giggled uncontrollably, shocked, embarrassed and uncomprehending. Gradually we notched up a bit more knowledge, like when Tracy P found a load of torn out pages from Playboy and Mayfair strewn around on the footpath behind her house (how did they end up there?) She brought them in to school and we pored nervously over the naughty pictures, in disbelief, unable to compare those oddly pink bodies on the pages to our own not yet fully formed ones.. so much hair!...so much strange-looking flesh!...such huge nipples! These must be the kind of women who'd put their boyfriend's... you know... in their mouths!

I don't know what kids of that age know now, how much is taught or when, nor how much sense it makes to minds that may have already been exposed from infancy to the internet and Keith-ubiquitous-Lemon. There must be a fine line between a refreshing openness and too much too soon – but not having kids of my own I've swerved that particular challenge.

Elizabeth went on to be a midwife, by the way.  And by the age of ten Christopher and I were no longer talking, so I wanted to marry Simon, who had a bicycle with gears.


14 comments:

  1. Posts like this are why I still read and LOVE blogs, especially yours.

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  2. Never mind where babies come from, what the heck is a pudding stone?

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    1. Oh, I think you'd love a pudding stone! A great big lump of rock containing loads of different coloured pebbles and flints - perfect for sitting on, stroking, lying across, riding bareback and hiding behind when you're 9 years old. I just assumed every primary school had one!

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    2. Hm, we might have done but the main thing I remember was the giant wasp's nest in the tree that we had to avoid every summer. Why the school didn't just get rid of it, I don't know -- kids got stung every day!

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    3. Oh that's mean! Maybe it was part of some sort of postmodern curriculum?!
      I just looked up pudding stones and think maybe it was a regional thing - there's such a thing as 'Hertfordshire Puddingstone' and seeing as that was where I went to primary school perhaps it was a local quirk?

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  3. Superb.
    My mum told me she didn't know where babies came from until she went to work at the age of 14 and a work-mate let on. Amazing.
    Your bit about finding old porn mages really took me back. We used to live near an enormous paper mill and they had acres of 'stacks' where all old paper, books, magazines etc, were collected to be pulped. Anyway, many of these stacks contained 'nudie' mags and certainly stuff that had no doubt been banned and seized. So, we got much of our sex education by either raiding the stacks or just asking the blokes who worked there to give us a few good pages. You can imagine, our local streets were covered in the bloody things. It's a wonder we didn't all end up more warped than many of us are. 'Merry-Go-Round' doing sex ed? A step too far!

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    1. Thanks SB, amazing about your mum too! I don't know how my mum found out but I do know that it wasn't from her own mother, who apparently just told her she would need to have some towels handy on her wedding night (?!?)
      Like your tale of your early peeks at porn. I guess a lot of us pre-internet-age kids must have 'learned' stuff from those mags, however we came to find them! To be honest, at that age I thought those exposed bodies all looked rather grotesque. In retrospect, I'm glad they were just real! No silicon or surgical enhancements to try and live up to, just proper, natural, variously-shaped, hairy, women (and a few men too)!

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    2. I have story in a similarity vein to bears (though of course it didn't involve me looking at porno mags...perish the thought).
      When I was in the army we had a little curb store and bookstore on the barracks. Evidently, at some point, they had recieved a huge shipment of remaindered dirty books. I discovered this one night when I took a bag of trash to the dumpster. Just as I was about to toss my bag, a small hand clutching a wad of cover less magazines emerged, followed by a beaming triumphant equally small face. This kid was so ecstatic he could barely explain what was going on.

      As it was dark and no one else was around, I, of course, waited by the dumpster to make sure the lad got away safely...then returner to my room.

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    3. I can picture it perfectly, Erik. Like a kid let loose in a candy store, well... sort of....

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  4. Catching up on the backlog of your posts that I've not had as much time to peruse over as I used to...brilliant as always!!!

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    1. Ah thanks and it's always lovely to hear from you. I had a sudden spate of posting, but I'm short of time again myself for the moment... a few posts on AT to catch up on as well!

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  5. Yeah - I had an old bike of my Dad's the frame was from the 1940s - actually if I still had it it might be worth a bob or two now. It had straight handlebars - my Dad refusing to give me racing ones on the basis that "You need to learn to handle a bike properly before you get them" - it had an old in hub three speed gear system... I never got the girls :-(

    Kid of today... don't go there I'm sure o and a sex are on the primary curriculum hearing the things my wife says about the kids in here school these days. Frighteningly it is the availability of stuff without context that worries me I suppose

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    1. You had a bike with gears? I'm impressed ;-)

      Absolutely agree with your last para - 'without context' is exactly what worries me too.

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