Woman's Body: An Owner's Manual

A09 Puberty: Time of Onset

The rate of puberty varies with the season of the year – growth in height is fastest in spring, growth in weight in autumn.

My last summer without a bra, I spend on the Isle of Wight, in the woods. I stay out with my older brother and his friends each night after dark, running through the trees, chasing and ambushing each other. There is no one in shouting distance, and we make tunnels in the nettles, thrashing our way through with garden canes. We make guns out of sticks and play complicated games that involve hideouts and holding breath, kiss chases and deliberately stinging ourselves with nettles or stepping barefoot on thistles. School kids camp at the end of our wood and we colour in our faces with burnt cork and sneak up on them in the night, try to scare them with howls and hoots. There is something about being in the woods after dark that makes me feel strong and excellent. I am too old to believe that I can turn into a puma just by wishing it, but there’s the memory of that feeling – I know the ground so well that I can run with my eyes closed, I know where, and how high I have to jump over thorn bushes, where to duck the low branches, how to hide amongst the leaves and moss and brambles of the rooty ground. There’s a feral look to me that I admire in the small mirror in the caravan. Birds nest hair and grass stains, clothes that over the summer have stopped being my size and which I’ve had no reason to get out of for weeks.

One night I watch my brother’s friend – whom I’ve recently started mooning over – kiss a girl from the camp up against a tree with his charcoaled hand up her T-shirt. She has a ponytail on top of her head and bangles that slide up and down her wrists as she moves her hands over his back. If they get caught she might get sent back home. I throw a rock noisily into the bushes to try and make the supervisors come out.

My parents have parties in the woods with their friends who get red in the face and spread out like starfish on the grass, talking loudly. Sometimes they stay for weeks, washing in the nude in front of everyone, bellowing as my father pours eskis of cold water over them. One of their friends keeps stamping on my feet, because he thinks I find it funny. He kisses me on the lips in a wet way, and I don't find that funny either.

‘Men do that,’ my mother says when I complain to her. ‘They’re dickheads when they’re drunk. Tell him to fuck off next time, no one’ll mind.’ Later, I’m sat next to him at dinner and he tries to rub my crotch while we eat. I pinch the skin on the back of his hand till he stops and then I go out into the woods, and nobody minds.