“It will happen”, my mother assured me, although I had not asked for reassurance. I was late developer. This was normal.

It didn’t happen. Secretly I was relieved. At the end of the childhood they spring onto you all sort of terrible secrets about adulthood. Yes, you grow bigger but your body changes. I was going to change; everybody changes.

Childhood was cruel in thousands of small ways; in adolescence the cruelty was focussed. The girls who looked like women, who had changed, filled the corridors. Where they walked they seemed more real than I could hope to be.

After PE the changing rooms smelt of laundry and mud and body spray. Changing my clothes on cold mornings I fumbled like a magician. School skirt over gym skirt, wriggle out of gym skirt pull up tights, school shirt under gym shirt and a windmill of shoulders until one was swapped for the other. Ta da!

My skin was an unacceptable country, unexplored.

The other girls with brand new bodies milled around unlearning shame.

I read magazines and took their suggestions for the things I should consider thinking about. I listened to music my mother didn’t understand and wore the clothes that my mother refused to buy for me. In my bedroom, watched by the unfocussed eyes of strange men torn from the magazines, I was my own canvas, applying and reapplying make-up that never quite looked right. Not yet.

One day I took the suggestion I should rebel and so I changed the colours I wore and bought some different CDs. This convinced some people. My mother was kind enough to pretend she didn’t understand this new phase either.

When it became obvious I was abnormal we visited a doctor. My mother sat in with me and answered on my behalf. We were told not to worry, to eat healthily, sleep well and to come back in a year if nothing had happened. Until I changed she worried that our body’s had not yet diverged; as long as I was a child, I was her child. She wanted a daughter who could understand.

I would often walk the dogs by the river. I would run and they would run after me and overtake me joyfully. Animal joy is kinetic. I watched the swans as they broke the surface of the water, arching their white wings wider than sails and stuttering into flight, running on water. Often they failed to lift off. The dogs went mad with barking. The swans closed ranks at the river’s edge, hissing with avian rage. At this time I carried a journal. I can’t stand to read it now.

Change is inevitable. At breakfast one morning I realised my skin felt tighter. I touched it lightly with my fingers and realised it was thickening.

A month or so later I was at a friend’s when I caught sight of myself in her hall mirror and realised my colour had faded. The change was happening. My mother was thrilled, “When you’re done we’ll have to buy you so many new clothes!”

My limbs felt stiffer. I woke up one day to find my eyelashes next to me on the pillow. My hair became more static, less soft and less subtle. Another morning I found my scalp had slipped off onto the floor.

“She’s so lucky”, I overheard my mother tell her friends the next day, “she gets the best of both worlds- real hair and the flexibility to go for all kinds of different looks if she gets bored of it. I took her to buy her first wig yesterday, not that she needs one yet her own hair still looks very fashionable”

“I had a cousin like that,” said one of the friends, “lucky cow. All the girls on my side have absolutely solid hair naturally and I think you’ve got to be quite alternative to carry that look off.”

“You couldn’t tell though” said my mother, looking her over critically, “I couldn’t tell.”

On the bus home from school I stopped being able to move my eyes, I hadn’t blinked for a few days but it came as a bit of a shock. My world had narrowed so suddenly. It frightened me that this might be the way grown-up women always saw, the way I would always see. Staring ahead, looking at nothing.

It had been surprisingly easy to get used to my new walk. Some girls, the girls on the hockey team and the ones who played netball, had jointed knees and elbows. But everyone knew what that normally meant. My legs moved a little at the hips,

I walked with a pincer movement. My mum’s friends told me I looked very elegant, they didn’t tell me that they were so jealous.

Eventually my body was smooth and weighed nothing. The boys knocked on our door and offered to carry me to the cinema or to the park.

‘Yes’ or ‘no’ sounded so similar through the sardonic red pout of my lips. The effect was better when I said nothing. It was difficult to hear me anyway.