The bra is a training bra (training for what?) from Mary Quant - two shivery triangles of pink stocking material on a stretchy band with a clip at the back. Putting it on makes me feel odd and grown-up and, I hope, makes my sisters jealous. Every morning, when I do it up in front and swivel it round, I feel like a real lady with a real life ahead of her. It takes 18 long months before my mum finally concedes that I might need a bra, and by then my breasts are standing up under my T-shirt in a most unsettling way. There's nothing silly or strange about Cinderella's or my mum's breasts.
If you're a beautiful lady, it makes total sense to have something soft and rounded there. Maybe I think I'll wake up next morning with a Cinderella d?lletage, but I don't. "Oh look!" shriek my younger sisters, still in the water, half laughing, half disgusted. "Her nipples have gone wobbly! She's getting bosoms!" I stop jumping It's a big moment - sudden, embarrassing, exciting It marks me out. I know I'll never live it down; that from now on, I'm different. I know that tentative, quivery wobble - barely discernible but undeniably there - is only the beginning. I'm going to that smelly, rude and unknown place where grown-ups go Blood, sweat and hairs in strange places will surely follow My sisters and I know all about bosoms.
We know they are something ladies have - strange, funny appendages to be shrieked at and to run away from. Bosoms are fat and droopy, perky and sexy or maybe all of those things. A joke on a postcard, a round circle with a naughty dot in the middle Bosoms are always chasing Benny Hill around on television Daddy likes Benny Hill and he likes bosoms. He has magazines upstairs with pictures of the biggest, barest bosoms you've ever seen.