17. I Need A Bra

I really need a bra. All my friends wear bras. I feel self-conscious dressing in the morning, pulling on my Marks and Spencer’s white vest. I glance sideways as Nicky hooks up her bra. “She’s not that big, she’s quite flat chested”, I think, comparing my breasts to hers. If she needs a bra then I definitely need one. I have to get one.

I’ll ask mummy for a bra when I write home on Sunday. I hope she says yes. I pray she says yes. I did ask her once, when I was at Marymount, because all my American friends were wearing ‘trainer bras’ and I so wanted to have one, but she dismissed the idea immediately. “Ne sois pas ridicule” she scoffed.

In my letter in make my case for a bra. I ask politely but I hope I've made a convincing case and that I haven't been too tentative.

I’ve been checking the pigeon holes every day for a letter or a parcel and finally today one arrived! It’s, medium sized, a soft parcel of brown paper, it's from France and I recognise my mother's writing straight away. I think, I hope, I know what it is.

I race to the dorm and rip it open, sitting on my bed.

This is what I'm hoping for...

This is what she sent me...

I sit and stare. I feel completely numb, frozen. I just sit there and stare and then I slowly get up and shove the bra into my drawer. I want to cry, but I don’t. I feel confused and heartbroken. Inside the parcel was a flesh coloured, lacy bra and a note from mummy. She says I can have one of her bras, it should fit fine.

Along with the bra, she also sent me a jumper of hers, a very smart, green designer jumper by Courrèges. This is clothing for a grown up, not for me. I don’t understand.

I so want to wear a bra but I’m too embarrassed. It looks nothing like my friends’ bras which are white and cotton and look made for girls not women. I don’t feel like a woman. I’m only 12. I don’t want a woman’s bra, I want a girls bra. But I also don’t want to wear a vest anymore. I don’t know what to do.

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My mother had no idea. Her mother died when she was six. She had been brought up by her father and governess. She was making up being a mother as she went along. And my father didn’t help, he wanted her to himself, he simply couldn’t cope with sharing her with me and my sister. Boarding school was ideal. While we were out of the way, she could take care of his every need. And our needs simply didn’t figure. There was no time to think about us and even if she had made time, I don’t think she would have known what to do.

It never occured to her that I would feel hurt or uncared for receiving an old bra of hers. She probably thought she was doing something nice, sharing her clothing with me. She simply didn’t know what it meant to be a young teenager in England in the early 80s. And as a result I constantly felt like a fish out of water, like I didn’t belong and everyone would see how odd and different my life was to theirs. I longed for the ordinariness of their lives as I imagined them. I didn't know then that we all felt different, that none of us had ordinary lives or easy relatoinships with our parents. We were all struggling, mostly silently in our own particular ways.

When my daughter was twelve or thirteen, had I done something like that, missed the mark completely, she would have let me know. She probably would have been quite gracious but unapologetic about it. “What were you thinking mum?!” But we were not brought up to question our elders or to disagree with them. We were not accustomed to telling them when they got it wrong. So I kept quiet and I wore the itchy, lacy bra, a size or two too big, until I went to choose some slightly more suitable ones with my mother in the holidays. I never did get the pretty, white cotton teen bra even then, just an ordinary flesh coloured bra made for audult women. "So much more practical for washing and invisible under any clothes" my mother said in her unsentimental way. I stayed ungratefully silent.

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