Free The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs by Dawn O'Porter Page B

insisted they made everything I wore look slutty (when actually, looking back, I realised, I just bought slutty clothes), for holding them hostage under thick material, never to see the light of day. Breasts, at any size or shape, are a miracle. They are the food with which we nourish our children, they are the collateral with which we negotiate with lovers, and come on, let’s face it, whatever they look like, you have to admit we got lucky, we could have had balls … imagine that.

The Wall and the Door
MAUREEN JOHNSON
    It was a very hot autumn when I first arrived at my Catholic girls’ school, aged thirteen, non-Catholic, clueless, never having faced a nun before in my life. Why I was sent there has never been made clear. This is the kind of thing that passes for a joke in my family. And during that very hot autumn, the order lost one sister a week for the first five weeks of school, as if on schedule. Every week, we were taken to the chapel to see them. We knelt and said prayers I did not know directly in front of the bodies of people I had never met in life. I’d only seen a few dead bodies in my life, so five was a lot. That they were all nuns was deeply disorienting. And for a while, it looked like this was how things were always going to be at our school. Someone was going to die every single week. But it wasn’t. It was just a bad five weeks, and it earned us the name the Freshmen of Death.
    I felt that this was a bad thing, in that distant way that you do when you hear about the death of someone you do not know. You do not want anyone to die. You do not want people to be sad. But when you do not know the deceased, it can be hard to truly engage in what is going on. The five deaths that greeted our arrival almost seemed to fit the strange new surroundings I was in.
    There were constant reminders that we were mortal, we were all going to die. There were prayers about it, songs about it, rituals to aid us, statues that depicted it. We said the Hail Mary every morning and before every class, imbedding the words ‘now and at the hour of our death’ into my brain. I said it in three different languages every day. There was a giant painting by the front door of our school showing nuns of our order bravely standing up to Nazis, and being mowed by machine guns and falling into a mass grave. That was how we greeted you. I had never seen so much death before. It was like I had arrived at Death Prep.
    But there was life as well. Potential. We were constantly being told that we were blossoming young women, young and fertile. Too many comparisons were made to flowers. Our bodies were the source of constant commentary. It started before we even got to school, at our mid-summer uniform fitting before freshman year. We were sized not according to our current shape and person, but to the blossoming young woman we would become.
    By this, I mean our chest size. See, we wore these tight vests. Well, they were tight in theory. They would be tight when the blossoming had happened. But as pre-freshmen, our petals still closed, it was hard to tell just how much lily there was to gild. And your vest had to last you for four years – you didn’t get a new uniform every year. Which is why they employed the Amazing Breast-Size Guessing Nun.
    The A.B.S.G.N. would take one look at us, spin us around, and then proclaim our fate in the form of our vest size. She would proclaim it VERY, VERY LOUDLY. ACROSS THE GYM. Because, of course, the sister taking down the sizes was sitting all the way across the room. Why? Why not! It made it more fun for everyone.
    â€˜SMALL!’ the A.B.S.G.N. would yell, as a tiny girl curled into a ball and prayed for someone to come and kick her away. ‘SHE’S FLAT! THIS ONE’S PRETTY MUCH DONE.’
    No breasts for her. But not so for the early-blossoming next girl, who was probably already wearing what my grandmother used to call an ‘over the shoulder boulder