Free Being a Girl by Chloë Thurlow Page B

stretching its wings and taking to the air for the first time, you are conscious quite suddenly of your girl power and you keep that power until your virginity has gone.
    But then what happens? Do you become powerless? Or do you acquire a different sort of power?
    I still wasn’t entirely sure. Most girls lose their virginity at fifteen or sixteen in the summer holidays with the best friend of their brother in the garden, or on the living room sofa while parents are out at the theatre or at one of those irksome dinner parties my parents attend with dreary regularity and inflict on our own dining room when Daddy’s home from his important work in Brussels.
    That was the usual scenario with girls at Saint Sebastian’s and those girls would appear in September with the braces removed from their teeth and alook of inner knowledge in their glossy eyes. They gazed dreamily out of the window, tossing their hair like startled ponies when the nuns in the classroom raised their voices to demand attention. I always had mixed feelings towards those girls, envy and superiority, and tried to imagine what it is like
doing it
, something, of course, you can’t imagine, as baby birds can’t imagine what it is to fly until they are shoved from the nest.
    They say that girls at state schools are losing their virginities at thirteen and fourteen and half of them are pregnant before they even do their GCSEs. We loved reading about the underclass chavs in the tabloids left behind by the maintenance staff and gasped with wonder at the wayward morals the journalists described.
New Council Flat Given To 14 Year Old Girl With Twins!
Who’s Going To Pay? Disgusting!!! Bring Back The Birch!!!
    Yes please.
    But it’s true, though. I have seen with my own eyes girls pushing buggies who surely remember having been pushed in buggies just a few years before. From childhood to motherhood without passing GO . Mummy blames television and the fashion industry, television for its overt sex (and that’s something she does know about!) and the fashion industry for dressing little girls still sucking dummies as starlets and models. Instead of ribbons and bows now it’s chains and leather. By the time they take the dummies out of their mouths they are ready for the first cigarette and, as we were warned at Old Basher’s, one thing leads to another.
    If you were caught creeping into another girl’s bed in the dorm for a kiss and a cuddle the nuns would turn a blind eye, unless they were perverts, but Godhelp the girl caught puffing on a fag; one hundred laps of the top field, letters home to parents, an interview with Father McMurphy, the parish priest, with his slobbering lips and strange eyes: blue eyes that seemed to hover in a red sunset, the result, I imagine, of too much communion wine. Still, he didn’t smoke, and the girls caught smoking redeemed themselves returning from their marathon wet with sweat and chanting a few Hail Mary’s while Father McMurphy stroked their skinny knees.
    Now here’s something that I have been thinking about for a long time: back in Jesus’s day, cigarettes hadn’t been invented. There is absolutely no reference to tobacco in the Bible. So who decided smoking was a sin?
    Anyway, I was not one of those girls with the new haircut and a twinkle in the 4th form and can only attribute this to the fact that I have no brothers, no male cousins and the Polish gardener clearly prefers older women. Perhaps being far from home he misses his mother?
    During the long drought in my sexual growth, I had developed a romantic, 18th-century attitude to virginity. I was Emily Brontë drooling over Heath-cliff; a Capulet chained to a Montague; Isolde burning with desire for Tristan; Honey Bunny with big eyes for Pumpkin in
Pulp Fiction
. Virginity was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the Holy Grail, the answer to the riddle in
The Da Vinci Code
, something you wanted to share