Some of you might consider me disrespectful, arrogant, snobbish even. Considering how spoilt I was by my wealthy parents. Granted, I did turn into a bit of a teenage rebel during my pubescence.
Don’t we all at that age?
I put my juvenile delinquency down to the unfortunate incident with the old pervert in the orchard when I was pure, just turned thirteen. An ugly affair that left me scarred for life. A life crisis that’s still as vividly embedded in my mind as the scar across my belly. An emotional seizure which left me in a state of shock for years, vulnerable to bad influences at school such as sixth form sexual schoolgirl predators violating my body in the dorms, and my indulgence in soft drugs, shit mainly.
As if those weren’t enough of a cross to bear for a growing girl, I developed bad habits at home, like sitting on my mother’s kitchen worktop sipping stale tea in a floppy t-shirt, regulation school pants and knee-length socks. She was constantly telling me off for ‘spreading the virulent bacteria living in your butt, honey,’ as she put it, ‘all over our meal’, before she prepared her complex vegan salads for lunch in the naturally lit conservatory with my absent-minded genius of a father.
Desperate for some precious me time, I took to raiding the strictly out-of-bounds, derelict potting shed. Cavorting in the gloom in my black leather bomber jacket and jeans. Scrawling graffiti in basic French above the smashed glass door:
Sortie de Secours! Emergency Exit!
Spraying COCO on the flaking chipboard wall for the sheer hell of it, in black paint, always black. Smashing the rotten wooden potting bench to smithereens with a claw hammer in loving memory of its previous occupant: the delinquent, vagrant, alcoholic gardener who tried to rape me, once, but never again. My mother readily accepted my plea of self-defence. He had no surviving relatives. So, we buried his corpse in the manure pit, covering him with quicklime, where he could safely rot in Hell. And we never mentioned Tom’s cursed name again.
Things came to a head when I was expelled from Roedale’s for smoking pot and having illicit sex in the dorm with Melissa, my creative inspiration from Benenden near Rolvenden near Tenterden. At the tender age of sixteen, I’d found myself a beguiling girlfriend with a fascinating fetish for fifties crash helmets, scooters, mopeds, heavy metal motorbikes and customized red sidecars, that turned me on. It was after a particularly torrid bout of sex, while we were smoking rolled up joints of sinsemilla in bed, that I opened my heart to her about the gardener, the orchard, his attempted rape, the pregnant naked female shrine to girlhood, motherhood, adulthood, twinhood, and babies. I told her what the shrine meant to our family.
Melissa just kissed my breasts and suggested the idea of a health, fitness, leisure and sports centre centred on the worship of a woman’s body from girlhood through to motherhood, based on the shrine in the orchard. I fell asleep in my mechanic’s arms dreaming of how her dream could be brought to fruition.
The next day, we were summoned to see the surly headmistress, Miss Cane, in her wooden veneered walled study, and expelled from school – her harsh reprimand was arguably the happiest experience of my teenage life.
I would like to thank my mother for all her love and support, for understanding me at my worst.
Father and I never spoke face-to-face. By the time I came of age, he didn’t know what day it was.
