Wombwell Hall & Womanhood

Back in the years that followed World War Two the Nit Nurse regularly visited St Botolph’s School in Northfleet, and very likely every other school in the area. It was a visit that mostly we looked forward to because it broke the day to day monotony of Primary School life. The only other school medical visit I can recall was made to Wombwell Hall in the first few weeks of term two, nineteen fifty five when I had just had my fifteenth birthday. It was definitely an event of some significance because we were warned about it in advance and a note went home with us during the preceding week upon which there was a space for our mothers to write down anything specific about us from a medical viewpoint. That information was to be returned to the office in advance of the visit. I was careful to make sure nothing was written about me by not delivering the note in the first place.

It might have simply been our particular year and not the entire school but we were to have eye and ear checks together with an assessment of our physical development to ensure that we were all progressing in an expected manner. I wasn’t concerned about the eye and ear checks but the assessment of our physical development certainly raised some apprehension and I wondered if we were all to undergo a test of some kind to prove we were normal. This was largely because I knew I wasn’t normal and my lack of normalcy was both mortifying and distressing. It wasn’t something that could be discussed easily with friends firstly because I didn’t really have any friends that I was close enough to and secondly because it was a fact so shockingly embarrassing that I was very fearful of being publicly ridiculed on account of it. And in order to avoid the horror of schoolgirl community shame I had already told a number of lies about it, some of them quite extensive. The fact of the matter was that at the great age of fifteen I was destined to continue life as a Late Onset Menstruator, a situation so shameful that even typing it now makes my arm pits tingle and my heart beat anxiously a little faster.

My absence of menstruation was definitely at odds with other aspects of my physical development and since my thirteenth birthday men on building sites had been yelling out to me that I had a Lovely Pair. You don’t need that at thirteen of course so it didn’t actually make me feel any better. Neither did classmates with minimal development themselves who assured me they were envious. Shirley, measuring us all amid the trees next to the hockey pitch, now a favourite lunchtime occupation, said mine were the biggest in Form 2SC and perhaps I should stop drinking school milk in case they exploded. We were not terribly well informed overall.

This was a time of a complete lack of sex education either at home or at school except a brief session or two called Human Biology but it was also a time when, somewhat strangely, girls seemed to share every aspect of growing up with each other and if they had nothing much to share, they made it up. Stories abounded of ten year olds in white dresses playing on the swings in Woodlands Park on summer days suddenly and profusely beginning to menstruate and having to rush home through throngs of curious Grammar School boys. For some odd reason there were always throngs of Grammar School boys ever watchful. The distraught girls were invariably comforted by caring older sisters or aunts and put to bed with Aspirin and hot water bottles to ease the physical pain of which there was always a great deal. They also had a stirring tale to share with friends. One by one over several years my schoolmates had each joined the ranks of Becoming Women, even those with no breast development whatsoever. Accordingly whenever the subject was discussed, which was often, I found myself adding to the tales of unbearable pelvic pain and being excused from team games.

You might well wonder why in the light of my well-constructed web of deceit the visit of a school Doctor or Nurse, or both, should concern me in the slightest but the fact was I suspected that they would know simply by looking at me that I was a physical oddity, an aberration like poor Auntie Queenie who my grandmother said was One of Them There Aphrodites and none of us should ever go into a toilet with her. My affliction was more than likely something hereditary like haemophilia and the apprehension I now felt definitely had something to do with the respect generally afforded the medical profession at that time, a group of special beings with special powers.

As it happened, when the much dreaded day arrived, despite the combined abilities of the attending doctor who was much younger than any of us expected, and the rather elderly nurse who most of the time seemed to be directing rather than assisting him, it turned out that my lack of growth towards Real Womanhood was not as glaringly obvious as I had suspected. Neither of them seemed to suspect for a moment that I was in any way abnormal.

The Headmistress’s study had been turned into a consulting room for the duration of the examinations and she shared her desk with the nurse whilst the young doctor sat uneasily on a folding chair in the centre of the room. On another chair beside him was a pile of pink pamphlets with the title Growing Towards Womanhood. As we entered in our underwear Miss Fuller announced us as if we were attending some kind of formal event, by full name then adding our exact age. I was Jean Bernadette Hendy – 15 years and nearly 2 weeks.

My sight and hearing was briefly checked together with my teeth. I was measured and weighed. The nurse simply filled in a vast chart in front of her. The young doctor did not look at me at any stage but most especially when he noted I had `Well-developed breasts’. Oh the humiliation of that announcement, particularly for a fifteen year old who would have been quite incapable of ordering Chicken Breast at Chicken Inn had I ever been fortunate enough to be taken there. Breast was a word firmly absent from my vocabulary. Both the nurse and Miss Fuller looked up, alerted by the word, the latter advising me to stand up straight, there was no need to hunch my shoulders. How I despised her with her straight back, in her silk blouse with no obvious mammary development whatsoever.

Alert for a possible abnormality to lighten the moment the nurse then wanted to know if my periods were regular and if I experienced any undue pain at which I froze and said nothing at all. Miss Fuller repeated the question slowly and in a voice that indicated she was getting just a little bit irritated but I was still mute, immobile, quite unable to give any reply. The silence that followed seemed endless, all eyes were upon me and I could hear my heart thumping loudly. At last the nurse asked in a slightly more gentle voice if my periods had actually started yet and then I was able to shake my head. She rose from her chair and came over to where I stood, pulling my voluminous forest green winceyette knickers down enough to peer at my private parts and returned to her chair with an obvious waning of interest. She wrote a sentence or two before instructing the doctor that he did not need to give me one of the pink pamphlets as they were only to be given to girls who were already menstruating. Cheeks burning, ears thumping I was then dismissed.

I blame Jill Butler for what happened next, the further and more extensive mortification back in the Science Block as we waited for our usual post morning break Monday class of Human Biology to begin. There was a frisson of anticipation in the room because not only was Miss Norman a forthright and entertaining teacher, we would be discussing The Development of the Human Embryo. Jill Butler, from Burnt Oak Terrace in Gillingham and full of confidence since she became a prefect wanted to know why I had not been given a pink pamphlet like everyone else. A number of students now sat idly studying them as they waited. I said she should mind her own business because she didn’t need to know everything about everybody.

But she was not a girl who gave up easily and sensing a victim she added that at her cousin Brenda’s school they had been handed to everyone who had started their periods – the only girls who missed out were those who were in no danger of becoming women any time soon. Surely this must mean that I also fell into that category? Foolishly, as was my habit, I immediately restorted to lying. Why break the habit of a lifetime? Lowering my voice and asking her not to spread the information far and wide I told her it was because I only had one ovary. That I thought might shock and silence her but Jill was unstoppable and to my horror she rushed towards the chalk board and wrote in capital letters JEAN HENDY HAS ONLY GOT ONE!

And of course everyone wanted to know what she meant and there was no use hissing at her that I had believed she could be trusted with sensitive information and that only having one while everyone else had two might well mean a number of unpleasant medical events were in store for me. The truth of the matter was that Jill quite sensibly did not believe me and was utterly determined to continue the humiliation with clever taunts including comments that she would have thought somebody who wore a size 36 DD bra as she knew I did would have started at eight or nine and not still be still waiting for Womanhood at fifteen! By the time Miss Norman arrived, only two minutes late for class, most of the remaining class members were dutifully sniggering, and some were laughing uproariously.

If she had left it at that I might even have re-ignited our quasi friendship at some later stage but being Jill, and from her lofty Prefect perch she was quite unable to let the topic lie and halfway through the Human Biology class when we were drawing embryos and Miss Norman was hovering in our row offering help and advice, she queried in her piercing voice with its stage-like natural projection if it was abnormal for a girl to be born with only one ovary. Miss Norman said she had never really come across it and thought it must indeed be quite unusual.

That lunchtime Jill and I were on plate duty together and I took the opportunity to tearfully tell her that I would never, ever trust her with confidential information again, that she was totally unreliable. She said she’d rather be unreliable than a complete weirdo like me with tits like mine. She said it was called Abnormal Breast Development.