In praise of my breasts

I never had the kind of breasts that I could hoik up and squeeze together to form a pleasing cleavage.

My oldest friend once described my body shape as Maori, which I've relished ever since. 


When I was young, the thing was to be thin and that preoccupied most of my girlfriends, though most of them never achieved that aim, loving food too much and probably not being so convinced of the goal itself deep inside. Not enough to forgo the food they were so justified in loving; chocolate, cake, chips and all kinds of other calorific things.

Me, I got into the idea of abstinence. I learned to love the empty feeling in my belly. It felt triumphant, defiant. It possibly echoed the emptiness I felt deep within that part of ourselves we tend to label soul.

I'd seen alot of things on tv. War generally. The documentaries about concentration camps in the War  and news reports on the famine in Biafra in particular. I couldn't understand the spectral figures of the children walking on their sticks for legs. They looked like some conception of an alien to me and my heart hovered between broken and astonished at how we are sculpted by what we are allowed to consume and what we are denied.

I never wept. I never do at the things that affect me most. It goes too deep.

Like when my Mum kept watching the terrible disaster when the coal slag heap fell upon the little school in Aberfan. I watched in silence as the village kept vigil and brought the childrens' tiny bodies up so tenderly from under the rubble. My mother sobbed. It was probably the release she needed desperately from all the troubles she had endured herself as a child. 

I learned to fast and control my intake.

I learned to take tablets to give me diarrhoea if I wanted to get rid of things I felt I shouldn't have ingested. And they were many.

One day, dragging myself up a hill to my hovel of a bedsit squat, I felt as if I couldn't go on. I went to the doctor and I suppose he misdiagnosed me, for want of accurate information.

There were years ahead of me in which I would allow myself, if not to fully understand, then to come to some arrangement with myself in which, my Maori-like breasts would feel beautiful to me.

Our lives, the film and the colours it would be, 

from white to vivid technicolor and the whole palette

in-between.

Those days when the sky was a flat grey, 

no lights to seek out depth in pavement

or highlight the grains of variation in the red

and orange brick behind

the sharp edged privet hedges.

Our window looms,;

a black square as we push the gate open on it's tight spring. 

Only the faded pastels of the Hydrangea's dried out flower heads 

lend a gentle tone to soften the suburban chill

of a late November afternoon.