Twelve Seconds Of Shame

The first time you get to be on the radio is an amazing experience. Even if, for me, it lasted all of 12 seconds. It was something of an inauspicious start.

I was in the last year at Mosspits Lane County Primary School which, I would learn, could only mean one thing - it was time for ‘the talk’. All the girls in 4B were taken out of class while the boys were left behind - in oh, so many ways.

We carried on working on a project to design a water irrigating shaduf made from six inches of green hosepipe and some balsa wood while the girls were given a whistle-stop tour of puberty. These were skills that I suspected, even then, would not be needed at any other time in my life (the shaduf making, not the awareness of puberty). So far, I’ve been proved right.

Forty minutes after they’d been led out, the girls trouped back into class. Carol Malley sat down next to me. For a minute, she said nothing. I desperately wanted to know what was going on and why the boys hadn’t been allowed to go. Eventually she leaned over and whispered:

“Do you know what periods are?”

“Nope.” I said, cluelessly, like Dumbo.

“Oh, you will do.”

She spilled the beans.

As I listened, my eyes grew wider and wider. I looked like a two week-old kitten staring out of the window for the first time and seeing the world.

Gulp.

Hats off to the school for teaching the girls everything they needed to know about menstruation. There was only one slight problem.

They didn’t explain that boys don’t have periods.

That night, I lay awake, occasionally turning the light on and checking under the covers, panicking.

I wasn’t the only one to be under this misapprehension and so, the next day, Mr Bates corrected the minor error immediately after we’d been out for playtime. My teacher could see I’d been a bit traumatised so called me to his desk.

“I’ve got a treat for you,” he said. “This afternoon there’s a reporter from Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart’s Radio 1 show coming to school. He wants to talk to you.”

“About periods?”

Surprisingly it wasn’t.

“ You told me your mother’s been to Russia. He wants to know about children whose parents have gone to foreign countries.”

Anything to keep me away from shaduf building was more than welcome.

Four of us sat in the staff room, it smelled of stale cigarettes and biscuits (most places did in the 1970s). The reporter placed his reel to reel tape recorder on the table, clicked a couple of buttons, blew into the microphone and poked it under my nose. With me was a girl called Wendy who would later become my first, very short-lived girlfriend (as evidenced by us holding hands once on a school camp to Colomendy in North Wales) and Russell Churney, my best friend, who went on to become a famous pianist and died far too early.

“So, when did your mum move to Russia?”

I paused, my mouth slightly open. This question raised an interesting problem - which my eleven year old mind had to formulate a response to quite quickly - because my mum hadn’t actually moved to Russia. She was sitting back home, waiting for me to knock on the door at the end of the school day. She’d gone to Moscow for three days with the rest of the class from her night school course. There had been a slight breakdown in communication.

I had two choices. I could explain to him that he’d got the wrong end of the stick. This would result in me being dropped from the piece and not appearing on the radio that weekend.

Or …

“Recently. Very recently,” I said honestly - although, if you’re being pedantic, it might be considered to be a slightly incomplete truth. The reporter leaned in close.

“How did that make you feel?”

“I missed her a lot at first.” The words came faster now as confidence grew. “But it’s easier now. She told me it was something she had to do.”

“Is she able to stay in touch with you?”

“Yes. I’ll be talking to her this evening.” I paused. “In lots of ways it’s like she’s always close to me.”

At this point I started to get a bit (over) confident.

“She says she might move to China soon …I think she might be a spy.”

Gilding a lily is one thing, talking complete bollocks is another and the reporter saw straight through me. He didn’t say anything - he didn’t have to. He smiled in a “screw you” sort of way and his body twisted towards Russell and Wendy. I was frozen out.

When the interview was broadcast that weekend I appeared in it for a grand total of twelve seconds. My classmates were on for a lot longer. I’d paid the price and learnt a valuable lesson. On the radio you can smell manure a mile off.