adolescence

Revisiting

~ Paula Harmon ~ 6 Comments

Last week I met a friend in the town where we first met as students. Apart from attending an open day with my children once, I hadn’t returned in decades.

Walking up from the station, I expected to be filled with hiraeth, an untranslatable Welsh word which, like the Portuguese Saudade, broadly means a kind of melancholy nostalgia.

As a student I made the mile and a half walk from station to college many times. It was often very late at night and, not having money for a taxi, I would walk very fast through town and across the college fields hoping to avoid any ne’er do wells. (My parents never knew and I’m not sure I’ve ever told them.)

Despite my anticipation however, I walked up that once familiar street and felt no hiraeth whatsoever.

I passed the place where I think I went to for my twenty-first birthday meal with my college friends. It was an Italian restaurant then. It’s a music venue now. There’s something incongruous about this half-timbered, wattle-and-daub building which was then draped with artificial grapes and is now advertising open mic opportunities.

Temptation in the form of bookshops, antique shops and independent shops full of pretty things slowed me down. Then… was that where my dentist was? Was that building once my hairdresser’s? Surely that was once Woolworths? And wasn’t that once the Athena shop where I used to buy posters for my bedroom wall?

Quite possibly I was wrong about them all. It didn’t really matter.

Apart from my former bank, the only things I recognised were things that have been there for centuries without materially changing: the Cathedral and the Cross.

I walked a little further and met my friend rushing the other way. We hadn’t met in the flesh since before Covid so there was a risk we wouldn’t recognise each other, but we did, and we went to have lunch and catch up on what had happened in the last few years that we didn’t already know.

 ‘Do you remember…?’ said my friend about a series of places in town which I’d entirely forgotten.

‘Didn’t you spend much time in town?’ she asked when I shook my head.

The thing was that I did. But I also went for cycle rides, on my own or with another friend who’d wanted to join us but couldn’t, or with my then boyfriend. I climbed the local hillfort, I visited the Harbour. Once, at least, I cycled to Southampton. I went on train trips to see my gran or my parents or school friends who were in different universities.

Mostly I wandered around in town too, only the finer details evade me completely now.

My friend and I visited the cathedral which we both remembered well, not least because we both sang in the choir and took part in Christmas concerts there.

‘I remember this aisle being a lot longer,’ she said.

‘We were in long skirts, carrying candles and singing slowly,’ I said.

‘True.’

Perhaps my lack of nostalgia is partly because I’ve (so far) never put roots down anywhere longer than twenty years. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many places I’ve lived in and to feel nostalgic about them all would be overwhelming. Each of them has left something with me, I remember most with fondness, but take me back to any of them and I feel like a visitor.

On reflection, I don’t mind.

I may not recall the teashops and pubs, but I remember the friends I was with. I can’t remember what we talked about, or even really what we looked like. But when I looked in my friend’s eyes, her essential lovely soul was the same. Physical changes that years have made disappear when you look in someone’s eyes. And despite all the setbacks and heartbreaks the last few years have brought her, at heart I know the essential her is still there in the process of healing. I was glad to hug her and listen to her and talk not just of a distant past we can’t really remember, or of a recent one which holds pain for her, but of a future that will help her lovely soul to blossom as it should.

No I don’t remember the finer details of those days, but I remember who we were.

I remember choosing posters and books that portrayed who I wanted to be rather than who I was. I remember sitting in pubs with my then boyfriend (poor chap) tying his brain in knots with my assertions of black and white certainties I am no longer certain of. I remember cycling to the lazy south coast because I was lonely for the wilder Gower waves. I remember getting lost with my other friend walking through fields of yellow on the way back from the hill fort. I remember the Christmas procession down the candlelit cathedral aisle. I remember being young and doubtful and foolish and confused and impetuous and illogical and angry and sad and happy and in love and heartbroken.

If I felt any hiraeth at all, it was perhaps for the girls that we were, including the friend who couldn’t join us. All three of us were shy and out of synch with our own generation.

We were the first drafts of people we are still becoming.

And that’s what I remembered and recognised and saluted, not with nostalgia but simply with acknowledgement. That was then. This is now, but the goods and bads of then, have helped to form now and are worth a raised glass (or cup of tea as we were both driving – then or later).

Rather than feel nostalgia, I felt a warm, fuzzy, joy to be back somewhere where I was once very happy and to be meeting one of two people who made it happy.

We were first drafts of ourselves then. Who knows what draft we are now. But one day, we will be masterpieces.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Barnet Fair (1)

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When I was a teenager agonising over my hair, my paternal grandmother told me about her brother cutting hers when she was around the same age

At the time of this conversation my own hair was long, straight and mousy-brown. In theory it had been in fashion for a while (although it would have been more fashionable if blonde), but somehow it – along with me – never was. Now, a new fashion was coming in: shoulder length with curled sides. I needed a good hairdresser, possibly a perm and definitely curling tongs. None of these were things my mother thought worth spending money on. She considered me too young for a perm, could trim my hair herself and from bitter experience suspected it would take more than curling tongs to curl my hair.

‘I rather regretted letting him do it,’ said my gran, touching the nape of her neck where there were some adorable grey curls sticking out.

This stopped my whinging in its tracks. While my sister and I are now best of friends (which we weren’t at the time), I still wouldn’t trust her with my tresses and a pair of scissors. And what I knew of friends’ brothers, I definitely wouldn’t have trusted them.

‘Whatever did he do?’ I said.

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘He did what I asked him to.’

Halted in my tirade against parental unreasonableness, I asked the obvious question: ‘Whatever did you ask him to do?’

‘Bob my hair,’ she said. ‘My parents wouldn’t allow it. The bit where he shaved at my nape has never quite grown right since. Before my parents found out, I sold a lovely necklace I’d been given so I could go to a barber and have it done properly. They were horrified all the same, even though my mother once did something similar.’

Her parents were horrified? So was I. My gran was the archetypal housewife. She had married young, had never had to work for a living and never had an urge to. She’d fallen happily into running a home efficiently and well. She gardened, styled her home, baked and sewed with high skill and also joy. She was calm, conforming and believed in obedience and the status quo. The last thing I could imagine her doing was anything that horrified anyone. But what did she mean about her own mother ‘doing the same’?

It turned out that it all went back to cultural perceptions of femininity, modesty, and being a good Christian woman which we’ve now largely put aside.

My great-grandmother was in her late teens in the 1890s, one of the youngest of eight (I think) children. Her father would have been well into his sixties. While not remotely poor, they certainly weren’t in the ‘going to balls’ class, so when she obtained a party dress which exposed lower arms and neck, her father was apparently horrified. (Although I have a photograph taken of her in this extremely modest – by today’s standards – dress, so she must have been forgiven.)

Her daughter, my grandmother was the youngest by far of four, a teenager in the 1920s. The brother who cut her hair must have been a good six years older, since the eldest one had been killed in WWI. Their father would have been in his fifties and her mother in her forties. Bare lower arms and neck were one thing. Short hair and short skirts were something else altogether.

But WWI had accelerated what had already started in the 1910s – more sensible, practical clothes and hairstyles for women – and by the 1920s there was no going back. My great-grandparents forgave her. It was a very loving and accepting family, and they must have realised that the world was never going to be what it had been before the Great War and that fighting over the length of someone’s hair was pointless. Plus Gran had a married sister who was eleven years older and probably took her side.

The whole conversation came back to me recently as I started writing a new project: a mystery set in the 1920s where the female main character is twenty-three. She hasn’t had her hair cut into a bob yet but a number of the other female characters have. (At the time, you went to a barber to have it done, holding a page from a newspaper with possible hairstyles in your shaking hand.) Will she get it cut or not? Haven’t decided yet.

I don’t think having her hair bobbed was Gran’s only rebellion. I believe that there was some concern about her marrying my grandfather. It wasn’t because he was unsuitable in any way as a person, or is family was less than acceptable. I think it was because there was a possibility of mental illness in his family since his father had tragically died by his own hand. Somehow my grandparents prevailed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

I never did get that fashionable curled sides hairstyle while it was still in fashion and stopped nagging my mother. Perhaps I realised maintaining it required more skill than I had (or would ever have).

At Christmas, some months after the conversation I’m relating, my paternal grandfather unexpectedly died. A little after a year after that my paternal grandmother did too. We’ve always felt that a broken heart was more of a cause than anything medical.

For reasons I still can’t explain, one of the first things I did in my grief was to demand to go to a hairdresser, where I had my long hair cut into a short bob. Ever since then, my hairstyle had been fundamentally one of three styles: long and straight, long and permed, or in a bob.

But for the record, so far I haven’t got my sister to do it, and no one has ever taken a razor to the back to create the adorable curls that stuck up at a funny angle which my grandmother had.

(NB for anyone not in the know, Barnet Fair is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Hair. And I will be writing more about the subject.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Vector Set of Different Flapper Girls Icons in Modern Flat Style Isolated on White Background. Stock Vector – Illustration of hair, face: 87491137

Apples, Pears and Triangles

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When my sister and I were teenagers, our parents went away for the weekend leaving us to our own devices.

Is this a tale of wild parties? Nope. We were far too boring.

Instead, we started a two day super low calorie diet.

Started.

The first meal was a raw egg beaten into orange juice.

One sip was enough for both of us. We’d been brought up not to waste food, but…down the sink it went and the diet went in the bin.

At the time, my sister and I were slim, healthy and fit, but we were both self-conscious about our busty figures. ‘You’re an inverted triangle shape,’ the magazines told us (apparently is a carrot shape now). We could have been apples or pears or hourglasses. We didn’t want to be any of them. We wanted to be like the girls on TV.

The negative body imagery I grew up with was not simply through media and peer-pressure (then nowhere near as bad as it is nowadays) but from years of little comments (made as if we weren’t there) by the extended family:

  • ‘He’s rather a trencherman isn’t he?’ (*)
  • ‘Her feet are large – I imagine she’ll grow up to be big.’  (She didn’t.)
  • ‘You’re not as thin as you used to be.’ (I’d just had a baby.)
  • ‘Isn’t that dress is a little tight/low cut/short?’ (No.)
  • ‘Their busts must be from their Polish great-great-great-grandmother.’ (She wasn’t Polish and no one knew what she looked like.)

(*In case you don’t know, a ‘trencherman’ is an old-fashioned term which suggests someone who’d not only eat their meal but what it was served in (a trencher originally being a piece of stale bread used as a plate).)

One of my earliest memories was hearing someone say Dad ought to lose weight and being upset because I thought he was lovely and cuddly. It wasn’t till much later that I realised the risks to his health.

He really did try.

He started every fad diet going, and what Dad ate, the whole family ate. Luckily for us the diets only lasted as long as Dad could bear them (generally about two days).

He kept a complicated graph on which noted his weight daily down to the quarter pound. When later quizzed as to why, he said it was because of a diet he’d been on which had worked. Was he still on the diet? No. He’d just kept the graph habit. My sister and I rolled our eyes. We didn’t understand the genetic element of the situation nor the psychological one.

I had a different battle at eighteen. A combination of negative body image, a broken heart and struggling with my A levels meant that my life felt out of control, so I controlled the one thing I could: eating.

I wasn’t trying to make myself ill. I’d had a friend who became anorexic and was taken out of school a few years earlier.  But caught up in my own misery, I couldn’t see I was risking the same.

There was little recognition of eating disorders then. They were seen as a lack of self-control rather than a psychological issue. The parents of the friend with anorexia initially insisted she was just losing puppy fat. But she’d told me she’d started cutting out food because bullying from boys at school and feeling second best to her brother had become too much. I hope she got the treatment she needed. The parents completely cut her off from her former friends and I never found out.

I myself didn’t become anorexic because Dad spotted how thin I’d become and said so. I realised it must be bad if he noticed and started to change what I was eating.

It was a struggle to get back to normal, not least because shortly afterwards I went to university (despite duffing up my A levels) and was too shy to go to the refectory to eat with strangers. I fundamentally lived on crackers and soup until I made lifelong friends and started reaching a sensible weight.

You might not believe that if you saw me now. A combination of menopause, medication, genes (perhaps) and a sedentary job mean I’m no longer a carrot but an apple and need to lose several pounds.

Proffered help is sometimes trying.

A (male) doctor said ‘It’s so easy for post-menopausal women to gain weight but so hard to lose it.’ Little chuckle. ‘My wife’s forever complaining when I tell her she can’t eat carbs!’

How humorous.

I drink wine and I don’t exercise near enough, but I prefer healthy food. I’ve never been a comfort eater, but I am a boredom eater.

I explained all this to the doctor, who said that my ideal diet was poached chicken, poached eggs, lentils and no carbs. Thinking I’d infinitely prefer to give up wine than pasta, I got off the call with a desperate urge to make a massive bowl of macaroni cheese.

Instead I cooked eggs. (Poached, with no orange juice in sight.)

My paternal grandmother despaired over her post-menopausal but quite average weight and her greying hair and her soft face. I loved all of it and couldn’t see the reason for her distress then. But I understand now.

I’d like to be thinner not just – or even – because it would be healthier, but because deep down I still want to look like women on TV, even though they’re the middle-aged ones not the teenage ones.

Is that a society thing or a me thing? Dad and his daily weight graph is no different to me and my weight-loss apps which are only relevant if I’m eating less and exercising more.

Part of me wants to say ‘Come back next week and see if I’ve rejoined the gym and lost some weight.’

The bigger part knows ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I need to love myself as I am either way.’


UK Help Links

Beat Eating Disorders

Menopause Matters

Obesity Support Groups

Diabetes UK

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit ID 21036277 | Apples And Pears © Elena Schweitzer | Dreamstime.com

Wandering in Ink

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.

Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.

They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.

Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)

One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.

As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.

We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.

No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.

During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.

A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.

I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.

When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.

We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.

Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.

I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.

Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.

I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.

Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.

But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.

Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.

(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)

Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.

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