Becoming an Adult

‘Go on,’ Sue said. ‘You know you want to.’

I wiped my nervous hands together. I have never been this close to one before. I felt hot, sticky… aroused. Only recently had I become aware that there was this other, this adult, world out there that I had up until then not known anything about.

As I got older, though, I began to notice how the adult conversations changed when I entered the room; how subtle little gestures, winks, gestures of the hand and head, uses of words to mean other than I thought they meant and other adult distortions of what had to me up until then been an uncomplicated and straightforward life.

Sue, of course, claimed to be sophisticated, older than our years. She claimed she had done it with another boy at her older sister’s wedding. She saw me staring at what she’d uncovered.

‘That one’s Brie,’ she said. ‘It’s foreign… French.’

Up until recently I’d only been dimly aware that there were other cheeses apart from the plain ordinary cheddar we had as children. I’d once heard my father whisper something about Stilton once, but my mother had hushed him and nodded over to where we children were innocently busy with our Dairylea cheese triangles.

Now, though, here I was alone with a girl and a cheeseboard. She asked me if I knew about crackers and – of course – I said yes. But all I knew about cheese biscuits were those typical schoolboy jokes, teasing and moments of bragging.

One boy I knew had been caught by a teacher with a Water Biscuit. Of course, back in those days, schools still had the cane. The boy – Jenkins – later said that it had been worth it, but there were tears in his eyes when he came out of the headmaster’s study and for the rest of that term he only ever brought ham sandwiches to school.