Burnley Grammar School

Hi James,

What you describe there is my worst nightmare. The difference being, the last time it happened to me I was seven years old. It is actually what gave me what has turned out to be a lifelong preoccupation with double standards. I can't even begin to imagine how I would have felt having to wear shorts at thirteen.

I do remember one of the women teachers, come straight from a PE lesson, taking our Maths lesson still in her short netball skirt. Don't know what the girls thought about it but we boys paid attention.

Hi Yours Truly,
When I wore shorts particularly at secondary school I found that they gave a distinctly childish and immature look to the boys that worm them,including myself.
This look may have appealed to some adults,but most boys wearing long trousers and girls continually mocked and teased the boys that were wearing them.

Steve, the difference today would be that boys would have a choice if they preferred to wear shorts.When I wore shorts and short trousers I was made to wear them continuously.My mother bought shorts for me and never purchased long trousers or jeans in case I refused to wear my shorts.When I returned from school I would change out of my school uniform shorts and change into my satin shorts.These fitted tightly and my mother used to show me off and display me in my shorts.

Hi James,

It's interesting you say 'she'. Women seem to have had a particular thing about boys wearing shorts. It was all women pronouncing the shorts rule at my infant school. And certainly when my teacher brought me into line my mum happily responded by putting me in shorts most of the time. I also remember, in junior school, when I thought I had escaped the tyranny of shorts, our woman teacher one day in summer surveying us in irritation and exclaiming, "All you boys should be in shorts!" She then proceeded to ask every boy in class in turn whether he owned a pair of shorts. I pointed out that mine weren't regulation school grey but she was very quick to say that didn't matter.

Several years ago I was walking through a park with a social group I used to be a part of. There was a group of young boys playing there and one of the women in the group was moved to remark, "I like to see boys in shorts." Another woman responded, "Little boys?" and they both had a good laugh. They weren't being malicious, they just regarded boys in shorts as part of the natural order of things.

I remember, in my last year at secondary school, a class conversation turning to how we had been at primary school. I remember one girl pulling an exasperated face and remarking how one particular boy had always worn short back then. The two boys she told, who had gone to different primary schools, immediately started laughing exultantly and were straight over to him to start the mockery. So both genders associated short trousers for boys with a sense of indignity.

I still think it was weird that your secondary teacher was keeping count of the boys in shorts though. Or maybe not, given my previous observation that women seem to have a thing about boys in shorts. I expect she thought it was amusing to see you in your shorts and also maybe saw it as you say as a way of cutting potentially bolshie young men down to size, by undermining your developing masculinity. I can't be much younger than you but I don't remember a single instance of boys wearing shorts in secondary school. I wonder if they would even have been allowed them? Girls too, officially, weren't allowed skirts above the knee.

Weirdly the same principle worked and works inversely for girls. Miniskirts had a resurgence in the mid-80s and I remember girls in increasingly short skirts, by their own choice, in contrast to your and my experience, and incidentally, very much against the school's rules. Girls seemed to want to get their legs out as they got older. Didn't they feel self-conscious? Didn't they feel vulnerable? They didn't seem to.

And before you expect me to whip out the double standard thing, we boys were bumming the dress rules as well, in our own ways. My school was just very inconsistent.

Yours Truly,It was in the late seventies when satin shorts became fashionable.
I thought it was strange that my teacher counted how many boys were wearing shorts,but she probably wanted to encourage them to wear them.I agree, my parents wanted to keep me in shorts to keep me looking young.

How times change. I understand the awkwardness of being made to wear shorts by parents however in recent years we have seen protests in schools from teenage boys wanting the right to wear shorts to school in hot weather.

Hi James,

You're not kidding about adolescence being an awkward time for boys - and girls.

What era was this? Sixties? Seventies? I was unlucky enough to catch the tail end of the 1970s and there were still some archaic practices going on in schools.

Why the hell was your class teacher keeping count of the number of boys in shorts? Was he some sort of fetishist?

Maybe the adults deliberately didn't want you to grow up too soon. If I look back to the social landscape of my childhood it included football hooligans, punk rockers, skinheads, metallers, the national front and the Brixton riots. There was a great deal of hysteria in the newspapers about out-of-control young men, not all of which was spurious media hysteria, and a corresponding attitude among older adults that teenage boys needed to be put back in their boxes.

Comment by: Ronnie on 5th May 2025 at 01:24

I also decided to watch that film for the first time late last night, which must have been the very time you were watching it again after all those years since you remembered it. It was very much of its time, but I thought as well as being such a moving film, it did demonstrate quite clearly the difficulty some fathers have in demonstrating their love, which they do have, for their sons, no matter the reason. Very sad.

Yours Truly,boys generally go through an awkward time when they go through adolescence and as I was kept in short trousers at 13 this made it particularly awkward.How can anyone start to feel grown up when their parents insisted that I wore short trousers all the time? My form teacher encouraged this by counting how many of the class were still wearing shorts.

Comment by: Mark on 4th May 2025 at 22:33
Comment by: Matthew S on 4th May 2025 at 20:28


Thanks boys for your help. The winner is Mark! That's the one I was thinking of, spot on. Even older than I thought it was. I've enjoyed watching that again over the last hour.


Thanks Matthew, I'll also check out your suggestion too if it's around to be seen anywhere. I believe the writer of the drama Mark's found was also just 22 when he passed.

Hi Ronnie, I think I might recognise your description. It wasn't this was it? Although if it is it's older than you thought, actually from the mid eighties not the nineties. It has a cancer story, a teenager, football and halfway through a sudden communal nude scene with bath and walking about at 28 minutes.

In always find it weird when they put such gratuitous scenes in drama like this, even if it is portraying reality. But then it was the 80's. I wonder how they sell roles like this to actors and if many refuse to do them when asked.

https://youtu.be/zH4jHGgxdUs?feature=shared

Ronnie, this may not be the drama you were referring to, but there was an inspirational, if desperately sad, film repeated on the BBC in the 1990s called "The Terry Fox Story". It depicted a real Canadian who gave up football after having his leg amputated. Terry Fox ran a three-thousand-mile distance with an artificial limb to raise money for cancer research. The cancer returned and he died at the age of twenty-two.

Yours Truly,thank you for your reply,you raised some points that I hadn't considered,although I did accept that the wearing of short trousers was a form of a strict disciplinary practice.Of course growing up wearing shorts I had to accept wearing them all the time and like your parents mine were locked into this mindset'little boys wear shorts'.To be told that'I looked nice in my shorts'seemed to me to be very patronising which led to my mother by me more pairs of shorts.My parent took the decision that I should continue wearing them through my secondary school.

We also had white shorts which exposed every detail when wet.
My older and younger brothers, and their classmates, also complained about them. Yet they never changed them. Bizarre

Chris H, we also wore those white running shorts at school.Mine were made out of polyester nylon and had a very shiny satin effect and were translucent.When we ran in the rain they were almost see through.,which could be very embarrassing.We often participated in inter-house running events and we provided the girls quite a spectacle.

Comment by: Simon W on 3rd May 2025 at 17:09




".........I'd like to try and understand how those who faced compulsion to shower at school found it, for good or bad, so if anyone would care to share such thoughts I'd like to read them and to know exactly what it was about this that caused anyone's own personal difficulties, or perhaps none at all......."

Hello again, Simon and welcome back, I can only wish you had been my P.E. teacher at school. The great problem I had at school, apart from a P.E. teacher who seemed to have been put on this earth to make everybody's life a misery, (I have discussed him at length previously and will not do so again) was that, before the age of 11, and the world of compulsory showers and near nudity in lessons, I was aware that I was homosexual, which troubled me deeply. It has always been the bane of my life. I loathe it in myself, and had I been aware of conversion therapy -non-religious, - I would probably gone through it, but in school years I was terrified of being found out. Luckily I never was, but of course back then it was illegal for anybody under 21, and there were still very pejorative stories in newspapers, and the lads in our school (a fairly rough area of East London) used the "q" word about everybody, just as often as the "f" word. There was always fear, and all the years I was there it never lessened. It probably got worse, in truth. It didn't help, on the physical level, that the P.E teacher's name for me was "Tin Ribs" - he disliked me as much as I disliked him.

To this day, I am astonished, when reading on here, of how lads were looking at each other (somebody the other week referred to enjoying the "naked camaraderie" of the showers) Our school expected over 30 boys to use those showers at the same time - it was a small area and you were constantly trying to avoid contact. I was very green and unaware at the time, and I would have been mortified to know that there were old men out on their bikes watching us, and enjoying the spectacle. A few years back we had one old man on here who used to drop into a school playing field, on a regular basis, to watch shirtless boys (in December!) and chat to the P.E. teacher. I can't imagine you doing that. It might have been his fantasy, but nevertheless whether it happened or not, that is what he would have LIKED to have done.

The situation for lads like me was bad enough then - imagine what it must have been like pre 1967 when it was illegal full stop.

Not you, as clearly you are cut from a different cloth to the old doctrinaire teachers, but it astonishes me that teachers back then did not realise there would be boys who had similar difficulties, and made no effort to understand it. I am equally astonished at the number of lads who "come out" at school these days. Seriously if they had done so at my school, it would have been very dangerous to do so. You could get beaten up for just having the wrong accent or wrong colour hair - even fights over which computer was best - the Spectrum or the C64 - can you imagine anything more stupid?. most of the violent behaviour happened at the bus stop, but schools should be a safe place where you go to learn, and I never felt safe at mine. Music and electronics, which were an interest from a very young age were non-existent in my school, even though they have continued throughout my life. I still listen to music, even though I ceased playing in my twenties.

Chris1970 I saw you write about the teacher pulling you by the ear and you having to take a going at from him without anything on. I agree that's not the nicest way to treat people but compared to some of the outright beatings, even just with a hand I saw in our school in the 70s that is almost nothing. Our gym saw lots of whackings across bare skin leaving reddened marks. It ranged from just a hand, a plimsoll or at worst a belting proper. Legs, backside or the back. Head clouting was so common in any lesson, but I remember the PE most for it.

Hi Greg2,

That extra detail in your previous post made more sense of your incident. Your PE teacher came in at the crucial moment, caught you violating the girls' private space and feeling obliged to defend them slippered first and asked questions later, since you 'obviously' needed to be temporarily stripped of your boyish exuberance, and touching your toes for his plimsoll was an immediate and effective way of doing it.

'To tell you the truth we seemed to forget about it, or just leave it, which seems odd now.'

You had no choice, did you? You knew what would happen.

'Unlike males, don’t all females like to think they’re entitled to know every detail about everything anyway, which is probably why their female teacher let them continue.'

I'm not sure that's the truth. Both genders have an evolved instinct to 'cut males down to size'. Men because of the adversarial alpha-male instinct. Women because, when you think of it, they are at far more risk of every type of violent offence from men than men ever are from women. Every opportunity to mock and humiliate men is to them is just evening up the score.

Also, both genders mercilessly tease each other at that age, don't they? And not just children. That bullying from your nurses was disgusting and unprofessional but then, hey, you were only a boy after all.

It actually reminds me of an anecdote my mother, who trained as a nurse, once told me about her days on the ward. This male patient came in for an operation and they happened to notice that it was stated in his notes that he suffered from what is nowadays termed 'micropenis', ie, he was unable to father children. They were all curious to check it out and while he was unconscious every single nurse on the ward took a turn tending him - and the male surgeon let them. Afterwards, on their break, they all had a damn good laugh about it. This was the late 1960s and there was a pop song with the lyrics "Willie, can you do the things I ask you?/ Willie, can you do them true?" One nurse sang this lyric before triumphantly hooting, "Willie, can't, can he?" to general laughter.

Although I do know that every salacious rumour at my school seemed to generate from among the girls. Some of them ought to have gone to work for GCHQ.

'there is one other thing I’ve realised since thinking this through again all these years later: we never did try to explain that we were just getting our own back'

Maybe because you all knew he wouldn't give a flying shit. You have mentioned several times how he never stopped his female colleague from entering your male space. He plainly had no regard for your feeling or boundaries, which seems to have been part of the job description for that generation of male PE teachers.

And as I have stated before, it's my belief that, contrary to every assumption and stereotype, it actually boys who are the more compliant gender. Boys find themselves in a world of physical threat, actual or implicit, from day one, while girls are raised to regard their personal boundaries as sacrosanct. For boys the consequences of resisting are potentially greater, as several previous posters here, both male and female, have observed.

A good answer you gave Brian there Neal. Where I was at all my teachers were Brian's though.

I flew to Norway once for a quick two day works trip with my then boss. The only people I saw there were well wrapped up! What is it that makes people from cold nations so easy going on the stripping off.

If anyone can give me the secret to that kind of casual easy confidence to take stuff off and not give a damn then I'm listening intently.

At our school in Wrexham forty or so years ago we had a gym teacher there who had a habit of going all physio on favoured sporty pupils after PE in our changing room and you'd sometimes see him massaging select boys bare legs and manipulating their bare feet too back and forth around the ankles, often after cross country, before or after we'd hit the showers. I never knew quite what to make of it. When they moved PE to last lesson another teacher, not him, started coming into the shower with us from time to time but kept his shorts on. We however could never keep our shorts on to shower, or anything else, getting naked was mandatory for us all.

It's surprising how many films, dramas and documentaries are out there that drop group showering scenes into them, not always adult but also younger persons even with a couple of examples on here and no strategic coverage.

Sometimes they pop up in the most unexpected places. I watched a moving drama one evening on telly about a teenage boy crippled with cancer who could no longer play football when completely without warning there was the abrupt appearance of a changing room with everything out. I'd like to know what this was actually, so if anyone here recognises my description then let me know. I think I watched it in the 90's, and it was a one off like those old Play For Today things of the 70's. I can't recall any of the actors or writers alas.

Hi James,

I don't think my parents intended to humiliate me either, they were just locked into this 'little boys wear shorts' mindset and were seemingly oblivious to my obvious distress.

But that is just the thing, it didn't make it fair at all when the girls were allowed to wear whatever they pleased.

I expect the school's motivation was the same, that boys just look nice and smart in shorts. Although I always wondered if there was a sly disciplinary tactic going on there. As you say, shorts in the seventies were shorter than today and going to school feeling half-stripped made you feel vulnerable and embarrassed and therefore easier to control. Also, having to dress in shorts meant you were aware that you were then under the teacher's authority. Perhaps the shorts were intended as a covert substitute for uniform which didn't come in until junior school. But this is all just my speculation.

I do think that if a child is that obviously reluctant for whatever reason their boundaries should be respected and to an extent kids should be allowed to come to these things in their own time instead of being forced by any means necessary. I did eventually come to relax and accept the shorts and put the unfairness of it to the back of my mind - but then when you discover that your teacher keeps a gym plimsoll for naughty boys a little embarrassment and injustice no longer seem such high priorities.

My parents were quite happy that the nonsense had been knocked out of me and my mum happily bought me several new pairs of short while my treacherous father actually shook that teacher's hand at a subsequent parents' evening.

I do agree with Alan that you should not have been made to wear shorts casually after age eleven but then I understand that was still relatively common practice for boys as late as the 1960s. It actually reminds me of a letter from the problem page of a well-know tabloid when I was a teenager, from a 13-year-old boy who had been put back in shorts by his mother after he had been caught bullying girls. This was obviously intended to humiliate him and judging by his letter it worked!

Comment by: Russ on 1st May 2025 at 22:04

Thanks for the link to the Norwegian film site Russ. It seems an interesting websitewhere I might explore a little more. You also mention a historical films archive site, is this a Norwegian site? i think I remember watching some old footage on such a site some years ago but have since lost the link. I do sometimes watch digitalised old documentary films on the Swedish filmarkivet.se and also the Danish danmarkpaafilm.dk sites, both of which I find very interesting. Also the British Huntley film archive and the bfi are good, from which I posted a link last February showing a boys’ walking race filmed in 1922. Danny C gave an appreciative comment on that post. I hope he can return here sometime.

I decided, just out of curiosity and interest, to have my dna ethnicity checked earlier this year, and it came back telling me my highest ethnicity count being 46% Scandinavian and 30% Eastern European, which is how my family looks I suppose and takes in my Scandinavian surname from my Father’s side, and the Eastern European link covers Eastern Germany where my mother’s family came from. Basically I'm Northern European it seems, which I suppose explains the affinity I’ve always felt to Scandinavia and it’s culture and peoples…not sure I’d be too keen to have a shower like those lads with the corridor door wide open though! Actually, perhaps this might have been part of their changing room area as you can see a mirror on the wall out there.

Thankyou for one or two of the decent comments over my description of school in Maidenhead.

I'm struck by the very real similarities between us both Neal on here. Your choices this week seem perfectly sensible and reasonable and we do similar, and the numbers that opted to go without the PE kit when allowed seems to be what I might have expected. The kit list is specific here and expected to be brought in and worn. When it's not, if the incorrect item, either footwear of a top, the solution is none then, much like you with your tops uniform. If you can't bring the correct one into school then expect to do without whether you like it or not, likewise with any inappropriate footwear. This largely ensures correct kit but not always, never a day goes by without something.

My only obvious difference with you Neal is showering. We do not have any compulsion to do so. We have them and they work, and anyone is free to do so if they ask, but they remain idle other than for after school activity when they get used voluntarily. I think the voluntary arrangement suits me as much as the kids.

In your case Neal you made clear you require this. I'm not dead set against compulsion and if I had to work in a school such as yours I'd see to it if they wanted me to, but I prefer personal choice or encouragement as a rule. How do you find dealing with compulsion in your own case, especially when dealing with new intakes?

I'd like to try and understand how those who faced compulsion to shower at school found it, for good or bad, so if anyone would care to share such thoughts I'd like to read them and to know exactly what it was about this that caused anyone's own personal difficulties, or perhaps none at all.

I've already found the memories surrounding compulsion to do PE lessons in bare chests riveting.

It comes as no surprise to see that Norweigen boys are so relaxed, as seen in the Russ clip, but actually choosing to leave the door wide open onto the outside corridor while you are showering away with each other! That looked somewhat strange to say the very least.

Our changing room door was always flying open while we did our stuff, and was one of those doors that shut very slowly after you went through it, so it's quite conceivable that anyone passing at the right moment who looked in might have caught something they shouldn't have. With the changing room door open, the showers were directly ahead. Many times I came back later than some others from the same class, opened the door and some were showering, so anyone at that door could have seen them or me from the door while open, however briefly. It was one of the changing bench and hooks areas that was actually hidden out of view from the door around a corner, and someone thought that was the best way to design the room.


Peter, you've posed a cheeky question but I can't resist giving you an answer to it on checking others out. I had a friend called Ian who always caught my attention because he was well endowed even quite young, and we would sit on opposing changing room benches getting sorted for PE. The one thing about him was he had this very curly penis that always twisted noticeably to one side very clearly unlike everyone else who just pointed ahead like you expect when out. This never changed and I thought he must have been kicked in the groin at some point and injured the thing. You never dared say anything of course, even to a friend about their penis in a school changing room, just look and maybe judge and keep any thoughts to yourself.

If only we could publish all those thoughts about each other that quietly went through each of our minds it could prove quite entertaining or quite devastating.

I don't know exactly what my weight and height was at a certain age, but I seemed in line with normal looking boys in all departments. I wasn't short but not too tall, not thin but not chubby. Boringly normal. The only thing that was measured frequently was my feet as I worked through shoes. I remember most of my school shoes after about 14 being a size seven, always a popular size in shops that they'd run out of when I liked something and asked.

That was quite an unusual story you tell of a young person coming and measuring you up at school Greg, and you could only guess why he was doing it rather than be told why? I think I would have found that rather intrusive actually. I once picked up a book entitled Curious Facts for Curious People, or a title similar to that and under weird facts about the human anatomy there was one that said nipples on grown men are almost always situated the same distance apart from each other, it gave a figure, and hoping to disprove it I went and checked only to find out I was the same. I think it was 23 centimetres. You are going to check now aren't you.

One thing about being in PE at school and my own body was I felt very sensitive about the possibility anyone might make a comment about how I looked. I had thoughts on my own perceived imperfections but would have been horrified if anyone had said anything that matched what I thought about myself, effectively reinforcing it. Unfortunately I had a teacher, the one I first mentioned on here grabbing my ear, who did pick out things, such as telling me when showing me how to climb and grab a rope that I had small fingers. I looked at my hands after that comment later and wondered what he was talking about and put it down to the fact he must have had massive hands or that the school ropes were thicker than they should have been. His comment did not match one of my perceived imperfections, one of which was having too many moles along one arm.

Alan,I never considered that my parents considered that keeping me in short trousers was a form of humiliation.They enjoyed the look of me wearing shorts and decided to keep me in shorts rather than allowing me to wear long trousers.

Mine was one of those schools in the 70s with one of those you must take off your pants for PE attitudes, thus they came off in the changing room at the start of PE and we slipped on our shorts onto nothing. PE was shirtless and barefoot for gym, so the white shorts were the only item we had on for PE there. About as simple as it gets.

Others ran school cross country shirtless, so did we. , the same gym shorts and no pants. These white shorts, unsure what they were made of to be honest but the material wasn't very thick, but was a touch shiny looking. Nylon? Anyway, the shorts were not very giving, with not a lot of room in them. If you had big thighs they could mark them like socks do at the ankles. When we ran outside in these shorts in cross country and it rained on us, the shorts would get wet through and become horribly see through, it was literally a running joke among us all but nothing was done about it. Black ones would have solved this I think. The wet shorts would cling as well onto the skin so if you were running behind others in the wet shorts they clung to the buttocks and being white on white boys at a quick glance it sometimes looked like no shorts were being worn and they were running naked ahead of you, other than sight of the elastic waist part holding them up. I would have looked the same to anyone behind me I'm sure. The front was not quite so bad but the shape of things became clearer and if you looked properly things were not viewable. Yet all we needed to do was wear pants or change to dark shorts. Luckily were we ran didn't pass too many people and was mainly off road. Rainy cross country in white shorts, trainers and a bare chest were joyless for many and very chilly to do.

Peter, my physique was average build and I was never unhappy with it, no idea what height I was at fourteen, and never measured myself down below but I seemed to be up to standard when it came to checking out against others. You always needed to have reassuring quiet peeks at the competition in the showers at school to see how the race to adulthood was coming along!

Hi Yours Truly,further to my previous message,to attend a school wear short trousers wear compulsory for all boys made it fairer than just a few boys wearing shorts like myself and a few others.We became the objects of fun and teasing by both girls and younger boys.Yes,I do remember the song,'who wear short shorts'which was often sang to me. My parents were always oblivious about my thoughts when I contested wearing shorts all the time and told me that I looked nice in my shorts. Shopping excursions usually involved purchasing new shorts,which I was displeased because I was thirteen,but after visiting several shops,my mother found some Adidas satin shorts that appealed to her and she bought me two pairs in blue.Her clear refusal to allow me to wear long trousers was obvious.

Comment by: James on 3rd May 2025 at 09:44




".........Although I disliked being in the minority my parents relished the spectacle of seeing a teenager getting accustomed to short pants as I grew older........"

Forgive me James, and with all due respect to your parents, why the hell would any reasonable parent want to see their son (or daughter) humiliated like that?. They must have been adherents to the philosophy of Robert Baden-Powell. Given the amount of bullying that goes on in schools (and outside them on the bus to and from school) why would anybody want to make their lives more difficult?. It seems almost as spiteful as sending them to boarding schools.

Yours Truly on 1st May 2025 at 09:43

They may well have continued to check us at times, as they left us with the impression that their teacher didn’t discourage them. To tell you the truth we seemed to forget about it, or just leave it, which seems odd now. What could we do? When you think back to being that age, just one day seems to last so long with lots of things to get through, that even from one week to another seems an age. Perhaps it was a year’s optional, ongoing, observation of interest for them, who knows. Unlike males, don’t all females like to think they’re entitled to know every detail about everything anyway, which is probably why their female teacher let them continue. It still irritates me thinking about it now, but the years have gone by. I always did think their gym teacher was a bit strange though; at least we’d stopped her walking through our rooms…there is one other thing I’ve realised since thinking this through again all these years later: we never did try to explain that we were just getting our own back, but when our gym teacher arrived and caught us, all he would have seen was the door to the girls’ shower open; their showers still going; the girls having vacated the place; a group of us boys still standing by that open door. Perhaps he’d heard their screaming and their door slam. I suppose that’s quite funny.


Tony, thank you for your nice comment at the bottom of your 1st May 2025 at 21:37 post.

It was a nice post Tony but I find it a little awkward in answering.

When I wrote about the shower peeping episode, it was really following on from a previous discussion, and I certainly didn’t intend to write about the troubles that seemed to follow, but one then reminded me of the other. It’s odd how such things become so vivid, so that the writing just flows as you recall certain sensibilities from your younger years; you find feelings resurface that you know only belonged to who you were at that young age. At that time I really didn’t have a clue what was happening or why, but all these years later I do now think it was probably because of how I looked I suppose. Similarly, I even think it was why a 14 year old boy kept coming up behind only me when I was only 9, to push me under the water as I was playing about with same age friends in a swimming pool. I was a none swimmer then. If only he knew that he succeeded in putting me off swimming for life by doing that. Despite always being a sporty kid, on dry land, I was always in the none swimming group during school swimming, feeling pretty useless, and always a little humiliated.

My physique? Well I’m speaking about all this starting when still a child really, though moving into teens, so then still just a slim, tallish, sporty kid at that age. I did write on here some time ago about a man who turned up at one gym lesson, who we all thought was a student of some kind. Our usual gym teacher wasn’t present. After getting changed for gym and still all sitting in the changing room, he proceeded to take various measurements of each of us, one after the other, as we stood on the bench before him while he measured the distances between various joints, the width of wrists and limbs, limb and even finger lengths, all while writing this down on a clip board. I’ve mentioned before that I never had to do shirtless gym, as we always were strictly enforced to wear our all white gym kits, but for this we all did have to remove our tops. This must seem odd. I’ve since thought that he must have been a university medical student of some sort who was probably revising for his thesis? When posting of this that last time, I left out that he quietly complimented me at the end of all this, so I do realise I was very lucky that it seems I was well proportioned, or at least as I think he meant, on target to be so as an adult.

This is beginning to sound ever so self-satisfied, which is not how I ever was at all, so now I’ll explain a particularly awkward aspect of my childhood appearance that really did get me down at times, so I might succeed in undoing some of what I’ve just said. I'm going to admit to something! People seemed to identify something about my face when I was a boy that said, ‘girl’ to them. I never really understood it, and I remember complaining to my mother when I spent some time in hospital (see below) but she did explain to me. I don't think I ever behaved in any effeminate way as I grew up, and I certainly can’t begin to explain how much I hated this. I always hoped that when out with friends anywhere, someone didn’t say, or assume, which could have provided a topic for continued ribbing from the others. In fact the last time this did happen is when I was 13, so my voice still unbroken. I’ll give a brief example. I’d gone with a friend of the same age to meet up with others at a campsite; the same place I’d mentioned previously with showers. We had a few tents plus a smaller one used as our larder. I decided there were things I’d like to buy, coffee for instance as I didn’t like tea. So off we all walked to a small store nearby. I collected a few things as the others looked at other shelves elsewhere. I went to the counter to pay. The man said, ‘Oh, I see they let the girl get the food as usual.’ I looked around, saw my friends were out of earshot, and the woman next to me just smiled. I didn’t reply, paid, then we all left. Is having to put up with nonsense like this usual for a boy? I’m not sure whether others ever had this, as it’s yet another unspoken aspect of boyhood that we would never mention to anyone. It would be very interesting if to find this out on here once and for all. Anyone?

I spent 3 months on a children’s ward having fractured my femur when I was 11. This was the very summer from which we all transitioned from junior school to ‘big school’ so I missed that important time shared with your friends, including that first showering experience usually all shared together. I’ve written previously about the double standards issued out to boys regarding lack of privacy while on that ward, so I’m not dragging over all that again, but during all my time in there everyone assumed I was a girl, until newer nurses gave me a bed bath! Probably my unruly mop of hair had grown a bit longer during that time.

I suppose one potentially funny moment could have happened when one young lad came over to my bed and asked, ‘Are you a boy?’ to which I replied, ‘Yes.’ He then undid his pyjama bottoms to show me his appendix scar with stitches. I’ve since wondered how he might have reacted if I'd then said, ‘By the way, no, I’m a girl!” But I wouldn’t have said that at that age.