In later primary school I sucked furiously on bamboo sticks behind the school's art room. I'm not sure I was looking for a bamboo buzz, so much as just wanting to be a bad girl smoker. I can't recommend it. Bamboo cigarettes don't ever really get going, unlike my mother's early smoking fuel – the pages of a Bible. From what I hear, they really take off – which I gather can be alarming when you're smoking in bed. I should point out that I don't think my mother was intending to be disrespectful, she just didn't have much else at hand. The same case could be made for the altar wine.
When I was about 10, said mother was reading Mary McCarthy's The Group. She hid it in the second drawer of the chest in her bedroom, under her 'slips', which is where she hid everything she didn't want us (her daughters) to find. For some reason page fifty-something sticks in my mind, but the imprecise reference is all that remains. I can no longer remember why it had to be hidden or why that page was the one I must not/had to read. Was it the sex, contraception or Lakey's sexual orientation?
Inevitably I went on to more bad girl stuff but nothing to write home about. After a long spirits' dry spell I overindulged in Bacardi and Coke in my early teens and nursed my first hangover. I regularly drank in pubs when I was underage and blithely drove for close to 10 year without a driver's licence (which I promptly got when I turned 18). Not content with country roads, I ventured out in one of the country's major – and to me unfamiliar – cities. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't inhale, or that the sexual revolution passed me by.
My excuse? I come from a line of rebels.
