Chapter One: Aches and Gripes and Lumps and Bumps:Why growing up is hard to do

Conversation by the pool:

• My three-year-old nephew:‘Where’s your willy?’
• My three-year-old daughter: ‘I haven’t got a willy.’
• My three-year-old nephew:‘Then how do you wee?’

The only time in my life when I have kept a diary was between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Although this is not an age usually associated with diligence in boys, I wrote an entry every day for three and a half years, almost always within twenty-four hours of the happenings. Disasters and hangovers permitting, I would sit down and write honestly and frankly about what had happened to me every day and every night.

I soon developed the ability to write in a script and style that would be completely incomprehensible to anyone else, and this gave me great confidence. It is amazing what you will admit to yourself on paper, especially when you know your writing is entirely secret. Of course, on many days nothing much happened, but scattered throughout those hundreds of pages are moments of crucial importance in my life – new experiences, new perspectives and new feelings – more in those few years than at any other time before or since. The humdrum mixed with the bizarre mixed with the delicious. I liked to refer back once in a while just to see how much I had changed in such a short time, and how things I had recently thought impossible and exotic had become accepted and commonplace. The growing narrative of the diary gave me a real sense that I was going somewhere.

As I wrote and wrote and kept reading back I noticed that, almost without realizing it, something had happened to me. Very gradually my experiences, perspectives and feelings seemed to mount up into something quite dramatic.Without realizing it, I was not the same sort of person any more. All those accumulated changes now looked like a barrier, a mountain range between me at eighteen and me as a child. I still clung to my belief that boys do not have to grow up – I still do sometimes – but the evidence was stacking up against that idea. I had enjoyed being a child and I was enjoying being eighteen, but the two enjoyments were not the same. There was no going back.

That is why I included the quote above – because I thought it might make you think about how you too changed (or maybe are changing) as a teenager. No doubt that little conversation will seem like the sort of thing you could only have said many years ago. It may even be hard to imagine that you were once a person like that, but the fact is that you were and you can never be that person again. Those three lines of infantile jabber say so much about childhood – the sexual naïvety; the honest inquisitiveness about the lives of others; the assumption that everyone is like you. You too probably think that there are many mountains of change between you now and you then. Maybe we all spend our teenage years as mental, emotional and sexual mountaineers.

The other reason I used that quote is that it makes an important point about growing up. On the surface, that little pool-side conversation was about the basic differences between male and female sexuality, and how children are less sexual than teenagers and adults. But at the same time, it shows that children also think and act in fundamentally different ways from us. Contrary to what you might think from most discussions about teenagers, adolescence is not entirely about the start of sex. Admittedly, sex is an important part of life, and adolescence is when many people begin to do it, but the second decade of our lives is far more than a crude training course in copulation. In this book, an important point I will return to again and again is that as teenagers we all have to grow up in many different ways – sexually, physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually – and all these processes are mixed up together. You may become ‘sexualized’ when you are a teenager, but you also become ‘intellectualized’, ‘emotionalized’ and ‘spiritualized’ too. Oh, and you have to get bigger as well.

As you will soon see, I believe that there is so much that is unusual about the second decade of life that it deserves to be seen as an important life-stage in its own right, and not just as a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood. Indeed, I will show you that it is actually even more important than that – that it is a fundamental biological difference between humans and other animals. That said, it is worth mentioning the often-quoted idea that the ‘teenager’ is nothing more than a modern social construct. According to this theory, until the Second World War (or some other arbitrary date), people exited childhood and entered adulthood without passing through what we now think of as a ‘teenage’ stage. However, while it is true that society’s attitudes to teenagers have certainly changed over the years, and that teenage activities have often been ignored or suppressed, this does not mean that teenagers did not exist before the late twentieth century. There are many literary examples which show that the concept of the teenager as a thing apart has existed for centuries, albeit in forms modified to fit the times. The ancient Greeks and Romans made great play of the status of youths and maids in their societies, for example – Homer and Virgil both wrote sub-plots which are defined by their edgy teenage protagonists. Also, can you imagine Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet, with all its overpowering, impulsive, contrary passion, about adults? No: teenagers are not a social idea – they are quite simply different from everyone else.

This first part of the book is an attempt to answer the mysterious question: ‘where do teenagers come from?’ The complexity of the teenage experience means that there are several, linked ways to answer that question. First of all, we will look back into our fossil history to see when teenagers first appeared, and what actually constitutes the advent of the ‘true teenager’. Then we will examine the processes that herald the onset of puberty and adolescence in today’s teenagers – when the body finally decides to finish the job of making us men or women. Then we will consider the effects of all this change on the parts of us not directly involved in having sex with other people.We do not want to leap forward to actual sex too soon – so instead we will think about growing taller, thinner, fatter, smellier, hairier and so on. After all, most teenagers spend more time wanting sex, avoiding sex, worrying about wanting it and avoiding it, than actually doing it.We are going to take the same approach, and do the equivalent of sitting in our room and worrying about things like why our armpits become smelly, and only get back to the nitty-gritty of sex in Part Five. Finally, we will blend the fossil and biological signs of the coming of human adolescence into a theory of why teenagers appeared, and what they are here for.

So Part One will look at the bodily changes that teenagers must endure, tolerate or enjoy – some of the humdrum, bizarre and delicious things I scribbled about in my journal. And if you want to amaze yourself by how many things change when we are teenagers, I suggest that you hunt through your personal possessions to see if you can find your own teenage diaries, doodles or letters. All I can advise is, do not mysteriously lose that written record like I did. Writing my diary seemed a good idea at the time, but I must admit that I heave a slight sigh of relief that it is lost. I have no idea where that diary is now, nor whether its current owner is getting close to cracking my code.