Back on topic...
I remember my parents telling me that I was found under a gooseberry bush. I always found this rather insulting. I hate gooseberries. Why couldn't I have been found under something nicer, like a raspberry bush?
I was the youngest child. As a result, I really didn't have a clue for the longest time where babies came from. I suspect children with younger siblings are more likely to realise that babies come from mummy's tummy. However, if you never get to see the 'watermelon belly', how are you ever supposed to guess something like that?
Yvonne, you obviously went to a more forward thinking school than I did. We didn't get any sex ed classes... at least not unless or until we chose to study biology for 'O' level, and lots of pupils didn't do that. (We'd have been somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, then.)
I remember how that particular biology lesson started. The teacher breezed in and said, "Right. We're going to start on reproduction this week. According to the syllabus, I can either teach you about the sexual reproduction of rabbits or of humans. I thought you'd be more interested in humans, so we'll be studying that. However, just so you know, the only real difference is that rabbits ovulate as a reflex action to sex."
Even those kids who studied biology were desperately ill-informed. The attitude was that the kind of nice girls who attended the school didn't *need* sex ed. Suffice to say, the attitude was naive in the extreme. It took me months to figure out that one of my classmates didn't just have a passion for baggy clothing!
Mind you, after I figured out what was really behind said classmate's fashion choices, I realised that there was a far bigger mystery to unravel, and that was... how did girls got to meet boys in the first, since we were at an all-girls school!
Chris
