Please can I have the smallest bra you’ve got

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 16

Please can I have the smallest bra you’ve got

My daughter was five years old and living in the United States when she astonished her father by asking for a bra. He nearly had an apoplexy. . “Well, I’ll have to get one when I’m eleven,” she sniffed, firmly under the influence of the tots next door in training bras.

When she was eleven and living in Sydney, her class were studying family characteristics which could be passed on from generation to generation. It was a very ambitious neck of the woods and the children tabulated many worthy qualities they hoped to inherit from their upwardly mobile parents. But my poppet held the trump card. She diligently researched my side of the family and found nothing to emulate but not so her father’s ...

“If I take after dad’s family,” she announced, “I will have great big boobs.” But this rich endowment he had so rashly promised, proved to be far in the future. When she came to New Zealand aged eleven and a half, she was amazed at her well developed Kiwi contemporaries.

“I think it must be the butter,” said she who was raised on margarine. But »she didn’t envy them. Not yet.

I have always felt sorry for girls who develop early and have to endure teasing and unwelcome attention. But I have since discovered, just as a girl does not want to be the first in her class to get a bra, equally she does not want to be the last. When she entered intermediate school, none of her friends wore bras and nobody wanted to be first. When someone took the plunge, others quickly followed, sometimes, as my daughter observed sanctimoniously, without good and proper reason. “Maggie has a bra,” she announced one day, “and she’s got nothing to put in it except puppy fat.” Well!

“I wouldn’t buy you a bra just to put puppy fat in, even it you did have any,” I replied, equal to the high moral tone. But by the end of her second year, the tables had turned. It is now cool to have a bra.

“Everybody teases me because I haven’t got a

bra,” she wailed. “There are worse crosses,” I pointed out, “some children are born with unsightly birthmarks or serious handicaps and teased unmercifully.”

“You don’t understand. Wah! What would you know?”

Well, not much actually because I am a convent girl, and we convent girls did not wear bras until we were a size 36C.

“Why exactly do you want a bra?”

“I just want to be like

everyone else. Wah! All the girls have bras and the boys ping their straps.” “You want a bra so the boys can ping it?”

“Wah! You don’t understand.” I decided to buy my way out and said ... “Go and buy yourself a bra.” She brightened.

“Come with me.” Now I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself by taking a flat-chested child into a lingerie store. “Go yourelf. I’ll pay for it.”

When I returned an hour later she, who had been suicidal, now looked like the cat that ate the cream. She presented me with a bill for $13.20.

“Notice anything different about me?” She bared her infant chest and related her triumph

“I just said ... show, me the smallest bra you have got please ... the girl laughed and sent me to this Chinese lady who had a ‘lingering degree’.” Well! I had obviously underestimated the scope of lingering degrees. She flaunted the garment all night, even allowing her sisters to try it on. They all had turns at pinging the straps. It was exciting stuff. But there was one drawback. “These straps hurt when they ping,” she complained. Ha! What’s the use of a lingerie degree if it doesn’t even teach which bra straps hurt when they ping!