1960s, Cheltenham, United Kingdom

By Teresa Hewitt

“She says I’ve grown 2 feet since she last saw me,” I sobbed, hurling myself into my mother’s arms for comfort after Aunt Ellen’s visit.

“Look her straight in the eye, and tell her you’ve ALWAYS had two feet,” was my mother’s robust reply, but being tall was no laughing matter - not to me.

I was teased for everything at school - for being shy, for being plain, for being asthmatic, for being knock-kneed, and for having a weird blinking tic that made me look like a worried frog in a swamp, but the one thing that really singled me out was my height.

You have only to look at my school photographs to witness the embarrassment of being a tall, plain weed in a bed of tiny rosebuds. There you see a smiling row of sweet little schoolgirls identical in pleated skirts and little white-socked legs, and pushed to one side a gangly hunchbacked giant wearing an emergency 6-foot tunic. (There were no school skirts beyond Size Dinky.)

Sometimes, in an attempt to neaten up the aesthetics of his picture, the photographer has placed his most awkward subject (me) at the back, among the teachers. That is worse, as there is now one brown pudding-like school hat imperfectly concealed between the neat gray perms of the matronly staff.

This embarrassment reached its climax with my school production of The Water-Babies. Paralyzed with shyness, I was deemed unable to reliably speak a line, even if I managed to learn any, so I was relegated to the chorus.

Charles Kingsley most probably imagined a whole miniworld of sea creatures peopling his undersea kingdom, but the school had, for some reason, only a large number of prawn suits in its dusty cupboards, so prawns it had to be. (Do we wonder what the previous years’ production was? Yes, we do!)

The day came for the dress rehearsal, and it was discovered with some alarm that the prawn costume assigned to me was many sizes too small. While I stood on one leg in an agony of embarrassment, earnest discussions took place on the lines of “could she perhaps be a crawling prawn? Then it wouldn’t matter that her claws are on her knees,” but in the end, one last desperate rummage in the Costume Cupboard produced a larger suit.

It was not pink, and it was not even a prawn, but a huge brown lobster kit complete with two big waving stalks on the headpiece, each with a dangling bulbous black eye the size of a tennis ball.

I put the suit on and stood there miserably, a giant misfit on the stage as a little army of well-meaning teachers clucked and fussed down around by my knees, trying to pull and pat the costume into some sort of convincingly crustacean shape. Finally, it was doubtfully pronounced “perfect!” and I went home and cried.

I don’t suppose I was very coherent about my despair, and I don’t blame my mother for not understanding why it was so demeaning to be a lobster while everyone else was a prawn, for, as she bitterly pointed out, none of us had a decent part; we were all rejects for the speaking roles, and to be the mother of a chorus prawn was nothing to shout about, even if your own little shrimplet was the perfect size.

The night of the production came around, and I peeped out from the wings of the stage to see that the school hall was full. There was not a single spare seat, and people were packed along the sides and the back of the hall. All too soon, it was time to go on. “Go out there, and shine, shine, shine!” sang out our drama teacher, pushing on the first of the dancing prawns.

The audience sighed with delight as one by one, a cute little shrimp in pink skipped onto the stage and lined up. But this was nothing to their delight at what came next.

All of a sudden, a pair of big black rubber eyes on stalks appeared around the side curtain. The rest of me did not follow, as my toes were clamped to the floor in fear. A ripple of laughter began to flow through the audience.

I suspect that they assumed that it was intentionally funny - the lobster’s eyes bobbing up and down, the lobster itself too comically shy to be coaxed out. A slow clap began, and, with the aid of a hefty shove from the teacher’s toe, I shot out onto the stage at the end of the line.

Fifteen tiny pink prawns danced their cute little dance, and one enormous brown lobster shuffled miserably on the spot, its stalks swinging this way and that. People were holding each other up, howling with laughter. There was not, as they say, a dry eye in the house. Least of all mine.

Teresa Hewitt is a writer, mother, and horse lover from the Cotswolds, United Kingdom. She is, thankfully, now of quite an average height for her age.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, August 27th, 2007 | Email This Post

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