I was never a girl guide. Well, that’s not entirely true: once, when I was about 12, I tagged along behind a girl I was hungrily trying to befriend while she went to one of her meetings (although possibly “meetings” is the wrong word; maybe “pow-wow” would be a more accurate term).
Anyway, I had a bit of a crush on this particular girl. I met her shortly after my family got chucked out of the blistering suburbs, when we ended up renting odd, damp homes in whisperingly rich neighbourhoods, and I was agog at some of the lives of privilege and confidence that were revealed to me.
I suspect her appeal lay in the fact that she was bossy and lissom and freckled and difficult to impress, not that I had anything much to impress her with, and to top it all, she had jodhpurs. Jodhpurs: the extravagance of the word alone was enough to make my adolescent head spin.
Our friendship failed to ignite, however. My inability to correctly mount her pony or persuade one of her many lethargic Labradors to sit up and beg for his bonio was a source of great irritation to her and, ultimately, I failed in my bid for her fickle attention, which in itself was no great loss.
I did learn one important lesson from our truncated courtship, however: sitting on a wet beach over a smouldering heap of twigs, singing “There was a bear, there was a bear” in two-part harmony, over a resolutely untoastable and blackening marshmallow, was not my idea of good, clean fun.
I should have persisted
In retrospect, I probably should have persisted with the whole Girl Guide thing, got myself a neckerchief and a couple of woggles, learned how to tie a slip knot, resuscitate a choke victim, read a compass and make sturdy gingerbread men, rather than becoming a dab hand with the henna dye, a wizard with an eyeliner brush and a technician with brain-surgeon levels of dexterity when it came to rolling my own cigarettes. But hey, it takes all sorts, right?
In fact, I was thinking about the Girl Guides the other day, lashing through the unseasonably hot city, past gangs of summer-clad young girls congregating around the doorways of cheap boutiques, their coltish legs streaked in badly applied sun shimmer, their wary eyes gazing at themselves in the darkened shopfront glass.
They spread out on to the sun-bleached street, arm in skinny, jangling arm, propping each other up in stilt-like sandals, clutching paper carrier bags stuffed, presumably, with more tat – sorry, I meant to say pretty pastelwear – and I remembered something a friend had said in passing about her daughter spending the weekend roaming around the hills with a torch and a sleeping bag and a bunch of Girl Guide mates, and it sounded fantastically freeing and wholesome. And my enthusiasm surprised me, because wholesomeness is not a word that tends to feature too often in my thinking, let alone rock up very often in my dog-eared lexicon.
If I was 14 again I’d have been one of the kids crucifying her insoles in the 6in plastic wedges. I’d have been one of the skinny girls in the 100-per-cent-polystyrene leopard-print crop-tops. And, from vivid memory, I’d have thought that I was fat and ugly and didn’t deserve my dinner, and I’d have been feeling desperate for someone, anyone, to tell me that I looked good.
The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts has recently introduced a programme called Free Being Me, which attempts to unmask society’s beauty myths, exposing air-brushing and opposing unhealthy body talk. Through a series of thought-provoking activities, girls are challenged to stand up and take action against unrealistic body ideals.
This is the association’s response to a world where appearance-related anxiety and low self-esteem among young girls is thought to be at the root of some disturbing statistics. According to research in the UK, one in 10 young people will develop an eating disorder before they reach 25, and one in five primary-school girls has been on a diet, sometimes skipping meals in order to lose weight.
Wild horses, or even someone else’s moody pony, wouldn’t have dragged me to a Girl Guides jamboree when I was a teenager. But if a modernised version of the institution can help spare any of our children years of self-doubt and crippling insecurity about body image, I’ll happily throw my spurs into the ring.