3. Joining the Nefertiti Club

I guess the title needs an explanation. I started teaching History in 1974 at an inner city all-girls comprehensive, recently changed from a grammar school and ill-equipped to deal with less academic pupils who quickly became my favourites. My first lesson with the new Year 9s was “What is History?” The workbook presented a series of black and white images of People Through Time (History being “about people and what they have said and done in the past.”) Images threw up interesting questions, well, I thought so - why were they mostly men? why not all photographs? - the obvious stuff alongside a lot more probing things.

Marking their homework - a thoughtful comment about each of the images - I was completely thrown by what Biddy McElhone had written and it’s stuck with me ever since: ‘There was this ejipshun qeen who had her tit choped off.’ I kept going back to it, determined not to be thwarted by a 13-year-old’s mind and then had my Eureka moment. I remembered saying in the lesson ‘Just think, all we have that we know about Queen Nefertiti is this one bust.’ It never occurred to me to explain what a bust was!

So I joined what I call the Nefertiti Club - one of many with a tit chopped off.

It’s been no big issue, apart from the severe discomfort caused by the axillary clearance and finding things to replace my beautiful bras. I was never a fan of that breast: it already had a long smiley scar from having a 5cm fibroadenoma removed in the 1980s, which left it permanently tender inside and numb on the underside. I’m small-breasted and didn’t even contemplate the partial mastectomy originally offered. Just get rid of it. Huh, not as simple as that, is it!