Girl’s World

Broadcast: BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour

Audio Series

I was briefed to go out, speak to 13-year-old girls and find out what they are thinking and feeling. At Woman’s Hour we spend a lot of time talking to women, but less time hearing from the girls that they once were.

I remember worrying how they would open up to forty something year old me? How do you walk into a classroom with decades between you and not feel it immediately? How do you get past the polite answers? I didn’t want the tidy version of their lives. I wanted the bit they’d say when no one official was listening.

Then I remembered my grey vintage suitcase that lives in the loft. Inside are my teenage years. I’m a keeper and I kept many of my favourite things from my teenage youth. The very best thing was my diary.

I started writing this diary on my 13th birthday. Reading it again was like introducing my teenage self to my adult self. The drama, the uncertainty, the way every friendship felt life-defining. The invisibility, the need for love and to fit in. So I took the young me with me to meet the girls I interviewed. It worked.

They stopped answering like pupils. They started answering like themselves. We giggled, they corrected my terminology, we compared their life now with my life then and discussed the shifts.

Finding the girls took ages. There were parental permissions, school approvals, pre-calls to make sure we had the right mix: different backgrounds, different energies, different ways of seeing the world. From Glasgow to Stroud, I travelled and recorded these brilliant girls.

The series was divided into chunks that were played on Radio 4 over the course of a few months. The small conversations were dropped into the programme - little reminders of the girls who will one day be the women the show speaks to.

It was exhausting and brilliant. What stayed with me wasn’t how different things are now. It was how familiar it all felt. How hard it seemed then and how hard it actually is now.

Do you remember 13 year old you? Here’s me, 13 (ish). I was at hockey camp as part of my gold Duke of Edinburgh stuff when I was picked to play for Scotland (for all of 10 minutes) against South Africa. I was so ill that day, but also so proud of me.

LISTEN: Episode 1 , Episode 2 , Episode 3 , Episode 4