The Worst Kept Secrets [Narrated]

The Rec had the best slide. We’d sit on waxed bread wrappers to pick up speed, launching ourselves off the end toward a patch of grass, and just beyond that, a roundabout.

Our goal wasn’t to stop—it was to fly. Not land—launch. We never stopped to consider how that might hurt. At the top, we had rituals: gripping the side rails, bouncing our knees, breath held like we were waiting for the shot—then letting go.

We didn’t want to be careful. We wanted speed. We wanted flight.

The playgrounds in Lower Pilsley—The Rec and The Green—were linked by a lattice of footpaths, carved long ago by miners walking to work. They linked the pits, the playgrounds, the terraced houses—thrown up quickly and cheaply when industry arrived.

The paths were short, direct, familiar. That didn’t mean they led anywhere we were meant to go.

They once led to Pilsley Colliery—“Catty Pit,” closed before we were born. We knew the name, not the story. Not the explosion. Not the 45 who never came home. We just played. Slid. Raced. We knew how to run on it, not what it had buried.

The collieries were gone. The local train stations, too. Only the main line still ran through North Wingfield. A few years later, when I was at Deincourt, we all went down to the tracks to watch The Flying Scotsman roar past. We waved like something might wave back. It steamed by like it still believed in arrival, even if it no longer stopped.

The trains didn’t stop anymore.
But the sorting remained.

By eight or nine, the split had begun. I was one of three in the top set that year—me, Chris, and Bryan—extracted from the rest to prepare for the 11-plus. Every day, we were fed a steady diet of logic puzzles and aging test papers while the others made papier-mâché, sang with the student teacher, and watched Meeting Our Needs on the wheeled-in TV.

We weren’t bitter. But we noticed.

The 11-plus wasn’t explained so much as absorbed. It decided which school you went to—Tupton Hall, the grammar, if you passed; Deincourt, the secondary modern, if you didn’t. But what it really decided was who got to be going somewhere.

Even the language was uneven.
A few of us—boys, mostly—got verbs: aim, climb, achieve.
The rest got nouns. Miner. Sheet metal worker. Factory hand. Nurse. Housewife. Shop girl.
Maybe teacher, if you were lucky.
That was the sorting, too. Not just by gender. By usefulness.

I got a verb. Not because I was better. Because someone decided I could be shaped.

So when we were told something special was happening after lunch—and yes, the three of us were included—it felt like we’d been let in by mistake. At the octagonal lunch tables, speculation buzzed. A film? A treat? A visiting magician?

We filed into Mr. Wright’s classroom after lunch. The desks had been rearranged. On each: a pink envelope, too neat to be ignored.

"Don’t open them," he said.

He was waiting for Miss Cotton—his girlfriend, though it was the worst-kept secret in the school. She wore tailored skirts and jackets, and her hair was the color of copper—the shade that only comes from bottles, though I didn't know that then. That day, she was late. Mr. Wright looked impatient. Checked the hallway. Then left to find her.

It took less than a minute.

One rustle. Then another.
Soon, most of us were peeling open the envelopes. Inside were slim booklets—not games, not puzzles. Just rules for a body we didn’t have the words for yet.

I remember the drawing.

The female reproductive system, pale blue ink. Fallopian tubes curling like cursive. Ovaries looking like something hidden behind a curtain—familiar in shape but unnamed, unclaimable. I stared too long. Not because I understood—because I didn’t. I didn’t know whether I had any of it. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to feel. A sudden thud in my stomach. My throat tight with embarrassment. And beneath that, a hard flicker of something like envy. Or panic. I wanted to ask, but the question didn’t have words. Just shape. Just heat. Just the awful feeling of being caught mid-thought.

Mr. Wright and Miss Cotton returned to a room gone still. At least one of the girls was crying. Miss Cotton went pale, panic rising.

"Put the booklets away," she said quickly.
"Back in the envelopes."

We obeyed. Clumsily.

Then the boys were told to stand and leave.

We filed out into the corridor, awkward and silent. We found out later the booklets were part of a sanitary product company’s campaign—information for the girls, a video too.

It was never mentioned again.

But I knew, immediately, that I’d seen something I wasn’t meant to. That there were rules I hadn’t been told. That shame and knowledge came in matching envelopes. That someone else always seemed to know more about my life than I did. Not just teachers. Not just adults. The kind of systems you don’t see until they’ve already shaped you. Paths that seemed open until you stepped off them. And someone—some institution, some design—wanted it that way. It kept us polite. It kept us obedient. It kept us guessing at what we were allowed to know. And for boys, especially, it taught us that ignorance was masculine. That not knowing was a kind of strength. That questions were a kind of weakness.

Even now, in rooms where I’m meant to speak, I feel for the edge of the map.

And when the silence came again, years later—different body, different questions—I recognized it. I knew how to obey it. I still do.

Some days I think that was the real test.
Not the 11-plus.

It was that moment—when a question formed, and I was told not to ask it.

The tracks were still there. But no one said what to do when the map ran out.

Maybe that was the point.
Maybe it still is.