When I was a teenager, my grandmother would pick me up from school every week and drive me to the orthodontist, the aptly-named Mrs Crabbe, so she could stick more pieces of metal in my mouth, tighten something up, or twist some new jazzily-coloured elastic bands onto the brackets glued onto my teeth in a vain attempt to distract onlookers from the horror that was my metal-adorned smile.
Don’t expect me to be able to talk properly, and be prepared to be spat at
A buck-toothed child, with overly large teeth for my mouth, I had years of orthodontic work, from the age of about 12 until I was 16 or 17, at which point the braces came off and suddenly I was able to smile with my mouth open – a total revelation. But the years up until then were painful and humiliating, especially the period when I was forced to wear night-time headgear, a sort of bondage-like contraption akin to a scold’s bridle that slotted into brackets glued into the back of my mouth and strapped under my chin – particularly embarrassing to don at bedtime at boarding school.
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