At the age of three, the worries of most little girls rarely stretch beyond what outfit to dress their dolls in, and how to ride a bike. But for Hayley Smith, her third year brought a set of problems most children her age wouldn’t even have heard of, let alone been able to comprehend – puberty.
While her baby-sized friends enjoyed the simplest of life’s pleasures, Hayley spent her time laid up on the sofa with period pains.
She also had to put up with other un-pleasantries of puberty, including body odour, greasy hair and mood swings.
Not surprisingly, her parents, Debbie, 41, a chemist and David, 45, a project manager from Nottingham, were left both distraught and baffled by the changes in their daughter’s body, and behaviour.
For some reason I was thinking about the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza uses Jerry’s home phone as the number to the fictional Vandelay Industries.