The day before New Year's Eve of 1975 I turned 18 and felt my life was about to burst open. I was blind to the world but did not know it - all I knew was the intoxication of beginning. All through my childhood I had been waiting only to grow up and now I believed myself ripe. For the first time I was going to try to pass myself off as a normal girl, with an ordinary old scar between my breasts instead of collapsed bones. As if in preparation for my new, grown-up life, I had spent the previous school holidays having the hole in my chest rearranged into a more acceptable shape with the aid of a medical saw and a steel pin. I believed the hole marked me, as if God had punched his clenched fist into me before he let me out and by doing so had permanently branded me an outsider. But a scar was something I could joke about: shark attack, the painless removal of a third bosom! A scar was ordinary, commonplace, while sunken bones spoke only of want.

All that summer as I waited for my new life to begin, I proudly wore a run-of-the-mill halter-neck bikini top, flaunting my scar on as many beaches as possible. Between visits to the beach, I visited my grandmother's dressmaker. Unbelievable as it now seems, I went with my father's mother and my mother to be fitted for the dresses I would wear to my first job. My grandmother who was watching was from another age, a left-over Victorian, stiff-backed but deeply emotional. Her house smelt of decay and seemed richly peopled by loosed ghosts: it was from this house of the past that I was to take my first steps into the future. My parents still lived on a pineapple farm too far from the city and it was arranged that I would stay with my grandparents until I found a flat. And so it was that on a steaming morning in January I woke and stepped into a handmade dress suitable for a young lady's debut. I felt like a character from Jane Austen or Edith Wharton as my grandmother waved me off and I strode towards The Courier-Mail and adulthood.

I remember crossing the tiled newspaper foyer, light-headed with triumph. At the chief-of-staff's door I announced myself and was led into the newsroom where the other cadets had gathered. Lounging across the desks were several boys who all seemed to be called Mark, virgins from good Catholic boys' schools. I inspected the other girls and decided they would not make too difficult competition. One girl was missing, suffering from chickenpox, and would join us when she had recovered. A red-haired girl and myself exchanged smirks at this: the humiliation of being late for your first job because of something so childlike! As the days passed, everyone and everything struck me as strange and wonderful. The men and women of The Courier-Mail seemed theatrically vivid, cartoon-like: the sub-editors, for instance, all appeared to be notorious drunks, uniformly small, middle-aged men with Brylcreamed hair set with a comb's teeth marks. On my first night shift one fell into a spectacular alcoholic fit and had to be taken away on a stretcher. In Women's News there were spinsters with the names of the virtues. Several plump Nosey Parkers worked there as well and a blowzy, bottle redhead, rumoured to be as old as 40 (!!), with a permanent cigarette, who spoke out of the side of her mouth. When she talked she sounded like Mae West, and after she seduced one of the virginal Catholic boys, everyone in Women's News knew the following day.

When the chickenpox cadet finally turned up she immediately became the focus of the Nosey Parkers' attention. Flamboyant, loud, an eccentric dresser with an impressive vocabulary, she did not seem at all like a school-leaver. I immediately singled her out as my friend and asked her to The Journalists' Club: she was an immediate hit and before long had accepted an invitation to lunch from a real journalist. That the man should turn out to be married was perhaps not as important as the fact that she accepted so publicly and so loudly, thus making her first mistake in an unwritten code of which she was as yet unaware. By year's end, both of us were beginning to comprehend there were rules you did not break. But by then it was probably too late for the chickenpox cadet: the Nosey Parkers already had her in their sights. Before the end of our cadetship she was unceremoniously fired and I had begun to sense that the world was a harsher and more devious place than I had imagined. By the time I walked into the office after lunch on a hot November day to hear the government had been sacked, I suspected there were important things I did not know, and that I might not be invincible after all.

There have been other years since when I have been happier, certainly years when I have been wiser. But I know now that year was the last in which I still dwelt in the rooms of childhood, where I retained the magical thinking of a child. Back then I had each of my four loved grandparents and great-grandmother still with me and supposed life incapable of doing me or anyone I loved any great harm. All the painful lessons were still before me: I was blessed, though not in the way I believed at the time.