Chapter 2 – Adolescence

 If Chapter 1 laid the foundations, Chapter 2 tells the story of beginning to build on them, often clumsily, sometimes brilliantly, always with intensity. Adolescence, that long in-between stretching from childhood to adulthood, is told here without excessive nostalgia or retrospective judgement. Simply with honesty. 

Nine chapters, a continent to cross

This chapter covers an entire decade, from age ten to twenty, across nine narrative chapters: Secondary School, Meningitis, Spain, High School, England, India, the Tunon School, settling in England, and my first jobs.

What strikes the reader is the sheer geographical and emotional range of this period of my life. From folded paper secrets exchanged on the walk to school in Niort, to the streets of Mumbai, the slopes of the Alps, a basement flat in Surbiton beside the Thames. In ten years, my world opened up radically and each opening left its mark. 

What this chapter is about

The relative tedium of chemistry lessons sits alongside the revelation of a maths teacher who proves that 1+1 does not necessarily equal 2 and turns a disengaged student into a near-top baccalauréat graduate. A viral meningitis caught just before the summer holidays of 1976, the year of the great heatwave, leads to a summer of family construction work under a scorching sun, and a fireplace to move by sheer muscle strength. A language stay in Worthing to improve my English becomes a first love story. A trip to South India at eighteen, between Bangalore, Mysore and Kodaikanal, becomes a direct confrontation with poverty, spirituality and the beauty of the world.

This chapter says something essential about the formation of character: it rarely happens where or when we expect it. 

The twelve Strawberries of Wisdom

This chapter is the richest in Strawberries, with twelve reflective sections covering themes at the heart of adolescence:

Character: how identity is forged in my invisible micro-choices, between pleasing others and staying true to myself.

Habits: the behaviours of a teenage girl, even those that looked like flaws, as survival mechanisms and drivers of growth.

Life in Society: friendship, groups, and travel as the first mirrors of who we are when faced with the world.

Emotions: from lumbar punctures in hospital to my first butterflies of love, a decade of intense emotions without yet having the tools to navigate them.

Teaching: learning not because we are obliged to, but when we understand why.

Values: built in the heat of lived situations, never in the abstract.

Negative Beliefs and Failure: the judgements received, the fears internalised, and how my first failures ultimately become teachers.

First Freedom: from a Peugeot 203 moped in Nantes to a flat in England, freedom tasted in small doses before becoming total.

Priorities: love, friends, and immediate pleasure as the compass of a teenager who has not yet mapped out her future.

Adventures, Humanitarian Work, Religions: travel as a terrain for self-exploration and opening up to the world.

Health: my body as messenger, from meningitis to a growing addiction to sugar.

Separation and Passage: the loss of my grandmother, leaving for Nantes, settling in England: thresholds crossed without any ritual to say goodbye to my childhood. 

What makes this chapter particular

Chapter 2 is perhaps the most universal in the series. Who has not crossed this period wondering who they were, seeking approval on one side and authenticity on the other? The metaphor of the white wolf and the black wolf, introduced here, runs through the entire series: in adolescence, we do not yet know which one we are feeding most.

This chapter also says something rare about travel: it is not the change of scenery that shapes us, but the confrontation with a reality we cannot ignore. India in 1984 is not an exotic backdrop in this story. It is the place where something shifts permanently in the way the world is seen. 

The poem and the recipe

The chapter closes with a poem about adolescence as a slow, silent moulting rather than a storm, and with the recipe for Queen of Puddings, that classic English dessert of meringue and raspberry jam, a direct memory of that first immersion in British culture. 

Going further

This chapter carries a question running beneath every chapter: between what was expected of me and what I felt deeply, which one did I choose to feed?

The next articles will explore each parts of this chapter in detail, starting with the secondary school years and those folded paper secrets exchanged on the walk to school.