Mind The Gap – A Tale of British Teeth and Personal Growth

A 3D illustration of Diastema shows a noticeable gap between the two front teeth.

I have always hated my teeth. Perhaps ‘always’ is a bit of an overstatement, for I had no idea anything was wrong with my smile for the first ten years of my life. But after sending seven years living in the Caribbean island of Jamaica, I returned to London aged ten to discover almost immediately that kids can be bloody mean.

It’s not that we pickneys were not mean in Jamaica. However, we were probably more used to people with toothy smiles and a gap between their two front teeth and found other reasons to ridicule them. So “your teeth are like stars, yellow and far apart” and other such comments did not cross my consciousness before returning home to London.

Not that my new school chums had anything much to smile about themselves. The teeth of the nation in England were pretty poor by any standards, even back in 1973. Little poverty-stricken Jamaica still had much better notchers than your average, more well-to-do Brit. None of my former schoolmates in Kingston would have ever envied ‘the London look’. Yet that didn’t stop me from getting ribbed mercilessly for my so-called ‘buck-teeth’ smile in the playgrounds of British schools.

I repeat, children can be cruel. They will tease you endlessly when they find your most apparent flaw. And the more you react, the more they will turn the screw. I…