AS a junior reporter with The Northern Echo I covered my fair share of stories about giant prize-winning leeks, cucumbers and marrows. Gardeners in the North-East excel at producing the sort of monster vegetables that defy the laws of nature.

I can't help being reminded of these prize specimens now when I see some of the huge, super sized youngsters we appear to be growing nowadays. And I'm not talking about our obesity epidemic here.

All the standard growth charts show that in everything from shoe size to height and neck measurements, children today are beginning to dwarf the adults of previous generations. One of my nephews, just 15 years old, is now a lanky 6ft 2ins, taller than his dad, with size 11 feet. He hasn't worn a school jumper for the past year because the school's biggest XXL size is too small. Thankfully for my sister, John Lewis stores now sell school shirts in up to a size 17-inch neck. In the fifties, the largest they stocked was 14ins. Another nephew has size 12 feet. Years ago, it would have been difficult to find shoes to fit in the shops, but he has no trouble now outsize feet are more common.

Apart from a monster-sized two-year-old, I seem to have produced a row of mainly fairly average-sized boys. But there are signs things might be about to change. The 13-year-old's feet have suddenly shot to size ten, bigger than his dad's.

And, last week, the nine-year-old turned taller than his soon to be 12-year-old brother. Warning bells rang when I picked him up from school and he was complaining: "Mum, my ankles are freezing." It turned out the trousers that fitted him perfectly a few weeks ago were now flapping above his ankle socks.

So the 12-year-old will soon be wearing hand-me-ups, rather than hand-me-downs.

I got a taste of what could be to come last weekend when the 13-year-old and a group of four much taller friends called at our house to "hang out" (we don't use the word "play" anymore) before they headed off mountain biking.

It was like a scene straight out of Day of the Triffids as they mooched about "chilling" in the garden, towering above me, with huge, gangly limbs and enormous feet and emitting the odd incoherent grunt. One of them lay down in my husband's hammock, and fell straight through, splitting it right down the middle.

Then they decided they wanted something to eat, and proceeded to Hoover up all food in sight. "Do you fancy some toast?" the 13-year-old asked his mates. Whoosh, one-and-a-half loaves of bread was gone in minutes. Ten minutes later they fancied a snack. Six extra large cans of rice pudding and five cans of fruit salad went the same way.

I dread to think what my youngest will be devouring when he reaches the same age. At only two, he is already wearing clothes aimed at four to five-year-olds. I am sure people wonder what I am doing pushing a great big boy like him round in a buggy, or lugging him around in my now amazingly muscular arms. "Shouldn't he be at school?" someone asked once. I think they were joking. People often refer to him as a "bruiser" and a "big lad".

He is undoubtedly one of those children Gap is aiming at with its new bigger-than-large children's clothes size. Flatteringly, they have labelled it "husky" size, likening jumbo youngsters to strong, energetic furry dogs who run about a lot in the fresh air. I wonder how long it took the marketing department to come up with that one. Most experts argue our youngsters are taller and larger thanks to better nutrition. I hope they are right, but I can't help wondering about what else could lie behind it. After all, it is only thanks to pesticides, fertilisers and other chemical substances that gardeners are able to produce those huge, prize-winning vegetables.

John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids may have been the stuff of science fiction. But his theme of the tenuousness of mankind's position, as humans struggle to cope with the knock on effects of an alteration in their environment, has some resonance today.

In the meantime, all we can do is watch as our children continue to grow at increasingly rapid rates. One friend whose son and daughter tower above him complains they can hardly get into the house, they have to crouch down so far to get through the door frame, while all the ceilings in their home are now too low. "We will soon have to start redesigning our houses and rebuilding things to cope with it," he says.

As if we parents don't have enough to do...

Published: 26/05/2005