silicone spray – A Tale of Pins and Things
Posted: August 31, 2010 at 8:52 am
A TALE OF PINS AND THINGS.
© Mollie Kay Smith
My young friend told me of his intention to wear 501’s rather than his Chinos. They looked cooler, he said, with his red Tee and black Docs. His words set me thinking. What might I have said in a similar situation at his age/
Looking back it seems like only yesterday, yet almost three quarters of a century has passed since those post-depression wartime years.
Many of my memories centre around clothes which is strange since like most people then I owned very few. It was an era of make-do-and-mend. Everything was re-cycled, though the word had yet to be invented.
Press studs, buttons, zips, bits of braid and ribbon were cut off and saved in biscuit tins with pictures of York Minster or fluffy kittens on the lids.
Seams were unpicked and the resulting pieces of fabric washed in the big set-pot – that built-in cauldron in the kitchen corner where water for laundry and bathing was heated over a coal fire. Sometimes before being dried the fabric was dipped in a gluey mixture obtained by adding powder from a carton with a robin on its front. No silicone spray starch in those days.
Careful ironing with flat irons, heated on the stove, a la Mrs Bridges remember, rendered the fabric like new before it was put in the cloth drawer until such a day as we children needed new clothes.
Coats for Sunday best were generally handed down from older siblings or even cousins, and were passed on again when outgrown, but still scarcely worn as they only saw the light of day on holy days.
In my family ‘new’ Sunday clothes were paraded on Whit Sunday at the Chapel Festival and you can imagine the embarrassment when less diplomatic relations revealed that your coat ‘used to be mine’.
Despite all that most children in those days did not appear to be disadvantaged – at least those we knew – just the opposite. The legacy from World War 1 meant that even small villages had their clutch of unmarried women, those whose sweethearts had never returned from the front. Three of these greatly influenced my life.
The first two were my father’s sisters, and being childless they indulged my sister and myself like puppies, feeding us rare off-ration titbits and the like. But more importantly their ample forms kept us well supplied with plenty of clothing fabric.
The elder sister was an excellent seamstress and knocked up dashing little numbers with cap sleeves and tie bow belts made out of matching bits of cloth. The younger preferred more delicate work and her smocking ensured our best dresses were real works of art.
Our mother excelled at holiday clothes. Dad’s old shirt tails were transformed onto skimpy shorts and sun-dresses designed for our brief annual holidays which were spent at Bridlington at the end of July. And how proud we felt as we emerged from the changing hut wearing our new rainbow-coloured swimming costumes under a sun which in memory always shone.
The only snag was that the costumes were knitted from rescued wool and drooped when wet, a real hindrance to tyro swimmers. And an even greater problem when the time to leave the water arrived!
But it was thoughts of another dressmaker which prompted this tale. She was a professional and always referred to as ‘the other one’ because her sister, a cook, was larger and more dynamic. ‘The other one’ worked in what was called the sewing room, remembered by me as a dangerous place.
Today my pin obsession would probably have been blamed on my mother’s constant cautioning.
‘Watch out I’ve dropped a pin. If it gets in your foot you’ll be crippled for life.’
In the sewing room these threatening objects lay scattered around the floor like daisies on a lawn. All those pins waiting to cripple ‘the other one’ as she knelt to measure my hem. All those pins held between lips waiting to be swallowed. Al those pins hovering near your s
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