After donning my winter woollies after that cold, frosty, snowy spell over the past 3 or 4 days, today I am sweating. LADIES don't sweat, I know. Well, I am positively glowing as yet again our weather in this part of Scotland has changed and the temperature is in the lowish teens! -just give it a day or two, though, and it'll have changed again. You would think I should know better by my age.
My mother made the vest a permanent part of our clothing. In the summer it was a white, sleeveless cotton garment and in winter it was a woolly thing with short sleeves and a short opening, with buttons to allow access, only in my case, I had to wear the cotton version underneath as the wool made me scratch! At the start of October a liberty bodice was the next piece of additional underwear to be donned. Younger readers will be rushing to their encyclopaedias to find out what these were. They were shorter than a vest, reaching to about waist level (unless you'd got one "for your growth" ) and were cotton, fleecy on the inside and had vertical strips of tape sewn at intervals down the outside and were worn over the vest, or vests, in my case! They were front opening with about a million buttons which tended to ping off when put through the unforgiving, solid wooden rollers of the mangle after the wash. I was quite excited when mother came home with new pull-on types. How simple were my pleasures!
Girls sometimes had suspenders sewn on to the bottom edges to hold up their woolly stockings.
No wonder central heating was unknown in our neck of the woods.
When I was thrown out into the big wide world, at age 11, to attend secondary school in the city, I discovered that none of my classmates wore these contraptions. There followed a lengthy battle of wills with mother, until, when I was about 15, she caved in and I haven't worn a vest since. She said I was sure to succumb to kidney troubles in later life, but so far I've been free of such problems. Liberty bodices seem to have disappeared into oblivion.
Don't tell anyone, but I have, lurking in the back of a drawer, a little lacy number which goes under the guise of a vest----but it's not a patch on the original version.
4 comments:
And do you remember the rubber buttons on the liberty bodices which went horribly rotten between one bodice season and another? I never could understand the idiot who had put the word "liberty" on them as when they got a bit too short and the stockings likewise I remember feeling like the hunchback of you-know-what as the suspenders joining the two together took the strain.
Which also reminds me of knickers! Every pair of knickers I had as a child was either navy or dark green. Red was available, but my mother wouldn't entertain the idea of red. (Maybe she thought I would turn into a scarlet woman) I swore that if I had a daughter she would NEVER EVER have to wear navy or green knickers, and when Jude was a child she had knickers of every shade of the rainbow,embellished with all sorts of trimmings, lace etc, but guess what she craved .... blooming navy knickers. You can't win in this world.
You blether as much as my granpops and his bikes! It must run in th family
Those really were the days! So glad I was only a gleam in my father's eye then
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