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A Tale of Pins and Things

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 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 skin as she pinned in a sleeve.

   She last made clothes for my in 1943 when a Grammar School scholarship created the need for a school uniform.  Yes, more re-cycling.  Purplish-green barathea for a raincoat, some almost bottle green gabardine for a skirt and white cotton for my regulation three blouses.  And did they cause a stir!

  'The other one' had fashioned them from some practically transparent lawn she had kept from her trousseau chest 'just in case'.

    But who cared. Designer labels had still to be invented.  A couple of things did please me on my first day though.

 My hat was the real thing. Nobody we knew had ever taken up millinery.  And the other?  My pin obsession had disappeared, which was just as well because the hat required anchoring with one of enormous proportions.  Re-cycled of course. Or to be exactly truthful one which had been saved by yet another aunt 'just in case'. 

 

 

 

 

About the Author

Mollie Kay Smith, journalist and author, now lives in France. Prior to leaving the UK she was a Management Consultant advising and lecturing on Small Firms and Personal Development.As Chaiperson for the national UK charitable organisation she established in 1984 she edited Women in Enterprise Magazine until she retired in 1989. She was short-listed for the Yorkshire Woman of the Year Award in 1988.Since then she has been widely published on her specialist subjects.

I need to purchase new bridge pins for my acoustic guitar are there any certain types that are best?

I am just going to learn on this guitar and buy a better one once I know how to play

That depends on whom you talk to. I've been using regular plastic ones for years and I think they're fine. Others swear by brass, bone, ebony, or some other exotic kind. Each to their own but I'm sticking with plastic.

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