A 1940s Childhood by James Marsh

Author:James Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750957069
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Clothes

The 1940s sees lots of different varieties of clothes, though for us it simply means wearing what your older brothers or other boys in your road have grown out of. While there is still wear in anything it is passed on in this way. Nothing is wasted. So for boys it means black shoes, long grey socks, short grey trousers that come to just above the knee, then either a white or grey shirt, hand-knitted pullover, a grey jacket and, on the head, if you’re lucky, a matching cap. Some boys though, with mums and grannies who were good at knitting, have to put up with a balaclava. This goes right over the head and comes down to the neck, completely covering the head so only your face is still visible. Girls do better than us. They wear dresses, usually with a flower pattern on them, and ankle socks, a woollen cardigan and a ribbon in their hair. A lot of them have pigtails, so a ribbon is tied to the end of each one of these.

Boys and girls have one lot of clothes that has to be worn on Sundays. Girls actually look nice when dressed in their Sunday best dresses, with brightly coloured ribbons keeping their hair in place. We have matching short trousers and jackets and we have to wear a tie, like our dads, when going to church. On these occasions our shoes are polished by our mums until they gleam, but once church is over and we are let out to play the shoes are the first to suffer. No red-blooded British boy ever comes home without that necessary sign of boyhood, scuffed shoes. Older girls wear dresses or sometimes skirts, and they go to somewhere called a salon to have their hair permed. On their feet they wear shoes with a very high heel and, of course, those stockings with the thin line down the back. They had to draw the line on their legs during the war.

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