22 Victorian Underwear and Science-fiction Shoes

Highgate, 1952–55

‘If I ever find out who was supposed to have tightened them bolts on t’ scaffolding,’ Pauline Hollingworth hears her dad saying, ‘I’ll stick a rocket up his backside that big that he’ll go up and never come back down again. Take these plates away and turn t’ radio up, will tha?’

It is a month after the great Coronation Day fireworks disaster and Pauline is on the stairs, listening to her mam and dad in the sitting room, and laughing to herself.

‘Give me a chance wi’ t’ fetching and carrying, Harry. I’m not your flaming servant.’

‘I’ll gie thee flaming servant. Don’t bother, I’ll do it my sen. This damn thing won’t let me move . . .’

The damn thing that will not let Harry move is a grey surgical corset, fitted at the Montagu Hospital, which he has to wear for three months. The corset holds his spine rigidly upright, and makes movement, and sleep, difficult. Occasionally Winnie says he is milking it, the accusations provoking a stream of complaints that end in imaginative threats against whichever idiots had reckoned to be tightening the bolts on the scaffolding.

Off work until October, Harry has still been spending odd mornings and afternoons down at Manvers Main, talking to his mates, and cadging materials for do-it-yourself projects. Goods from the nationalised pit yards are used in most home-improvement activities in the valley, one way or another: garden sheds are painted in colours from the pit stores, whole streets are wired with NCB electrical cable, and a generation of children is told that they had an ancestor so wealthy he had tools engraved with his initials: N.C.B. Hampered by the corset, Harry brings only small or light objects, transforming them with a little light work into items for the house and yard. A roll of rubber belt becomes a doormat, industrial brackets prop up radio speakers, a wooden crate turns into a new home for his chicks. Some of his curios are adapted for individual members of the family. When he brings home a six-foot-high, half-inch-thick sheet of white polystyrene foam, he tells Pauline it is for her.

‘I’m going to show thee summat after tea. I’ve a right idea. For thy feet.’

‘You can get it shifted, whatever it is,’ says Winnie, who wonders how a man who needs his crockery carried can undertake such elabor­ate handicrafts. ‘It’s dropping bits all over t’ carpet.’

After he has finished his tea and had a smoke, Harry tells Pauline to lay the polystyrene on the carpet, remove her shoes and stand on it. He then manoeuvres himself down to a kneeling position, marks a line around her feet with a knife, and cuts out the shapes. Finally he inserts the flat, white cut-out pieces of polystyrene into Pauline’s shoes.

‘There!’ He looks triumphant. ‘They’ll keep thy feet right warm when it’s cold.’

Pauline is always cold, and complains particularly of cold feet. In November, to save her from tonsillitis, Winnie bastes her in goose grease and makes vests from Thermogene wadding to wear under her liberty bodice.

‘But it’s not cold yet,’ Pauline says to her dad.

‘It will be in winter,’ says Harry.

Winnie shakes her head. ‘She can just wear them in t’ winter then.’

‘She wants to be wearing them in now.’

‘They’ll not wear in, Harry. They’re plastic.’

‘It’s polystyrene. It’s a material of t’ future.’

Pauline intervenes by placing the insoles in her shoes and walking around the room. The shoes are tight and her feet feel uncomfortably hot.

‘I love them,’ she says, to dispel the tension. ‘You want to try ’em, Mam.’

*

Pauline wears her new insulated shoes when she returns to Bolton-upon-Dearne secondary modern after the school holidays for her second year of senior school. Her futuristic footwear is in contrast to the pink, boned-cotton corset that her mam has made her wear since she started there. ‘All t’ other lasses’ll also be wearing them. It’s what you wear at that age,’ she says when Pauline objects, but what she really means is, you’re a woman now, and to be a woman you must tolerate discomfort. When Pauline asks other girls her age if they wear corsets, no one even knows what they are, so this becomes another thing to hide and worry about: underwear that feels Victorian, now offset by science-fiction shoes.

The contrast between the ideas of a restrictive past and a bright future based on novelty and innovation is experienced by Pauline not only in her own home, but also in the classrooms at school. For the girls of Bolton-upon-Dearne secondary modern in the mid-1950s, education is characterised by a struggle between two opposing factions of teachers. One is made up of approachable younger women who wear fashionably cut skirts and pastel tops, and who talk to you about topics that interest you, such as food and hobbies. To talk to these teachers is thrilling, if nerve-wracking, because, unlike other adults, they act as if your opinion is as valid as theirs. The other faction comprises older women who teach drier subjects such as science and geography. Some of them have taught your mam or your aunties in the old elementary schools, and are often said by your relatives to be right tartars. They wear thick, tweedy suits all year round and are greatly concerned with preventing contact with the boys who occupy half of the segregated school premises.

The leader of the tweedy Victorian group, and a strong influence on the atmosphere of the school, is Miss Grose, a short, squat woman who had briefly taught Winnie Parkin. Miss Grose teaches science in a room with wooden benches and stools, and concentrates almost exclusively on the topics of dinosaurs and the formation of coal from dead forests during the Carboniferous Period. The Bolton teachers often refer back to coal formation, presumably out of a sense of local relevance, though few children are interested, hearing quite enough about coal at home. What interests the girls most is the armadillo shell – curved so that the armadillo’s tail is in its mouth – that Miss Grose displays behind her desk. At the end of each term she allows her pupils to stroke it, providing a treat that many of them consider to be among the high points of the year.

More than dinosaurs, coal or armadillos though, Miss Grose is interested in sex. She believes that all her charges’ failings can be attributed to their interest in boys, and particularly to their desire to look at the boys studying gardening in the plots outside her classroom window.

‘You’re not listening!’ she shouts at Pauline one day in her first term, after she has answered incorrectly a question about coal. ‘I’m not looking at the boys outside, and neither should you be!’

‘I’m not, Miss Grose,’ says Pauline. ‘I wasn’t even looking out of the window.’

‘Yes you were. If I catch you looking again, I shall cane you.’

In fact, no one was looking out of the window. Even the bored, forward girls are uninterested in these boys, standing in a pimpled hairy line, pink monkey hands slackly gripping their spade handles. It is Miss Grose herself who is interested, though not in the boys themselves so much as the threat they represent.

The leader of the pastel faction is Miss Bryant, a brisk, forthright young Yorkshirewoman who teaches domestic science with great passion. She speaks with enthusiasm about modern technologies for the home, such as vacuum cleaners and electric irons, and makes the learning of brass-polishing techniques seem like an adventure in the acquisition of knowledge. Miss Bryant summons up images of dream houses and makes the new efficient ways of cooking and cleaning sound somehow invigorating. Food rationing is coming to an end, and Woman’s Weekly runs stories about the attractive modern kitchens owned by housewives in America. One day, says Miss Bryant, we too will have such kitchens, and the skilful management of them will be a joy and fulfilment for which you will all be grateful.

Pauline is enthused by Miss Bryant’s vision, but her favourite subject is English, particularly when taught by Miss Senior – one of the modern teachers – in Pauline’s favourite room, the library. Overlooking the gardens, the library is dark and old-fashioned with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, long, waxed wooden tables and heavy chairs. Around the walls, the books’ variously coloured spines, each with its own little number taped to its foot, look well against the polished oak, as pleasing to look at as the American kitchens in their way. Week by week Pauline works her way through those she has heard of – Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility – and her comments impress her teacher. One afternoon in late 1953, Miss Senior is reviewing the class’s essays about Pride and Prejudice. Outside there is slush, dirty snow, an unlifting wet, brown fog. The school gardens are dead and colourless. Here in the library the air is dozy with the heat from the big iron radiators, and the smell of camphor oil, soot and damp woollens condenses so thickly you could write your name in it. ‘And now, Pauline Hollingworth,’ says Miss Senior. ‘Well this was very good. Keep studying like this, you don’t know where it might take you.’

Pauline wants to ask what sort of places Miss Senior is thinking of, but instead she just says ‘Thank you’, and blushes from her scalp down to her polystyrene insoles.

She tells her mam that she likes school, but Winnie, always busy with the housework, has no time for it. It seems to Pauline that some of the women of her mam’s age resent their daughters for not having to deal with the hardship that they endured in their childhoods. ‘You girls don’t know you’re born,’ they chide, making it sound like an insult. Even among her peers, Winnie seems particularly old-fashioned – often deliberately, wilfully so. When Pauline starts her periods she is so scared that she thinks she must be dying. She washes her underclothes herself, but not thoroughly enough for Winnie, who complains about the blood, explains nothing, and gives her daughter a crude cloth belt to tie around her waist with some pieces of rag, torn for the purpose, to attach to it with safety pins. Her mam’s grumbling makes Pauline feel she herself is to blame. It isn’t until Auntie Olive comes to visit and hears Pauline asking her mam for rags that anything changes. Olive reprimands her sister for never having been up to date, and buys Pauline some sanitary towels from the shop on the corner. No one ever explains what causes the bleeding though.

*

Gradually the new spirit of pastel cardies and American kitchens and labour-saving electrical appliances enters some of the homes on Highgate Lane. When Peggy Copper walks out on Arthur in 1954, she leaves behind her Singer treadle sewing machine, and Arthur, lost and depressed, allows Pauline to use it to make clothes with fabrics that Winnie brings back from Doncaster market. For herself, and for friends on Highgate Lane, she makes clothes like the ones she has seen in films and Pathé newsreels: gypsy skirts in pinstripes, full skirts with material printed with airline badges, tops to go with denim jeans and bumper shoes. On Fridays she sits in the living room with Winnie and Comfort and knits youthful cardigans in the firelight. These garments are the beginnings of what the newspapers will call ‘teenage fashion’, but Pauline doesn’t know about that; she just thinks of them as pleasant, colourful things for young women who don’t want to wear corsets.

Among the older women it is Nelly Spencer who is the first to embrace the domestic vision that has so enthused the likes of Miss Bryant. Nelly’s parsimony might have been learned in the austerity of the twenties and thirties, but it means that in the 1950s she is able to buy the new household gadgets as soon as they arrive in Goldthorpe’s shop windows. Her clothes are always current, and when the new kitchen units come to the shops of Doncaster and Barnsley, she is the first to have one. Electric irons have been in the stores only a few days before Winnie enviously beholds a smart, Morphy Richards model in Nelly’s kitchen.

Most prized of the modern household items are the trim new fireplaces which replace the dirty black ranges in sitting rooms. Once you have one of the new gas cookers a range is no longer necessary, and with a fireplace sitting rooms look impossibly tidy and clean. Winnie thinks it wouldn’t even be worth asking Mr Meanly for one, but Nelly says, with her chuntering up-beatness, ‘You want to get one, Winnie. We love ours. We’ve just had one put in, you know.’

‘Have you?’ says Winnie.

‘It looks grand. I brought Comfort round to have a look t’ other day and she were lost for words.’

‘I wish I knew how you did it, Nelly. I should love to not get so mucky cleaning that thing.’

‘Do you want me to show you?’

Winnie feels suddenly naïve, a girl in the presence of a woman. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean I’ll show you how to get a fireplace out of Meanly. Has Harry got a hammer?’

The following day, Nelly Spencer is on her knees before Winnie’s range, its large grate pulled out, and a blanket spread over the oven bottom. Above her head she has Harry’s ball-peen hammer tightly gripped in both hands.

‘Look out,’ she says, and brings the hammer down hard. It makes a muffled crack. She strikes again, again and again. ‘Once more for luck.’ And then like a conjuror she whisks away the cloth to reveal the range’s shattered base.

Winnie’s mouth is open, and her voice is small when it comes out. ‘What have you done, Nelly?’

Nelly explains that landlords are bound to replace fixtures that are irreparably damaged, and no landlord is going to replace a range when he can have a modern fireplace cheaper. ‘Tell him you dropped t’ grate on it,’ she says. ‘Act helpless.’