Stitched memories

If there is one past in the present moment in this life I'd love to recreate anew then this experience would be one on my list of five I'd put toward the top of it.

You see, for me visiting grandma's meant many things, playing games usually the sorts of games we either never had or perhaps no one would of thought I'd love like connect four, or tv shows my folks had issues with but talking with her about what was being shown and soft drinks and biscuits.

She understood my feminine side.

To me that was more fun than being locked into a car for three-quarters of an hour on your own and we'd make things from either paper or even make cakes.

The big thing was near enough every other week I'd be measured and we'd go through knitting patterns as she hand knitted nearly every single cardigan or sweater I had adapting the instructions to get a perfect fit on me usually at the same time and the same style as my female cousins in either dusty pink a odd mixture of bluesy pink, red or grey.

So outside of school uniform, I never owned a machine made one into past my teens often on a similar style to the one on the right.

It's enough to know she's very much missed by me.

Stamp collecting

Talking with a friend the other day lead to talking about their interest in the design of postage stamps, not that they were a collector of those things and that was inspiration enough for this post.

That strip of stamps came recently on a compact disc I had bough from a guy in Poland, Europe which caught my eye as most mail today commercially doesn't have stamps on but instead is put in a machine that marks you have paid the mailing fees for it and often things from other countries around the world are interesting.

Stamps generally come in two forms, those which are  fairly plain in appearance with fixed designs on them such as the British 'definitive' ones with the Queen's head  that have a long period in production and other more decorative  ones that commemorate events or show things such as historic events, buildings, transportation, nature and seasonal events such as Christmas. 

I started a collection when I was ten years old starting with inherited stamp albums of the hard back book design with fixed pages per country some of which went back to the mid nineteenth century when it came to British Stamps including a complete unused set of the present Queen's Coronation issued stamps.

It wasn't long getting into my mid teens that I moved into the loose-leaf binder kind of stamp album so I could set the pages out as I wished, making better use to present them in a more attractive way only feature entries by theme and countries I wanted.

Around this period, I used by buy mixed bags of stamps from my local store and visit a specialist dealer from time to time buying direct from him specific issues I wanted in my collection.

To aid with this I would borrow the Stanley Gibbon's guidebook that listed all World-wide stamps and make notes in a pocket book of those that interested me.

Around this time I collected religiously British "First Day Covers" that were a stiff card envelope with all of a commemorative set of stamps on that would by stamped with a special first day of issue stamp and later on Presentation Packs that had the stamps pre-mounted in a presentation.

Comic talent

Comics were always a big thing with me buying loads and having them bought for me by my parents, my Nan and family friends as a boy but sometimes we forget that within the medium of our mirth there resides considerable talent.

Not everyone can draw so well as to get a job as a illustrator drawing the characters and creating from guidelines new stories every week for publication and this is an example of the kind of talent used from here in the Midlands about the man who draw Korky The Cat.

Jacqueline

In a week where events that have been dominated very much with a national tragedy, the full nature of we are still very much learning of as well as trying to come to terms with emotionally, I need go back in time to what helped and still helps the adult-child me.

 Jacqueline is a dolly I had now for over fifteen years, that I like to handle, feeling the fabrics and generally care for who has a soft dusty complexion and isn't so obviously pretty pretty with her blue eyes.

She has however seen me  through a number of less than pleasant experiences and situations, steady and reliably very much the girl in what was the equivalent in UK terms to Juniors who looked after me she was named after.

While not being particularly fussy her dress has a simple country print and just a hint of lace and a bow which is more where I'm at not being heavily into lace, frills and 'sugary stuff'.

I always found back then getting back to a bit that regular child structure when such awful things happened did help more than just going over and over the events and involved your dollies and teddies.

Wave me goodbye

It was just about three months ago that I was given by a kind relation who enjoys reading, a gift voucher for a well known book and stationery store and in early June, a new book by a favourite author of mine came out so I called in and used it to buy this book.

Entitled Wave My Goodbye, it is about the world of one Shirley L. Smith who lives with her Mom who works in an office and Dad who has joined the Army in the centre of London in Nineteen Thirty-nine.

It has been decided all the children need to be evacuated as the threat of war with Nazi Germany for their own well-being from bombing and it is being done on a school by school basis.

The whole of Paradise Road Junior School is called up, so Shirley has to have a suitcase packed with a change of clothes including night wear plus her favourite dolls and  books before her mommy sees her off at London Victoria railway station which after some fuss she is allowed to sit with the girls of the St Agatha's Convent School of whom it transpires seem to get the best of everything, enroute to Meadow Ridge way out in the countryside.

Arrangements for billeting the children and staff seem very rushed as nothing had been prearranged between the W.V.S. and W.I.and the children are taken around the village until someone claims  them. Unfortunately Shirley plus two east end boys, Kevin and Archie appear to stuck with nowhere to go until with some reluctance Mrs Waverley and Chubby who is her assistant at the Red House, decides to take them in although it appears they hadn't enough food in for them straightaway nor beds .

The children are bought new clothes which for Shirley includes a School Tunic and tie as she only had a pleated skirt with attached bodice and a party frock to change into plus Mrs Waverley also loves reading so they have something in common.

The story sees them attending school in extra classes of the villages local school with lessons by  who is brisk, kind in some ways but not opposed to strapping misbehaving children.

They appear to get on although life has it's ups and downs not least with one of the boys having a problem with bed wetting that creates a lot of work but following an accident  when Kevin follows Shirley who can look at Mrs Waverley's dolls house from the end of the war and to which is a kind of model of the life who had hope to have until her husband was killed in the Great War (W.W.1) and in the course of playing with it breaks the arm of the dolly of him, she gets upset and Kevin and Shirley run off back to London where she is met by her dad for a few days.

He returns them and smooths over the misunderstandings with Chubby and Mrs Waverley so they feel at home and so stay there until the war is over.

The story is one that is undeniable moving, based on what happened across much of Great Britain during the build up and shortly after World War Two, when our major city areas were deemed to unsafe for children and they travelled often more in hope that everything would work out being without their parents.

It is also true that some didn't want 'city children'  and their ways around and others only wanted them for much more for what they could bring them on say farms for labour rather than providing a safe place to live and yet for others it did bring changes for the better in their lives having access to fresh air and countryside.

As a book I found it highly enjoyable although a bit sad in places, telling an important story about the social history of being a child caught up in the storms of war having to adjust to vastly different realities.

Talkin' about it

Sometimes when you say you've been on a journey people presume you've walked or cycled along a route but it's not always that at all.

For some of us it was discovering the feel of soft tights and stockings, the allure of a pair of frilly silk panties, the discovery the image in the mirror was more what we liked.

I felt what I saw was as girlie as I felt.

But then there were other things like wanting to made to be made up with foundation, lip stick and at least  a pretty head band if not a wig by a dominant woman or big sister.

I felt like a million dollars like that but getting it wasn't easy.

It just depends on what "price" you're prepared to pay and what favours you're prepared to give.

The New Girl and Nancy

After a bit of a pause, today I have decided to write a bit about a book I have been reading this week.

The Nancy and St.Brides series of school based stories  by Dorita Fairlie Bruce is one I've been slowly making through since being presented  with one book and buying the others in a series of contemporary  high quality reprints.

We last left Nancy at Maudsley Grammar after a disastrous term at St. Brides, working on the resolving the feud between themselves and Larkistone through the Guildery movement and its ethos of moral  education and personal responsibility and the inter-school competitions.

This new term a heiress, Barbara Stephen, arrives and Nancy is involved in settling her in although the expression "two's company, three's a crowd" comes to mind as it place strains on her previous friendship with with Desda.

Things would of been so much the better if Barbara had not been so encouraged to see her role as that heiress, home taught by a Governess who very much indulged that very self centred, revolving all around her way of thinking who just wanted everything to be as it was so when she was spirited away from people who only wanted to be her parents for who she was for the Stephen's, she could not even see she had so much to be grateful for even for going to a lesser school.

An example of that defiant streak is her refusal to consider changing how she has her hair fixed as it is long and very wavy in a more grown up way while at school it would of been  a bit shorter and in pigtails or in a bob even though the signs from the other girls and even staff could not of been plainer.

Nancy takes a principal stand of not ganging up on her but carefully steering her toward the values of the other girls, seeing  past all that attitude she possesses, that there was a lot of potential good and she joins the Guildery where that hair creates problems for the unit inspection although to Nancy's surprise given the problems she had in Section 6  as "Maid of Merit" with unit discipline and even fighting, Barbara does emerge with some credit for her conduct.

That three's a crowd side rears its head when Desda decides to study for a Scholarship (what I understand to be a funded place based on ability) with an examination when Barbara decides to spit her in a battle for affections to apply too even though she really has no need to  given her financial security which indeed brings an attempted kidnapping and would crush Desda's ambitions.

During this period Barbara's relationship with school, the village she moved to and her new parents come under strain as her mind battles with the emotions her past way of life and that she now is in and expected to adjust to.

Indeed she even begs her Aunt to have her back and home schooled but the kidnapping puts that very much on hold as finding Nancy in who spent hours looking for her and her new friends tending to her injuries sustained from escaping the kidnapping,  she finds herself torn between her original aim and wanting to play for Maudsley in the inter school cricket match.

She finds even though she prepared for the scholarship exam revising, she struggles recalling information and understanding what the question is really requiring so she fails it. Pride isn't enough to get you through that.

Having recovered from her injuries, she plays excelling leading her team to victory, gaining acceptance from not just the other girls in the team but the whole school and soon she decides she really wants that school life as just a everyday girl part of a group than that exalted on display older girl as doll-child with all her refinery.

Indeed the end is quite moving that she decides to give away her fancy dresses for her plain girls wear and her uniform and lets Nancy cut her hair in a bob using a pudding bowl: she has given up the past, literally discarding it accepting being moulded anew apologizing to Nancy for how she treated her and the others.

Reading the story really made an impression on me, seeing family fortunes aside some similarities between myself and Barbara and where we were lost in self serving bubble that did us no good.