The Bikini
Remembering last week childhood days of gruesome clothing and swimming gear in particular, I was reminded of an incident that occurred many years later while I was a freelancing photographer.
I was commissioned to join a film crew for a few days and to write an illustrated piece about it for a magazine.
On location, I found the very young and gauche Second Assistant Camera trying very hard indeed to behave like a veteran. This was quite obviously for the particular benefit of the girl playing the part of a student model. It was comical to watch him hovering near her whenever he found an excuse to do so.
However, there was something he did not know: although the director had auditioned for a teenage girl the eventual girl, who appeared to be a shy seventeen from drama school with her innocent, wide-set eyes, was in fact an extensively-practised 22-year-old. She was a very busy model girl.
We were all turning in for an early night in preparation for an early start the next morning. I was in my room sorting my baggage. The door was still ajar. I caught sight of the girl as she walked past toward her room. She was followed by the young assistant. They halted at her bedroom door.
I heard her say, ‘You wanted something?’
‘No! Yes! I mean, look, love. A little word in your shell-like ear. About these scenes tomorrow. The Bikini scenes. Now, there’s something you won’t know about filming in Bikinis.’
‘Oh? Really?’
‘Yes. You see, Bikinis, in your actual camera, well, they show a bit more. . . you know what I mean? Yes? Mm? So, what you’ll have to do tonight is to, um, remove the, um.’
‘Oh! Really? I see,’ she said.’ Well, I think you’d better show me, don’t you?’ and I heard her door gently opened, and then closed.
He still looked surprised at breakfast.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Growing up – 2
Practical jokes took up lots of our time. Like making apple-pie beds for your enemies.
Practical jokes were rife in my boyhood. Ah, it was a hard life. The big joke played on boys by nothing but fashion were those horrible bathing costumes.
The beach holiday in the 30s and 40s was wonderful but, on reflection, we boys did suffer ignominy. Sensible swimming trunks did not exist. Not even the sloppy shorts of today, which are quite bad enough. We of the 1940s had to climb into something that completely covered the chest, the back and the legs down to the knees. It hung there by means of shoulder-straps. Some were made of wool. Yes, wool. I knew mothers who actually hand-knitted them for their darling sons. Their daughters, too.
Imagine coming out of the water on a chilly day and having to run up the beach to mum and dad with an icy cold, heavy and sodden woollen sack hanging and slapping against your body. Older boys were frequently made to wear the variety that incorporated a ‘modesty skirt’. This was simply a separate flat panel that stretched across from the front of one thigh to the other; its purpose was to hide the terrifying fact that you were a male of the species.
I recently found an old black-and-white snapshot of me, aged about fourteen, wearing one of these.
It no longer exists.
As for the practical joke, the classic apple-pie-bed joke was a favourite when your friends came to stay. It became impossible with the arrival of the duvet but in those times we had an undersheet, an oversheet, one, two or three blankets and, in winter, an eiderdown - something like our duvet but not half as warm.
What you did was simple: you went to his or her bed, stripped it, gripped the bottom-end of the undersheet and folded it back to the pillow end. This turned the bed into a very short bag, into which they would slide with a tired sigh of pleasure.
The sigh would quickly turn into a PAH! and then a great deal of cursing as the complete re-making of the bed began.
But it was risky. Playing the joke on delicate aunts could get you anything from a quick whack on the bottom to a week’s foreclosure on sweets.
Nowadays we have the duvet. The duvet possesses its own sense of humour and needs no help from practical jokers, old or young. It slides off in the middle of the night. It swivels round so that it is resting across you instead of along you. If you hang on too tightly when you turn over you end up like the sausage inside the sausage roll. Most comical.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
Growing up
Someone apparently wants to know to know what it was like to be growing up in the 1930 - 1940s. There are those who will tell you I never did grow up, and I can’t argue with that. After all, can a fully adult man sit at his computer flying a fake aircraft? Consider.
At the age of six or thereabout I happened to see my father handing over his wages to
my mother and for the first time I saw real life. He drove London Underground trains not because he liked driving trains but in order to keep us alive.
Any remark or picture remotely connected with sex or the related regions of the body was out of bounds at home. All was unexplained and came only in scrappy hints and unreliable guesses of school chums. Ignorance of how it all worked caused bewilderment and embarrassment. My single most shattering revelation as a young child is now reduced to a comic memory. It comes later.
There were so many little hints. In the quick scanning of my older brother’s magazine, tucked not quite carefully enough under his mattress, I discovered what a woman’s body looked like.
Adolescence arrived with a rush of blood to the head and a pounding heart telling me that I was suffering from some unspeakable disease. For week afterwards, I was certain of it. Then in the local Public Library one day I discovered a book that gave me the facts. I was not suffering anything more than the arrival of maturity. Quite possibly I ran out of the place crying 'Yippee!'.
School ended at fourteen and, like all other 14-year-olds, I was allowed to wear long trousers. Knee-length shorts were thrown away.
I became an apprenticed mechanical engineer. A curiously satisfying incident gave me my first actual feeling of becoming adult. I cycled home at the end of my first week with the engineering company, walked into the kitchen and handed my mother my first earnings. Ten shillings. That's 50% of £1 and about £21 in today's money.
So I was now a man. I was doing exactly what my father did. I was helping to feed us all.
A real girlfriend materialised. Girls had already intrigued me while I was at school; organised events like the annual Hertfordshire Schools Singing Championship meant that we occasionally mingled with girls in their crisp summer uniform of pleated skirts and pastel shirts and ties, their shirtfronts in many cases curiously and pleasingly urged outwards in a way that stirred me deeply; it was delightful.
Then I came to know and actually to speak to girls, and excitement grew. But the tightrope-walking experience of having an actual, a real and publicly-recognised girlfriend, was, I suppose, the ultimate declaration of adulthood. It came when I was just into my twenties. I had little idea of how one should behave beyond being nice. Polite, generous and nice. But, yes, I really was a man at last. I knew all there was to know about life. Oh, yes.
I suppose I felt much the same one morning at the age of nine. I had been taken by two girls, one a year older than I, the other a year younger, down to the little fishing-port beach in Cornwall early one holiday morning. They had told me, with immense excitement, that they wanted to show me something. I wondered about this. Lobsters? Buried treasure behind the rocks? On the way home from the beach I was a great deal more knowledgeable.
I was ready for my breakfast.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010