Growing up – 2
Some boys stopped doing it when they grew up. The rest of us carried on. The occupation? Practical jokes. Like making apple-pie beds for your enemies.
The apple-pie bed became impossible with the arrival of the duvet. It thrived in the years when beds were a matter of an undersheet, a top sheet and a couple of blankets. And possibly an eiderdown. If you're under 40 it'll be news to you.
What you did was as follows: while your victim was out of the way you went to his or her bed, stripped it, folded the bottom-end of the undersheet backwards to the pillow end. This turned the bed into a small bag.
When your victim approached their bed, weary and ready to flake out, it looked like a very innocent bed and if you were listening closely behind the door you would hear a very satisfactory thunk! as their feet hit the bottom of the bag and then a great deal of cursing as he or she started stripping the bed and remaking it.
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.
The big joke on boys at the beach 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.
I promise you, it no longer exists.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
