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