When I was 15 by Linda Noon
I was just becoming aware of Biba and Mary Quant back when I was fifteen and remember seeing pictures in the magazines of model Twiggy. My Dad used to go on about her short hair and how she looked like a boy. Top of the Pops had just started on TV and I recall watching Cilla Black and Sandy Shaw wearing the latest trends.
In the rural town where I grew up there were no fashion shops or boutiques as I knew them to be called. I tried to make fashion outfits with my friend Pat as we longed for some of the excitement and dazzle.
Her Mum worked night shifts at the hospital and was always sleeping during the day. With Pat’s Dad at work, her home was the best place to go after school to make our fashion statements, away from the parental eye.
We would use her Mum’s sewing machine that had to be turned by hand. The bobbin looked like a tiny canoe the size of a Monopoly piece I thought. Together we would scour the jumble sales and look for bargains that we’d buy for pennies and turn into new creations.
Our first items were mini skirts. It was simple enough to raise the hems of our finds, but invariably they were too wide so we removed the waist bands and created pleats with the excess.
Pat had an aunty who seemed not much older than us. Using the wool that we unravelled from our scavenging, she showed us how to knit a ‘shorty’ jumper. They were very figure hugging as they were knitted using a ribbing stitch that made them stretchy and they ended at our waist, much higher up than our school jumpers. We also made ourselves little berets by coiling French knitting into circles and then stitched garter-elastic around the edge.
Dressed in our home made fashions we thought that we were the business. To increase our options Pat and I used to share our clothes. We would pool them on her bed and make our choices together.
We had to be very careful not to wear our fashion clothes in front of our parents. We just knew that they would not have understood or approved. When I was with my parents I would have to wear clothes that my Mum chose for me even at fifteen. I had stretchy trousers with stirrups that went under the feet. Most of the time I grew so quickly that they soon became too short. To make them fit the stirrups would have to be cut off. My dresses and skirts would have the hems taken down, sometimes twice to make them last even longer.
My first big adventure with Pat was when we decided to take the train to Weymouth and wear our special clothes for the first time in the great outdoors. We told our parents that we were doing an after school project. I kept my fashion outfits in my games locker at school in an olive green canvas duffel bag, an ugly thing that was meant to be used for my hockey boots. We dressed up at Pat’s house but felt that our look was spoilt as we had to wear our ugly brown school shoes, but we were not going to let that ruin our fun.
We took them off as soon as we got onto the Weymouth sands and paddled in the sea. We had ice cream that was bought for us by some local lads who tried to chat us up but we ran off, we gave them the slip as Pat said. We had a cup of tea at one of the cafes on the esplanade and thought that we were so grown up. There was a juke box and it was playing ‘Hard Day’s Night’ by the Beatles, which remains one of my favourites because of this memory.
We returned home with no harm done. I thought that our secrets would give my friendship with Pat a special bond; however she left school later that year and did not return.
She worked in a shoe shop and we lost touch because I stayed on at school. Mum took me to the same shop to buy my new school shoes. Embarrassment lay heavily between us as Pat served and I became customer. Pat married a year later and I never saw her again.
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