LINGERIE AND STUFF…………………….part 7
Grandma was born in 1890, I saw light of day in 1945, so gran was 55 when I was born. However, she always seemed like an old lady.
Gran’s hair, was silver white, cut to ear length, parted to one side and held in place by a barrette. Photographs of her as a young girl showed her with thick blonde hair, worn in a bun, but the gran I knew wore it short.
In my youth women always wore dresses and gran was no exception. Her dresses were always the same style, cotton with a small floral print on a dark background, a tie round the waist and a deep neckline. Pinned inside the front of the neckline was a modesty front. This was a piece of white fabric, with a lace edge, worn to cover up whatever the deep neckline may reveal. Why she didn’t make her dresses with a higher neck, and dispense with the “front” was a mystery.
The dress always was finished off with a big ivory brooch. This cameo type brooch had been brought from the far east by her son Albert, who had been a naval officer. It had a face carved into it but was full face, not the profile of a regular cameo. It was also all ivory, no background metal. Gran wore it every day, so it obviously meant a lot to her, another item that disappeared when she died.
Over top of the dress she always wore a hand knitted cardigan. Grandma was a great knitter and all her grandchildren were the recipients of her handiwork. She taught me to knit before I went to school and, from an early age, I would knit mittens and scarves for Christmas gifts. This hobby has clothed all my grandchildren until they got too old to want hand-knitted sweaters.
Underneath her dresses gran always wore an underslip made of a fleecy cotton, nothing frilly or lacy, but always in a pastel colour. Once this was removed you got down to the real nitty-gritty of grandma’ lingerie. I guess gran had been much bigger in her younger life, but she wasn’t that way any longer, however, she always wore the most formidable looking corset, which she called her “stays”.
This garment was something to behold and must have taken ages to put on. It consisted of straps, laces, hooks and eyes and whalebone, all stitched into a strong pink fabric. On the bottom were several suspenders which held up her thick lisle stockings. If the garment had been fastened across the gates of Poland, the Germans would never have got in.
Gran’s bra was of a similar construction and two of Victoria’s Secrets models could have been wrapped in it, with room to spare. However, the crowning glory of gran’s lingerie were her drawers.
These were always pink, always fleecy and always enormous. The legs had elastic in the hem and gripped gran’s legs just above her knees. This gave a large expanse of pink to anyone who happened to be standing behind gran, when she bent over. These old fashioned bloomers had various funny names, however the best one, to my mind, was “Come to Jesus Knickers”
This was the name given to gran’s drawers, by my two uncles. On laundry days, several pairs of the pink abominations would proudly hang on the line, which was strung out in the back street. Both of my uncles worked in the same place and would often drop in to gran’s house for lunch. On laundry day, they would both stand under the drawers, crotch resting on their heads and the legs wrapped under their chins. They would both sing to my grandma which drove her mad and she would chase them, down the street, with a broom.
My Grandma was seventy seven when she died, so she had had lots of time to adapt to a more modern way of dressing. My aunts often bought her neater, sleeker forms of underwear but they were kept in a drawer and never worn. I guess old habits die hard and gran never felt the need to modernise her lingerie.
In northern England, women’s underwear is still referred to as knickers but I very much doubt that the women of today, including modern day grandmas, would wear anything that resembled gran’s old drawers. The flimsy pieces of lace and elastic that are the knickers of today would make my grandma shake her head in amazement.