4 of 50

It seems there is too much horror in the world at the moment, so I thought I’d write about something a little more light hearted this week.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s money was tight and it wasn’t uncommon to be given hand-me-downs. Clothes that an older friend or relative had worn and grown out of and was then given to you and which if it survived the rigours of your use would be passed on again.

Some of my old clothes regularly went to one of my cousins families who had younger children and they in turn passed them on to another cousin. This included clothes from their daughter which obviously were of no use to me, but often we transported them if we were going to see them.

On one such trip on a weekend we’d gone to see my Uncle and Aunt with a bag of those clothes. These were duly handed over when we arrived and nothing more was thought about it. After lunch my Uncle suggested that we go for a walk as it was such a nice day and have a look at the new housing estate that was being built at the end of their road.

I think it must have been a Saturday and there had been workmen there in the morning but they’d obviously now gone home for the remainder of the weekend. This was also in the day before health and safety on building sites was a thing and you could walk around and look inside the partially constructed buildings with no one to stop you.

I remember we’d looked inside a couple of houses and were about to walk into a third. I was in front and went to walk across the concrete driveway of the next house up to the front door. Only the concrete driveway hadn’t set yet. It was still very wet cement, obviously newly laid that morning. I took a couple of steps and quickly sank up to my knees. I managed to extricate myself with a little help from my Uncle and we went back to his house to quickly wash off the cement before it had a chance to do me any damage.

I was lucky, no skin burns or other problems, but my trousers were beyond salvage, and they certainly wouldn’t be entering the hand-me-down cycle now either. The only problem though was that I now of course didn’t have a pair of trousers to wear. No problem there was of course a big bag of hand-me-downs from my other cousins. However they were all girls clothes. After trying to get into some of the trousers and realising that they didn’t fit, the only thing that came close was a skirt. It wasn’t even as if I could get away with pretending that this was a kilt. This was most definitely a girls skirt.

I was mortified. Late 70’s me having to wear a girls skirt for the rest of the day. A GIRLS SKIRT! the shame of it. Fortunately no one would ever know, oh no wait, that’s my Dad taking a photo of me. I was of the age when girls were a thing to be reviled, oh the foolishness of youth. This was a punishment of the severest kind.

Of course I got off pretty lightly. I wouldn’t have liked to have been around on Monday morning when the builders returned to site to find the footprints now cast forever into their set concrete.

Anyway, when we did finally get home that evening, as you can probably imagine, I changed my skirt for something more suitable almost instantly we got in the house, and I have had a new found respect for wet concrete ever since.

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