Charlie's dead

No, it's ok nobody died.

I just remembered that while we were at school, if your petticoat was showing below your skirt then you would mutter 'Charlie's dead' to the offending person and they would hoik it up. Since most of my teenage years were spent wrapping the waistband of my skirt over and over to make it shorter and shorter and shorter this happened often.

This got me thinking about underwear and what we used to wear.

My mother always used to wear a petticoat - I don't think it was a slip or an underskirt, I think she always called it a petticoat. She had a bra and a girdle - large elastic knickers - and a petticoat over the top and I can't remember if, in the winter, the vest came over or under the petticoat. I also can't remember if there were knickers under the girdle, I guess there must have been.

As children we had cream woollen Chilprufe vests with buttons - like a grandad vest - in the winter and cotton vests in the summer.

As teenagers in an all girls school we used to 'shower' after sports. This involved getting undressed in front of one of rows of pegs, grabbing the towel (mine was pale green with name tag - no games kit was ever washed for the whole half term, just lived screwed up in your locker) and running through a room of showers trying not to get wet - no soap at all - and then getting dressed. All the other girls were doing the same thing. Some of the girls were dressed as copies of their mothers and some were beginning to chose their own clothes.

We all had stockings and suspenders in the winter because tights were only just being invented and were seen as unhygienic by the headmistress. The only tights you could get were plain and the only stockings in the school colours were ribbed so couldn't be substituted. I remember being very envious of one girl (Josephine Hamer) who had tights that looked just like stockings that her mum had got for her and wishing my mum would get some (why couldn't I get them??)

I don't remember being shy of all this nudity although it must have been crippling embarrassing for some girls. Nor critical of the shapes of others, just vaguely interested in the endless variety.

The main emotion is still anger that one of the games mistresses - Miss Thorburn or Miss Rothery - would stand at the exit of the showers and send you back in if you weren't wet. You were excused showers if you had a period and if you were thought to be having too many, they were recorded in a register and something must have happened that I don't remember - letters home? I was much too 'goody two shoes' to dare! We all 'knew' that they were lesbians and got their kicks out of watching us but I wonder if they were. It must have been a thankless task trying to make all these teenage girls do hockey, tennis, netball, rounders, dance, gym.