4 Their Last Penny

‘They’d Give You Their Last Penny’

There’s a lovely balance between being ‘a bit tight’ and being willing to give you the last penny they had and I hear many a story that uses one, or both, of those phrases. I hear about the everyday reluctance to part with money that doesn’t need to be spent, paired up with the willingness to hand you a chunk of cash if the cause is right. Many of the men and women whose stories I tell have grown up in hard times and have worked hard to get to a place where they could give their families some luxuries.

I hear of the ability to knit jumpers – those Icelandic patterns that were big in the 80s have been worn, willingly or otherwise, by dozens of grandchildren and many a mother saved a penny or two by knitting the school jumpers required for the weans out of the special ‘itchy wool’ that only mothers of a certain era knew how to source.

I do my own head tilt of sympathy when I hear of those who knitted, but really should have known better, since my own mother had the skill but not the patience with counting required to produce a cardigan or jumper with a vaguely person-shaped outline once completed. We all fervently hoped that any baby my mother knitted for would have no need of her jumpers with their oddly placed arm-holes and sleeves of different lengths.

It was with an ungrateful fake-smile that we opened our Christmas jumpers and found that they were not, as requested, ‘shop-bought’ but label-less and made by hand. I was not, I am grateful to say, the only child who threatened to phone Childline and see what they had to say about itchy wool and jumpers to match your siblings.

A client spoke to me of having her inside leg length measured on the run up to Christmas and bursting into tears, convinced that this meant that the horror of horrors – knitted trousers – were in her future! When the day came, she opened her bike with relief, but her Mum had let her believe for all those days in-between that Santa really had thought that knitted trousers were on her Christmas list!

We children of sewers and knitters were an ungrateful bunch – home-made clothes, even made by those who worked for big clothing companies by day, were just not cool. One enterprising mother found the perfect solution for her son’s desire to wear only the best of clothes – she simply stole a bunch of labels from work and when she handed over that green cord suit and her son flipped back the double-breasted front and saw the label inside, he wore it with pride until it barely fitted him. He was there in the front row when I broke the news that mum had conned him for the past 40 years and that all his siblings knew the truth and NEVER TOLD HIM that his beloved suit was a mum home-made number!

There were other enterprising mums who went shopping for school clothes with a small pair of scissors in their handbags in order to cut off a button or open a seam here and there, securing a discount and stitching things back up at home. These same mums became Grans who taught grandchildren the benefits of a dented tin discount and could hold a straight face while eager grandchildren played a wee game of ‘drop the can’ to be able to afford pudding!

One client of mine learned to quickly take the labels off new clothing purchases when she discovered, to her horror, that Mum was using her new purchases as a pattern for things she sewed herself … and then taking the original purchase back to the shop for a refund and replacing it with the home-made imposter! She’d try it even if the tag was taken off, but there was then at least a chance that she’d be denied the refund and the shop-bought version would make its way back into the wardrobe!

Oh the tears I have seen from the now grown up versions of the hand-me-down youngsters who wore the cast-off clothes of their cousins and begged their hard pressed parents to see the problem in being the younger boy in a family of girls who had to wear the clothes that would ‘still do a turn’. I have seen pictures of the indignity of a full family in matching knitted jumpers on their family holiday … to the beach … in summer.

So, I always pause for breath when a family says to me that their loved one was a knitter or a maker of home-made clothes because for every tale of excellence there are a dozen stories of the itchy, scratchy indignity of a hand crafted error of judgement, worn in suffering silence and lodged deep in the memory banks of the wearer!