Seventeen again!
Anne de Menezes revisits those halycon teenage days when she endured the elegant torture of pencil skirts and stilettos
When I was 17 and dance mad, hobbling about in crippling stilettoheeled shoes, I begged Mam to make me a pencil skirt for Christmas. They were all the rage at the time – tight-fitting and reaching almost to the ankles. But before Christmas came, my betteroff friend, Pat, offered to lend me one of hers on condition that I went with her on a pub crawl.
In those days, women rarely, and young girls never, went into a pub without a male escort but, being a rebel, the danger appealed and, besides, I was anxious to find out if a pencil skirt would look right on me and if I could walk in one!
‘In our high heels and tootight skirts we could only teeter along in small steps’
We decided to go on our adventure the following Saturday and to stick to the lower end of town where nobody would be likely to recognise us. The plan was that we would buy shandy and lemonades in alternate pubs until it was time for the last bus home.
It took us ages to walk from one pub to the next in our high heels and too-tight skirts, which meant that we could only teeter along taking very small steps. In the fourth pub
I saw two men who lived in our street, but before they spotted us we made a fumbling getaway through the side door and into the street. My bladder was bursting because of all the shandy and lemonade I’d drunk, but I didn’t dare go back into the pub to the toilet in case the men saw me and told my mam.
Linking arms, Pat and
I struggled on towards the next pub but halfway there I could wait no longer. To our right was an unlit back lane with a drain in the middle and a gutter running the length of the lane.
I decided to take a chance and ordered Pat to ‘keep cavey’ while I did the necessary over the drain. I panicked when
I realised that I couldn’t bend down in the too-tight skirt and I tried to pull it up out of harm’s way, but it wouldn’t stretch over my skinny hips. In desperation I undid the zip and stepped out of the skirt, handing it to Pat to hold while I let nature take its course.
Just as I reached what is known as ‘mid-stream’ and almost sighing with the relief of it, there was an almighty clatter as the huge wooden double doors behind me opened and the crowd who’d been at the pictures’ first house came streaming out into the back lane! There was Pat, leaning against the wall in a fit of giggling hysterics as I reached out to grab the skirt and tried to look nonchalant as I stepped back into the offending article.
Then linking arms, the two of us continued up the lane, trying not to laugh, and ignoring the wolf whistles and raucous remarks from the cinema crowd behind us.