Those of us of a certain age will recall in the olden days when our mums ran a catalogue. My mum ran a Grattan catalogue for as long as I can remember.
It was always exciting when she received the latest edition. Hundreds of glossy pages filled with exciting photos of everything from toys to underwear, furniture to ornaments, perfumes to toiletries, and so much more. My brother and I would sneak the catalogue into our bedroom, just to craftily peak at all the latest women’s bras. Those were the days!
Mum would allow us to order something, based on our pocket money or savings. In a sense, it was like the Temu of the day, though definetly not as cheap. I bought my first 1970’s led watch, as worn by Kojak, and handed my fifteen shillings every week for twenty weeks. It was worth it for posing purposes!
I was around fourteen years old and had a part-time job at an engineering factory, where I cleaned swarf out of the lathes and swept floors. The job afforded me the funds to buy something I wanted from mum’s catalogue, a lime green two piece suit by the C&A brand. How cool would I look wearing that and my ‘Danny Wilde’ Foster Grant graduated shades? Danny was a charactor from ‘The Persuaders’, played by the ultimate cool actor Tony Curtis. Every boy wanted to be like him!
Like we all did back then, I wore that green suit every chance I got. I believed I looked so cool. Thank goodness we can’t see ourselves as others see us! I hadn’t paid attention to the crappy old crocodile shoes I wore with the suit, instead focusing my attention on making sure I wore the Foster Grants slightly down the nose, as my telly hero did.
One day, dad said he was taking us all out to Newent, a nearby horticultural area, where we would go strawberry picking for a few punnets for mum’s larder. Yes, I wore my suit of course! Those of us that have gone fruit picking will know that the secret of success in the field is not in how many fruits you add to the punnet, but how many you can scoff without being noticed. Our family were olympic champions at that, except when dad took us gooseberry picking. Yuck.
After an hour or so of picking fruits, our punnets were full and we were preparing to leave. But, like Baldrick, I had a cunning plan. I filled my suit pockets with loads of strawberries and sneaked back to the car with my own stash of nicked fruit. I was proud of my ingenuity and all the way home in the car I sneaking produced strawberries from my pockets for my siblings. But things took a turn for the worse when we arrived back home.
Mother went ballistic at me. She was angry and gave me a severe telling off. Why, not because I’d been nicking fruit. Why would she, everyone had been involved in that activity. No, it was because of the state of my green suit. Not dirt as such. The issue was a great big strawberry juice stain that had seeped through the suit pocket where I had stashed my plundered fruit. Immediately she went to work on trying to remove the stain with all the chemicals she had. But no matter how hard she tried, the stain remained clearly visible on the suit pocket.
That was the last time I wore that suit. But I still had to keep up the payments on it! I wonder what mum did with that suit?
