Sunday 9 June 2013

Make do and mend


It didn’t seem to matter that my dad was in a well-paid job.  I don’t know quite what his work involved, but he went off to ‘The Labs’ every morning where he used his enviable brain power (sadly not inherited by his daughter) to fiddle about with computers the size of small houses, fibre optics, radio waves and things that involved complicated mathematical formulae.  I don’t know how much he earned but it was presumably enough to keep his family comfortably in Clarks shoes and Vesta Paellas and yet the maxim in our household still remained:  Make do and mend’.

We didn’t replace things when they went wrong; we found increasingly inventive ways to keep them going for a little bit longer with pieces of green nylon string, old pennies,  discarded chewing gum or whatever we could find to hand.  And what we could find to hand was a cornucopia of oddities, because we rarely threw anything away -  ‘it might come in handy one day’  being another family maxim.

Does anyone darn socks these days?  My mum used to darn my dad’s socks all the time.  I actually thought for years that men’s socks only came in one shade of grey with random patches of another shade of grey on the heels and toes.  The giant darning needle was kept with the balls of wool that dated back to wartime, along with a vast collection of spare buttons and a ridiculous array of ribbons.  I don’t think we ever needed to use  ribbon for anything and, besides, most of it had already come from Christmas cake decorations and still had tiny fragments of icing stuck to it.

I’m sure my dad’s latest technical report on the descaling of electro-magnetic noodles could have bought us a new television, perhaps even a colour one, but still we persevered with the ancient black and white one because it worked.  Well, it worked when you fiddled about with the strategically placed matchsticks between the control buttons when you couldn’t find the channel  you wanted, and seeing as there were only three channels at the time that shouldn’t have been that difficult.   The picture was ok, as long as the image being shown wasn’t too stark.  Anything that had high contrast caused the picture to wobble, twist and stretch and for a long while I thought Morecambe and Wise – whose black and white suits posed a major challenge to the TV’s warp factor – were contortionists.  But we soon learned that a quick thump to the top of the set could sort it out.  Not just any thump, though, there was a knack.  My father always got it right but then he had probably calculated the exact degree of force required according to velocity and gravitational pull.

So I grew up in a household where remnants of old candles were melted down and amalgamated to make new ones, which were then placed in empty wine bottles acting as candleholders; where cushion covers were made out of old curtains, and where my mum’s laddered tights were recycled and stuffed to make draught excluders for the back door.  Is it any wonder that I still have the little red biro from my old Spirograph Set?

17 comments:

  1. Another brilliant example of your talent for combining nostalgia with tales of your sweetly eccentric family. Loved it !

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    1. Oh, thanks for your lovely words, tindersticks - so glad you enjoyed. The fun for me is in sharing this stuff - or maybe it's therapy? ;-)

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  2. Curiously, I don't recall hearing the actual phrase 'make do & mend' until relatively recently, but ‘it might come in handy one day’ is one that definitely sets bell ringing. Mum had cupboards and drawers full of bits & bobs with no apparent function, just waiting for the right occasion, which usually never came. She was, however, still darning items of my clothing, as she always had, until a week before she died - in that case a pair of jeans.

    Dad would have denied being of that mindset of course, and indeed often chided Mum for hanging on to stuff unnecessarily, yet he never sold a car in his life. Upgrading was something he simply would not have considered. He drove them until they failed an MOT to such an extent that it didn't make financial sense to repair them and then sent them off to the scrapyard before buying another second-hand one. It must be a case of like Father like Son, because I've never sold a car either!

    The whole television palaver is very familiar too. I can remember matchsticks being involved in my house, as well as a portable aerial that had to be moved around the living room to a different spot for each channel.

    This is a lovely piece C, that has really got my memory ticking. One thing you didn't mention though was soap. Did your family not save all the small leftover pieces and mold them into a big mutant bar? Hmmm, just us then.

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    1. Thank you! Brilliant tales from your family too which I can identify with. I suppose it was a hangover from wartime, and the desire not to waste anything, but I was thinking about it a bit more earlier and concluded that there was also an underlying suspicion that shiny, new things must be a rip-off! All in all it added up to this thrifty, but often more-trouble-than-it's-worth "make do with whatever is handy" approach, didn't it?

      I'm so relieved my family was not the only one to have matchsticks wedged in their TV buttons! And hopefully you'll be equally relieved to know that yours was not the only one to make 'new' soap bars from leftover old ones. I'd quite forgotten that, so thanks! Mmm, that lovely combination of Cussons, Camay and Imperial Leather... it frequently fell apart and never lathered up properly either.

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  3. My parents still live like there's a war on; powdered egg has only just been taken off their meal time roster.

    Instead of darning socks, we just coat our toenails more often.

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  4. *typo* that should, of course, be 'cut'.

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    1. :-)
      And 'coating' your toenails probably works too, perhaps in a nice shade of pearly pink varnish...

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  5. So much that sounded familiar in this. Actually our candle holders in the garage for power cuts are wine bottles!! My wife still moans that I insist that we press the old soap on the new one and I have a special spoon to get the last bit of sauce out the bottle!! ;-)

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    1. Ah, seems these habits are had to shake off. But where did you get your special spoon? - We could definitely do with one of those!

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  6. Have I been beaten to the MacGyver reference? :)

    These stories of your family are so intriguing...fun usually. I guess that makes sense.

    There must have been more of this going on in my house than I remember...maybe I blocked it out, because I will toss a thing the second it goes wobbly.

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    1. Thanks, e.f. - I didn't remember MacGyver but I looked it up and I think you're onto something there :-)

      You've got it right! Too much making do and mending is bad for your health.

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  7. This was something my grandparents were often saying it seemed (r.i.p.). They grew up during the depression. Sometimes it got a bit ridiculous I suppose, but it 'built character' (which is what was said whenever you complained back, I suspect more than a drop of Scots blood in my grandmother). Now whenever I get something brand new it still brings a mild thrill at the sheer extravagance!

    Now I can imagine kids in the '50s playing in bombed out lots in England with woolen jumpers patched with pieces of rough twine, carrying pantomime angel wings, and possibly overhearing the first strains of Elvis from some nearby open window.

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    1. Hi Rebeccca - I know what you mean about the 'sheer extravagance'!
      And that's a great picture you paint of those '50 kids. It's in black and white too ;-)

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  8. I still can't throw buttons away. I have a great teetering mound of them in a box on a shelf, though I can't remember for the life of me when I last sewed one on.

    And...green nylon string! Now there was a multifunctional product that you just don't see enough of these days...

    Great stuff, thank you.

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    1. Good to see you again!
      Thank you too. I understand the button thing. It's under control, just, but I do keep some. In a pretty little draw-string bag that came with some smellies from the Body Shop years ago. Recycling par excellence. But, like you, can't remember the last time I actually sewed one on either!

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  9. I suppose I come from the same enviroment...be thrifty!!! but all my life i have been the complete opposite...if I had money I spend it...fortunes have slipped thru my my slippery fingers...I do somtimes wish I was a bit more careful with money...but I don't worry...how much can I eat, how much can I drink, I don't need to impress (anymore)...I have enough!
    Nice to have you back 'C'.

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    1. Thanks, OPC. It sounds like your non-thrifty ways haven't done you any harm! My fortunes seem to have reversed and I'm now more skint than I was fifteen years ago (oh the perils of going freelance). So I can't help thinking thrifty most of the time :-( Still, it isn't half nice when I get a little bit in and can splash out (on a curry, or nice bottle of wine that ISN'T on special offer ;-) )

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