a humdinger!
The Prince of Wales check was pitted against Harris Tweed.
Let me tell you a story a sad tale. As a girl I went with my parents to visit my Great Auntie Gertie who lived on the cliffs overlooking Teignmouth.
Looking at the photograph I must have been about 13 or 14. For my new holiday clothes my mother had a suit made for me out of ‘lightweight’ wool Prince of Wales check fabric.
The jacket I quite liked, the skirt was yards and yards of fabric made in to box pleats.
Box pleats... wool?
Not a marriage made in heaven and it was a nightmare to wear... the weight of fabric!
Auntie Gertie was a matriarch of the Victorian kind, you know the sort, humourless with starch in her drawers. Ironing board down her stays to keep her upright, that sort of a woman. She took one look at me in that ruddy suit and said in tones that reverberated down the cliffs, across the railway that ran along the front, then carried on the wind out to sea. Her voice boomed far better than the
Teignmouth foghorn.
‘That girl needs to go on a diet!’
I eyeballed her with daggers for optics.
‘I’m not blooming surprised I look fat in this yurt of a skirt, you try it for size in your itchy old dears’ Harris Tweed!’
I thought kindly!
On arrival home for weeks after the holiday, mum took me every Friday afternoon to the local chemist to be weighed, if I lost a couple of pounds we would retire across the road to the teashop by way of a reward!?!
All my life since then I have been on a diet. I lay the blame squarely at her door high on the cliffs of Devon.
The Harris Tweed suit won hands down over the Prince of Wales check ensemble.
Interestingly enough dad would tell the tale of how on her visits to them. Auntie Gertie would thrill the assembled company by singing opera to the accompaniment of her brother, my grandfather on the piano. Meanwhile the kids, Dad, Auntie Margarine and Gertie’s son whose name I have forgotten (probably never knew?) would hang the cat out of an upstairs window in the tied off bottoms of my grandfather’s suit trousers. The cat’s caterwauling was drowned out by the screeching of Auntie Grace’s trills!
The old dragon to this day is still winning, never in all these rounds having managed the killer blow... the diet goes on...
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