Make do, mend

I recently bought a copy of the newest issue of the Debbie Bliss knitting magazine. It had a couple of projects in it I might want to make someday. (With knitting magazines and such, I find you have to get them when you see them...because if you decide in the future you want that issue, you sometimes wind up in a fruitless search on eBay or somewhere).

It also had a couple of interesting articles in it. The one that grabbed my attention the most was the one titled Make Do and Mend, which was a very short discussion of the challenges of clothing oneself in WWII era Britain.

(I have to confess: I'm utterly fascinated by the whole WWII-in-Britain history. It wasn't all that long ago, and yet...it's a time so different from our own. And I wonder how we present-day folk would bear up under the stresses. The risk of being bombed while you tried to sleep in bed, or tried to cook dinner, or tried to go to work, would be by far the worst...but the rationing made things even more difficult. Right now I'm reading Vere Hodgson's diaries from that era ("Few Eggs and No Oranges"). I've also read some of the Mass Observation writings, and I have a copy of Nella Last's war diary to read sometime. I think M.F.K. Fisher's "How to Cook the Wolf" first got me interested in it - even though I had the standard boilerplate history-of-WWII that most American kids of my era got in school, I had no idea at all how awful and stressful things were in Britain during that time - and how people really, honestly believed that they might be invaded by the Nazis. (The now-famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters, which were never ACTUALLY used during WWII, were printed up as preparation for that possibility...which I admit, made me look at the whole trope with a more jaundiced eye and a bit of a shudder once I knew its history.)

The article talks about the kind of austerity measures individual families had to take, problems like, "How do you get material to make underwear for growing children if there is no material to be had in the shops?" (In some cases, if a parachute could be salvaged, that was used...and I've read of brides getting married in dresses made of parachute silk.)

The author describes Mrs. Sew-and-Sew, the mascot of the "Make do and mend" campaign. (Another writer - I think it was Raynes Minnis, in a book I read, described her as "insipid"). And the article author notes:

"Mrs Sew-and-Sew was the campaign poster girl who encouraged women to go through their wardrobes and make the most of what they found there. For working-class women who had never had many new clothes, Mrs Sew-and-Sew's well-meant advice was patronizing in the extreme. It had long been a point of pride for those women to come up with the most ingenious ways of turning old into new...But for middle-class and even upper-class ladies, Make Do and Mend was a whole new adventure, and one not especially relished." (emphasis mine).

"Patronizing in the extreme." Heh. I will note that I nodded in recognition - that's exactly how I've felt about some of the "new frugality" advice I've seen, the stuff like, "Carry your lunch from home every day and save money!"

As we used to say when I was a schoolgirl: "No duh."

I think it is partly the breathless tone of some of that "advice" that annoyed me, along with the fact that so much of it seemed to me to be, well, plain flat common sense. (Then again: common sense is less common than one might think.)

I also noted the bit about working-class women being experts at "making over" clothes: my mother talks about how when she was a girl, her mother was so good at re-doing clothes (for example, when my mom's older brother was demobbed from the Navy - this would have been at the end of WWII - she used his old uniform to make jumper dresses for my mother). In fact, my mom remembers that on occasion, people would stop them on the street and ask her mother where she bought the clothes!

The amusing thing about the article, is that the author perhaps falls a bit into the Mrs Sew-and-Sew trap: she suggests that in the light of new environmental concerns, we all do things like "keep a cotton t-shirt another season, applique a pretty patch over a stain, and turn up the sleeves to hide a frayed hem."

(I laugh, because I have a few t-shirts that are closing in on being 20 years old. Yes, I still wear them. A few are worn enough that I wear them as pajama tops rather than wearing them out of the house. And I've tried to do things to fix frayed hems on my slacks, though that's mainly because I'd rather do the repair than go out shopping for a new pair.)

But it amuses me that these things - which I've been doing much of my life, and which my mother has done (she darned socks even when it was hard to find darning cotton* and she "turned" the collars on my dad's shirts when they got worn) are promoted as these new smart ideas. (My mom grew up, I guess you'd call it working-class. But my family was pretty firmly middle-class...my parents were just frugal.)

(*I remember once we were all out at the mall, she was trying to find darning cotton - black darning cotton, so she could fix some of my dad's socks - and no where had it. Not even Woolworth's, which normally seemed to have such things. My dad quipped: "Twenty years ago, when you got a hole in socks, you said, "Darn these socks" and put them in the mending basket. Now, I guess, when you get a hole in socks, you say "Damn these socks!" and throw them away.")

Thank goodness, though, that we don't all have to wear "utility" undergarments like the people in WWII Britain. And thank goodness that I have enough funds that if a bedsheet wears out, I can decide not to cut it down the middle and resew the hem-edges together, like people used to do. (I know how; I just think I'd prefer not to. I've never had to do it, though...never had a sheet wear out yet.)