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MAKE DO AND MEND

Winifred Barber

The clothing coupons never went far enough, and we used to save them for emergencies, in case you lost a child’s shoe or anything like that. When the war started the shops were pretty full of things, but before many months had gone by everything had become very very scarce and some of the things had disappeared altogether.

We had to make do and mend — that was the order of the day, and everything we had got in the wardrobe was kept there, we never threw anything away. I can remember when I was expecting my first bay I was wondering how I could get a christening gown for her and I thought of my wedding dress, but I couldn’t bare to put the scissors into it. A few weeks later I went and had another look at it and thought as there was a war on I would have to use it. I got it out and cut a great big piece out of it to make the christening gown, which turned out quite well, and when my little girl was four years old she was in a maypole dancing troupe and she needed a white dress, so I went back to the wedding dress and cut a bit more out of it and made her the little white dress. It was like that with other things like summer dresses.

You see during the war most ladies wore skirts and blouses because a skirt only took about a yard of material, and if you bought a dress you would have to pay a lot more money for that. Sometimes you would cut the top from a summer dress and use that as a top, but the majority of them had knitted jumpers and the wool was very important.

When the war started I had got a big bag of wool because I had always been a knitter. I looked at it one day, and thought I would knit the children a jumper, and you would be surprised how nice the jumper looked just but using up oddments of wool. People used to comment on it. Now that’s how we went on.

Men’s shirts during the war and before the war were made of linen or cotton, they had loose collars, some had two collars and some had three, and after a time the collar would begin to fray and when all the collars had frayed we used to throw the shirt away We couldn’t do that in the war, the shirt had got to be worn until it was threadbare. I used to unpick the collar, and I cut the tail off the shirt and was able to reface the collars and then they were like new again. With turnups on the trousers when they frayed, where they hit the boot, we would cut off the bottom of the trousers and turned it up slightly so that the frayed part was on the inside, the same with the cuffs on the shirts. It was amazing what we could do with what we had got and how we made do.

I had a friend, and one morning I was going down to the shops and I happened to see her coming back from the shops. She was very pleased about something and she told me she had managed to get a box full of mending wool cards. She was so pleased with herself, because the shop assistant had let her buy them all. She had told the assistant that the vest she was wearing was in tatters, and with all that mending wool she could make herself a new one, and that’s how she came to have the box full!!
After a couple of weeks I bumped into her again and asked her how she was getting on with the vest. She said it was wonderful and she pulled up one of the straps for me to see. She was so pleased with herself.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Winifred Barber (author) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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