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| The spiv was the first post-war folk-devil. He was a peacetime mutation of the black marketeer, flourishing under austerity like ragwort on a bomb-site. Disliked for jumping the queue, he was tolerated, even smiled at, for his entertainment value and occasionally his usefulness as a source of nylons, whisky or pork chops. In a time of petty bureaucracy gone mad, when the government sought to tell the public not only how much to spend but what it could have for its money, spivs cocked a snook at the system on behalf of all. |
| The stereotype spiv was a barrow boy in a wide-shouldered, wasp-waisted, baggy-trousered suit of loud pattern (the 'zoot' suit), a dazzling 'kipper' tie, a jaunty trilby and a pencil-line moustache. His style was a model for youthful dress and behaviour every bit as potent as those of the Hollywood tough-guys, the war heroes or the leading sportsmen of the day. In his book Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall has written of the 'formalised stoicism which we borrowed from the spivs, from demobbed soldiers and from Hollywood movies, which we took and transmuted into a romanticism of toughness and aggression and subsequently wore like a suit of armour.’ |
| Hollywood was not the only American influence on British youth; the US servicemen who had first arrived in 1942 were still coming over to man the bases, charm the ladies and distribute cigarettes and nylons like so many randy Santa Clauses. |
| They used to organise coachloads of GIs from the bases to local dances. The boys hated them of course, because they had more money and they even smelled nicer. Their uniforms were smarter- polished cotton instead of the rough khaki the Tommies wore. Cuddling an English soldier was like being wrapped in a horse blanket! The Americans brought the girls flowers and boxes of chocolates, and the English boys sneered at them and called them ponces. |
| To these town and village socials, the GIs brought with them, in a cloud of aftershave, a different way of dancing. 'Jitterbugging' had become popular in the US during the war. It had spread from the black ghettos to dance-halls across the country and was now firmly established in Europe, along with its more formal variant, the jive. They say that, to this day, when they jive in Warrington (down the road from the site of the Burtonwood base) they dance to the off-beat, the way the American hepcats taught their mums forty years ago. |
| Smart girls took their dance-steps from the 'doughboys', but their fashions came from France. In the spring of 1948, Christian Dior's New Look conquered Britain: the effect was like the simultaneous hatching of a million pupae into a million butterflies, and women still glow when they remember it. |
| I remember the New Look coming in and that was very, very exciting. Everybody hated it at first. They were so indignant and horrified at the thought that they were going to have these long, full skirts after being free with very short, straight skirts, which was really only to save material during the war. But Dior, I think, knew women better than they knew themselves. He knew that once they got over the shock of it, that's what they were really longing for - those full, feminine, flowing things, lots of petticoats underneath, like a ballerina length really... Oh that was marvellous! We all wanted those. |
| I remember having a skirt my mother made out of some curtain material for me, and I thought this was great. People used to say 'Your skirt's made of curtains' and I'd say 'No it isn't!' |
| The first thing was that it was banned at school. We weren't allowed to let down our gymslips or buy long ones. |
| Underlying all this excitement, there may have been a deeper social current moving women in the direction from which the New Look beckoned. |
During the war the women took the men's role. They worked in factories and they ran the home. Then, after the war, they wanted to go back to being pretty, feminine 'little women' again, and being looked after by the men. And perhaps this was sort of encouraged because when the men came back from the war, they wanted their jobs back, so the women had to be sort of pushed back into the home, didn't they?
Although it was worn by girls from fifteen upwards, the New Look was conceived, adapted and marketed for women in theirtwenties, thirties and forties, the women who always had been, and it seemed always would be, the fashion trade's principal customers. |
| You tried to look how the models looked, like you saw when you went to the pictures. You tried to emulate the model look neat, ladylike and sophisticated: two-piece, hat, gloves, stiletto heels, seamed stockings (and the seams had to be straight). If you were sixteen and somebody said you looked nineteen, it was wonderful. |
| The Hollywood image confirmed it; the great female stars were not ingenues, they were mature women in their late twenties or older, sophisticated ladies who knew their way around. |
| I can remember thinking when I was in my teens, 'Oh, it must be nice to be twenty and sophisticated.' And then when I was in my twenties I thought, ' Well it must be nice to be thirty and sophisticated.' And now I'm fifty and I'm still not sophisticated ... |
| Although her clothes made her look years older than she actually was, in terms of real sophistication the fifteen-year-old girl of forty years ago was years younger than her present-day equivalent. |
| We knew absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. I mean, it amazes me that we didn't all get pregnant. Actually, quite a lot of the village girls did hare babies, particularly with the Americans. |
| Sex before marriage was just something that wasn't spoken about. It was all hushed up, like so much in those days-. All your mother would say was 'Be careful, whatever you do, or you'll finish up having to get married. You'll ruin your life.' |
| This enigmatic advice, with its equivalent for boys - 'Don't get a girl into trouble' - did little to dampen youth's perennial interest in the subject. |
| All we wanted to know about was sex, because it was so hidden, especially in our school where the girls' half was divided from the boys' half by this mythical barrier. You could see the girls but you couldn't talk to them across the area that was no man's land. There were just a few girls you could talk to, who were 'that sort of girl', you know. Everyone would tell you they were 'that sort of girl' and everybody had done it with them. I mean, I hadn't of course, but everybody else had. That was all we ever talked about. I must admit, quite frankly, that if it had been presented to us we'd have run a mile. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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