20181115.1 – Friday – “Ladies in Black.”

“Ladies in Black” –

This movie was pure nostalgia. For someone my age, 79, anyway. It was set in I think It was 1959, so that was 1 year before I was married, so it was spot on to be nostalgic for me.

There was no real main character, but as each character was introduced they “fit the bill” very well for  a group of women, or one woman, I personally was very familiar with, me!

Woman in my day were very naive. We wore dresses that were absolutely skin tight. I remember I used to lose weight and gain weight on a daily basis, so my Mum was taking my clothes in and out on a regular basis. 

I had a tiny waist when I was 16 – 18 years of age, in fact I remember my measurements (in inches). I was Bust 34, waist 24 and hips 34. So all the skin tight dresses. Portrayed in the movie would have fit me very well.

As for the young girl who wanted to go to University. That WAS me. My brothers (at least 2 of them) went to teachers college, but when I wanted to go. The answer was a definite “NO.” 

I wept and I cried and I begged my father to go but he was simply adamant. 

And yet, I never dreamed of opposing him. His no meant NO. 

In hindsight I know that if I had just told him, “Sorry Dad, I’m going” and I’ll get a job to pay for it, he would have caved in and let me go.  But like the Woman and her daughter in the film, they conspired to “wait for the right time,” and maybe they could cajole him into signing the papers.

And then there were the “New Australians.” It didn’t MATTER what country they came from, or whether they had been rich or poor, and whether they had been doctors or lawyers. They were all lumped together with that one label. ‘New Australians” when we were being polite or “wops” or “Ikes” or  “Krauts” when we were not.

And the regimentation in the major fashion stores, all the ladies dressed in black and the “customer is always right”,  and all the assistants taken from the schools to “help out” over Xmas.

But I just envied that young girl who KNEW that she wanted to go to uni, and exactly she wanted to do after she had finished.

When I went to high school, I had no idea WHAT I wanted to do. I had no wise counsellor either in school or out. Oh yes, I KNEW. I wanted to go to University but I had no idea what I was good at, so I ended up in a commercial course. That’s where everyone who didn’t know what they wanted to do ended up.

So at university, instead of doing subjects I would have loved, like the Arts, I who was simply hopeless at Maths, did Economics, bookkeeping and all commercial subjects. So my entire life I have been working in the field that I simply hated.

The only subject I did well in at school was English.

So, back to the film. The clothes were simply beautiful, they could all have come out of my wardrobe because my mother was a dressmaker, not the kind of dressmaker who is depicted in the film but the kind of dressmaker who could whip up a beautiful tennis dress on the morning before an afternoon’s tennis.

And I wish, I wish, I could lay my hands (and eyes) on that one dress of pins-width pleats made out of every colour of purple and mauves and greens of scenes of knights in armour and maids dancing at balls and the greenwood forest of Robin Hood’s days, all hidden in the pleats until you held the full circle of the skirts out at the sides (from a very tiny waist, which was mine).  Oh, how wonderful it was and how I loved it.

So that was the film to me! A journey back into the days of my youth, with all the nostalgia, but all the prejudices of the times wrapped up in the contours of the story. The story? There really wasn’t a story, just the nostalgia.

But don’t ask your husband or boyfriend to accompany you to watch it, I promise you, he will not “get it.”