A Vintage Flavored Fortnight

I went to see the movie, “The Dressmaker” last weekend. I liked the movie a lot and I’m going to blog about it soon.

The film also stirred up some old family memories and roused my interest in vintage themes.

I didn’t live through the 1950’s. But I have memories of family members talking about significant historical events last century that influenced the post war years of the fifties.

Firstly, the desperation caused by the severe and worldwide Great Depression in the 1930’s. Work was hard to find and therefore money was scarce. Men left their families to find any type of employment they could in order to survive. 

Not everyone had cars to drive. Men might set out on foot and trek all over the land to find or fail to find an elusive job.

One of my grandfathers traveled around country New South Wales searching for work. He ended up driving a truck and carting bags of wheat for farmers. He was grateful to be earning a small wage.

The lean war years, 1939-1945, meant a shortage of everything, including food. Family members adopted a ‘waste not, want not’ way of living. Making do with what you had was the norm. Sharing your worldly goods and chattels wasn’t a maybe, it was a given.

The 1950’s saw the western world emerge from the troubled years of two world wars and the Great Depression. The future was looking brighter than it had for a generation and the ‘baby boomer’ children were being born. Perhaps the optimism was short-lived. The Korean War started and finished in the 1950’s. The Vietnam War started in the mid 1950’s. The 1960’s were just around the corner with the people’s calls for cultural change and revolution.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

“The Dressmaker” movie has at its core, a story about a mother and daughter reconciling their pasts. I thought I would share a little bit of history about my mother and me and vintage fashion.

As a sixteen year old woman, my mother was forced to leave school due to the family’s poor financial situation. 

There was a prolonged illness in the family and no health insurance in those days. 

Her father was responsible for substantial medical bills after a family member passed away from a slow death caused by cancer. (Her father was my grandfather who carted wheat in the Great Depression.)

My mother had to help out her debt-ridden father. She gave up her dreams of going to University and studying to become an Archaeologist. 

source:fotofolia
Beside the type-writer is an early desk calculator (I think?).
An operator of the calculator was called an Accounting Machinist.
It was another occupation for women. 

Mum left school to start work at a typing pool in Sydney.

A typing pool was a group of mostly women, who were employed to type documents on their type-writers all day. 

The repetitive strain injury (RSI) on fingers, wrists and forearms from striking the hard, metal keys wasn’t good in that era. Only women were expected to leave work permanently once they were married.

Each workday, Mum walked from her father’s house to the station to catch a train into the center of the city. She spoke of wearing her hat and gloves and with a color-coordinated handbag.

I think she wore court shoes.

Always wearing stockings on her legs no matter the weather.

Being well-groomed and looking well-turned out.

On a Friday night, If she was going dancing with her girlfriends after work, she might bring her evening dress with her on the train to save a trip home to get changed.  

I remember her red lipstick and the screw-on pearl earrings. The lead crystal bead necklaces, single and multi-strand. Also the necklace made from the black gemstone, jet (maybe a legacy from Victorian age fashion).

While she was working in Sydney, Mum met the love of her life and married my father. She looked lovely in her wedding photographs and I’m sure her dress would still be liked by a retro-chick or vintage fan somewhere in the world today.

After the wedding, my mother moved from Sydney to Queensland and she did various typing and secretarial jobs for most of her working life.

She adopted a progressive attitude to life. She made a conscious effort to be happy despite the tragedies in her younger life. In the 1970’s, I had a vague sense that my Mum was a bit different to other mothers. She had a licence to drive a car. A lot of other local women walked or rode bicycles to school and to the shops. She had her own small car (it wasn’t an expensive one). She loved the color – I remember it as a type of teal. She gave her car a name and didn’t like Dad driving it.

When my parents had a quarrel, Mum might leave the house and drive us kids to the beach or downtown.

She needed to work to help pay the mortgage. At the time, It was more usual that mothers didn’t work.

When I wanted to go to University, my mother was determined to give me the opportunity she’d missed out on. My parents borrowed more money on their home loan to help support me. It seemed an impossibility that they would ever pay their mortgage off. They paid the bank for their house many times over and eventually had to sell it to pay medical bills. (It was a familiar family theme)

I had days at University when I didn’t have a single dollar in my purse. I worked part-time around my studies, but I could barely earn enough money to keep going. The impressions left by my relatives and their stories about the war-times, and the Great Depression helped me get through the financial struggles.

Mum generally had a long fuse on her temper and a lot of patience. However, when she reached the end of her tolerance, she was a flaming, hazel-eyed Irishwoman. A relative to a Banshee, whose sharp tongue dressed down those who deserved it.

Mum also had a legacy of Victorian age standards, morality and views on polite society breed into her by her Irish grandparents. She tried to pass on the antiquated values to me. Eek! No! I was a child of the revolution. I wasn’t having a bar of that old stale, stuffy stuff from the 19th century.

Now I love writing romance set in the Victorian age. Sometimes mothers know best…

When I was a young child, the clothes that hung in my mother’s wardrobe were what we would call vintage today. 

Mum kept the same clothes for years, decades for special dresses. It was a money crime to get rid of a dress that still could be worn.

Nowadays, my elderly, widowed Mum dresses for comfort and in her favorite colors. 

She has had a lifetime of pleasing others so there’s a bit of rebellion in her to now please herself. 

She would say the spirit of her feisty, red-headed, Irish grandfather’s ways was finally letting loose. She would be happy about that too, after a lifetime of biting her tongue and trying to keep the peace in her world.

In honor of my Mum, and her inspiration for me to not give up on my dreams, I thought I’d spend the next two weeks posting about vintage themes both here and more so on my Google + site, https://plus.google.com/+AshlynBradyauthor/posts

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

My next blog will be about “The Dressmaker” movie.

I sighed with pleasure at the gorgeous, vintage, haute couture fashion I saw on the big screen. There is an element to the story that is told by the clothes the characters wear.

The Dressmaker—Tilly Dunnage uses her sophisticated, couturier skills to bring out the nasty truths hiding beneath the clothes.

The townspeople of Dungatar did her and her mother wrong.

Revenge is back in fashion.

Hope you can join me again.

Ashlyn

“The Dressmaker” pictures sourced from facebook.com