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Clothing is a facinating topic. Both as children and adults, we often have favorite garments that we feel comfortable in and wear over and over. There are a variety of reasons we do this. Here are some details about specific garments I wore as a boy. Some of the items are worthy of mention even though I do not recall a lot about them. I do remember some details about many specific garments. Funny how things stick in your head even years later. A lot of items came and went. But certain items stick in my head much more than others. I am not sure just why this was. Of course I recall much more about the items I wore as an older boy and teenager, but I think the items I wore as a younger boy are also interesting.
Here I am in our garden. or American readers this means our back yard. It was mid-afternoon, probably March/April, 1955. I'm wearing a top with sleeves pushed up, dungarees and sandals. I was about 4 years old and apparently into gardening.
I recall a pair of cotton, green shorts that I wore every summer. A lot of boys wore shorts like this during the summer. They were a bit of a departure. Until the late 1950s, it wasn't all that common for boys, except the very youngest, to wear colotful shorts like this. There were several different colors. Mine were a kind of lime green. Earlier it was common go wear khaki shorts during the summer, but not colorful shorts like this. They were boxer-type shorts. I remembr them qite destinctly and some of the other colors boys wore. Of course I didn't know at the time that these colors were a new thing. Not only do I remember them quite destinctly, but we have quite a record of them. I wore them on vacatin with sandals. We took trips each year and dad took lots of vacation snaps.
I think it’s worth mentioning that I never wore school uniform except for school. Home clothes were for wearing at home, school clothes for wearing at school, and that was that. I don’t remember ever needing to be particularly smart as a younger boy – not, at least, beyond wearing a tie, with a jersey if it was cold. When I was about 14, I first had a Harris Tweed jacket for smart wear: I’d grown out of it by the time I was 17 or 18, and it had to be replaced, by another fairly similar. I always rather liked these, and I was rather sad when the second one finally got too scruffy to wear!
At night I always wore pyjamas; in very hot weather I’d occasionally leave off the top.
When I was a boy, the only kind of swimwear that I remember for men or boys was swimming trunks. These were close-fitting and brief. Neither school had any particular rules, except that they had to be a plain, fairly dark, colour. A photograph shows me at about age 10 years in 1961. I getting into a paddling pool at my uncle's house. I wasn't used to going barefoot on grass in those days -- whence, perhaps, the expression on my face. My swimming trunks have always been more or less like these, usually some shade of red. I don't know now why they were usually red.
I wore sandals quite a lot as a boy, as was normal for all children. At the prep school we were required to wear sandals indoors; and at home I wore them indoors, and also outdoors in the summer. They were always the closed-toe T-strap type, usually from Clarks. I carried on wearing such sandals until I went to university, when I changed over to the open-toe variety which were cooler in hot weather and much more readily available in 1971. In my younger days, the usual alternative play shoes for boys were plimsolls (i.e. canvas shoes with rubber soles). These would be the same as they would wear for PE - quite possibly the same shoes, especially if indoor PE was done barefoot. I only ever wore plimsolls for PE, latterly only for outdoor PE in the winter because in the gym, and outside in the summer, I did PE barefoot.
