the dress (crimplene conundrum in Coventry)

In 1967 we had moved as a family from my parents centuries-long Hertfordshire roots to Warwickshire.  In the early days here we sometimes went shopping to the big shiny spangly city which was Coventry.  It had a Green Shield shop, where you handed over your pages of accrued green gummy squared stamps for things like lawn mowers and paddling pools, depending on who got lucky.

Coventry boasts one of the most beautiful Cathedrals in England.  In the 1960's in shameful contrast at about the furthest reach of the city centre was a shopping area dominated by ugly concrete blocks, called Lower Precinct. Within one of these cubes was housed the cavernous temple called C&A, pioneering fast-fashion bazaar.

It's strange what gets saved on the permanent hard drive of your memory. How travelling back and forth in time modifies the specifics. 

With hindsight I now know that the earliest deposits of the language of music and attending sensory experiences were accumulating within my brain in the late 1960's, even though piano lessons hadn't commenced.  When at university, I was in a class where we were played excerpts from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and asked to say instantly what came into our heads.  Most people talked vaguely about rolling fields and peaceful feelings.  I was rapidly transported back to 1969, sitting cross-legged on the school hall floor in assembly with a couple of hundred other small people in d.i.y. blue knitwear, with tendrils of disinfectant odour wafting into our tiny nostrils.  And the fear, the gut grasping fear of that formidable headmistress.

If you were around in 1969 you were supposed to know exactly where you were or what you were doing at the time of that earth shattering moment when man landed on the moon (I have no idea). 

Perhaps I never saw the momentous event on TV.

Maybe my books seemed more interesting and important at the time.

Memory, the old curiosity.

Back in C&A, as a five year old, I was in one moment being led by the arm in the midst of endless rails of clothes. Then suddenly standing alone, feeling trapped in a maze with no escape, a scary labyrinth with giant sides of garish garments being swished to and fro, which you might just fall into and never be able to escape...

But, the dress,  

we had come to get the dress for the photo

so everything was OK.

Mum chose the style she wanted me to have in the bargain, wrinkle free wonder fabric of the era, crimplene. (You couldn’t turn over in bed in those days between polyester sheets and nightclothes without seeing tiny shards of static flash before your eyes). I was given a choice between two colours, the pink flower print or the yellow sunshine motif dress.  I plumped for pink florals, but it was the yellow with the symmetrical suns that was taken to the till. I know there were some tears but otherwise what happened between the changing room and the checkout is a mystery. Still the event and its periphery have sat there in the long, twisting corridors of my mind ever since.

A conundrum that you cannot choose what lodges in your mind.


Given the vagaries of consciousness, sometimes what do you believe?

(Linking with Tanya Amber and friends for #concretewords – communicating the abstract through solid things.)