Submitted by Jean Warren, Alysham u3a
You have to be my age to remember knicker elastic; it lost its importance when panty hose was invented, but until then it loomed large in the daily life of every schoolgirl.
You have to be my age to remember fog too; the pea-soupers of my youth were banished by the clean-air acts of the fifties, a providence for which I'm just as grateful as I am for stretch fabric.
To a young child of that era the walk home from school was usually an enjoyable event, accomplished with much skipping and even more dawdling, but if you dawdled too much in a fog you got separated from the crowd. At first I could hear them up ahead of me, their voices muffled and distorted by the thick blanket of pollution, but eventually they disappeared altogether.
At the age of five I had never walked home alone, but I was confident I knew the way. It was pretty much a straight road with just one left turn. The trouble was which left turn? The fog was so thick you couldn't see the road until you fell off the pavement and the street names had disappeared altogether. I tried counting the number of streets I crossed, but as I had never counted them before it didn't help. How was I to know which number to turn at?
By now the winter evening was drawing in and the heavy, yellow dampness had turned to grey. My growing anxiety lent speed to my feet and I hurried onward, peering into the descending blackness. Suddenly a monster loomed out of the swirling shadows ahead and, with heart in mouth, I waited for the attack. It didn't come. Plucking up my courage I approached cautiously, and recognized the familiar telephone box on the corner where I should turn. Thankfully I hurried on, but then I seemed to walk forever with no sign of the garden gate. It must have been the wrong telephone box. I began to weep softly, and couldn't decide whether to turn back or press on.
And that was when my knicker elastic broke and I stood in the street and howled.
My savoir was Michael Jones, a big boy who lived further down our street. He appeared as if from nowhere, another shape in the dark, and, unrecognizing and paralysed with terror, I howled the more. It was only as he hitched up my knickers and tied them with a piece of string from his pocket that I realized who he was, and when he took my hand and led me home I whimpered and clung on, determined not to be lost again. I must have been a pathetic sight when he delivered me to my mother at the front door, because she never even scolded me for lateness.