Long Trousers

When I was a youngster, the purchase and wearing of a boy’s first pair of long trousers was a major event. It marked the anthropological changeover from being a boy to taking one of the first steps towards manhood. I didn’t look forward to this time in my life, for being short of stature, I knew I would get a razzing from my playmates at school when I appeared in my very first pair of ‘longies’.

Boys wore short trousers and long socks until the age of 13 or 14. 
I always kept my socks pulled up neatly, unlike Michael, whose socks were usually around his ankles

Mom had bought the long flannel trousers from ‘Peacocks’ a shop on the ‘Main’, as that part of Soho Road was called where the shops congregated. Auntie Chris, who had a treadle driven Singer sewing machine, had cut the legs of the trousers, because they were too long, and hemmed the ends to suit my shorter legs. She had measured me in front of my mother and my laughing brother. He was younger than me and was therefore safe from derision for at least for another two years.

Auntie Chris arrived with the doctored long trousers in a brown paper bag and advised me to go upstairs to my bedroom and try them on in case they needed some minor adjustments. Mom, Auntie Chris and my brother waited in the back room for my grand entrance. I tentatively tiptoed down the tortuous wooden stairs, holding on to the rickety wooden rail that was held to the wall by only one desperate screw. I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and whooped with as much bravado as I could muster in this critical situation in my life, ‘Ta Da!’

Auntie Chris shouted delightedly at her handiwork, ‘Ooh, they fit ‘pearfict’, and don’t they make him look oldah!’

Mom wisely said nothing, and gazed out into the back yard as though deep in contemplation of the coal heap. My brother burst into hysterical laughter. ‘Yow look a right prat Tone, yow look like a little old man’, he said.

Mom absent-mindedly smacked him on the back of the head with her open palm, and said, ‘Don’t swear Michael. Yes they’ll do, our Chris’.

After the performance I went upstairs and changed back into my comfortable shorts. I lay on my bed looking at the ceiling thinking how I could delay this terrible event tomorrow and the resulting embarrassment. I turned over the situation in my mind. I didn’t mind parading in front of my own family, but going to school and walking through scores of boys in the playground, all laughing at me, was another matter. I knew that I could not delay growing up, and as a man I would look stupid in boy's shorts. I came to the conclusion that there was no way out of wearing those bloody long trousers.

Monday morning came. I put on my long trousers and Michael sporadically laughed at me as we got ready for school. It was pouring down with rain and my shoes had holes in the soles, and cardboard would not keep out the water. Mom said I had better put on my Wellingtons. Not being experienced with long trousers, I wondered if I should wear them outside of the ‘wellies’ or push them down in the top and in my socks. I decided to push them into the top of the boots. So off I went to school in the rain, with my brother by my side. I approached Handsworth New Road Secondary Modern School and looked through the railings with some apprehension. No one was there that I knew, so I strode into the playground in my long trousers and Wellington boots with an assumed nonchalant air. Because it was raining, the Prefects let us into the school and I sat down at my desk so that I could hide my legs.

During that momentous day, I was ready and waiting with a practiced retort for any comment concerning my trousers, but not one schoolboy or teacher mentioned my change in apparel or my consequent move into manhood. Not even Mr Archer, with his twinkling blue eyes, who reminded me of Alan Ladd the film star, said a word about it.

All morning I savoured being a man, and imagined that I had become, or looked, somewhat taller, and perhaps my voice had started to deepen just a little, and maybe there was the beginning of some whiskers on my face. But by dinnertime I had forgotten all about my sudden transformation into manhood and was galloping around the asphalted playground with all the other boys. Because we were cowboys, and I was Hopalong Cassidy (in my ‘wellies’), the famous American cowboy who was on at the ABC Regal on Saturday mornings, and I was not concerned with such trivialities as long or short trousers. I had a posse to run and some rustlers to find.

Hopalong was one of my western heroes.

This is how we dressed fo 'PT', in shorts and plimsolls with no socks or shirts, not matter what the weather.