Regulation Navy Blue School Knickers

Frances Garrood: K is for Knickers

How I hated those pants. Aside from the fact that they were not allowed, they showed me. Then everyone jumped in the pants about the Navy regulations, was frightened away in my royal blue. Apart from anything else, how on earth my mother to find them? I have never before or since, seen royal blue pants. Pants were school, forest green, gray, brown eventually - but royal blue? Finally, my mother bought me those of the navy, but they were not the right kind. They were short, revealing not the kind you want to be the pear tree (I have no idea where she found them, either).I never had the pants right, and the memory of the False Knickers stayed with me all my life. Although I have worn many pairs of pants in my life, those royal blue (small navy and their successors) are the only ones I can remember.

We had to wear pants navy and they had to have name tapes in them. I remember having to line up at school all the girls I went for inspection by the Director who peered down all of our pants to see if we name tapes. My grandmother was horrified. "I'm going to peer down her own she threatened. That was before I became a rebel.Two years later, I would have told the director, it did not receive his feelings by checking my underwear.

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