Things my mother taught me….#2 You can’t stint on shoes.

Money being tight and clothes expensive, growing up I rarely had new items of clothing. My older brother’s clothes were carefully washed, repaired and put away until I was old enough to fit into them. I don’t just mean trousers, jumpers and shirts; I mean underwear too. Mum was an expert with a needle. Socks were darned, trousers patched, buttons stitched back on. Back in the seventies, cheap clothes at places like Asda were not to be had.

I wouldn’t want you to think that I was badly turned out in any way. Far from it. My clothes always fitted and were clean and pressed. What it did mean was that I was always two years behind the fashion. When it was all the rage for school trousers to have pockets on the side of the thigh like modern cargo pants, I had straight forward side pockets. Two years later when I inherited my brother’s cargo pants, everyone was back in trousers similar to the ones I’d worn previously. So it goes. I suppose I was lucky to grow up in a time when fashion wasn’t the be all and end all it is now.

One thing mum never stinted on was shoes. She never saved any of my brother’s footwear (besides those black utility school pumps) claiming that feet had to be looked after and given room to grow correctly. Every few months she took my brother and me into town on the bus to have our feet ‘properly measured’ in Clarke’s. If our feet had grown we were kitted out with a brand new pair of black school shoes. Clarke’s shoes were not cheap. Mum could probably have bought similar shoes at a fraction of the cost elsewhere, but she was adamant that healthy feet demanded Clarke’s shoes.

As far as school shoes go, Clarke’s now do a pretty fashionable range. They are still expensive, but until our youngest reached eleven they were the only school shoes he ever had. When he was around eleven I read in the paper that although their shoes were absolutely the best, in seventy-odd percent of cases they were fitted by idiots who didn’t know a toe from a heel. Of course, expensive ill fitting shoes do more damage than cheaper shoes carefully purchased by parents who have a good squeeze and prod around their children’s feet when they try them on.

In the 1970s fashion had passed by the designers at Clarke’s. When all my friends were running around in cheap, mock beetle crushers, I was wearing expensive black lace ups.

So, what did my mother teach me? You can’t stint on shoes. Result: flat feet and a developing bunion. (And I have absolutely no fashion sense.)