Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace. Part 3.

Growing Up In War Years - first part. By May Vincent.

[Graham speaks: Tom McKendrick’s painting of a terrace of tenement buildings burning in the conflagration that was the Clydebank Blitz.]

As August consists of 31 days it is most likely that we returned from Troon on a Thursday, that year of 1939. It was probably the very next day that my mother rushed me from department to department within the huge Wholesale Warehouse of Todd, Cunningham & Petrie where she had a Charge Account. I didn’t enquire into the reason for this sudden spending spree lavished upon me from Lingerie (perhaps up to 6 sets, as well as nightwear in multiple sets) I was permitted a say in which coat, hat, shoes, gloves and loved every minute of the extravagance, especially choosing from the rails, instead of having to politely thank Aunts Polly, Meg, Ella and Netta for matching coat/dress sets (even hats) or knitted dresses with bolero, striped jumpers from wool oddments and the like: they having been dotingly thrust upon me for birthdays and Christmases throughout childhood. But, at 13 1/2 nearly, I was beginning to be fashion conscious and just loved Mum’s mad splurge upon my entire wardrobe.

[Graham speaks: a relic from before World War II and still doing dutiful service, a luggage label from the firm of Todd, Cunningham & Petrie, once directing whatever it was attached to towards my mother’s home at 25 Dalnair Street, and nowadays identifying the spare key to my car’s anti-theft device.]