December 24th, 1971She wore blue velvet, bluer than velvet were her sighs – not to mention her shoes, knickers, legs and the plasters on her ears
MY FIRST evening dress was baby blue, and it had a great panel of blue velvet down the front, because my cousin who actually owned the dress was six inches thinner everywhere than I was. It had two short puff sleeves, and a belt which it was decided that I should not wear. It was made from some kind of good taffeta, and had, in its original condition, what was known as a good cut.
It was borrowed and altered in great haste, because a precocious classmate had decided to have a formal party. A formal party meant that the entire class turned up looking idiotic and she had to provide 23 idiotic men as well.
I was so excited when the blue evening dress arrived back from the dressmaker. It didn’t matter, we all agreed, that the baby blue inset was a totally different colour from the baby blue dress. It gave it contrast and eye-appeal, a kind next door neighbour said, and we were delighted with it. I telephoned the mother of the cousin, and said it was going to be a great success. She was enormously gratified.
I got my hair permed on the day of the formal party, which now many years later, I can agree was a great mistake. It would have been wiser to have had the perm six months previously and to allow it to grow out. However, there is nothing like the aborigine look to give you confidence, if you were once a girl with straight hair, and my younger sister who hadn’t recognised me when I came to the door, said that I looked 40, and that was good too. It would have been terrible to look 16 which was what we all were.
I had bought new underwear in case the taxi crashed on the way to the formal party, and I ended up on the operating table; and I became very angry with another young sister who said I looked better in my blue knickers than I did in the dress. Cheap jealousy, I thought, and with all that puppy fat, and navy school-knicker-plus awful-school-belted-tunic as her only covering how could she be expected to have any judgement at all?
Against everyone’s advice I invested in a pair of diamante earrings, cost 1s. 3d. old money, in Woolworths. They had an inset of baby blue also, and I thought that this was the last word in co-ordination. I wore them for three days before the event, and ignored the fact that great ulcerous sores were forming on my earlobes. Practice I thought, would solve that.
The formal party started at 9pm. I was ready at six, and looked so beautiful that I thought it would be unfair to the rest of the girls. How could they compete?
The riot of baby blue had descended to the shoes as well, and in those days, shoe dying wasn’t all it is these days. By 7pm, my legs had turned blue up to the knee. It didn’t matter, said my father kindly, unless, of course, they do the can-can these days. Panic set in, and I removed shoes, stockings and scrubbed my legs to their original purple, and the shoes to their off-white. To hell with co-ordination, I wasn’t going to let people think I had painted myself with woad.
By 8pm, I pitied my drab parents and my pathetic family who were not glitter and stardust as I was. They were tolerant to the degree of not commenting on my swollen ears which now couldn’t take the diamante clips and luxuriated with the innovation of sticking-plaster painted blue. They told me that I looked lovely, and that I would be the belle of the ball. I knew it already, but it was nice to have it confirmed.
There is no use in dwelling on the formal party. Nobody danced with me at all, except in the Paul Jones, and nobody said I looked well. Everyone else had blouses and long skirts which cost a fraction of what the alterations on my cousin’s evening dress had set me back. Everyone else looked normal; I looked like a mad blue balloon.
I decided I would burn it that night when I got home, in the garden in a bonfire. Then I thought that would wake my parents and make them distressed that I hadn’t been the belle of the ball after all, so I set off down the road to burn it on the railway bank of Dalkey station. Then I remembered the bye-laws, and having to walk home in my underwear, which the baby had rightly said looked better than the dress, so I decided to hell with it all, I would just tear it up tomorrow, at dawn.
But the next day, didn’t a boy, a real live boy who had danced with me during one of the Paul Joneses, ring up and say that he was giving a formal party next week, and would I come? The social whirl was beginning, I thought, and in the grey light of morning the dress didn’t look too bad on the back of a chair.
And there wasn’t time to get a skirt and blouse and look normal like everyone else, and I checked around and not everybody had been invited to his formal party – in fact only three of us had.
So I rang the mother of the cousin again, and she was embarrassingly gratified this time, and I decided to allow my ears to cure and not wear any earrings, and to let the perm grow out, and to avoid dyed shoes. And a whole winter season of idiotic parties began, at which I formally decided I was the belle of the ball even though I hardly got danced with at all, and I know I am a stupid cow, but I still have the dress, and I am never going to give it away, set fire to it on the railway bank or use it as a duster.