102 Early incidents.

Some innocent childish incidents involving rainwear and Joscelyn, particularly the raspberry picking episode

Together with the preceding Introduction and some of the earlier of the following sections, this was typed on an old fashioned typewriter and took no little time with lots of corrections and sno-pak. Much later on, I re-typed it and up-dated it on a word-processor, and then later still converted it to MyWord when we eventually got a PC at home.

My first recollection of this particular interest of Jos’s and myself occurred at quite an early age, when I was perhaps five or six years old. Jos and I both had raincoats made out of rubberised cotton material. Jos’s was a green one and mine, a blue one, although I later grew into his green one and felt very grown up. Both the raincoats had sou-wester type matching hats in the same rubber lined material.

Jos seemed to find it nice to hold his hat back-to-front over his face and I remember being fascinated to watch the green material of the sou’wester balloon out and then collapse as he breathed. He encouraged me to do the same, but I wasn’t so keen - the feeling, the darkness and the smell didn’t appeal to me as it seemed to for Jos. I remember mother telling us not to behave so ridiculously in an exasperated manner. On one occasion, Jos tied his sou’wester over his face with the tapes that were attached and then he gropingly took mine and tried to tie it similarly over my face. I protested half-heartedly but Mother intervened and took the sou’westers right away. We never saw them again but the damage had been done!

Jos, on the other hand, remembers two other incidents, involving me but which I do not clearly recollect. Our Mother had a grey rubberlined cape, with a hood, a style apparently quite common in our very young days immediately after the war. On one occasion, we were waiting with Mother outside a shop in a neighbouring town, whilst Father went off to fetch the car. It was raining, Mother was wearing this cape and, presumably as Jos and I hadn’t got our raincoats, we were sheltering under, in fact inside, Mother’s cape. According to Jos, who somehow noticed, since I was being ‘difficult !’, Mother was caressing my face with her gloved hand, through the mackintosh material. When he demanded that she did the same to him, he was told not to be silly. Years later, when I said I didn’t remember this, Jos arranged a re-enactment – I won’t go into detail, you can imagine it - but it didn’t provoke any recollection on my part. Again, Jos says he remembers that we both once went into our parent’s bedroom and Mother’s cape was laying across the bed, rubber lining upwards. This is likely, as I do remember that she normally kept outdoor clothes in the bedroom wardrobe, just as I do. According to Jos, I ran up to the bed and threw myself onto the cape, burying my face into the rubber lining. He was too haughty to follow suit and told me that I was being foolish.