Everyone told me how lucky I was to have a godmother who owned a dress shop. This dress shop was for babies and children up to teenagers. Auntie Barbara, as I called her, always had a large window display of cherubic- looking baby dolls sitting in Moses baskets or antique prams with expensive shawls draped over the sides along with a few manikins dressed in pretty outfits and school uniforms.
My Auntie had wanted my mother to give birth to a girl following the birth of my older brother. For as for as long as I could remember she had given me a Christmas outfit to wear on the day when our house was packed to the doors with uncles, aunties and of course my grandparents.
I hated those outfits with their petticoats, matching frilly belly knickers, white knee socks and black shoes. The dresses were always totally girly and made me look like an oversized powder puff. I found out later when I visited her shop that my Auntie would ask her staff to add further trimmings to the outfits to ‘pretty them up’. Certainly the knickers, which always had a waterproof liner, showed their efforts! The crackling sound they made and the long ribbons hanging from them were a constant reminder of their presence as they tickled my thighs.
Normally I dressed like my older brother. I'd wear shorts or jeans, check shirt, leather, ok plastic, holsters and always two guns that clicked when I pulled the trigger. Sometimes I dressed as a Brave, but I never, ever dressed like a girl from choice
When I was young, five or six it wasn't too bad but when I was around eight it dawned on me that I was a boy and being treated like this was strange. Plus, the dresses and other things were getting even fancier! However, Mother was always delighted to see me "all dressed up", while my brother teased me unmercifully. She, I am certain also wanted a girl and was totally supportive in my Aunties aims to dress me up.
My grandpa was a piano player and he would always insist we children should sing carols. We sang them without song sheets. I didn't always learn them too well and Grandpa who had good eyesight, would pick me out in that dressed-up frock!
Each year, as I said, Auntie Barbara gave me what she would call my "Christmas Outfit".
Mother and Auntie were thrilled to see me all dressed up but each year, when the day was over, the dress and other things were packed away again into a large white box and stored in the bottom of my wardrobe. It would be brought out again every time my Auntie visited or if I had been naughty. By the next year I would have grown out of that one, so several boxes lay in my wardrobe.
Along came the evening before the great day itself when we had our last practice in the front room.
We children, filed into the large room to
stand around the piano, guided by my Mother and my Auntie.
Two children sat in the far corner, near the fire. Mandy and Ellie, two friends of mine.
Mandy always looked untidy at school, with the elbows out of her jumper, and shoes that often let water in when we jumped in puddles on the way home from school.•
Ellie, her young sister, with her unbrushed hair, sat alongside her.
I didn’t care how they looked. They were my best friends. It wasn't until years later that I heard that their father used to spend all their money on drink, so they had very little to spend, even on food.
So, the final practice went on and Mandy and Ellie sang along with everyone else, and without any song sheets.
Before we all trooped out, Mother went along to my Auntie to have a whispered conversation and then, as we all thronged down into kitchen, she went over to Mandy and Ellie.
As I joined them, she said, "Your little friends will be staying with us .. ."
Nothing unusual in that, as Mandy often played with me at home.
Mother took us straight upstairs to my bedroom.
She opened my wardrobe where the boxes of my Christmas dresses that I hated so much were stored, year after year. Then she reached out the large white boxes and placed them on my bed.
Mandy and Ellie stood waiting. "Let's see what's in here, shall we?" Mother said.
As she opened the boxes, Mandy and Ellie peered inside.
"Eh, aren't they lovely?" little Ellie whispered.
"Let's have a try on, then, shall we? See if they fit you . . ."
So that's what we did, with those discarded but new posh dresses, that I thought were too fancy for me, who would rather be dressed as a boy in my jeans and shirt!
Mandy and Ellie had such fun, trying those dresses on, and was even better when my mother said, "Right then, let's see you home and take these to show your mother. If she agrees, they'll look nice with you girls inside them, you can borrow them." She picked up the matching knickers and facing Mandy and Ellie turned them inside out to show the waterproof lining. “I don’t thing you are going to need these are you girls?’ she asked.
Mandy and Ellie both giggled and said no they were much to old to need to wear baby pants.
‘I thought so, we’ll keep them here just in case he needs them,’ said my mother, turning them back the right way, folding them neatly and putting them back in my wardrobe. “Girls are so much cleaner than boys, aren’t they,’ she said as a statement looking at me, blushing, I almost died of shame.
Off we went, helping my friends to carry the big white boxes back to their house. Mandy and Ellie did not tease me as much as I thought they would but they appeared fascinated by the knickers I was made to wear and asked many, many questions. Both agreed they were very happy not to be made to wear them but that did not stop them trying to lift my skirt to see me wearing them.
On that very special day when the sun shone and the birds twittered in the eaves of house joining in with all the voices singing happily, there was not just one special Christmas frock around the piano that year, there were three pretty dresses from Auntie Barbara's dress shop!
Because Mandy and Ellie wore my earlier dresses and sang with me that year, I didn't mind so much being dressed that day.
The next day I was glad to put on my normal clothes and go and play with my friends, whilst the outfit was folded up and put neatly away in my wardrobe. I couldn't wait to climb trees in my jeans and shirt, and I was glad the "posh frocks" were stored away for the moment.
The only cloud on the horizon was that the following morning my mother identified the drying and stiffening signs of my early attempts at masturbating on my bed clothes and in my pyjamas. She must have told Auntie Barbara because the day afterwards, Auntie visited us with what she called, 'a supply of rubbers' for me to wear and a rubber sheet for my bed.