Caught with my pants down in 64′

It was late 1964 and my mother had just bought me the most hideous-looking, off-the-rack trousers from a Sydney Wide store in Pitt Street, City. I’d gone there with her, believing my very first pair at age 14 was going to launch me onto the fashion scene and boost my chances of winning female hearts at the city’s dance venues. The Beatles and Stovepipes were all the rage, and I was fully expecting to leave with a pair, but she wasn’t having any of that. So, I ended up with pants that were baggy, from top to bottom, and her unwelcome assurances they would last me a ‘very long time’.

I might have been beaten that day, but I wasn’t giving up and soon persuaded my friend Barry to lend me a pair of his skin-tight jeans to wear at the city dances. My idea was to arrive at his house and swap my trousers for his jeans, then return there after the dance and change back. We were to do this without attracting any attention and Barry warned that if we made a noise and woke his light-sleeping, drunken father or grandmother, or both, he’d be in big trouble.

The first night we returned to his house all the lights were out, so the lounge room was pitch black when I entered to look for the trousers I’d stashed under the sofa. I couldn’t see the sofa but could hear his grandmother snoring and crept towards the noise until I was inches away from her Sherry breath at the end of the sofa. From there I began to feel my way along the side of the sofa and then suddenly froze when I touched her dangling foot. I was very nervous, then more so when my hand collided with the empty Sherry flagon and sent it rolling across the wooden floor. Barry started giggling and I had to gag myself too, only relieved of laughter when I finally found my trousers. It took long minutes to squeeze out of his jeans and short seconds to launch into my trousers, while Barry frantically whispered for me to hurry up.

A succession of weekends rotating pants undetected followed, and all was well until Barry announced he was going on holidays for a fortnight and couldn’t offer his place or the jeans. I convinced him to leave the jeans with me, but the question of where was I going to change into them needed an answer, because I could not possibly go to the dances without them.

I had a week to figure out a plan, and on the Friday night I left the flat as usual, kissing my mother at the front door and scurrying down two flights of stairs to the exit door, which I opened, and then closed. I did not exit, instead tiptoeing back up the stairs to the garbage room, opposite our flat. Once inside, I sought out Barry’s jeans hidden behind the bins and quickly changed, before hurtling downstairs and out the exit, feeling very triumphant.

Keeping up with fashion was very important to me as a teenager, even crucial when I became a Sydney Sharpie and slavishly followed their dress codes a year later. It was ironic that my mother accepted the Sharpie wardrobe and not the Beatles’ fashion, which she expressed quite emphatically the following Friday night in the garbage room. As she stood there in the open doorway with rubbish in hand and disbelief on her face, I was still struggling to haul up the second leg of my skin-tight jeans. Completely lost for words and turning crimson by the second, I saw there was no need for a jury here – just an agonising wait for the sentence, and there were two. “You’re grounded for two weeks!! And don’t you ever let me catch you wearing those disgusting things again.”

Ever suffered the nightmare of conservative parents’ attitudes towards fashion and been forced to become secretive to escape their prying eyes? Share your stories here… 

Kim is also the author of Out With The Boys: the sharpie days. You can purchase it for $22.95 via Amazon.