Secret Girls' Stuff (2 page)
Read Secret Girls' Stuff Online
Authors: Margaret Clark
Bodgies were boys and widgies were girls who wore the rock ’n’ roll clothes. The bodgies wore tight drainpipe trousers, bright shirts and had a litre of grease on their hair to slick it back. They wore shoes with pointed toes called winklepickers.
The girls wore tight jumpers or tops, flat pointy-toe shoes, and lots of full petticoats under their gathered skirts so that when they danced the petticoats whirled right up to show Presley purple or bright fluoro pink knickers. Waists were pulled in to eighteen inches with wide leather-studded belts. The petticoats were only what you’d call half-slips but each had metres of material and so did the skirts. Girls kept their petticoats stiff with starch or a mixture of sugar and water squirted on then left to dry.
It was really important to shop with your friends and to share beauty and fashion secrets
after school and on Saturday mornings. The shops weren’t open on Saturday afternoons, and they shut at 5pm on Friday nights.
Dear Diary
,
I bought a new petticoat today. Ally and Jan came with me. I tried on seven and Ally tried on eight. Jan tried on five. The shop lady was going berko. There were petticoats everywhere standing on the floor. Now I have three multicoloured tulle ones, a rope one and a wire hoop one
.
I’ll wear them all to the dance. Dad says I look like a flamingo. But if I don’t wear at least five petticoats I’ll be a square
.
Dear Diary
,
Ally and I are making plastic flower earrings. We bought coloured plastic tubing in three colours then melted it into shapes. The plastic stuck all over the stove
and Mum went nuts. But our earrings look good, huge red, white and yellow flowers glued onto clip-on bases. We’re going to make some more
.
Ally is doing the seven day Ponds beauty treatment. If you cream your face for seven days you’re supposed to get rid of wrinkles. Ally has five wrinkles round each eye when she smiles. Ha. I have three. Ally also came with me when I bought my new togs. She has bottle green ones with a built-in foam bra. Mine’s got blue and white stripes and a padded bra too. I look like I’ve got big boobs at last. Marilyn Monroe’s are size 38 inches. Mine are size 32 inches if I puff out my chest. Boys don’t like you unless you have big boobs. We wore our new togs swimming to Eastern Beach. I crashed into everyone because I can’t see without my glasses. I look like a goog with glasses and act like a goog without them. My granny says, ‘Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ Thanks Gran. I’d rather be dead than wear my glasses
.
When you are a teenager it’s important to look the same as everyone else and wear the right stuff. Friends help you do this by making suggestions and telling you if you look like a dick.
Dear Diary
,
Our parents won’t give us enough pocket money to buy decent gear so Ally and I are learning to make our own clothes, mainly skirts and matching tops. Each skirt needs yards of material because it has to be gathered in tightly at the waist, and have lots of flare before the top gets sewn on. We bought the same material but different colours. My new dress is American Beauty, a sort of pink, and Ally’s is Ming blue. The latest colours. Ally’s cut her top low but then her boobs are bigger than mine
.
Privately I think it’s too low. You can see her nipples if you peer down her neck. Her mum will throw a fit
.
It was important to have big boobs. That was the
fashion. And a big bum. Marilyn Monroe was our idol. She was actually a size 16. She had a 38 inch bust, 23 inch waist, 36 inch hips and a big bum!
It was the ‘hour-glass’ look. I was a bit jealous of Ally because she had big boobs, 36 inches.
Also I had this problem. My right boob was much bigger than my left! I thought I was the only girl on earth with one bigger than the other. It was my big secret. I didn’t even tell Ally! I certainly didn’t tell my mother! I would stuff socks down my bra to pad it out. And secretly I worried that I’d never get married or have kids because no man would want a wife with one boob bigger than the other.
Then suddenly one morning it seemed to be bigger. Just like that. Unbelievable. And gradually the left one caught up with the right and I had a matching pair! Whew! So if you’re lopsided, don’t panic.
Having friends also gives you the courage to try new things. New experiences.
Dear Diary
,
We had a seance in Joanie Timm’s bedroom. There was Ally, Jan, Irene, Yvonne, Joanie, Judy and me. She didn’t have a ouija board so we used a glass and wrote the letters of the alphabet on bits of paper. The glass kept falling over. Then Joanie used her sister’s crystal ball. She reckons it said I’m supposed to marry Wade Kimberley! He’s the biggest square in the school. I’m supposed to have five kids, three girls and two boys
.
I’d rather be dead than marry Wade Kimberley and have five kids! But then the freakiest thing was when everyone left the room except me and Judy and we were just mucking around and the glass took off with me sort of attached. It was like I was glued to it. And Joanie came back and was reading what it said. It was going so fast. She said that my spirit guide was called Mike, he lived in the Mauritius
Islands in 1820 something and he’d got hit on the head with a stout stick and any time I wanted his help just ask. Then the glass sort of fell over. I was so scared I was shaking. I don’t want some old ghost called Mike being my spirit guide, watching me get undressed and stuff. Forget it. I’m never going to a seance again as long as I live
.
I didn’t dare tell my mum about my seance for ages but when I did (after I’d been screaming out in the middle of the night for the sixth night in a row while having a nightmare about it), she said that my great great uncle had lived on Mauritius Island for a while. She didn’t know whether his name was Mike or not. I thought this was even spookier.
Once when I was walking along the beach on my own with no one near for miles, I thought I could smell my dead grandpa’s pipe smoke. I thought that was spooky too.
Personally, I don’t think seances are very useful unless some expert clairvoyant is running them,
and I think you need to be careful when you dabble in this stuff. It’s not worth the nightmares!
I do believe in guardian angels and spirit guides, though, or whatever they are, because they’ve hauled me back from the brink of danger by the scruff of the neck about fifty times. Like, I was picking blackberries and there was this thick piece of car tyre in the grass and I was about to step over it and this voice sort of in my right ear said, ‘
Don’t do it!
’
I got a real fright because there was no one there. Then I thought, this is stupid and those blackberries are the best here, so I went to step over and the voice said, louder this time, ‘Don’t do it!’
I bent down and peered at the tyre and I saw stripe, stripe, stripe. It was an enormous tiger snake! I was outa there faster than a speeding bullet.
Some people say it’s intuition, some people say it’s destiny, some people say it’s God, some people say it’s the universe. All I know is that I trust these ‘good guys’ and I don’t trust the ouji board /seance guys. And I’ve never told anyone about some of this stuff. Till now. With you.
The problem is that if you try to share some
of these experiences with certain people like your homeroom teacher, the doctor or a cop, they might think you’re nuts. If you are going to tell about weird personal experiences, make sure the person is trustworthy and a good friend. But back to the basics of life.
Hair
.
The best thing about girlfriends is that you can share hair fashion and sympathise together about bad hair days.
Here’s an extract from a letter sent to me by Miranda, age 14.
Skye and I dyed my hair. She got this purple dye and did streaks. I’d already dyed it red so it looks cool with red and purple. There’s this boy Will who I think likes my red and purple hair. Not like my father. He says I look like a Ribena berry
.
When I was sixteen the beehive was top hair fashion. You had to grow your hair long then back-comb it till it stood out a mile from your head and you looked like Yahoo Serious, then you
carefully and gently combed the top strands over the ‘hive’ neatly and kept it in place by spraying a couple of litres of hair lacquer on it. The higher the beehive the better.
Dear Diary
,
Ally, Jan, Yvonne and I did each other’s hair in the beehive look. It took practically all Saturday afternoon. Ally’s was the highest. It was exactly ten inches off her head. Mine was only six inches, but Ally put in this Silver Magic dye. It’s for old ladies with grey hair but on my blonde hair it looks fab, real deep purple. It washes out. We were going to the Youth Club dance. We wore blue eye shadow and we pencilled our eyebrows thickly with black eyebrow pencil and drew ‘wings’ on our eyes. Jan had black mascara and I had new Baby Pink lipstick so we shared. But when we were walking to the bus stop it rained on us and my Silver Magic dribbled all down my face
and on my dress and our hair fell down. We were wrecked. We had to go home
.