A Boy in a Sailor Suit

I suppose it was really my mother Dorothy’s embarrassment rather than mine, given that I was probably too young to feel that way at the time. But, given that I remember it so vividly after all these years, maybe that was the first occasion – out of so many since! – when the spark of embarrassment was kindled in me.

It all came back to me at my mother’s memorial service two years ago. She had lived all her very long life in the town of Poole, on the coast of Dorset, England. She had never moved more than a couple of miles from the house in which she was born, during the second year of World War I, and she had died -only a month short of her 104th birthday – at a flat within walking distance of the same house.

She had always belonged to the Methodist Church in Poole’s High Street. She had been christened and married there, and had sat in the same pew nearly every Sunday for a century, so that was the natural place for her to be remembered by her many friends and relations.

After the formal part of the service was over, refreshments were laid on at the back of the church and somebody had the bright idea of projecting a slideshow loop of photographs on to the blank inner wall of the church. These were all images from Dorothy’s past life, taken from wherever they could be had, and naturally they included a number of shots with either me or my sister as part of the picture in various family photos that often included our late father, who had died in 1983.

It was one of these old pictures that brought the embarrassing moment hurtling back to me.

It was a photo that had clearly been taken by a professional photographer employed by the local newspaper. It showed a row of important-looking people sitting in a row on a stage, with the presentation of a bouquet about to be made. This was in the arms of a small boy dressed in a sailor suit, who was being pushed onto the stage by a woman who appeared to be his mother.

The reason why this photo was on the slideshow was clear enough. The woman was Dorothy and the small boy was me.

As soon as I saw this, the memory flooded back from what must have been 60 or more years before. The occasion was one of the church’s annual indoor bazaars, which were quite something back then.

The bazaar, an important fund-raiser for the church, took place over two days and was based in the two halls that adjoined the church. The smaller hall was used for refreshments and the judging of various cake, preserves and craft competitions, while the larger one was ringed by stalls from which various items were sold, each stall being promoted and staffed by one of the church’s various societies, such as the Sunday School and the “Monday Guild”. The upstairs gallery at the back of the hall was used for games and competitions, such as bar billiards and “guess how many sweeties are in the jar” – that sort of thing.

On the second day of the bazaar, the children put on a short play before the stalls were opened, but on the first day there was an official opening to which the town’s mayor and mayoress were invited. Speeches were made, exhortations given to spend as much as you could afford in a good cause (keeping the church roof intact, for example), and the lady mayoress was presented with a bouquet of flowers. That was where I came in.

The sailor suit? That was because the annual bazaar always had a theme to it, and that year it was the “Nautical Fair”, which was not surprising given that Poole was an old port town with a maritime tradition that went back for many centuries. I reckon that the date of that bazaar must have been 1956, and that I was therefore four years old at the time.

I had just been told to give the flowers to the lady mayoress, which might sound simple enough to most people, but at that age I clearly didn’t have a clue what a lady mayoress was, or what all the gold chains round the neck of the man sitting next to her meant. Also, it was not the case that she was the only lady sitting on the stage. There was a whole row of them! I imagine that another civic dignitary, plus wife, had come along as well, and there would also have been the church minister and maybe the senior steward, both with their respective life partners. For a 4-year-old boy in a sailor suit, with a room full of people staring in his direction, this presented quite a dilemma!

And then the worst possible thing happened. There was a sudden loud pop and flash of light right in my face. Of course, this was the instant when the photo was taken that my much older self was now seeing projected on the church wall, but at the time I had no idea what was going on. I did what I thought best at the time – I thrust the bouquet into the hands of the first lady I could see and ran screaming from the stage in a blind panic!

Presumably my mother must have put things right by handing the bouquet to the right person and uttering profuse apologies, but I was only aware of a chorus of laughs bursting from everyone in the room. Well – what other reaction could there be?

I am sure Mother forgave me my little moment of infantile panic, but it was probably quite some time before I could be comforted with sufficient supplies of ice cream to get me back to terra firma.

Oh well – it would not be the last time when I would suffer being laughed off stage!