MY GRANDMOTHER'S DANCING KNICKERS
It’s International Women’s Day, and I’ve been thinking about my maternal grandmother Helen Tate and her dancing knickers.
Helen first laid eyes on my grandfather in a New York restaurant in the early 1920s. He was touring America before returning to the textile business in the North of England. Never having seen an artichoke before, he was about to eat the fuzz when my slender, red-haired grandmother rushed across the room and stopped him. It was, as they say, love at first sight.
A few months later my grandmother escaped her dominating Irish mother in Brooklyn, her meanness and smallness, and sailed across the Atlantic to elope with a man she barely knew. Arthur greeted her at Liverpool docks wearing a trilby hat; she wore a cloth bonnet. Neither hat was flattering and there must have been a moment of hesitation. But soon my grandfather was bringing his long-legged, whiskey-drinking American bride to set up home in the North of England.
Bradford had never seen the likes of Helen. To this then dour and provincial place she brought glamor, parties, and a passionate love of dancing. My own mother well into dementia, her eyes shining, would tell the story of my grandmother’s dancing knickers. She wore them so that when my mother’s Uncle Bertram (an honorary uncle) and elegant dancer, lifted my grandmother on one hand above his head , decorum prevailed. My grandmother reputation remained intact.
When the Second World War struck my grandmother signed up for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Back in the States, she had been a secretary to two senior executives in Wall Street and was a superb organizer. Soon she was running the WAAF efforts in Bradford. My grandmother, once slow to rise, would get up early, don her uniform and set about her day with purpose. My mother had never seen her happier or more energized.
After the war effort she missed the authority that she wielded so effectively. Motherhood was never that exciting to her. She was fond of her children but didn’t overly concern herself with their welfare. She didn’t cook, do housework, or pick up after herself. One Christmas she forgot to turn the oven on and so they all had to sit down to cold ham for Christmas lunch. My grandfather was furious; Helen was unfazed.
Here was a woman who didn’t give a whit about the responsibilities she had been handed, but who possessed talents and skills that could have run my grandfather’s textile company like a smooth machine. But to work for a living? A woman of her position? That would never do. And so she continued to be the life of the party, while never fulfilling on her innate gifts and aptitudes.
So today I think of Helen Tate, a woman brave enough to cross an ocean on the basis of a chance meeting. A woman who loved life to the full. But a woman, like so many others of her generation and of previous generations, on whom society placed intolerable limits.
Yet even so she found a way to express herself—straining the established boundaries of polite behavior—thanks to those dancing knickers.
What woman do you want to celebrate on this International Women’s Day?
