Brown Cord Trousers
by Ronnie Smith
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: We are scarred for life by some events in our childhood and sometimes we refuse to change our habits when we grow old. That's why we still catch the cold around Easter.
_____________________________________________________________________
It was a Thursday afternoon in Spring, close to Easter. The snow had long melted and there had been no rain for the first time in ages. Everything outside was suddenly filling up with buds and turning green. I was five and I could hear my friends, the brothers from downstairs, already outside and playing noisily in our vast, shared washing green. I stopped mobilising my soldiers on the rough El Alamein, battle terrain that I had created on my bed covers and hurried through to the living room to talk to my Gran.
She was sitting in the large cushioned armchair into which she fitted exactly, like a formula one driver in his customised cockpit. The one difference being that he can’t sit with his legs open so you can’t actually see his long knickers under his skirt. My Gran was busy knitting another blue jumper for me to wear to school because I had grown again and the sleeves of the old one were riding up my arms, making me look like an orang-utan. She was dressed in tweed, buttoned brown wool and puffy blue slippers, counting rows and listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio. The sun was shining onto the rug in front of her, split into dust-filled rays by the chimney pots on the roof next door.
I leant against the doorway quietly, to let her finish her counting, her lips moving with the numbers. She got to one hundred and ten then looked up and smiled. ‘What are you up to, wee Eddie?’
I quickly compiled my best case. ‘The boys are playing out the back and the sun is shining so can I go outside?’
‘I’ll boys you,’ she said, in that senseless way that Scottish grandparents seemed to regard as being perfectly sensible. Such as they might say, ‘I’ll give you bike!’, when I wanted to go out on my bike or, ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face’, when they thought that I was sniggering at the wrong time or at the wrong people. I never knew how you could laugh on the other side of your face and it became one of life’s unanswered questions. My Gran and her friends were supreme mistresses of this mysterious linguistic form and so I lost heart.
Then, surprisingly, she relented. ‘Yes, you probably need some fresh air so you can go out for a couple of hours, until tea time,’ she answered but with a stern tone in her voice. ‘But put on your cord trousers and your black coat with the hood.’
I knew this would happen. The boys never wore their coats in the Spring, when the sun was out, and they would be wearing their jeans, jeans that my Gran considered to be too thin for rolling around in the wet grass. So I would go out looking like the weak child, the infirm child, the child who had to be helped out of his wheelchair and not knocked over by the others. I became very conscious of wearing the family frown, the one inherited from my Grampa’s side of the family.
My Gran put her knitting down on her lap with an exasperated sigh and gave me her own family’s famous frown. ‘You can frown all you like and if you would rather stay inside that’s fine with me. But if you want to go and play with your pals then it’s the brown cords and your coat.’
This was obviously absolutely outrageous. ‘But Gran, the boys aren’t wearing coats and they’ve got their jeans on. It’s nice and warm now and I’ll look daft. And I’ll keep off the grass.’ The last sentence was as far as I had got in my life negotiating skills course.
Gran’s expression changed from a frown to a cold, hard stare. ‘I don’t care what the boys are wearing, they could be out there running around naked if their mother allowed them to. I care about you not catching another one of your Spring colds. You remember them, the ones that you always catch at this time of year and take weeks to clear? The ones that start in your nose then go up into your head, then down into your throat then even further down into your chest. Maybe you like all that medicine after all, the nasal spray, the ear drops, the TCP that you so enjoy gargling, the hot sticky, smelly kaylene poultices that you love to wear and then staying in bed with nothing to do for two weeks. Is that what you want? No, so you can either do what you’re told or stay inside.’
During my Gran’s tirade I tasted, smelled and felt each one of those dreadful, soul-destroying tortures, especially the horrible gargling of TCP and the kaylene poultices which were like having a boiling hot towel, covered in quick-dry cement, plastered onto my chest. My Gran was right and I had no rational answer. I seemed indeed to be significantly weaker than my three pals who could probably have run around all winter naked without any ill effect while I always caught the cold around Easter for exactly the same reason, not enough clothes.
As some people still say, annoyingly, ‘Ne’er cast a clout ‘till May be out’ or, keep your cords and coat on until the first of June no matter how deep the humiliation.
So, of course, having run out of intelligent arguments I lost my temper and heard myself yelling, ‘Ha! And I thought that the Mackays were a sensible family!’ Then I ran back to my room while my Gran struggled to climb out of her comfortable chair gasping, ‘You cheeky wee Turk…!’
She eventually caught up with me, as angry as I’d ever seen her. However, I was smart enough to know that only my Gran made my meals around here, washed my clothes and cleaned my face when I was sick. So by the time she staggered into the room, wearing only one slipper, I was making a real effort to zip those tight corduroy trousers up all by myself.
‘Just as well,’ she smiled and nodded in victory. ‘Just as well. Ah’m just the wee wuman fur ye right enough.’ Of course I didn’t know what that meant either.
Swearwords: None.
Description: We are scarred for life by some events in our childhood and sometimes we refuse to change our habits when we grow old. That's why we still catch the cold around Easter.
_____________________________________________________________________
It was a Thursday afternoon in Spring, close to Easter. The snow had long melted and there had been no rain for the first time in ages. Everything outside was suddenly filling up with buds and turning green. I was five and I could hear my friends, the brothers from downstairs, already outside and playing noisily in our vast, shared washing green. I stopped mobilising my soldiers on the rough El Alamein, battle terrain that I had created on my bed covers and hurried through to the living room to talk to my Gran.
She was sitting in the large cushioned armchair into which she fitted exactly, like a formula one driver in his customised cockpit. The one difference being that he can’t sit with his legs open so you can’t actually see his long knickers under his skirt. My Gran was busy knitting another blue jumper for me to wear to school because I had grown again and the sleeves of the old one were riding up my arms, making me look like an orang-utan. She was dressed in tweed, buttoned brown wool and puffy blue slippers, counting rows and listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio. The sun was shining onto the rug in front of her, split into dust-filled rays by the chimney pots on the roof next door.
I leant against the doorway quietly, to let her finish her counting, her lips moving with the numbers. She got to one hundred and ten then looked up and smiled. ‘What are you up to, wee Eddie?’
I quickly compiled my best case. ‘The boys are playing out the back and the sun is shining so can I go outside?’
‘I’ll boys you,’ she said, in that senseless way that Scottish grandparents seemed to regard as being perfectly sensible. Such as they might say, ‘I’ll give you bike!’, when I wanted to go out on my bike or, ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face’, when they thought that I was sniggering at the wrong time or at the wrong people. I never knew how you could laugh on the other side of your face and it became one of life’s unanswered questions. My Gran and her friends were supreme mistresses of this mysterious linguistic form and so I lost heart.
Then, surprisingly, she relented. ‘Yes, you probably need some fresh air so you can go out for a couple of hours, until tea time,’ she answered but with a stern tone in her voice. ‘But put on your cord trousers and your black coat with the hood.’
I knew this would happen. The boys never wore their coats in the Spring, when the sun was out, and they would be wearing their jeans, jeans that my Gran considered to be too thin for rolling around in the wet grass. So I would go out looking like the weak child, the infirm child, the child who had to be helped out of his wheelchair and not knocked over by the others. I became very conscious of wearing the family frown, the one inherited from my Grampa’s side of the family.
My Gran put her knitting down on her lap with an exasperated sigh and gave me her own family’s famous frown. ‘You can frown all you like and if you would rather stay inside that’s fine with me. But if you want to go and play with your pals then it’s the brown cords and your coat.’
This was obviously absolutely outrageous. ‘But Gran, the boys aren’t wearing coats and they’ve got their jeans on. It’s nice and warm now and I’ll look daft. And I’ll keep off the grass.’ The last sentence was as far as I had got in my life negotiating skills course.
Gran’s expression changed from a frown to a cold, hard stare. ‘I don’t care what the boys are wearing, they could be out there running around naked if their mother allowed them to. I care about you not catching another one of your Spring colds. You remember them, the ones that you always catch at this time of year and take weeks to clear? The ones that start in your nose then go up into your head, then down into your throat then even further down into your chest. Maybe you like all that medicine after all, the nasal spray, the ear drops, the TCP that you so enjoy gargling, the hot sticky, smelly kaylene poultices that you love to wear and then staying in bed with nothing to do for two weeks. Is that what you want? No, so you can either do what you’re told or stay inside.’
During my Gran’s tirade I tasted, smelled and felt each one of those dreadful, soul-destroying tortures, especially the horrible gargling of TCP and the kaylene poultices which were like having a boiling hot towel, covered in quick-dry cement, plastered onto my chest. My Gran was right and I had no rational answer. I seemed indeed to be significantly weaker than my three pals who could probably have run around all winter naked without any ill effect while I always caught the cold around Easter for exactly the same reason, not enough clothes.
As some people still say, annoyingly, ‘Ne’er cast a clout ‘till May be out’ or, keep your cords and coat on until the first of June no matter how deep the humiliation.
So, of course, having run out of intelligent arguments I lost my temper and heard myself yelling, ‘Ha! And I thought that the Mackays were a sensible family!’ Then I ran back to my room while my Gran struggled to climb out of her comfortable chair gasping, ‘You cheeky wee Turk…!’
She eventually caught up with me, as angry as I’d ever seen her. However, I was smart enough to know that only my Gran made my meals around here, washed my clothes and cleaned my face when I was sick. So by the time she staggered into the room, wearing only one slipper, I was making a real effort to zip those tight corduroy trousers up all by myself.
‘Just as well,’ she smiled and nodded in victory. ‘Just as well. Ah’m just the wee wuman fur ye right enough.’ Of course I didn’t know what that meant either.
About the Author
Born in Glasgow, Ronnie Smith has lived and worked in Romania for the past eight years and is getting back into the writing of fiction after a long break. He publishes in Romania, in English and Romanian, and hopes to be published more in Scotland in the future. He is currently working on a novel set in post-independence Scotland.