A Ben Casey shirt, button-through to a medico’s stand-up collar and across one shoulder, lime-on-white striped, with a contrast red breast pocket for pens and stethoscope, was my tenth birthday present. It was what I’d asked for. Ben Casey and Doctor Kildare were the heart-throb stars of those early, eponymous black-and-white hospital dramas; the merchandising must have been aimed at kids, and found a target in me. What would the marketing department do with House? — mini walking-sticks for young admirers of Hugh Laurie?
We watch Operation Ouch! on the older-kids ABC channel if it happens to be on and we happen to be looking: those whacky twins, Doctor Chris and Doctor X and, hamming it up and conveying a lot of useful information (a wealth of obscure body-facts). X and got COVID early on in the pandemic, when he’d come back to London from his usual front-line doctoring in a war zone to work in a big hospital. He made a poignant and informative doco about his progress and alarming regressions.
Calling Doctor Casey, can you mend a broken heart? He was hardly a likely love-object for pre-teens. My real crushes of the day were Cubby, the Mousketeers’ drummer, and Annette Funicello, whom I yearningly adored. Dad took me to see them, frighteningly old, at Centennial Hall when they toured.
Naturally, there were birthday disappointments, like the year I turned twelve and had to swallow the news my parents couldn’t afford both school shoes and dress-up shoes. For a while I had to wear the brown horrors with nylons and my best dress to Sunday Mass. But I recall a pair of very desirable black court shoes you could also wear, daringly, without the strap, from about the same period, so perhaps they found the cash soon after. Now, I can imagine how galling it must have been for Mum and Dad not to have been able to splash out on us all once the family reached hillbilly-tribe proportions.
For the brief period I was The One (with just one baby competitor), they tried hard. They looked high and low for the fairy costume I wanted for my fourth birthday without success. My recollection has me wearing the cowgirl costume they did find with a good grace, but I would think that. It certainly came with more paraphernalia than the fairy dress and wand: hat, fringed vest, studded belt with holster and gun, swing skirt (no boots, no spurs).
I got my own clothes-money at fourteen, when the scholarships started coming and paying me, personally, real dollars. Before that, our wardrobes were filled out with hand-me-downs, from when I was thirteenish, from a family called Burford, maybe fellow-parishioners. They had slightly older daughters, and generously donated clothes I rather liked, such as a lilac gingham empire-line summer number; another very grown-up navy button-through with white-trim collar and large pearl buttons that I wore a lot; a rust-brown cotton with self-belt, with a wide skirt, that I am wearing in a snap taken at the sideshows beside Glenelg beach, sitting astride a pony. And there was a pretty coffee-and-white dress with puffed sleeves and a skirt you could wear a rope petticoat under. Rope petticoat!
Though I tended to like the dresses, I wondered about the Burford girls: were they perhaps a bit stodgy, rather dull? (we’d never met). Was some of their dullness seeping through their clothes onto me when I wore them? I hadn’t picked them myself, so maybe they weren’t me? Although I blossomed into an op-shopper and habitual wearer of other people’s castoffs, it makes all the difference if you’re the chooser. I can understand why second-hand shops began: people hated being charity cases, but kept their dignity if they parted with money to buy discarded clothes.
Excruciating to remember my agonies over the unchosen yet pretty things. Unbearable to think of how far the family wages had to stretch. But hey, you can’t make a Mother Teresa out of a self-obsessed adolescent, not then, not now.