Family Fortunes: There’s no business like bra business

Listening to a documentary recently about the bra brought me back to the late 1950s. In our family it seemed that all of the women, from my aunties to my grandma, were what one could call “well-endowed” in that area, and the same went in our own family when I was growing up. The dreaded trip to Clerys to be fitted when one reached a certain age was a mortifing inevitability.

Wearing a bra at first seemed to make my sister and myself stand incorrectly; we almost always stood hunched in the hope that no one would notice that we actually had breasts.

Back then ironing was a more ardous domestic chore in almost all houses. Most clothes had to be ironed; there was no such thing as “non-iron” material. In our home my mother did all the ironing and she ironed almost everything, including bras.

My boyfriend at the time, now my husband, used to cycle to our house in the evening after teatime to collect me if we were going out somewhere, and he would come around the side of our house with his bike, leave it outside the kitchen door and come in. This particular evening he walked into the kitchen and there was my mother doing the ironing on the kitchen table, but what was she ironing only my bra. Oh dear.

My mother just looked up at Tom and greeted him and then said, “Oh, I’m just ironing Anne’s . . . business”. We have laughed about that moment many times since. To this day I am prone to say, “I’m just going to the shops. I need a new business.”

Times were so innocent then. Now everything under the sun is “out there” (wrong choice of word when discussing the bra perhaps) and every part of the body mentioned without a blink. Nothing is held back, for good or ill. We have progressed, I guess.