When Scarcity & Silk come together to make Shorts & a Sign
My mother was a rambunctious little French country farm girl. Her family lived in a rural part of France called La Franche Comté, tantalizingly next to Switzerland and fearfully close to Germany. World War II was raging at its height when she was born. The proximity to Germany meant Les Boches, the pejorative French name for Nazi soldiers, were practically everywhere all the time. Luckily she was too young to worry about them unmasking or worse any of her family members who fought in the resistance. Her childhood was fairly carefree considering she was doing it in the middle of one of the worst wars of all time.
Everyone was thankful when the war was over, but there was a long way back to rebuilding what had been lost. The devastation of battles and the Nazi occupation had created shortages and hardships in the region and throughout Europe. The Franc Comtois people were very proud and self-reliant, a fact born of their agricultural and industrial capabilities and their microculture of independent spirit. Although in short supply, most things were obtainable with some effort but others, such as fabrics, were less so given they weren’t manufactured nearby. For these materials sometimes improvisations had to be made.
Throughout the final years of the war, American and British paratroopers were dropping out of the sky everywhere. They would be flown over at night and descend into the dark landscape to go off and accomplish their missions. The parachutes they used to safely land back on the ground would be discarded. They were often made of silk and thus became a valuable material to replace some fabrics for the locals.
My mother’s grandmother had several of these parachutes she had collected. She had already made a few things with them, from blouses to baby swaddles, and my mother was in need of underwear. To be clear, girls’ underwear at the time was far different from what they are today. They were bloomers. For those who don’t know what a bloomer is, they were basically plain versions of those oddly long swimming trunks young boys wear today that sometimes end well below their knees.
My great grandmother proudly made a pair for her granddaughter. When she presented them to her, the child’s reaction was much more than she had expected.
“Les Shork!” The old woman had trouble pronouncing the English word, shorts.
My mother was so excited that her grandmother let her try them on immediately. She looked at herself in the mirror and spun around in admiration at the beautiful silk bloomers. She was so excited in fact that she bolted towards the door and ran outside.
Her grandmother, snapping out of the pride and excitement of her granddaughter’s reaction, couldn’t believe her eyes. She quickly went to the door asking herself what the little girl had in mind. What my mother had in mind was to proudly show off the bloomers that her grandmother had made. Neighbors were joyful at her display while she spun for their viewing pleasure. The raucous scene forced other neighbors to come out to see what all the fuss was about.
By the time her grandmother made it outside half the village was clapping, smiling and laughing at my mother as she proudly danced around in her white parachute bloomer panties. Her grandmother was mortified. Morals, expectations and decency were completely different back then. She came down to the crowd and grabbed her granddaughter’s hand to take her back in the house. She was not one bit happy about this and made it clear to the neighbors. As she did so she expressed her dismay along with a prediction.
“Quelle indécence!”
“What indecency!”
“Quel démonstration d’immoralité!”
“What a display of immorality!”
When she finally reached her door she put the child inside and looked out at the crowd still gathered and looking towards her. She made the sign of the cross.
“Ô Seigneur, c’est sûrement un signe de la fin du monde!”
“Oh Lord, this is surely a sign of the end of the world!”
She then shut the door, reprimanded her granddaughter and then prayed the rosary before preparing dinner.
My mother returned to the mirror again to see how she looked. They were beautiful and she was very pleased with her parachute panties.
Renato Passalacqua 