Blue Apron

Regular readers will know I have just been away on a three-day trip elsewhere in the state where I took a very Dear Friend to visit a 96-years-young lady in hospital. And, as you drive you talk of many things. We started talking about aprons and Chicken Scratch.

So, when I dropped her home last night, she insisted on a frantic rummage in her linen cupboard, and loaned me a number of items to photograph and write about. I should also add that both this friend (in her late seventies) and I are involved in museums, so we often look on items that are less than perfect as being more important than ones that are pristine and as-new, because that is where we find the stories they tell.

So this is the first of a number of aprons she has allowed me to photograph:

The maker for this was a schoolfriend, whose estate my friend has recently finalised. It is the apron her friend made in secondary school, probably when she was 13 or 14, in the early 1940s.

In later life, she used this apron so much that the ties have shredded where she tied it around her waist. But it is still almost perfectly clean - I suspect in the 1940s and 1950s it would have been boiled in a copper.

My friend could not bear to throw it out, so keeps it with her own aprons - and I have one story to come from them, too, plus some other photographs.