Dear Lorraine,
Some time ago Blakmac said now that the Australians and the British had explored the raincoat scene, perhaps it was the turn of a Canadian to make an effort in the same direction. The following is my attempt!
I don't remember being aware of raincoats or rubber boots before Grade One. I assume that I must have had some of these items, since in those days, if it was raining, our mothers merely dressed us up and sent us outside to play anyway - usually in someone's garage, since virtually no one in our area had a car. However from Grade One on I know that I didn't have any.
In Grade One, one of my friends had a long black rubber raincoat, boots and a sou'wester (I think that he was the only one who did.) He was very popular on rainy days, since if all of us (boys and girls) were playing on a rainy day (in someone's garage), he would let us borrow them to go for a walk outside in the rain. We couldn't go very far, because the rule was not to go off the street which was only about five houses long. I remember what fun it was splashing in the puddles along the sidewalk when my friend loaned me his boots and coat. I was definitely fascinated by them.
By Grade Four I noticed that several of the girls had rubber raincapes, and I remember being very attracted by them although I couldn't understand why. When I used to go downtown on the streetcar with my mother on a rainy day, the car would be filled with a strong smell of wet rubber, since many of the women wore rubber raincoats specially designed for women. The coats were usually green, blue or brown. I don't remember women wearing black ones. I could never remember what these coats looked like - at least until a few months ago, when a friend sent me a very old photograph for a project on which I was working (not rubber raincoats), and the photo taken in the 1930s shows a woman wearing one. I think they were imported from England. There were black ones for men as well.
I grew up in Ontario and my best recollection is that while several girls (but by no means all of them) wore rubber rainwear of one sort or another, virtually none of the boys did. As a result, I look with some envy on the experiences of the boys and girls in Australia.
In Grade Six my best buddy was the girl next door. I'll call her Mabel. Mabel had a pair of brown rubber boots and a long, brown rubber raincoat. One very rainy day Mabel was splashing ahead of me through the puddles at the side of the road in her raincoat and rubber boots. She asked why I didn't get a pair of rubber boots? Because then, she said, we could go for walks together through the puddles. Unfortunately those were hard times financially, and my parents didn't have the money to buy me a pair. When Mabel grew out of the coat her mom gave it to us for my younger sister. By then I was in my teens and the sight of the coat hanging in the hall cupboard used to be quite exciting. When my sister no longer wore it, my mother put it in the storage cupboard in my bedroom. I don't think for a minute she knew what she was doing, but it was so nice having the coat close at hand.
One of the girls who often visited us also had a rubber raincape. Rubber raincapes were made of thin, coloured rubber, somewhat heavier than the weight of rubber gloves today. One rainy day the girl came to visit us, but the sun came out not long after, and when she went home she forgot her cape. My mom and sisters went out shopping, leaving no one at home. I had always admired the girl's cape - I liked its smell and the slippery feel of the rubber very much. With my heart pounding like a sledge hammer, I took off my clothes and held it against me. The thin rubber felt so smooth against my skin, the sensation of the smooth rubber on my skin was more exciting than anything I had known and in the end overwhelmed me. Mortified, and very much afraid of someone coming home unexpectedly, I hurriedly put things right, hanging the cape back up. For a long time afterwards I went around with a massive sense of guilt, but was careful not to touch the cape again just in case.
Unlike the Australian experience, in this part of North America rubber raincoats of some kind mostly seem to have been worn by girls. It was only several years ago with the introduction of the reversible unisex raincoats lined with rubber that both sexes have had access to this kind of clothing.
In Lesley's letter in Quantumleap a few years ago, she mentioned that the girls turned down the tops of their wellingtons so that they wouldn't flap. This was definitely true, but there was also another reason, at least during the early days of the Second World War. When I was in high school, many of the girls wore rubber boots of various kinds - either the long brown or black wellingtons, or the much shorter ones of different colours (red, white, brown) which they could pull on over their shoes. The narrow strip of rubber around the top of the boot on the inside just before the lining started would leave a black circle around their legs - I think from something put in the rubber called 'carbon black'. One of the girls I went out with said that the black mark was very hard to get out of stockings. As a result, the girls solved the problem by turning over the first couple of inches of the boots so that the rubber part wouldn't be against their legs. Of course, another problem then occurred - the lining got wet.
About this time the long wellingtons went out of style, and the shorter - pull on - type which fitted over the girls' shoes were "in."
In my late teens I went to live in the country for a year in a place where the snow was so deep that in the middle of winter you could bend down and touch the tops of the same trees that you walked under in summer. The family with whom I was boarding told me to buy a really long pair of thigh-length rubber boots before the snow started to melt, because in places the water from all this melting snow would be right across the road. I still felt very embarrassed about all this, but when I went to the big city the next time I plucked up all my courage and went to a department store to buy a pair. It was a good thing, because the family was right - to get anywhere I had to wade through some very deep puddles nearly to the tops of the boots when the spring thaw started, because it was like the line from the Ancient Mariner: "Water, water everywhere . . ." The good part was that I really enjoyed wading through the water, and was sorry when everything dried up.
These boots turned out to be a very useful purchase regardless of the simple pleasure of wading through puddles. Later there was a major flood in our city, and rubber thigh boots were worth their weight in gold.
One of the girls with whom I worked for a few years seemed to wear her rubber boots - the short over - the - shoes kind that were common then - more than the other girls in the building. One night when we were walking home after a heavy rainstorm, I noticed that she deliberately walked through every puddle that we came to. She told me that she used to live on a farm, and that she loved wearing her brother's long rubber hip boots and paddling around in the water-filled ditches. When we got to her apartment she asked if I wanted to put on her girlfriend's rubber boots (being made to go over shoes they would have fitted me) and go outside for a walk. Unfortunately I was still embarrassed by feeling that I was the only one in the world who was interested in rubber clothing, so I said no. Regrettably she moved away a month or so later. I guess that I should have explored the topic a bit more with her and probably would have discovered that not only was I not the only one, but that there were girls who felt that way too, at least many years before I did find out.
A few years later before I got married, I managed to find a long, black rubber raincoat and purchased a sou'wester to go with it. This was fortunate, because some time later, after my wife and I had built our new house, it snowed heavily all night, then began to pour with rain the next morning. Many of the neighboring houses were being flooded. My wife said I should put on my rain outfit (which she knew all about but which I had only worn in the house up until then) and go and help the neighbours cope with the flooding that was taking place. The rain was coming down in torrents so I was very glad I had the outfit. Eventually both the boots and the coat became very worn (both were now quite old and the rubber was splitting) so I threw them out, not realizing that it would be a very long time before I might ever be able to buy new ones.
During the next several years I was totally occupied helping to raise a family. Women did not wear rubber coats any more, or even rubber boots for that matter, and it would be a few years before the shiny black PVC coats came into existence. Meanwhile, here and there in the novels I was reading, I began to find out that there were others who enjoyed wearing rubber.
There have been several films with girls wearing slickers, seaboots and sou'westers. Many of them have been cited in your site. There are others which haven't been mentioned, however. I found in the biographies of Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford that they had worn clothes like this in some of their movies. The one in which Ingrid Bergman starred was called Branningar (Ocean Breakers) (1935), one which I believe was never made available in North America. Does anyone from Scandinavia have a way of tracking it down? The biography of Mary Pickford showed a picture of the display in front of a theatre in Toronto were her film Tess of the Storm Country was showing, and in the display she is wearing a slicker, sou'wester and seaboots. There was also about 1938 a film about a young doctor in which one of the actresses takes her father his lunch in a pouring rain storm, and sits down beside him while he eats it. The sequence goes on for some time, and she is also wearing appropriate clothes for the weather. In the 1950s there was a British film named High Tide at Noon. In the middle of the picture, the leading lady for a minute or two wears a long, shiny black rubber slicker. There are also the opening scenes of Reap the Wild Wind where the star pulls on her oilskins, seaboots and sou'wester. These are all much older films, but most of you have probably seen What's New Pussycat where the leading lady arrives home wearing a very attractive rain outfit.
I have one amusing story to tell about the long, shiny black PVC maxis that were fashionable in the 1970s. One of the girls I knew had one and she said that her mom had bought it for her when she was still going to high school. Out in the country at that time you stood by the side of the road and waited for the school bus to pick you up. When she left home that day it was raining quite heavily, so she was wearing her coat. When she arrived at the bus stop, however, the rain had just stopped. The others teased her about her coat. However, right on the road in front of where they were waiting was an enormous puddle, and in a few minutes what we call in North America a "cattle liner" (truck for taking cattle to market) raced past them right through the puddle. They were all totally soaked - except for this girl. The others had to go home and get changed, but she just walked across the road to the gas station and asked the attendant to wash her off with a hose.
One of my friends at work told me that one day she was especially stressed after a hard day at the office. She was wondering what to do when she suddenly remembered her young daughter's enjoyment playing in the puddles outside in the rain that day. Once her daughter was safely off to bed, she went and put on her own rubber boots and a raincoat and went out to splash through the puddles herself. She said that she remembered doing it when she was little but had forgotten how much fun it was.
For a brief period of time in the 1970s there were long rubber raincoats with hoods available which were worn by both sexes. I was always very careful not to stare at a girl wearing a rubber raincoat. One day, however, a woman came into our building wearing one of these coats and a pair of black boots. I'm afraid that I looked at her a bit longer than was probably polite. As she entered the elevator, she turned around and gave me a big smile. Regrettably she was not from our building, and I never saw her again. I guess if she was one of us she probably detected a kindred spirit.
I'm grateful to everyone who has contributed to the Rainwear sites. Like most of you I believed that I was the only one who felt like this, and that there was obviously something very wrong with me. I'm especially grateful to the girls who have written in, since I now realize that some of my friends of the opposite sex probably shared the same interest. I was just too worried about showing any excitement about what they were wearing to listen carefully to what they said or to watch what they were doing. As an example, I particularly remember a girl in Grade 12 who had a pair of wellies, even though she didn't wear them to school very much, and who said when we were out on a date one very rainy night that she would have liked to have worn her boots, but her father had taken them away because she kept getting the linings wet. I remember now that she used to talk about her boots quite a bit. Oh well!
Canregmac
Dear Canregmac
Thank you very much indeed! Your letter is so full of interest.
I would love to illustrate it, but it needs authentic photos or drawings, and I just don''t have any to fit the bill. Maybe someone will be able to help....?
SHOP | CLUB FOYER | CHILLOUT ROOM | ASK LORRAINE
