People measure time in different ways. There’s the obvious way, saying spring 2005 or whenever; another is by referring to your partner of the time:
“I was with Freddy (or Mike, or whoever) then”, or to your job:
“You know… it happened when I worked on the ferry.”
Me, though, I seem to measure time in terms of which coat I was wearing. That’s just my natural way of doing it. I can work the year out from that if I need to, but my first reference point to the timing of things in my life is definitely through whichever coat I was wearing.
My first proper new beginning happened not when I was born or went to school or work or anything like that, but when I got my first new coat. Until then I’d always had to wear my older cousin’s outgrown coats. That might not sound too serious as life events go, but it’s confusing being made to wear someone else’s old coat. It has taken on their shape somehow, it smells of them, it’s never the style of coat you would choose and the fabric is wrong, too scratchy, not a colour that suits you. And it is never a good fit. Somehow, I didn’t feel like myself in her coats and I kept thinking I wasn’t really me.
When I was eleven I started to get devious. It happened the day I got a coat that I hated with a deep vengeance. I had been dreading the day that coat would be mine, as it surely would, and it was the worst coat so far. It was grey! The collar was too high and it scratched my neck a lot. A little half-belt thing pulled the back of the coat, supposedly to create a better fit. It just looked silly though because, as well as being horrid, it was too big. Bulky pockets sewn on the outside had been made even baggier because my cousin used to put her hands in them all the time and the buttons were ugly - huge and grey and plastic. The fabric was hairy with little stringy things hanging from it.
“It’s mohair,” my mother had said. “It’s beautiful. Such good quality.”
As I walked down the street to get my Gran’s Saturday bread, I felt sure that everyone was laughing at me in that coat and so a plan began to form in my mind.
All went well and, in fact it was easy until I stopped off to collect the coat on my way home. I’d the idea of hiding it behind a neighbour’s hedge but, weirdly, it wasn’t there on my return journey. I spent ages looking for it on my hands and knees in the bushes. The earth was damp and dirty and the branches scratched me and cut my hands. I panicked and ran home rubbing huge tears into my face with grubby, earthy hands. I remember it as if it was yesterday. But it didn’t really matter as it turned out, because as soon as my parents knew I wasn’t hurt, another, even worse, coat was produced. And so it went on. I left that next one - a tartan one - in a telephone box. I left another grey one on the bus. The brown one I just handed in at a charity shop. I didn’t realise I wasn’t helping my cause. There were always more.
As I approached the tumultuous egocentric age of thirteen, one magic day, I snapped. I was furious enough to yell at length about the chronic humiliation and years of embarrassment I had felt at wearing my cousin’s coats. I screamed and shouted with that hormonal intensity that just takes over your mind. My parents were shocked and, I think, a little bit sorry (although they didn’t say that of course). Anyway, they decided I could have my own coat for my birthday. Oh joy of joys!
I chose a turquoise coat made of soft, warm woolly stuff. It was knee length and a near perfect fit with just a bit of growing room. The way it snuggled around me was a source of constant delight and I felt that all my dreams had come true. The colour was really lovely - it soothed me and excited me at the same time. The pièce de résistance of my new coat was a small white pretend-fur collar which stroked my neck and felt like a warm kitten when I turned it up to keep out the October chill. With that coat my life improved overnight. In fact my life started. I had a new beginning! I had arrived! I wore that coat until I could squeeze my blossoming form into it no longer.
Since then, each new coat (and there haven’t been many) has been a new beginning and I’ve realised that a new coat defines how I mark time. At fifteen, I got my next coat, a purple maxi which we bought in London. It was beautiful and I felt a million dollars. When I was eighteen, I bought myself a long black hooded cloak from a hippy shop near the university in Manchester. It was perfect for the time. I can chart the first awakening kisses of youth, of lovers, wild moments, devastations and great pleasures of my younger life through those coats. And my present coat? Well, we’re about to part company, but I bought that as I prepared to leave university. It has served me well for ten winters now and I have graduated, in more ways than one, with this coat. I have a new beginning you see, and it’s definitely time for a new one.
I didn’t meet anyone else who measured time and new beginnings in coat years until my work brought me into the turbulent company of Ben. At the tender age of seven, Ben greeted me at his front door by looking me up and down at length, thumping me in the stomach and then running away to hide behind a sofa from where he watched and listened. He was an inhabitant of Bay View, a residential school for children with emotional and behavioural ‘problems’ and I was there for an interview. His unusual greeting was, he later told me, his way of saying that he liked me! Why did he like me? Not apparently for my friendly smile or air of quiet competence. No! It was the look of my aging coat, the one that I mentioned earlier that‘s now ten.
I began to really understand that Ben also recognised life’s events and new beginnings in terms of ‘coat years’ one Monday afternoon later in the term. Earlier that day, while having a coffee with the housekeeper at Bay View, I had learned that Ben had run away from one of the residential staff carers at the weekend, while on a shopping trip to replace his outgrown clothes. He was apparently furious at the idea of a new coat. I was really much more interested in Ben’s reaction to the coat situation than in the long story about how he had been found and returned by the police, although that of course was very serious. No one knew his reasons, it turned out, and no one was particularly interested either.
Later that day in a geography lesson I drew Ben to one side and, equipped with crayons and paper (always a good prop when entering delicate territory), ostensibly for him to create a map of the way to the town centre, I began a conversation about the unhappy events of the weekend. Ben’s traumas surrounding the purchase of a new coat gradually began to emerge. For Ben, his current coat had the memories, sights, smells and sounds of his Nan’s house woven into its very fabric. He didn’t see a shabby coat that he’d grown out of. No, as long as he had that coat, he could wrap himself in a sensuous blanket of security. When he wore it he heard his Nan’s voice as she bought veg at the market or told him a story; he smelled her fags and her perfume before a night out. Christmases, treacle toffee and a coal fire smouldering and popping in the grate lay within the fibres of Ben’s old coat. Ben was not interested in having any new coat in his life. No way. Living at Bay View was one new beginning he didn’t want to commemorate.
My own coat is almost at the end of its ten beautiful years of life. It has seen me through the extremes of winter weather and the honeymoon months of married life and now I know I’m ready for my next one. I fancy a change of style for this new beginning. Something foxy I think! I’ll recognise it when I see it, that’s for sure. And Ben? Well eventually he went to a long term foster family which I so much hope works out well for him. The last time I saw him he was wearing a big grin and two coats - his old one and a shiny new one.
Janet Elleray Bartle
